February 2012
2 posts
3 tags
A Glimpse of Elementalism
To change things up a bit I’d like to talk about the Hellenic elements and what they represent.
The concept of element in an mystical sense is different from what is usually thought of and often portrayed as in the media. To use fire as an example, fire as flames is a very limited and incomplete view of elemental fire, even though it is the direct physical manifestation of elemental fire....
5 tags
They are right behind you
This is just for a bit of fun.
To kick things off, a gem from quantum physics: A particle exists simultaneously in all positions where the chance of it being is greater than zero (I hope I got that right).
Now lets apply that to a person (could be anything really, like your car keys) and see where we end up. They’re just a whole lot of particles, right?
If you are looking at a person then...
January 2012
2 posts
4 tags
Moral Responsiblity
Moral responsibility is a core aspect on discussion of free will. We are held accountable for the things we do, even though we may not be the cause of what we do.
I think it is a simple matter to understand how we can be morally responsible if we have free will. To have a free will is the premise that we have some faculty that is able to be a cause without being restrained or forced. Essentially...
The Cheerful Cynic: One teacher's approach to... →
togetherforjacksoncountykids:
“It’s Okay to be Neither,” By Melissa Bollow Tempel
Alie arrived at our 1st-grade classroom wearing a sweatshirt with a hood. I asked her to take off her hood, and she refused. I thought she was just being difficult and ignored it. After breakfast we got…
December 2011
5 posts
5 tags
On Ontology: Anselm
Ontology is the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being, in this case the existence of God.
Saint Anselm of Canterbury had a famous argument on this topic. He claimed that God is “something than which nothing greater can be conceived,” and his argument continues as follows:
Something that can be conceived exists in understanding.
Something that exists in reality is...
6 tags
Monism and movement
I tried reading the Ethics at first but it was obvious to me that I was not comprehending it well at all, so I decided to read the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza in the hopes that reading about Spinoza’s Ethics will allow me to understand the Ethics better when I read it proper.
As far as I understand about Spinoza’s substance monism, thought and physical extension are simply...
1 tag
“Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the world.”
– Archimedes
4 tags
On Omnipotent
Can God create a stone that he cannot lift?
If god cannot lift a stone, then how can he be all powerful? The same goes for a god that could not create such a stone. This question and others like it are often asked as a counter-argument to an omni-potent god. One problem with arguments along these lines is that they put forward a logical impossibility and demand that it be solved, as if the...
Why
I decided that I should use this tumblr as an opportunity to engage with my self-directed philosophical study and an excuse to continue writing in a routine manner. However, some of the topics that will come up have the potential to deeply offend people, so I shall endeavour to engage with topics in a charitable manner. I am still wholly ignorant in philosophical matters, so I will undoubtedly...
November 2011
1 post
Laconic at best
Several weeks ago I was waiting in a hospital common area. On one wall there were two white squares that people had scrawled messages over and read them out of curiosity. It seemed me that most of the messages on the left square seemed to be insights from people who had learned valuable lessons from tough times, while the ones on the right contained more hateful ramblings, often with a religious...
October 2011
5 posts
3 tags
The Other
When you know a person, all you can have is a representation of them in mind. Their actions and words are measured against your own experiences and biases. You cannot know what they think, for they cannot know if their words accurately portray what they think. In the same way, you cannot know all of your self, since you cannot see how you portray yourself, especially not in the same way another...
2 tags
True Free Will
Any act of true free will would be an act for which there is no antecedent conditions, an act that does not depend on anything that came before it and so cannot be determined a priori. However, such an independence also makes this act a logical necessity and so it holds over all possible worlds and could not be otherwise. So, if this act of true free will could not have been otherwise, can ...
6 tags
Common Sense
Quite often I hear the phrase “it’s just common sense” thrown about, often when someone misses something the one complaining thought should be obvious to anyone. Therein lies the problem, the person claiming common sense has made some vast assumptions about what experiences and knowledge they both have in common. While it may be accurate to place these assumptions on people with...
5 tags
E.S.P. and A.I.
I was doing the set reading titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing in which he describes the Turing test for machine intelligence, when I came across something I did not expect to see. One of the arguments against the test he discusses involves extra-sensory perception where the human participant guesses a card statistically higher than average due to telepathy...
2 tags
Did I wake up as the same person today?