New answers tagged metaphysics
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Are Good and Evil relative or absolute?
There is good and evil but it depends on alignment. Depending on your alignment of your beliefs ,which may be scientific or unscientific (like religion) , good and evil are understood and put into ...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
God is a concept that is not even based on logic. It is based on imagination.
BTW, the word human is redundant. Logic can only be human. 🙂
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Are Good and Evil relative or absolute?
One way of understanding "absolute" and "relative" is that absolute means having a stable reference outside this ephemeral changing world, whereas relative pertains entirely to ...
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Are Good and Evil relative or absolute?
>Are Good and Evil relative or absolute?
There IS no good.
There IS no evil.
There is only FLESH.
Read Nietzsche.
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a Solution to The Problem Of Casuality and Thing-in-Themselves (Problem of Affection)
I don't exactly know how you are using the term, but it's weird to say that our mind has access to the thing in itself since it is, by definition, something unrepresentable, i.e., something that can ...
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If something sounds like jazz, does that make it jazz?
"In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn
the meaning of this word ("good", for instance)? From what sort of
examples? In what language-games? Then it will be ...
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a Solution to The Problem Of Casuality and Thing-in-Themselves (Problem of Affection)
I think you're right. Let's say something bumps your hand in the dark. The sensation is processed unconsciously, so a priori as far as conscious apperception is concerned. You already have the idea ...
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If something sounds like jazz, does that make it jazz?
Clearly we identify and differentiate things according to their apparent properties. How else would we do it? Macroscopic things typically have large number of properties, some of which are more ...
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If something sounds like jazz, does that make it jazz?
All things arise like waves. Complex understanding is built upon simpler understanding. Precise understanding is built upon vague or fuzzy understanding. If something sounds like Jazz then probably it ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
99% is a huge over-estimate. 1% would be a huge over-estimate. Heat death involves guessing about the state of the universe in 10^106 years. This requires assuming that the guesses we have about the ...
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Is there not a muddy overlap between the great existentialist questions and the great metaphysical questions?
There's a bit of an issue with language here. Technically speaking, the term 'metaphysics' deals with all questions about the fundamental nature of things (including humans). Existentialism and its ...
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Is there not a muddy overlap between the great existentialist questions and the great metaphysical questions?
All sciences, not just this aspect of philosophy face logic problems when trying to compare statistical or philosophical answers with individual or anecdotal answers.
Existentialism is about the ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
Freeman Dyson explored the heat death of the universe in "infinite in all Directions": https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-All-Directions-Lectures-April-November/dp/0060728892 In chapter 6, he ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
There is the Boltzmann brain thought experiment which suggests that if eternal inflation (and some other physical theories) are correct then we are almost certainly brains that spontaneously formed in ...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
Does physical reality exist without an observer?
Yes, of course. Assuming otherwise would be hubris of the largest order.
Rough sketch if you really need logic for this: Observers are part of the ...
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Any philosophical works that explicitly address the heat death of the Universe and its philosophical implications?
I would suggest taking a look at absurdism and the works of Albert Camus. While, as far as I remember, Camus does not address directly the heat death of the universe, his whole theory of Absurdism ...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
You ask:
Does physical reality exist without an observer?
Well, for science, you'll get the answer yes. But as we are a philosophical forum, the answer might be more complicated like, it depends on ...
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Is there really such a thing as metaphysical necessity?
Necessity is a logical device: necessity describes the dependencies of Logic.
For example, for all judgements on a book about The Laws of Thermodynamics to be valid, it is necessary for truth to be ...
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Is there really such a thing as metaphysical necessity?
Metaphysical necessity is a question on which philosophers continue to disagree.
Our use of language contains a great deal of modal terminology. We say that some things are necessary, some are ...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
When we look at the relations which can exist between being and consciousness we see clearly that only two positions are possible: either being is primary (materialism), or consciousness is primary (...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
A wavefunction is a probabilistic understanding of the state of something which is collapsed by determinative interaction. The former is more abstract than the reduced state of the thing.
OTOH This ...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
Of course reality does not need an observer: Life is a late phenomenon in the universe. During most of the time there was no life and no observer.
According to the Copenhagen interpretation quantum ...
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Does physical reality exist without an observer?
I will give you a physicist's view. The Universe existed for billions of years before the sort of life we consider conscious evolved on Earth. Do you suppose that the laws of physics changed when ...
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Is there really such a thing as metaphysical necessity?
Energy itself is not mere imagination. In fact, if there were to be a notion that imagination even is, that it could even be or exist, it would require some sort of precursor. Thus far, in life, the ...
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How can Hegel call philosophy a science?
I have not read the book by Gardner but the way you (or the author of the book) formulated this thesis is wrong. Yes, Hegel always loved the idea of science, rationality and logic, and he did claim ...
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What are reasonable counter objections to the argument that materialism is incoherent because it conceptually separates Being and Mentality?
Being is such a general term that you hardly find any ontological entity which does not deal with being (= existent)
things.
Physicalism (taken as a neutral word better better than the fighting
...
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What are reasonable counter objections to the argument that materialism is incoherent because it conceptually separates Being and Mentality?
