Philosophy Now Forum

What on earth do you think could make Philosophy relevant again, that is, what do you want it to be relevant about? As a philosopher of physics I regard the divorce between physics and metaphysics as one of the greatest tragedies of the modern era. The proposition that we must live in a universe wh...

Leo, you wrote how NOT to define the social contract. That mean you have an idea of how one should. So how is it? I describe myself as a village socialist, which basically means we should back to our tribes. The nation state as constituted under the Westphalian model is a dying institution which wo...

How should one define a social contract? How long is a piece of string, mate? To me the social contract is simply the system of laws, ethics and conventions by which the society operates. However when economic Darwinism is allowed to supervene this system then the various laws, ethics and conventio...

The eternalism of Minkowksi's 4D manifold is what lies at the heart of the still unresolved "observer problem" in physics because it implies the notion of the transcendent observer. In a presentist reality the transcendent observer is replaced by an immanent observer who then becomes inter...

To my mind, no post in law enforcement or judiciary should ever be elective. To an Australian this practice also seems antithetical to our notions of justice. And the lover of justice positively bristles at the idea of private prisons - with a mandated quota. If it weren't for the crime business, t...

If someone really wants to measure up the specific value, it is measured. "It is the theory which determines what the observer will observe".....Albert Einstein If we design our models of physics specifically to predict what the observer will observe we can claim only a Pyrrhic victory wh...

Has there been some new scientific understanding, link please? Alas no. The philosophy of physics is my core business and the observer still remains the most misunderstood component of any physical system. In Newtonian physics the observer is located outside the system looking in but this is not ho...

It's so easy to prove that the real contraction or dilation declared by special relativity are nonsense. Just swap the subject (observer) to an object and you have got the opposite results. Of course, we can measure/see the differences, but these incorrect results are caused by the delay signals. Q...

My point is that we have a physical relationship with colors. Could that be the connection on every other level? I say yes. In process philosophy the key word in this statement is "relationship". Colour is not a property of light but a property of our physiological interaction with light.

I'm curious as to what it means to be a process philosopher. It seems to chime with my thoughts of 'qualia' as a nonsense term for Western academic philosophers to squabble over. I don't get why there is a problem. When I studied this, a few years ago, I settled on the functionalist view. Are the t...

I am not clear in terms of the relationship between Chalmers and Newton. Are you saying that Newtonian mechanics is promoting some type of dualism? Very much so. Newtonian reductionism is an entirely dualist notion because it places the observer external to his observation. This defines the observa...

Of course if you were to mention the word "metaphysics" in a room full of physicists they'd treat you like the bloke who farted in the elevator and all move over to the far side of the room.

It seems obvious that the answer to the titular question is YES. Spacetime physics is modelling an illusory world and the reason for this is transparently obvious. When Minkowski represented time as a Cartesian dimension he committed a gross metaphysical error. Cartesian dimensions are bi-directiona...

You make some good points, hammock. As I see it the "problem" of qualia is a non-existent one which is rooted in the Newtonian reductionist doctrine of eternalism, which essentially mistakes the map for the territory. In the more Leibnizian doctrine of presentism consciousness can be more ...

Physics deliberately divorced itself from philosophy early in the 20th century after Einstein concocted the spacetime paradigm. Instead it adopted the chilling anti-philosophical doctrine of logical positivism, which denies the role of human reason in the conduct of human affairs. Spacetime emphatic...