Comments

  • What's the use of discussing philosophy without definitions?
    If so, when I present you with an apple and say "Here is an apple", "Apple" refers to the concept-of-apple in my mindBanno
    Which is obviously not correct. If that was the case I would not bother to look at the thing. An "Apple" is not in the mind but a real thing that is in the world. In being-in-the-world there is always being involved but that is not reason to talk nonsense. Everyone knows that you think you have an apple there if you say so, but you do not refer to something inside your head - it is in the world.
    One could say being in your mind would disqualify that thing from being an apple.
  • Science as continuing research
    If there is a need for it, it must be progress. Technology is only concerned with how to do something. You do not raise the question why there is such a need or how killing people could ever serve a good purpose. This is where philosophy and religion sell themselves to the powers to be:
    We are so understanding...
    Like few others since Hegel, Nietzsche recognized the dialectic of enlightenment. He formulat­ed the ambivalent relationship of enlightenment to power. Enlightenment must be "drummed into the people, so that the priests all turn into priests with a bad conscience-and likewise with the state. ..." However, enlightenment had always been a means employed by the "great artists of government ... The self-deception of the masses in this respect - for instance, in all democracies-is highly advantageous: making people small and governable is hailed as 'progress'!''
    Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • Science as continuing research
    That the discussions here are driven by some kind of deep need to question. The explanations are good and nice - but the question YOU made up here is how this would embed into the current social context. Take the Pinker-vid for example. How would you call that show? Philotainment?
  • Science as continuing research
    Do you really have that impression if you take a look on this forum, for example?
  • Science as continuing research
    In this philosophy kinda seems to serve the same purpose as a better clothes shop.
  • Science as continuing research
    This already has been done, I guess. Why would we need explanations and philosophy? We got YouTube.
    Philosophy just tries to solve the problems it caused itself: Every philosopher dreams of making up a huge problem which would not even exist without him.
  • A question about free will
    The very definition of 'Will' is the faculty by which a person makes a decision. However, a decision can be free OR forced. Not every will is free. Decisions are limited as it is, we don't yet understand the concept of free I believe.GreyScorpio
    Will aims at purposes, not means. It is different from the action itself as well as the choosing of means.
    I do not really want to get up and walk to the fridge, I merely want something to drink. Not even that: I do not want to feel thirsty. I want absolute and total satifaction, felicitousness, wellness and sure a few other things else I can not imagine right now.
    See, if you ask me if I really want to do the things I'm doing the answer is generally "no". I only want the true, good and beautiful.

    you may think that you haven't yet made the decision, but it already has been made for you.GreyScorpio
    You mean by my-self, right? I wonder why this should be a problem?

    you have to ask yourself. Are we really free?GreyScorpio
    Are we? Of what? Of yourself? Of others? Of fear, dread and sorrow?
  • A question about free will
    Free will is the idea that we have the power to make our own decisions of which cannot be influenced by anything but our own infliction.GreyScorpio
    Will has to be free because otherwise it would not be "will" but an effect. It's nature is purely ideal. No one can decide if you do something out of free will, but you. It easy to make up situations and say that you somehow must have wanted to do something. - He who wants the purpose must also want the means. - This is a contradiction.

    Everything either has it's price or it's dignity. (Kant)
    Only dignity makes something unconditionally valuable, a value in itself. Free will is free because it does not focus on lower purposes, but on such values-in-itself, making it at the same time your duty as well as the duty of all human beings as a whole.
  • A question about free will
    So when I play a game of chess and think, say, 10 minutes about my next move, don't you think the thought-process that I am aware of is a significant contribution to the deciding factors which move I actually take?
  • A question about free will
    This is another problem with the idea of free will. Rationality is a guideline for thinking and as such constrains our choices. To act in a rational way is to limit one’s choices. In short to be rational is not to be free.TheMadFool
    Formally the number of potential choices increases when thinking about which things one should not do in any case. Nor is an "objective" decision tree an adequate model for the experience of everyday decision-making neither can be a process guided by reason be deemed to come to arbitrary decisions.

    There are psychological studies proving that our brain makes a decision 5-10 seconds before we consciously realize, hence, who is making the choice?GreyScorpio
    Is this that important? Won't the quality of the biases produced that way depend largely on how you approach things on a daily basis? Sometimes on weekends I wake up just at the time when the alarm-clock would ring on weekdays. May be an analogy.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    Your "of course" seems to indicate that you acknowledge you have been talking nonsense.Janus
    No, "of course" you are not trying to understand because it does not fit into your speculation.

    But all of that is really irrelevant to our original disagreement which was over your claim that free choice must be between what we want to do and what we don't want to do. I have demonstrated that this is false.Janus
    What you have demonstrated is that you can speculate about that you could have wanted what you did not want.

    Whether we could have actually chosen otherwise we can never know, because once we have chosen there is no way of checking whether we could have chosen otherwise.Janus
    There we are going. So why do you say then we could? Notice: You are always talking in hindsight.

    In fact most of our significant ethical decisions involve choosing between two things that we want to doJanus
    Yeah, and you can only choose as good as you can. Hope your best is good enough.
    See what? "Best" is superlative.

    one that we judge will or may be harmful to ourselves or others, and another that we want to do for purely hedonistic, selfish or self-indulgent reasonsJanus
    Make your choice. I'll tell you if it's free.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    I have no idea what you are talking about, unfortunately.Janus
    Of course.