David Bentley Hart
I have a feeling David Bentley Hart will be agreeable to you.
Note: The book seems to be written by a traditional Christian theologian but from the very subtitle itself — Being ...
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What are reasonable counter objections to the argument that materialism is incoherent because it conceptually separates Being and Mentality?
In short, (monistic) materialism doesn't separate being and mentality.
Dualism makes such a separation. The emergence you have in mind (which would be separate) sounds like emergent materialism (...
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What are reasonable counter objections to the argument that materialism is incoherent because it conceptually separates Being and Mentality?
One reasonable counter argument is that that's potentially the opposite of the truth, Materialism is a type of monism, which means all of it is wrapped up in this place we call the physical world.
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What are reasonable counter objections to the argument that materialism is incoherent because it conceptually separates Being and Mentality?
X is a body iff X exists and X is divisible.
X is a point particle iff X exists and X isn't divisible.
Therefore, by the propositional calculus
X is a point particle or X is a body iff X exists.
...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
To transcend reason is to attack reason (because you need need to destroy it entirely to transcend it) and as Chesterton put it (in Father Brown's words) to attack reason is simply "bad theology&...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
Yes, necessarily, but not in the way that you described.
Your proposition is interesting, and in some ways on the right track, but it moves past the easier and more obvious explanation, that God is ...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
This question is complex and multifaceted. Although God is incomprehensible in many ways but is also perfectly logical and reasonable in several other ways. Those who believe in God know that if they ...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
To the upvoted claims that it is "special pleading"
Special pleading is an informal fallacy wherein one cites something as
an exception to a general or universal principle, without ...
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Can God transcend human logic and reasoning?
This answer is both to the original good question and to Groovy's egregious answer, if I may apply his own rude and insulting language against him.
I fail to understand how it got so many upvotes.
The ...
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What's the relationship between good will and duty?
To explore the intricate relationship between good will and duty as elucidated by Immanuel Kant in his seminal work "Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals," it is crucial to delve into ...
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What is the view that Universe itself is not a compendium of things but a single entity?
‘Parmenides held that the multiplicity of existing things, their changing forms and motion, are but an appearance of a single eternal reality (“Being”), thus giving rise to the Parmenidean principle ...
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What is the view that Universe itself is not a compendium of things but a single entity?
There are two that seem to be a good fit for your question:
Advaita Vedanta is a Hindu school of thinking that sees the self as the same as the universe.
Process Philosophy imagines a universe that ...
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What is the use in arguing for or against the existence of metaphysical things?
There are two questions which we must ask here which I believe that you might be conflating.
One is what can we prove and the other is what should we believe. No, we cannot currently prove Free Will ...
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Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language
It took a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaitre, to propose an expanding universe in 1927. Einstein in 1915 had added a term to his General Relativity equations to produce the steady-state ...
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Chicken or Egg. Does anything begin Or is the idea of start/first origin. A misunderstanding of language
The question of the beginning or no-beginning of the universe is not a “misunderstanding of applied language”.
The issue is more serious: Currently we lack the concepts to think about this question. ...
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is there any inconsistancy if i claim thing-in-itselmselves are giving our mind "causality"?
OP: can't we just say, thing-in-itself gives us "causality" in our mind, because "causality" is a property of thing-in-itself, itself?
This is what Heidegger draws together in The ...
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Is Stephen Hawking's denial that gods exists founded on a misunderstanding?
Yes. He conceives of God as a "first cause" and that always leads to the question "who created God?" ad infinitum. Hawking sets up the question poorly because he has an agenda and ...
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Is Stephen Hawking's denial that gods exists founded on a misunderstanding?
Dipok didn't quote Hawking, and didn't mention what particular program or interview they watched, and Hawking gave a lot of interviews, so there's no way to be sure what prompted this question. But ...
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is there any inconsistancy if i claim thing-in-itselmselves are giving our mind "causality"?
Your hypothesis is based on the lack of a clear set of arguments for the origin of categories, so you assume that "the thing itself endows our brain with causal relationships", which is ...
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is there any inconsistancy if i claim thing-in-itselmselves are giving our mind "causality"?
There are many issues to debate here and apparently Parsa Fakhar disagrees with Kant on some fundamental points in the enlightened dialog with Conifold on the comments, despite his question being ...
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How strong is the argument for quantum mind theory?
See too June 2024:
"Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience"
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38920469/
"Here, we present a novel proposal: Conscious ...
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Accepted
Is our consciousness evidence of the existence of a true ontology that underlies many "conventional" ontologies?
You ask:
Is our consciousness evidence of the existence of a true ontology that underlies many "conventional" ontologies.
I think your question is prescient, but I think the terminology &...
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Is our consciousness evidence of the existence of a true ontology that underlies many "conventional" ontologies?
The question seems to combine several methodologies in inappropriate ways.
Starting with the primacy of experience -- is phenomenalism. Phenomenalism can, with great effort, be formulated to be semi-...
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Are Good and Evil relative or absolute?
There's an ancient Chinese story about good vs bad, which in morality terms is usually expressed as good vs evil. The specific story I'm talking about is a family that loses a horse and their only son ...
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