The mind .. mmm.. so fun to use, so fun to exercise... Thinking is an awesome thing. Endless thought problems, infinite loops, logical argument, self contemplation... Very nice. Philosophers have a clarity of mind and a focus that consistently impresses me. But they rest somewhere between reality and fiction... in a grey area that has been the source of quite a few social gems over the millenniums. It's starting to feel less and less like the mine has run dry, and more and more like the mine doesn't [...]
Sometimes I understand things.. sometimes I don't. I'm being vague on purpose while I mine for coal in a gold mine.
Doing the right thing totally depends on who you are and who you are most influenced by. I think the "right thing" is the thing that feels the most right for me. The thing I want to do at my innermost core. Sometimes this thing doesn't match up with an instinctual constant.. like survival. Often times it's complacency vs. uncertainty. For the most part human beings are taught to manage risk by going for things that are guaranteed. This training prevents us from considering things like quitting a job [...]
Last Tuesday in class we discussed determinism. The paper we read and discussed was from the hard determinist Holbach. My professor seemed to think that responsibility and hard determinism are incompatible. I don't feel that they are. I think it's completely possible that we enforce responsibility on ourselves, and that it might just be another cause and effect in our causal chain. What was proposed was that the concept of responsibility exists regardless of humans knowing it or implementing it. I find it hard [...]
Below is my paper which is an argument against the Teleological Argument for the existence of god from Paley. The Teleological Argument’s first premise lists several similarities between naturally existing things and a man made watch. Through conversations in class, additional reading, and extensive thought, I have not been able to find a way that naturally occurring and man made creations are obviously analogous. The place where I find the most weakness in the analogy is in Paley’s human perspective. [...]