Mike Long

I agree, there is a window, say 1 or 2 pints where it can be easier to understand, but once you get past three and especially past 6, I find the slurred speech and reverting to local dialect makes it pretty tough to understand. Following a drunk man in a bar in Glasgow (or in my experience in a Pub in county Kerry) was so impossible I just nodded…[Read more]

Defo Scottish. Sounds like a Southern Highland’s accent but has lived in the central belt (between Glasgow and Edinburgh). Or the other way around. Could be wrong. It’s not particularly strong. By this I mean, completely understandable without strain or effort. Had a plumber in from Glasgow last year, I had to ask him to repeat himself three times…[Read more]

Science and Philosophy have some overlap but are absolutely distinct. Even within Philosophy and Science there are so many different fields with different aims and methodologies.

Science deals with both the physical and the pure sciences, both practical and theoretical. Science heavily influences other STEM subjects (maths, engineering) as well…[Read more]

“Influence” on how people decide to live their lives, infers “choice”. Is choice meaningful or not Pope? If it is not, then influencing someone’s choice is not meaningful either. This is not rocket science.

There is no superficiality about it. If one argues others have no choice to have done but what they have done, have no agency, it is absurd to then, in the same book, go on to try and influence their future choices/agency. The only way around that is magical thinking or special pleading.

If we don’t have free will, we are not responsible for our…[Read more]

I remember reading Sam Harris’s atrocious book on free will. In the first half he dismisses free will. In the second half he talks about how we “should” look at the world in a different way. And then advice about how to best live your life. He still stands by it. One half of his book talks about how we have no choice but to do what we do, and then…[Read more]

There is a common concern that without free will there’s no accountability. Nonsense. We will go on holding people to account because we have to, in the sense that this is how we respond to acts that displease or enrage us. We respond in this way because we have to. Literally. We have no real choice but respond that way.

That’s such a cop out. B…[Read more]

Yeah, it seems like we have “agency”; but is it real? Probably not, but the best answer is that we simply don’t know yet.

Agency is as real and meaningful as: decision, responsibility, culpability, power structures, invention, reward, retribution, entitlement, ownership, merit etc. Dismiss one…you should dismiss them all. If one is meani…[Read more]

Nah not going to watch a bullshit video with a bullshit title. Civilisation is not being destroyed. At worst, some things we consider important are being chipped away at. We are far from “destroyed”. The very language of the title of this video screams “watching this will rot your brain”.

The left nor the right is not destroying anything. A lack…[Read more]