• Nietzsche: How can the weak constrain the strong?
    Obviously you're a dope when it comes to Nietzsche — Vaskane

    Isn't that almost everybody? :grin:

    Of course, that is a bad example because he has no actual beliefs other than narcissism, but you get my point. — schopenhauer1

    What about being a sexy, most intelligent, exuberant, successful orange billionaire?

    Just like ↪Lionino thought he was being smart by not using Nietzsche's perspective in his attempt to poke me — Vaskane

    I was not poking you — in fact I haven't really followed the thread. I was poking fun at a horrible translation practice. Derrida's différance is another one, but since it is not a proper term of the French language it does not require translation.
  • Nietzsche: How can the weak constrain the strong?
    Ressentiment is the enduring psychological state of resentment in which resentment is behind one's creative force for valuation — Vaskane

    "Resentment (in French) is the enduring psychological state of resentment". Interesting.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    So, if all there is, is energy then there are no things. — boagie

    Non sequitur and contradiction, energy is a thing.

    There are only things for biology, experiencing these energies and processing them biologically gives one a world of objects, an apparent reality — boagie

    Isn't the biology here a thing?

    If you mean to say that the "objects" we see are mere appearances produced by our brain, when we receive sense-data, then there is nothing novel about that — noumenon, phenomenon. But where does the sense-data come from? From objects. Obviously objects are also made of energy, but then your argument becomes simply a sequence of analytic statements from your semantic game, non-informative as a whole.
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    No. — 180 Proof

    What is an example of something non-empirical and natural? And by empirical I mean something that can be observed, not something that has been or is observed now — I believe you share this definition.

    So in the case of consciousness, as any act of explanation is a conscious act, how could the one capacity, i.e. consciousness, provide both the explanans and explanandum? — Wayfarer

    I agree with this doubt. For me consciousness explaining itself is like a computer simulating itself — not fully doable. And by consciousness I mean subjective experience, which even many physicalist philosophers admit to be an issue for their worldivew, I don't mean a biological or cognitive phenomenon.
  • Feature requests
    Having links to replies to posts would be nice, kinda like this at the end of the post:
    q78bNBZ.png

    Also, for some reason undo control Z does not work here sometimes.
  • Divine simplicity and modal collapse
    ↪Walter
    I am only quoting him for his quotations.
  • Divine simplicity and modal collapse
    The doctrine of Divine simplicity, according to which God is absolutely simple, has been out of favour for a while now in both Christian theology and philosophy. It is accused of being inconsistent with the doctrine of the Incarnation (Hughes 1989: 253–64), with that of the Trinity (Moreland and Craig 2003: 586) and of being incoherent in its own right (Plantinga 1980: 46–61)." — Christopher Tomaszewski
  • Bannings
    ↪Michael
    Care to share the script?

    I just happen to be right when everyone else is wrong so it's justified. — Hanover

    I am happy to hear you agree with me on every topic.
  • Bannings
    It would be better perhaps to have non-philosophical threads moved to another section, like the short story competitions, without it being on the forefront of the website.
  • About definitions and the use of dictionaries in Philosophy
    Have a great new year! — Alkis Piskas

    Ευχαριστω. Same to you.
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    As I said before, I don't think that most people would accept that the duty of sparing the person of suffering trumps the duty of bringing someone to life and not depriving them of all joys.

    In any case, my original comment was mostly playful. As a personal dogma, I don't think antinatalism is a serious idea that has to be debated. So I will just hide this thread. Cheers.
  • Deconstructing our intuitions of consciousness
    A more proper translation would be "thought, therefore existence" or "thought exist, therefore existence is proven" — mentos987

    That is not accurate, neither is it gramatically correct in English.

    Cogitō is the first person singular present indicative of the verb cogitare (to think), ergo means "therefore" or "thus", sum is the person singular present indicative of esse (to be).

