Philosophy Now Forum

1.) Perceiving something to be of good value, worth, joy, beauty, inspiration, love, a heavenly experience, and happiness to you can only be an experience for you that has a good quality. In short, having good value and worth, along with joy, beauty, and happiness in your life is always a good qual...

Netherlands is mostly atheist and they're doing just fine. It may in fact be as high as 95% of the population.

I'm not quite sure that you're point is coherent to what you're getting at, because the very vast majority of dictators in history have been religious.

They often don't expect to convert atheists is the funny thing. When they talk about turning someones heart around, most of the time they're talking about someone who was brought into christianity from another religion like islam or some person who dabbles in certain pagan beliefs. I think most peop...

I think theology has its place in philosophical discussion. I think they start to blur the line when they also cite theological arguments as something which specifically supports the religion they happened to be raised under, which is a little too convenient. Although some can defend this fact very ...

Can you not see the practical possibility of one person wanting to kill the many, who killed the innocent child of that one person? Surely you can see that as a practical possibility? What about if a group of human beings killed your very young absolutely innocent child, could there be a practical ...

Can you not see the practical possibility of one person wanting to kill the many, who killed the innocent child of that one person? Surely you can see that as a practical possibility? What about if a group of human beings killed your very young absolutely innocent child, could there be a practical ...

I don't think the example using a terrorist is a very good one or very particularly provoking. Obviously I would rather kill the man with the bomb to save the many. Usually, these sorts of ethical questions involve killing someone who is innocent to save others. Was an actual 'terrorist', in the ge...

It is. You're holding a Harry Potter book again with two alternate endings, both in the book. Armed with that completely determined knowledge (there is no information not contained in the book), it is impossible to know the actual fate of Harry Potter since there are two endings, neither more actua...

No on the second one. If it is outside the system, it is not a prediction, but rather just knowledge. I can know how the Harry Potter story ends because I'm not in it and have access to the last page even though that's not where my current point is in reading the story. That is knowledge of the fut...

The information isn't there because of quantum mechanics -- unless one wants to hold that past, present and future all exist (thesis of eternalism) In that case the information is all there, qm and all. But even in that case, for us entities stuck inside of the universe, no computer even in princip...

Perhaps we suffer from a language disconnect here. None of what I said is a claim for or against determinism. I'm not sure of the difference between 'determined', 'pre-determined', or 'pre-set'. Information about a temporal system is just information and nothing precludes that information. But to b...

davidm wrote:Well, they would be wrong

Sure. I'm just playing devil's advocate. I actually don't know that much about quantum mechanics.

Well that's also true; even if qm did not exist and hard determinism were true, no computer even in principle could compute all future events. I think some hard determinists also just think that the energy produced from the quantum field is not truly random. They usually have some sort of skepticis...

The information isn't there because of quantum mechanics -- unless one wants to hold that past, present and future all exist (thesis of eternalism) In that case the information is all there, qm and all. But even in that case, for us entities stuck inside of the universe, no computer even in princip...

No, the theorem acts more as a rebuttal to deterministic arguments. "If determinism, the future is, in priniciple at least, computable." Gödel showed that it is not possible even in principle. It's not possible due to a logical constraint, and it's not to say that the universe isn't actua...