Yes, Of course you will "leave it there": everyone and everything that doesn't agree with you has a "blind spot"; I get that, I really do! When, oh wh...
There is speculation and then there is empty speculation. Any speculation which does not take into account the latest scientific results and understan...
Yes, that's one of the imaginable possibilities, and many think it is the most plausible one. You may favour the idealist possibility, but that is not...
So are you saying that Kant was able to "notice the workings of intelligence"? Or rather is it not that he merely thought long and hard about experien...
I said I think there is a continuum between constraint and freedom, I didn't say I know the will is partly free. To you it may "seem" that determinism...
Granting for the sake of argument that we do not notice that "we never actually see it working, because we're never outside of it - we only ever look ...
I can relate to what you wrote there. Knowing is, like everything else, primarily an experience. I've long thought that knowing that is a form of know...
I didn't say it was "immoral". Amoral perhaps. I follow Kant in making a distinction between pure and practical reason. We might perform acts which ar...
For sure, the conditions you outline there do seem to be "a.... justification for punishment", but I'm not too sure about the "entirely moral" part. I...
The point is that if some event determines someone to a particular action, then there is no possibility that the determining event could obtain withou...
OK, I see where you're coming from now. So, I know that I am identifying the same concept from day to day because its meaning is established by conven...
By "sensible" I just meant something relevant to the context; i.e. the domain of inquiry and the observations and tests that have already been done, a...
The objections you have stated there to my contention that we have every reason to believe that others are conscious, and that evidence of that consci...
I agree with pretty much everything you said there, which to distill it, seems to be that the idea of absolutely unconditioned free will is not merely...
What I meant was that there should be a context which renders conjectures to be sensible, not merely arbitrary or logical possibilities. And as you sa...
If behavior is entirely determined then we either will or will not create circumstances which become those very determining factors for the behavior w...
This is not true. At the very least we each find our own consciousnesses, and we know that biological processes are always present in that discovery. ...
My familiarity with the private language argument is minimal, and from how I interpret it I can't see any connection to the question about whether we ...
Then I think you use the term "theory" inaptly. A better way of saying it would be " an idea of what it is". I have no clear idea what you are trying ...
The two logical possibilities are that we could have done differently than we did or that we could not have done differently than we did. Whether we c...
What has been observed is that biological processes are always present wherever consciousness is to be found. This shows that biological processes app...
Of course awareness exists before theories about it. Perhaps you mean instead the idea of awareness, but even then the idea exists before any theory t...
I think this should be the other way around. From everything that has been observed biological processes appear to be necessary for consciousness. Fro...
Of course we can only do what we do, because that is what we do. The issue with moral responsibility is different, though. Moral responsibility is pre...
Say religion and science are, to quote Stephen Jay Gould, "non-overlapping magisteria": if scientists make pronouncements about religious ideas, or th...
Claims or conjectures? A claim without evidence seems eminently rejectable. A conjecture without evidence, maybe...but a conjecture without context? (...
The car is epistemically deterministic in the sense that the problem can be identified and the car repaired or an irreparable part replaced. On the ot...
I do find it surprising that you don't understand what I wrote, since it is crystal clear to me, and I tried my best to express my thoughts clearly. I...
My approach in this thread has been to try to get clear about the logic involved in notions of indeterminability and indeterminism and the contexts in...
I didn't say that benefit is the same as flourishing. As a general rule, beneficial actions lead to flourishing, harmful actions lead to languishing. ...
This is the salient distinction I was trying to tease out with @"fdrake". Putting it another way is to say that randomness is indeterminability. Ontol...
I read "neither entity" as referring to position and momentum, not to the electron itself. After all it is already an electron we are talking about, a...
The way I understand it the concept of determinism is the idea that all events have physical causes which determine them 100 percent. QM of course den...
OK, firstly I thought you were referring to an existing particle of a different kind than any currently known, and were claiming that there were no su...
I agree. The "wheel-spinning" seems to be generated by the unacknowledged incompatibility of people's basic assumptions or definitions. If we can agre...
If we take "random" to refer to processes which are not causally determined, then, under that definition at least, there can be no randomness in a det...
As I understand, in accordance with the most common interpretations, the epistemological question is "What do we know and how do we know it?", and the...
I agree that money is a technology for distributing labor. But labour itself relies on energy, i.e. on real energy resources, whether oil. coal. miner...
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