    The meditations were originally written in Latin and then Descartes translated it to his mother tongue French. In French it says "je pense, donc je suis" which translates to "I think therefore I am".
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    But obviously one could contend that "survival" is some moral mission, especially above and beyond that of imposing the conditions of suffering for a future person. — schopenhauer1

    Well, everything can be contended in ethics, which is why I use more common sense than a philosophical approach when I am faced with a dilemma in real life — not my intellectual topic of interest.

    But to talk about, the future conditions of suffering are an unknown, which is an argument against suicide. Not only that, but the conditions of suffering are also relative. A young adult athlete might end up killing himself after a tragit accident that puts him on a wheelchair. People born without movement in their legs do not kill themselves over being on a wheelchair, because that is all they have known, and they make do without being able to walk, and sometimes they make do wonderfully. Of course, there is a limit to this, such as Harlequin disease or glass bones, but we do put down Harlequin disease patients and always have — they end up dying shortly after birth anyway.
  • Best Arguments for Physicalism
    The very successful use of scientific method in the West — J

    In the whole world.
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    If we are going for someone not suffering in the future — schopenhauer1

    Right, but if we are going for survival, which was my initial premise, natalism would be the answer.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    Not so sure about what the conclusions might be, but that’s ok. — Mww

    I just read the translation and it surely butched some 40% of what I wrote, but the meaning can still be understood partially.
    I am not sure if it is clear from the g-translated text, but the conclusion ultimately is that there is not just "thoughts", but there is something thinking that thought at least, and that something can be defined as an external structure, and that external structure can be, in basically all cases, defined as "I". So, I think therefore I am does hold in Cartesian philosophy and can still hold outside of it.

    Certainly it is. (Only that I would say, "a recurrent question".) — Alkis Piskas

    Right. The use of 'the' is just an idiom (with the butchered meaning of the word instead of the real meaning) in English, see.
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    How is that about truth or falsity? — schopenhauer1

    It is one of the theories of truth (or so I remember reading it).
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    What makes it “truth”? It seems a category error to apply “truth” to a process. You haven’t explained how this term is meant to be used in this context. It seems like a misuse. — schopenhauer1

    I recall reading somewhere that for some, truth comes to be by evolution, where X is true because we would not survive by believing non-X — Lionino

    If a belief leads to a groups' extinction while its opposite leads to its survival, the belief would be false.

    Antinatalism can be supported in almost any normative theory, including deontology. — schopenhauer1

    Right, that is why I said can be rejected, just like you said can be supported.
  • About definitions and the use of dictionaries in Philosophy
    Can you make this a little more clear to me? Do you mean that consciousness contains action? — Alkis Piskas

    You are dealing with an obscurantist who throws a hook and pulls the line bit by bit, and finally you see there was no bait (see here).
    Here is the what he quoted:
    7j2ClUY.png
    Not very helpful on its own.
    Don't be solicitous. If he had a point to make, he would have stated already.
  • Bannings
    Myself, I wonder why this particular forum, which is mainly concerned with philosophy, ought to accomodate never-ending threads on vexatious topics such as Middle Eastern politics, which is famously divisive. I hardly contribute to that thread, as I don't have a dog in the fight, and besides there's enough stress and bile going around without outsiders piling on with their own opinions. So let's bear in mind what the purpose of this particular forum is about, there are many other fora (reddit, quora, etc) where non philosophical issues can be canvassed. — Wayfarer

    I fully agree. Topics of that nature 90% of the time attract people that go against the spirit of philosophy. Why would anyone come to a philosophy board and spend his time debating covid vaccines?

    Only a part of my mind is philosophical. Another part wants to gossip. There may be several different personalities instantiated in my single brain, and right now the personality that wants to beat the guy while he’s down (probably because of a personal slight) is at the fore. Don’t ruin our fun! — RegularGuy

    What is the name for the feeling when you dislike pettiness, but find it admirable and amusing when the individual not only admits to it but also embraces it? Some corners of the internet would simply call it "based".
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    ↪Beverley
    What you are asking is a common wonder about the ontology of Descartes.

