Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts

Monday, 16 July 2018

Philosophical mental jerking, Difficulties of discussion and Free will

Philosophical mental jerking
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I find the need to think about the big questions about life and the universe even if it amounts to nothing more than mental jerking. I don't believe in god, yet I do believe in answers and thoughts that are transcendent. I have the need to believe that there exists profound answers which could be unearthed; If only I or anyone could just think with the right angle or collection of ideas, inspirations and knowledge it could be unearthed. Life without this underlying effort would feel unbearably hollow and insignificant.

Perhaps I'm simply holding onto this belief to reject nihilism and romanticize life.

Difficulties of discussion
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I have problems understanding people. In many situations I find myself on the receiving end of an explanation and I struggle to figure out the vaguest idea of what the other person means. It must be that the quality of the explanation and my receptiveness to it are simply not above the requirement to successfully communicate ideas.

This difficulty in communication leads to irritation and repetitions in unsuccessful explanations. This is more often the case when people come into a discussion with their minds set and they've aligned themselves to argue.

Argument is not the only form of meaningful discussion people can have. Exchange of knowledge and a mutual exploration of ideas and concepts is as productive if not more so.

Despite the difficulties I absolutely believe in the importance of talking about hard to grasp ideas and concepts. None of the big questions in life are going to be simple and easily communicated across, yet they are vitally important to think and talk about. Not bothering with talking about these hard to grasp and talk about concepts is just resigning yourself to a potential life of ignorance.

Free will
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Recently I've found listening to Sam Harris podcasts very comforting while I jog. Perhaps it's the fact that I like listening to shooting sounds and voices, or that I easily lose myself in thought once engaged with intriguing with ideas, or something entirely different, but the bearability of the activity has definitely improved that last couple of times I went for a run.

The last podcast I listened to Sam briefly talked about free will and how once he fully realized it's lack of existence, he no longer thought the act of being angry at other people was sane.

At the time I just sort of accepted this statement, as I didn't disagree with any particular step, but it has stuck with me for a while and I find myself wondering about it, or at least I'm doing so right now. I want to spend some time to think of the full implications of what it means for free will to not exist and how I can change my behavior in light of this fact, to be more consistent with this understanding.

Free will doesn't exist because at the biological level physics governs the processes. At the level of thoughts, the thoughts that bubble out are uncontrollable, at least not directly and in any real way that is guaranteed to work, and people don't have control over the information available to them when making decisions.

How then is it possible to justify anger towards someone for their behavior when all of the elements that went into the decision making process was outside of their control?

Sunday, 31 May 2015

On Objective Morality

Objective morality exists in the same sense that numbers exist. Now even how numbers exist is up to debate, however that doesn't stop it from being of practical use. This is the same for morality, the bits that we do have knowledge of can be utilized for good.

Objective morality is needed to fight moral relativism, which is used by many to profess that there is no point in making progress with moral philosophies, in fact the idea of progress itself cannot exist in the face of moral relativism, as all philosophies are equally but differently moral.

However this wholly separates morality/moral philosophies from their consequences, specifically how they affect well being, and in this sense morality not only is of no use, but the whole concept itself is rendered meaningless and pointless.

-What is morality? why is this morality? If there is one thing that morality is relevant to it is the well being of sentient beings. If any other types of moralities exist then they are irrelevant or incorrect in terms of what we mean when we talk about morality.

-Existence of moral objectivity If you agree that morality is relevant to the well being of sentient beings then we know that morality exists. It exists as a spectrum of possibilities in which the state of well being, of sentient beings, can exist. This is the objective morality that's out there. Just as there is a spectrum of possibilities in which the state of human knowledge can exist.

Friday, 17 May 2013

The GOD Debate's Current Status

At this point in time the debate, about the existence of God, has come to a standstill; so far the debate has wound up at a position where it supports soft atheism, as the most rational position to take, on the matter of God's existence. Many arguments have been raised, from both the theist and atheist sides. A lot of them have been refuted and rejected, so there are really only a handful of arguments you'll need to brush up on, to get up to date with the debate on the existence of God.

1. As of now God is outside the domains of human interrogation, therefore it is impossible to prove or disprove his, her or it's existence. This means that neither the atheists nor theist side can rationally move to a gnostic position. Gnostic positions would be a definite belief in God's existence for the theists, and Hard Atheism for atheists. Assuming this much, individuals should now come to the conclusion that the God's existences has a 50/50 percent chance of being true, since God can either exist or not exist.


2. God doesn't get any special exceptions over other entities, whose existence, similarly to God's, cannot also be proven. Therefore God is simply another entity whose existence cannot be proven. Therefore the probability of God's existence must be whatever the probability of other entities, whose existence cannot be proven, is.
Here are lists of entities whose existence cannot be proven:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptids
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legendary_creatures

Remember you cannot disprove the existence of any of these entities, similarly to how atheists cannot disprove the existence of God. It is also irrational to discard the existence of any of these entities, simply because of the lack of evidence that supports their existence. This is because similarly to God, these entities may also exist.

This means that the conclusion must be that the probability of the existence of God must be relatively low, at least as low as the existence of all the other entities. Actually the probability of the existence of all the other entities would higher than the probability of God's existence. This is simply because all the other entities are a lot more natural than God; this means that they may be a product of the practically observed and confirmed process of evolution, where as it would be a lot less likely that God was a  product of evolution. If the probability of the existence of God is relatively low than the probability for the non existence of God must be relatively high; this justifies the assumption that there is no God, because the probability of his/her/it's existence is too low to acknowledge.