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The shape of things to come, and it ain’t pretty

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From Joshua Knobe, “Thought Experiments: Philosophers – Some philosophers today are doing more than thinking deeply. They are also conducting scientific experiments relating to the nature of free will and of good and evil (Scientific American, November 2, 2011): Here

The classic image of the philosopher pictures an ethereal type who is lost in thought and detached from the pedestrian concerns of everyday realities.

Actually, a lot of us thought he was the person who could rescue us from the fanatic.

A new breed of thinker is now bringing to bear the cognitive sciences to probe why people perceive the world in the particular way that they do.

You mean it has nothing to do with how they were raised?

The tenets of experimental philosophy can elucidate whether free will really exists and whether morality is just a relative construct.

Don’t we already know what the answer was got to be, from these clowns?

Look, there’s a big trial going on in Canada. If you are just a stupid Darwinist, don’t even comment. Even the useless dweeb legacy media coverage can’t quite get around the radical evil that says everything we need to know.

Comments
While I believe we can empirically detect free will, I think you're right. These "experimental philosophers" will just be using "empiricism" as an excuse to peddle their materialism.Eric Holloway
October 30, 2011
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Agreed re language. We were bracing ourselves for the "evolutionary psychology" reason and the "experimental philosophy" reason he murdered them. Sometimes the stupidity gets to us, especially when something serious happens. By the way, Kingston is a nice town, once the home of our first Prime Minister. (Also famously, the home of a number of federal pens, but they will have seldom had in them anybody like this, assuming these accusations are true.) Columnist Mark Steyn went us one better when he said there is something not quite human about it, if they are.News
October 30, 2011
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I thought so too but maybe they're used a bit ironically, it may "seem" wrong but how can we be sure?IDunno
October 30, 2011
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I think the uses of the word "dweeb" and "stupid" degrade the quality of UD. Let's try to make UD more professional.noam_ghish
October 29, 2011
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And the connection between experimental philosophy and religious murder is....?Fossfur
October 29, 2011
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In a conversation, with a atheist the other day, it was interesting to note that the atheist was arguing that quantum indeterminism undermined causality (he apparently severely disliked the non-local, beyond space and time, causality required to explain the 'spooky' actions in quantum mechanics), to which I pointed out that indeterminism, in quantum mechanics, merely undermined the materialists deterministic view of the world and restored free will to its rightful place in the Theistic view of reality (of man having a transcendent soul that can freely choose between good and evil), whereas free will, in the materialist atheistic view of reality, is still unable to be accounted for , since, materialists ARE STILL just helpless automatons mindlessly obeying whatever 'indeterministic' state the particles of their brain happen to be in. notes:
Quantum mind–body problem Parallels between quantum mechanics and mind/body dualism were first drawn by the founders of quantum mechanics including Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Niels Bohr, and Eugene Wigner http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind%E2%80%93body_problem "It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness." Eugene Wigner (1902 -1995) from his collection of essays "Symmetries and Reflections – Scientific Essays"; Eugene Wigner laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963. In the beginning was the bit - New Scientist Excerpt: Zeilinger's principle leads to the intrinsic randomness found in the quantum world. Consider the spin of an electron. Say it is measured along a vertical axis (call it the z axis) and found to be pointing up. Because one bit of information has been used to make that statement, no more information can be carried by the electron's spin. Consequently, no information is available to predict the amounts of spin in the two horizontal directions (x and y axes), so they are of necessity entirely random. If you then measure the spin in one of these directions, there is an equal chance of its pointing right or left, forward or back. This fundamental randomness is what we call Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. http://www.quantum.at/fileadmin/links/newscientist/bit.html 'Quantum Magic' Without Any 'Spooky Action at a Distance' - June 2011 Excerpt: A team of researchers led by Anton Zeilinger at the University of Vienna and the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a system which does not allow for entanglement, and still found results which cannot be interpreted classically. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110624111942.htm Falsification Of Neo-Darwinism by Quantum Entanglement/Information https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p8AQgqFqiRQwyaF8t1_CKTPQ9duN8FHU9-pV4oBDOVs/edit?hl=en_US Does Quantum Biology Support A Quantum Soul? – Stuart Hameroff - video (notes in description) http://vimeo.com/29895068 On the Mystery Of Space and Time https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FFKL3FeyebpNNyal1DQ64y20zlplVrjkaLXrM0P5ES4/edit?hl=en_US
verse and music:
"See, I have set before you today life and good, death and evil, in that I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, His statutes, and His judgments, that you may live and multiply; and the LORD your God will bless you in the land which you go to possess... I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the LORD your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days." --Deuteronomy 30:15-16, 19-20 Flyleaf - Chasm (Living Water) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-BvOuE7wfw
bornagain77
October 29, 2011
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