Philosophy Now Forum

I think that for Mill proper names were not descriptive enough. That's what I gather from the quote used earlier.

If our choices are limited, then that really isn't free will at all.

This does sound a lot like dualism, as someone else said. So you think that the brain and the mind are the same thing?

I don't know if you can really teach someone how to say they are embarrassed. The person just knows what they are feeling, and then they say so. Though I suppose a child could learn how to do that by seeing one of their parents do it.

If we only experience thoughts, as you say, then are these our thoughts we are experiencing? I don't know what you're trying to say here.

Yes a robot's "emotions" would be a kind of expressed by what they do. They would not be real emotions.

I don't know if I could actually do that. I think that I will say no.

How is friendship an exchange of services? It seems to me that it is actually has nothing to do with that. You don't expect that from someone who is your friend.

There is really nothing wrong with being bored. It's just that sometimes people do not want to or have the energy to find some way to occupy their time, I think.

I have just looked up alien hand sydrome. Are there really choices with this syndrome? I can see what you are saying. I had never heard of that before.

I agree with that. When you are bored your mind is not really engaged, otherwise you would be active and your mind would be also.

I too have read Plato at the Googleplex. I quite liked it; it was interesting.

Choices are done consciously; there is no such thing as an unconcious choice. You are aware of the things that you do, and are aware of the choices you make.

I don't know if Platonic love (or Fraternal love) is necessarily the best kind of love. I think that it is very important in that people share things with friends that they don't with anyone else.

Absolutely! The figure of Golum in lord of the rings is an obvious allegory of the human being in a state of war with his own being, enslaved to his own deluded greed for example. It's amazing how mythology and popular fiction can live in our psyches. I've had the figure of the gingerbread man pop ...