    I will first say what it means for Cartesian philosophy. As far as I know, he does not directly address the question of the vessel of thoughts, but from his philosophy, we have things such as atributes, modes, and substances. Thought would in fact be an attribute of of the thinker. He says in a letter to Regius:
    You agree that thought is an attribute of a substance which contains no extension, and conversely that extension is an attribute of a substance that contains no thought. So you must also agree that a thinking substance is distinct from an extended substance. — Descartes

    The SEP interprets that attributes and the substance are in fact the same thing, only different in our understanding:
    Attributes are in fact what make existing substances intelligible to the human mind. He reaffirms this in Article 62, where he says that there is only a distinction in reason between an attribute and an existing substance. — SEP

    According to the fragment, thought would be the as the thing. Reading Descartes however we would not fully agree with that, reading even the material that the SEP quotes to support such a statement:
    But when it comes to knowing whether any of these substances truly exist, that is, whether they are present in the world, I say that it is not enough for them to exist in this way for us to perceive them, since in themselves they do not make us discover anything that awakens any particular knowledge in the world. our thinking. It is therefore necessary that it has some attributes that we can notice, — Principles of Philosophy part 1 section 56
    For example, because any substance ceases to exist when it ceases to last, duration is only distinguished from substance by thought. — Principles of Philosophy part 1 section 62
    I don't think it makes sense to consider duration to be the same as substances.
    We would think instead that an attribute is something that emanates from the substance. As he says that extension and divisibility is of bodies, thought is of the thinker, along with other things, such as feeling and intuition. So attribute would not be used much differently from its everyday meaning: something that composes and characterises X, but does not subsume X — there is no substance without duration, but duration is not substance.

    What it means outside of Cartesian philosophy. Bertrand Russel's criticism of Descartes touches on the definition of "I". Some people retort that the "I" can simply be defined as the thoughts themselves, but from there we have other issues. I have written a bit about it, though of course not in English. I have Google Translated it:
    • 1. I am the thing that thinks. But is there something beyond thought? If not, I am the thought; If so, what is it?
      I am either other thoughts, or an external structure.
    • 2. I am the thought. But how can I be thought? If I am thought, "I think, therefore I am." implies that thoughts think. If thoughts do not think, I am not "I think, therefore I am."", but something else. If thoughts think, I thought and came into existence, but from this it would follow that I existed before thinking myself, therefore I would never come into existence, because my existence would depend on my action. I could be a previous thought that thought "I think, therefore I am.", which would already qualify as an external structure, and this previous thought simply arose and does not require a thinker because it does not state "I think." — may or may not have prior thought.
      • 2.1. I have no previous thinker, I am this chain of consecutive thoughts which begins with a thought that only arises. This finite multi-thought begins, produces "I think, therefore I am.", remembers it, affirms it, and dies. This multithought would be the external structure.
      • 2.2. I have a previous thinker. Is this thinker me, another being, or another thought?
        • 2.2.1. It's me, so I'm a chain of thoughts that regresses to the past. Is the current finite or infinite?
          • 2.2.1.1.If the current is finite, I am a finite multi-thought, an external structure. But how does one thought become the next?
            • 2.2.1.1.1. An external structure causes the changes.
            • 2.2.1.1.2. They simply become, and causality is not necessary; I would therefore be this purely uncausal finite chain of thought.
          • 2.2.1.2.If it is infinite, I would have infinite thoughts, but I don't have them; perhaps it was therefore an infinite stream of thoughts with limited memory, this stream plus the limited memories, which may be part of the thought and therefore part of the stream itself, would be the external structure. But how does one thought become the next?
            • 2.2.1.2.1. An external structure causes the changes.
            • 2.2.1.2.2. They simply become, and causality is not necessary; I would therefore be this uncausal infinite stream of purely thought with limited memories.
        • 2.2.2.Another being, therefore another being exists besides me, thought, and this being could be identified with 'I', which thinks "I think, therefore I am.".
        • 2.2.3.Another thought, which implies that something must have thought it, and so on infinitely. However, this infinite stream of thought can be identified with 'I'. (Only if the thought that caused the other are the thoughts in my memory, if not, it cannot be identified with me)
    • 3. I am an external structure. But what attributes does this external structure have?
    However, even more directly and simply, the initial objection is “I am 'I think, therefore I am.', and I think”, therefore, if the agent is thought, it could not say “I think” nor “I exist”, as it would only pass to exist as soon as thought itself ceased, resulting in a paradox. If thought is something that occurs instantly, thought could not be experienced, as it would cease to exist as soon as it concluded.
    One answer to this would be, if I am a pure stream of thoughts, finite or infinite, how can I think about my own existence — and therefore see it — without it first ending, and then ending my existence? It follows that I can only see part of myself, and then identify “I think, therefore I am.” with pure infinite current retroactively changes the only possible statement of “I think, therefore I am.” to “I think, therefore part of me exists.”. However, every part is included in a whole, and establishing the existence of a part establishes that of the whole, therefore “I think, therefore part of me exists.” implies “I think, therefore my whole exists.”, which would just be “I think, therefore I exist.”.
    In short, it is possible to identify thought with the agent himself. And in this case, it implies that I am an external structure, or that I am a pure stream of thoughts, and those thoughts themselves would be something other than “I think, therefore I am.”.

