Richard Robertson

Davis wrote:
Yeah but you have to actually read works on free will (beyond something of encyclopedic, youtube or magazine article nature to get to a working definition). Plenty of philosophers have given more than reasonable definitions.

OK, so have you landed on one reasonable definition?

You don’t need to answer that. I’m mainly interested in…[Read more]

TJ wrote:
Wasting time trying to prove that a made up concept is not relevant to reality, is not productive though.

LOL, I conclude the same! Except I still consider that difficulty in itself to conduct productive discussions is, in itself, an interesting problem to try to solve, with hundreds if not thousands of years of rather unhelpful legacy.…[Read more]

This is not quite on topic, but I want to bump this topic up for review anyway.

I highly recommend you watch the new, mixed science and science fiction series at Netflix, Alien Worlds. It’s an awesome presentation of both how evolution works on Earth, and how evolution might work on other planets!

Season 1 has four episodes (see below), and I…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
Also, you need an additional term to “conscious” and “subconscious,” namely “preconscious.” This is because we know that conscious decisions are made before we are aware of them.

Certainly preconsciousness must be helping us consciously understand how we’re acting… the preconscious (and even lower processes) has been working out…[Read more]

Any chance one could just put their toe in the water and let on that it’s just temporary, until oneself and kid can get back on their feet?

jakelafort wrote:
But for 1500 will they be willing to risk zombieism?

Sign me up!

Covid response will look a whole lot different next year, with some federal backbone added to it, and I think attitudes will change… except maybe of course in Cult45 members, in which case I say let the cards fall where they will. The kind of Darwinism we see…[Read more]

Simon Paynton wrote:
It may in fact be illusory, but we experience it as free will.

Oh, the irony, God invisibly forcing us to believe in free will. 🙂

Kristina wrote:
And this is all before we jump from a logical argument that a god must exist and try to some how marry it to the idea that this god is a particular god as described in, let’s say, the Old Testament.

Yes, and if I can add my strange two cents to this (in case @Simon hasn’t incorporated something like it into his yellowgrain p…[Read more]

What do you mean by “bad rap”?

I missed how “[incest] became the issue of the day”.

Meanwhile, I always ask myself, what kind of evolutionary control, or guarantee is there that keeps cultures from having sex with a prepubescent (or for that matter newly-pubescent) member of their tribe or general population?

The answer has to be a combination…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:
The severity of hate speech and its impact, it seems to me, can only be weighed by the recipient. What makes one person feel demeaned another can laugh off.

Or, if it is a direct precursor to a hate crime, it can serve as evidence for it. (Right Jake? Is “hate crime” even a legal phrase, or is it just a normal kind of crime plus…[Read more]

Glen D wrote:
Close enough.

Glen, I think that was awesome because of how it reinforces something that’s been on my mind, and something which is new for our times.

There’s real power in reading lips, especially for me, who had to rewind movies so often or even slow them down to understand the words as spoken or sung. My kids hated me doing those…[Read more]