If we do not need any concept of time to explain and make predictions about the physical world, why does this "flow of time" matter? Occam's Razor see...
I do not know if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me. Is the free will in "God gave us free will" the same thing as the free will in, say, a neuro...
"Our illusion of the past arises because each Now in Platonia contains objects that appear as "records" in Barbour's language. "The only evidence you ...
Imagine solitary confinement at a jail/prison. Imagine a person living in that environment from the moment of his/her birth with no exposure to societ...
But then one reads that physicists are saying that time is an illusion and that we live in a static universe. Therefore, maybe the observation in the ...
An instinct is simply an unlearned response. If that response is regularly repeated, it becomes habit. When I was robbed at gunpoint I doubt that 1% o...
History as an intellectual/academic discipline may no longer exist in 2118. We seem to have decided that the liberal arts are luxuries that contribute...
But that high standard of living depends on a large supply of cheap manual labor in the Global South. If everybody in the Global South is suddenly in ...
I should add that the incentives in traditional cultures to have large families also explain why giving those people modern birth control technology d...
Not necessarily. According to Wealth Flows Theory, in traditional societies wealth flows from children to parents, therefore it is in people's best in...
In Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism Richard H. Robbins shows that it is governments in the West who have been the alarmists about human p...
I don't doubt that you are. That does not make it any less irrational, self-defeating, and morally wrong. Fighting evil with evil has not been the str...
Cloaking one's true beliefs out of fear of being shamed is not rational. A society in which people walk around harboring repressed thoughts and are si...
The David Smail quote in my previous post addresses almost everything that this thread is about in just a few paragraphs. The only things I don't see ...
But is racism a "character flaw"? David Smail seemed to unequivocally assert that the idea of racism, sexism, etc. being features of a person's charac...
In other words, people will think / not think things and say / not say things based on emotions such as shame, not as the result of rational considera...
In other words, "racists" do not treat certain people with dignity and respect, that is wrong, and the solution is to not treat "racists" with dignity...
FDR knew in advance that Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked, and he did not intervene. It was his way of getting the U.S. into WWII. I don't know i...
Something else to consider is that these days that 1/10th of 1 percent is often the product of performance-enhancing drugs, human growth hormone, etc....
A rematch of last year's national championship game produced the first sell-out in the history of Mississippi State University women's basketball. Peo...
I don't know. Why do you think that these invasions, conquests, occupations, etc. that you detest happen in the first place? Are people superstitious-...
Why do you think it happens? Is it the result of superstition? The U.S. believes that the stars in the sky are aligned a certain way and therefore we ...
Where have we heard this reasoning before? Europeans colonizing Africa, maybe? President George W. Bush deciding to invade Iraq, a country that had no...
Also, context is missing. A statement with no context is meaningless. Put the statement in context and then we can evaluate what it means/says. Here's...
"In a fragmented global culture and economy of exclusion that deem entire peoples and the earth itself expendable, Francis insists that members of hum...
Read Grassroots Post-Modernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures, by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri-Prakash, for accounts of how the world's oppressed maj...
But how many organisms do this?: 1.) Take from their environment far more than they need; 2.) Justify this by saying that it is an investment that wil...
It depends on your present position relative to philosophy. If you have specific questions, such as "Why is there something rather than nothing?", the...
The American Dream was bought with credit. It was bought with resources borrowed (or taken) from ecosystems, non-renewable energy, indigenous peoples,...
Does not change the fact that a consensual exchange of ideas is highly implausible between people who do not mutually believe in each other's existenc...
Your argument sounds like utilitarianism. I could be wrong, but I believe that utilitarianism basically says that whatever maximizes aggregate pleasur...
If people were not essentially in agreement--we exist (can't imagine a substantive dialogue between a being who believes he and the other exists and a...
Maybe even better than the alternatives I thought of. Is this agreement pre-existing, a priori, or whatever adjective you want to use, and then discov...
All excellent points. I don't know the history very well, but it seems to me like in the U.S. organized sports were conceived by clubs, fraternities, ...
A journal article I once read concerning the same topics as this thread--physicalism and epiphenomenalism--pointed out that we do not observe causatio...
I was going to say read David Smail's internet publication Power, Responsibility and Freedom but it is suddenly unavailable. Hopefully that is tempora...
This seems to clearly show that that is not true: "I do think there’s a huge issue in figure skating and in gymnastics about how our culture, the soci...
Sounds like it wasn't difficult for these girls: "He came over here after Nadia Comaneci, and he brought his system with him, which was a system of ab...
"I do think there’s a huge issue in figure skating and in gymnastics about how our culture, the society at large, views these girls and young women. H...
Yes, that is what I have noticed about all of the politics of identify: it seems to always be people living privileged lives saying that they are vict...
False dichotomy. It is not "producer versus consumer". It is "frugality versus consumption ". And it is an integral component of capitalism, not a lat...
All of the evidence that I have seen says that that is completely irrelevant to why racial categories were created. That does not make racial categori...
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