    If my decision was free, then I could have chosen otherwise.Janus
    Formally.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    If you had chosen the other option it would have been your free choiceJanus
    Now you are speculating. Then my initial (A) decision would not have been free. But I chose (A).
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    You're just repeating the same assertion, but you're not backing it up with any argument.Janus
    It is a contradiction to say that any option other than my free choice could be my free choice. If (A) is my free choice then (B) is not.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    At a particular moment I chose to smoke a cigarette, at that moment I could have chosen not to smoke it; there is no inherent problem or contradiction in that.Janus
    If one option is your free decision the others cannot.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    Your claim was that you could not have done other than what you did.Janus
    Yes, because only one option can be my free choice.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    Why?Janus
    Because you cannot decide to do both. Either your free decision is the one or the other.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    Then I would have wanted it in first place or the decision was not free.
  • Science as continuing research
    The measure of truth of an argument is it's negative, destructive power.
  • A question about free will
    A computer program is not responsible for the outcome of following a decision tree.Relativist
    Yet the everyday conception is satisfied with something being a "computer failure".
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    Being-with is not the condition for the possibility of Dasein.Dan123
    Yes, it is :)
    This "with" has an instrumental character.
  • A question about free will
    Exactly, we need drugs or other means to control which emotions might feel and thus gain absolute souvereignity over the flesh to totalize our freedom by complete subjuagtion of the piece of nature that we are ourselves.
  • A question about free will

    The essence of enlightenment is the choice between alternatives, and the inescapability of this choice is that of power.
    Horkheimer, Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    What sentence, and what is it about?Dan123
    §26 After the passage about Humboldt (I'm sorry I don't have an English Edition at hand).
    Must be something like "But the expression Dasein indicates clearly .... because Dasein is essentially Being-with". What? How? This does not concern Dasein itself. Just the conditions of it's possibility. How could this be a concern in phenomenology, right? I don't think so.

    Not sure what you mean here.Dan123
    Of course.
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    Just turn the question around. Heidegger drops a little sentence about this the term "Dasein" obviously implies first to be and then to be with, but that this "with" means basically with itself. Running forward to death implies the question for the conditions of the possibility of existing "Dasein" goes backward in time. How should the other have been if not "with"? The only possible answer: it has not been at all.
    I do not think this is possible.
  • A question about free will
    I cannot offer a definition for 'freedom' in this context as I do not believe there is such a thing as 'free-instinct'.Marcus de Brun
    Domination is conceptually absolute.
  • A question about free will
    There is probably an evolutionary pressure not to open your mind too much because focusing on the big picture makes you lose sight of the details, in this case the practical everyday details, which paralyzes you and decreases your chances of survival and reproduction.litewave
    I guess the evolutionary pressure in modern societies has more to do with the need to think twice - hard - before doing something foolish. It only gets as good as it gets but this should better be "good enough".
  • A question about free will
    Do you want to? That didn't seem to be such a problem...
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    Dasein wouldn't be "da" if it wasn't with others. Of course that does not mean the factical presence of others but an existential-ontological determination, i.e. a necessity making it possible.
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    So, Being-with, as an existentiale - a constitutive structure of the way Dasein is related to and immersed-in the world - is necessary to Dasein, even if no one else is ever around.Dan123
    Frankly, I think Dasein simply is not possible under that condition.
  • A question about free will
    Free will is will under the reign of reason. Schopenhauer seems right that this does not match the "empirical concept" of freedom. The dialectical one seems more appropriate when trying to grasp the idea: Freedom implies authority. Another question would be: Is it worth it?
  • A question about free will
    Matter does not think, yet water does not flow into arbitrary directions.
    If opting for something you do not deem reasonable you're not acting rationally.
  • A question about free will
    Yet it seems philosophical trivia that freedom is not to be confused with arbitrariness.
  • A question about free will
    But it is quite easy to draw a decision tree with millions of nodes enumerating all the things they do not do.
  • A question about free will
    So, how would you think this relates to the decision tree?
  • A question about free will
    Of course. The essence of human freedom is manifold.
  • Heidegger's ontology of others is solipsistic. Others are not contingent upon 'being-with'.
    Other people in Heidegger's ontology seems to me, as something which can be reduced to just an aspect of ones experience.dukkha
    I doubt he uses that phrase. Being with others is part of human existence. Observation tells us that everyone is in contact with someone else at least once in their lifes... No need to come up with people who were breeded by a lost retort in the jungle and then raised by apes later on: The book is not based upon speculation. It takes Dasein as it is and must do so as the whole analysis of Dasein was meant to serve as basis for further investigations into Being itself. Things are how they are, and not how they could be.
  • Why free will is impossible to prove
    To opt for what one did not want would count as evidence for our ability to resist innate preferences.TheMadFool
    I guess most people would understand it that way. This does not make it true, however: It is the reign of pure reason itself that does not leave any choices. Simply because choosing the one right answer is at the same time one's duty as a rational thinking being. If you would do otherwise you wouldn't act as rational being and thus negate free will.
  • Reality versus Desire
    How do you differentiate between what you desire to be the case and what is true?Andrew4Handel

    What should be the difference between both? You could not even say what truth should be without running into a tautology. Given: Tautologies are necessarily true, but this wouldn't give "truth" any content.
  • A question about free will

    Dignity arises from the subject's reflection of itself. Freedom has always been bought at the price of estrangement.