    I have not checked the translation. If you are interested, I will do it if there are any confusion to be cleared up.
  • Bob's Normative Ethical Theory
    Nice. Good job.
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    Ok, so you are trying to pose a hypothetical scenario and treat it like a "meme" that gets phased out. But the problem is the same as the naturalistic fallacy as applied to humans.. Humans are so plastic that it is possible that humans have the ability to refrain from procreation and discontinue humans for ethical reasons, like suffering (that those future humans might face if born). — schopenhauer1

    Right, but even then, under evolutionary truth, antinatalism turns out to be false, even if there are no humans around anymore — especially when there are not more humans around. The truth value of something does not depend on whether there is someone there to state it.

    That is to say, just because "it's in nature", doesn't mean it is morally right, simply. — schopenhauer1

    Of course, but I will not pretend that the moral argument works either. Antinatalism can be rejected by default in frameworks such as virtue ethics and deontology, as well as ethical egotism. Being that AN works under the premise that suffering outweights joy in life, it could also be rejected within consequentialism, as most people would reject that premise.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    So, is it just his belief that he is the res cogitans? — Beverley

    In the same way that it is just Kant's belief that existence is not a predicate, or Plato's belief that universals are real, yes.

    How did he know he wasn't simply the thoughts? — Beverley

    The mind basically amounts to every mental operation, or rather, the things that hosts these mental operations. So the mind contains the thoughts.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    ↪Beverley
    In a way, you could say he is thoughts, but what he say he is is the res cogitans, the thinking agent, or his soul.
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    ↪schopenhauer1
    It seems to me you are making a moral argument, where that was not my intention.

    My point was more of, if we accept that truth is determined by the universally held views of the surviving group, antinatalism will soon enough become false, and it will do so every time, as the holders of that view will eventually extinguish themselves.
  • Reason for believing in the existence of the world
    He uses something non-physical, such as thoughts, to prove something physical, himself. — Beverley

    Just a small correction: Descartes says that he is distinct from his body. So he uses instead his thoughts (mental) to prove something mental, himself.
  • Overcoming all objections to the Analytic / Synthetic distinction
    No existing terms exactly match the ideas that I must communicate. — PL Olcott

    So why use existing terms whose definition is different and well known?
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    ↪schopenhauer1
    ↪fdrake
    I recall reading somewhere that for some, truth comes to be by evolution, where X is true because we would not survive by believing non-X — I cannot for the life of me find anything on it online however.
    Adopting that view, antinatalism has to be false, at least after a few generations.

