Janus

Thanks for your explanation. It's still not clear to me why you think,assuming that the physical world is completely deterministic, chance could come ...

The usual criticism of pragmatism is that it conflates truth with belief. Realists will say that there are truths which are unknown, and that truth in...

Because I think that the idea of good and bad moral action, the inherent logic of it, if you like, is based on the idea of benefit vs harm, i.e. flour...

Sure, you can say that. But there is nothing stopping people speculating as to whether nature is deterministic or indeterministic, and finding that su...

Serendipitously, a friend just sent me the link to this series of three podcasts, and I thought you might find it interesting. https://civilizationeme...

Yeah I understand Terrapin's usage of the term 'fact'. I was just pointing out that under his usage you cannot have false facts, but under the usage w...

OK, I'm skeptical that AI can be developed to a really significant powerfully game-changing level, given economic and resource constraints. For exampl...

The word "fact" is polysemous. It can refer to propositions, information and states of affairs. This fact ( :wink: ) seems to cause much confusion. fa...

Just to be clear I was neither attributing nor not attributing the idea expressed in the text I quoted to you; I was merely responding to the text. An...

I see a convergence of existential threats in play right now. Resource depletion, entrenched human behavior, the greenhouse effect, economic complexif...

Would you say probability is a "latent structure" of the deterministic system itself or merely of our attempt to understand it?

I think the reason these two notions are often conflated is, in part, due to the fact that the ideas of determinability and predictability are, at lea...

I pretty much agree with your vision of life and human life. But I don't think of it in terms of "purpose". When I say that morality is based on flour...

In that sense of "competition" I agree. It's not that animals are, or humans should be, out to compete. "Competition" in this sense just refers to the...

I agree with you that it goes beyond human nature, but I would say that the definition of life is to flourish cooperatively, not competitively. That's...

No one wants to languish, everyone wants to flourish. That is a fact of human nature. From that fact it follows that whatever individual and collectiv...

Fair enough! I won't ask for any further explanation. :smile:

I presented a suggestion which you can take as an argument, that the experienced difference between our phenomenological orientations to past and futu...

Given that Heidegger's notion of gelassenheit translates as something like "letting be" or "releasement", I'm wondering what you are referring to with...

We may or may not have free will, but either way judgements (choices about what to think or believe) are made on the basis of what seems most reasonab...

I think we're on the same page in some ways, although it seems I am much less convinced than you as to the definitive measurability of flourishing and...

Nihilism is an interesting and I think, often misunderstood, proposition. People accuse Nietzsche of being a nihilist. Nietzsche claimed that nihilism...

Have I said that you could be oriented to both the past and the future "at the same time"? It's irrelevant to the argument.

How will you joining a philosophy forum help the situation; that others do no follow the path of "love-wisdom"? I have no sympathy whatsoever with the...

Yes, and I'm totally on board with that aspiration. Some, probably very many, people will not follow the path of "love-wisdom", but what to do about t...

I didn't say we are oriented towards the past or the future; in the sense of being oriented to one and not the other. We are oriented towards both but...

I think the problem is that what is metaphor or parable is often (probably most often) taken as literal. Religions cannot offer any literal knowledge;...

I'm not sure you are coming at this from the same angle as I am. I am not claiming that memory is infallible or anything like that. I am just saying t...

The only possible objective basis for morality, as far as we could ever determine, is the flourishing or languishing of the community.

The past, as the determinate, is embedded in memory, whereas the future, as the indeterminate, is merely imagined.

When it comes to the mystery of existence itself whatever people believe will be a matter of faith, since there can be no empirical evidence. I am inc...

Just as metaethics is the study of what metaphysical, epistemological, phenomenological and semantic assumptions and commitments are entailed by ethic...

Right, so given that religion is obfuscation, what you are saying really seems to amount to saying that for there to be religion, there must be an ill...

Yes, if the forms are immanent and inseparable from their particulars, they obviously cannot be temporally prior. If the forms are transcendent, then ...

:smile:

If there are no physical processes involving anything smaller than the Planck length then there could be no time interval shorter than the Planck time...

Yes i think that's one way to interpret the situation. Random uncaused events on the quantum scale average out to produce apparently deterministic eve...

So, commonsense analyses "miss the mark" and obfuscation doesn't? Where would that leave us, philosophically speaking?

Yes, enlightenment is merely relaxation, losing neurotic self-concerns and becoming totally yourself so as to live this life as well as possible. That...

Well, I was hoping I was right in thinking it is not a great risk. :halo:

If you get a straight answer that is coherent and plausible I'll eat my (filthiest) hat! :joke:

I think the point is that it is understood that there is no t/2.

OK, it seems you are not denying causation, but instead you are emphasizing the impossibility of prediction except in the simplest mechanical cases. I...

It seems I'm not understanding your thinking here; would you deny, for example, that influenza can be caused by a virus, or that if I jumped off a cli...

The notion of efficient causation is the idea of one thing directly acting upon another, it generally involves the concept of force. Two of Aristotle'...

The idea of ontological indeterminacy is confusing. I'm not a determinist and can accept that nature is, or at least may be, at bottom indeterministic...

I doubt the current physical theory posits particles "all the way down". The planck length is understood to be an absolute limit; you could not have p...

Can you name an ethical system which exempts "the great" from this axiom? The parallel postulate is more a stipulation than an axiom. Parallel straigh...

Could you give an example?

The current understanding is that particles are perturbations of the quantum field. In that understanding they are not "objects", like microscopic bil...