Philosophy Now Forum

Ahhh... so it's not the statements themselves alone! I can see I misunderstood the way it was being presented. Thanks for that, I felt I was just completely missing something obvious. Which of course, I was!

I was reading today and came across the Liar's Paradox. I read it a couple of times and couldn't quite see what was being claimed. I went off to read some internet explanations (eg Stanford's philosophy encyclopedia) but these were all explained in rather unfathomable language so I was left none the...

You may be right henry quirk, but it seems to me that isn't enough for an awful lot of people. Watching my Facebook feed shows me that rather clearly. This matter was illustrated to me recently in a discussion with a friend wherein I posed the question in slightly different form. I asked her what sh...

From what I understand of peoples' ideas of themselves and their place in the world, I gather many, if not most, tend to see themselves as something more than an organism existing in the physical world. That is, I think people imagine themselves to have a soul or at the least some essential essence ...

Leo, is 'Now' the same everywhere? I mean, spatially, 'here' is where my point of consciousness is and there is somewhere else, perhaps the other side of the universe. In the idea of space there is a separation due to physical distance. But if 'here' is really 'Now', and Now is the same everywhere, ...

raw_thought, you'd need to read the other side of the argument in depth to get a feel for that. It's not lying directly so much as it is group think. I think there is great pressure within science to conform to the consensus narrative. People like Hansen have a goal and it's not objective science - ...

oh and in case you wonder at my own philosophy of the world, here's a small peek at that. We need to have a population of probably no more than 1-2 billion total. We should live far more simply. We should abandon the pursuit of material goods, and reduce consumption, the cycle of growth and producti...

raw_thought, there's clearly little point in arguing with you as you very much have your mind made up. And as you say, your sense of the matter conforms to the consensus view, so you would feel pretty safe in arguing for being on the side of right. So when I offer my personal view, I do so just to s...

In posing this question, I'm not directly interested in Libet's experiment and what it illustrates, rather the idea that someone can be aware of an urge to act. I certainly don't have that awareness and I'm beat if I can see what is meant by that. For example, I can simply choose to flex a finger. I...

raw_thought wrote:The entire world's scientific community is aware of the earth's weather history and have concluded that our current extremes are not natural.

Maybe you could find a quote to support that?

raw_thought, you are doing exactly what I am suggesting - imagining that we are experiencing disasters we've not experienced before. Your examples are not weather extremes that have not been seen before. The IPCC, the main body making projections about impacts of climate change (from whom I drew tha...

raw_thought, scientists do not say that weather patterns are out of the norm. They project likelihoods of change according to both observations and theoretical considerations. There is no 'norm', simply a statistical average for some particular period. Here, for example, from the Summary for Policy ...

I won't bother going back through this thread, so am probably just covering old ground but I do find it intriguing how easily people are convinced that weather patterns today are somehow so very different from some mythical norm. In fact, I actually find it disturbing that young people are being enc...

Many may be familiar with the Libet experiments in the early 80s that suggested that the brain begins the process of preparing for a voluntary motor action before the subject decides to act. Essentially Libet had subjects undertake a motor act - usually a flick of a wrist or finger - and note when t...

I don't reckon it makes any difference which of the two major political parties wins government in this country, Graeme, and it certainly doesn't make any difference how popular either of them is. Democracy is government by the ignorant and we always manage to get the government we deserve. Heh, tr...