    I am not here to argue that view of truth by the way :100:
  • Antinatalism Arguments
    If we hold an evolutionary view of truth, antinatalism is false :razz:
  • The books that everyone must read
    ↪Dermot Griffin
    As awful as a list of Marvel movies novelisations.
  • Metaphysically impossible but logically possible?
    After some thinking,
    Reveal
    which was prompted by a retort to my friend jokingly saying that I am not X, to which I replied that I am so X that my appreciation for Y surpasses even the metaphysical and transcends into the realm of logical possibility,
    forcing me to wonder "What does it mean to transcend the metaphysical into the logical?", I have come to some new conclusions.

    When we ask whether something is a possibility within X, we are naturally asking whether something violates the laws of X or not. Thus, to be metaphysically possible means not to violate the laws of metaphysics. That brings us to: what are the laws of metaphysics?

    A quick search online gives us nothing, but the simple confusion of laws of logic with metaphysics.

    I thought of the following: if the laws of metaphysics encompass physics but are contained within logic, all laws of metaphysics must attend logical laws, but be above physical laws. In order to make "metaphysically possible" meaningful, it must also be separate from both physics and logic.
    So, let us search something that is not "A is A" but that at the same time is true in every possible world.
    It is metaphysically possible that the speed of light is 1 meter/second, that gravity is repulsive, that uranium is more stable than helium. It seems that it is metaphysically possible that the physical elements of the universe could be any way. But what about something non-physical?

    There are a few three types of objects afaik: physical, mental, abstract. We are acquainted with the former two, but abstract objects are objects that are not spatially or temporally located, and are causally inert; that is, they are not anywhere in time or space, and they don't act on anything. I personally do not think that abstract objects are real objects, but here I will assume they are
    Reveal
    (and I give myself that freedom for reasons I could but will not elaborate on)
    . Among abstract objects, we have universals, such as greenness or beauty, and numbers
    Reveal
    (you could argue a number is a universal from an immanent realist point of view, but that is besides the point)
    .
    Since universals such as greenness and beauty seem to invoke analytic truths, which hinge on the laws of logic, let's leave those aside to focus on numbers instead. What is it about 2 and 4 and 7 that is always true but does not hinge on its definition? That 2 always equals 2 is simply the law of identity. But then, that 1+1=2? One might say that that is a synthetic judgement, as there is nothing in 2 that evokes the definition of 1. However, if we are going off Peano arithmetic, 2 not only invokes 1 but its existence depends on it. It seems abstract objects won't very helpful.

    In some previous posts epiphenomenalism is discussed, and we argue about whether the "metaphysical possibility" is not encoded into the semantics of the metaphysical system, making every metaphysical possibility into a logical possibility. What about a law for every metaphysics?

    What is something that applies to every metaphysical system we could come up with, be it idealism, physicalism, Cartesian dualism, neutral monism, parallelism, etc? My immediate thought was causality. What are then the laws of causality? Well, I don't think we know any. Is it metaphysically possible that causality works backwards? Yes. Is it metaphysically possible that an effect has many causes? It seems so. I don't seem to find anything in causality that is beyond that which is determined by logic. Even if we want to say that causes can't be their own effects, how are we to prove such a statement beyond appealing to analytic truths? I don't see any way. Maybe if we look at the other two fields, we may find clues.

    The laws of physics are familiar, nothing goes beyond the speed of light, gravity is an attractive force inversely proportional to the square of the distance, etc.
    The laws of logic seem to invoke, to some extent, analytic truths. Of course, there is also identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle, which are required for analytic judgements, those are the basic laws of logic. But it is logically impossible that a bachelor is married, or that a colour is transparent, or that a flat surface has three dimensions.
    That leave us with synthetic judgements, something that neither physics (necessarily) or logic touches upon. Maybe it is the case that metaphysical laws are simply synthetic necessities.

    Someone brought up Kripke's before, so such a conclusion might not be surprising. But it seems that the laws of metaphysics limit themselves only to synthetic necessities. Let us take a triangle. There is nothing about a triangle that invokes its angles adding up to 180º, because it does not always. A triangle projected on Earth can add to more than 180º. It is only when we bring Euclidian geometry into the equation that triangles' angles add up to 180º necessarily, but that law seems to derive from the semantics of Euclidian geometry constraining the semantics of "triangle". "A regular triangle's angles in Euclidean space sums 180º degrees" seems therefore to be an analytic judgement. So we have to search for things that are not only synthetic, but that also scape our definitions, no matter how hard we try to systematise them into axioms and theorems. Well, that would be it for mathematics, as the existence of nominalistic mathematics shows that mathematics does not scape our semantic games.

    Therefore, if we want to find something logically possible but metaphysically impossible, we must find a violation of a metaphysical law. We
    Reveal
    (and by 'we' I mean me)
    have this intuition that metaphysical laws are synthetic necessities. To find something logically possible but metaphysically impossible, we must find a synthetic necessity and state its opposite.

    Searching for a synthetic necessary judgement, I found “A Defence of `Synthetic Necessary Truth’” by Stephen Toulmin, where the example of a knockout game is used (or better, of a raffle).
    8aM9BYU.png
    Here, we see that both King’s and Lady Margaret go to Heat 1, only if they win the game, and only one can win the game. And it is also the case that, no matter how hard they try, neither will get to Heat 2.
    Even though we could argue that {2 teams in bracket 1 cannot go to the Heat 1} is inbuilt in the semantics of the game, there is nothing about the definition of Kings that implies it is in bracket 1 with Lady Margaret, thus we have a synthetic statement. If we contradict that synthetic statement, we say that both Kings and Lady Margaret can go to the semifinal. While that statement is metaphysically impossible, because it must be the case in every possible world given the rules established; it is logically possible, as the laws of logic are not violated if, say, both the winning and losing team go to the next bracket while none of the teams in the other bracket go forward, only the laws of the game are violated, which here I call metaphysical laws.
    Formulating it plainer:
    A: In a knock-out game decided by luck, with 4 brackets (1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4) , each bracket contains two opponents, who knock each other out to go to the next bracket of 2 (2.1, 2.2), then to the bracket of 1 (final), which decides the winner.
    B: Bracket 1.1 is composed of Kings and Lady Margaret (synthetic statement, given by the particular condition those two teams find themselves in).
    C: It is metaphysically impossible that Bracket 2.1 is composed by Kings and Lady Margaret (derived from both the semantics of the game A and the synthetic statement B).
    D: It is logically possible that Bracket 2.1 is composed by Kings and Lady Margaret (no laws of logic are summoned).

    Reveal
    A draft:
    That morning star and Venus mean the same thing. But a group of workers can be designated by Arxc or Bcxr, that A3x4 and B4x3 references the same worker is true, is it logically possible that it could reference a different worker? If so, what would it mean for it to mean the same worker metaphysically possibly? The meaning of those two systems is given by a language, to use the system A for example, the language maps the first element to a row and the second element to a column. To ask if A3x4 and B4x3 could reference different workers means different things. Could the system (mapping) of each be different? If we change the system, we are changing the meaning of the word ‘bachelor’ to mean something that could be a married man.
    Changing the way workers organise would make A3x4 and B4x3 possibly refer to different workers. The system has not changed, yet the result has.


    It turns out, relating metaphysics to synthetic necessities is obviously not original:

    Synthetic a priori judgments are the crucial case, since only they could provide new information that is necessarily true. But neither Leibniz nor Hume considered the possibility of any such case.
    Unlike his predecessors, Kant maintained that synthetic a priori judgments not only are possible but actually provide the basis for significant portions of human knowledge. In fact, he supposed (pace Hume) that arithmetic and geometry comprise such judgments and that natural science depends on them for its power to explain and predict events. What is more, metaphysics—if it turns out to be possible at all—must rest upon synthetic a priori judgments, since anything else would be either uninformative or unjustifiable.     — http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/5f.htm
  • Would you live out your life in a simulation?
    Inside the machine I will be free from the hustle and bustle of everyday existence, having to work, cook, eat, etc, just contemplation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

    Taking that the machine operates based on its programming, and not on the laws of nature, you would not really be uncovering true reality, but a subset of it.
  • There is No Such Thing as Freedom
    Wait what? The freedom to phase through a wall? That's not freedom, it's a fact about wat physics says can or can't be done — Manuel

    Yes, I brought that up a couple times. That is freedom, a freedom determined by physical facts. The freedom of Danes or Scots or Russians or Palestinians or Chinese are also ultimately determined by physical facts; that was ultimately my point as to why your original comment about modern politics is irrelevant here, and now you seem to agree.

    I don't feel like you are actually paying any mind to what I am saying and my original comment was just made in jest as a little criticism, so I am calling it for this thread — it should be deleted anyway.
  • Nietzsche: How can the weak constrain the strong?
    ↪baker
    I must say that I understand just ever so slightly more about Nietzsche than the average person — which is very close to nothing —, but I believe that when Nietzsche talks about strenght or weakness it is from an individual point of view, and it is not only practical strenght, but strenght of spirit also. The corrupt and ugly may win with cunning but that does not make them stronger than the brave and beautiful.
  • There is No Such Thing as Freedom
    If you don't have metaphysical freedom, the freedom to move an arm or choose to get up now and read a book or not or any other trivial thing, how can you have any other freedom? So no, I certainly do not buy the notion that metaphysical freedom is opposite any other freedom, in fact, it presupposes it, as do the laws in the societies we live in. — Manuel

    Even without metaphysical (free will) freedom, there is such a thing as freedom as determined by the laws of physics (the freedom to phase through a wall). But even if I grant that to you, which I am willing to, you make a point about freedom existing because people in Copenhagen have more freedom than in Palestine. I show that this does not depend on metaphysical freedom and so much so that it is completely relative (Palestinians have the freedom to bear arms, Danes don't). Your point about modern politics is therefore completely unrelated to the discussion.

    What is the point in saying we don't have it, if all of us, including the most die-hard determinist lives as if they do have free will? — Manuel

    Because, as I said, the point or meaning of a proposition is separate from whether it has truth value or not. You are doing what some other users here do and basically saying "Ok but so what?/Who cares?" in reply to a discussion topic. That is not philosophy.

    In any case, the OP is short and poorly formulated, it does not even fulfill the requirements to make a thread as put in the rules.
  • Nietzsche: How can the weak constrain the strong?
    Germs. Gravity. Children. Promises. Memory ... wtf, think! :sweat:

    Yet more gibberish.
  • Overcoming all objections to the Analytic / Synthetic distinction
    You have to actually see the redness of a rose to get its full meaning. — PL Olcott

    Fine, but that is called a posteriori knowledge.
  • Overcoming all objections to the Analytic / Synthetic distinction
    I am defining Analytic(Olcott) and Synthetic(Olcott) so that they can be unequivocally divided. — PL Olcott

    That is fine but your definitions will not be picked up because that is not what analytic means neither is it for synthetic. When the word 'synthetic' is used it never implies sense data in any context. When the word 'analytic' is used it does not always imply language.

    The words you are looking for are a posteriori and linguistic/semantic.
  • What is the way to deal with inequalities?
    btw, Chinese authentic civilization has no 'religion' concept or word in language, as western culture — YiRu Li

    What does Zōngjiào mean?
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