From Joshua Knobe, “Thought Experiments: Philosophers – Some philosophers today are doing more than thinking deeply. They are also conducting scientific experiments relating to the nature of free will and of good and evil (Scientific American, November 2, 2011): Here
The classic image of the philosopher pictures an ethereal type who is lost in thought and detached from the pedestrian concerns of everyday realities.
Actually, a lot of us thought he was the person who could rescue us from the fanatic.
A new breed of thinker is now bringing to bear the cognitive sciences to probe why people perceive the world in the particular way that they do.
You mean it has nothing to do with how they were raised?
The tenets of experimental philosophy can elucidate whether free will really exists and whether morality is just a relative construct.
Don’t we already know what the answer was got to be, from these clowns?
Look, there’s a big trial going on in Canada. If you are just a stupid Darwinist, don’t even comment. Even the useless dweeb legacy media coverage can’t quite get around the radical evil that says everything we need to know.
In a conversation, with a atheist the other day, it was interesting to note that the atheist was arguing that quantum indeterminism undermined causality (he apparently severely disliked the non-local, beyond space and time, causality required to explain the ‘spooky’ actions in quantum mechanics), to which I pointed out that indeterminism, in quantum mechanics, merely undermined the materialists deterministic view of the world and restored free will to its rightful place in the Theistic view of reality (of man having a transcendent soul that can freely choose between good and evil), whereas free will, in the materialist atheistic view of reality, is still unable to be accounted for , since, materialists ARE STILL just helpless automatons mindlessly obeying whatever ‘indeterministic’ state the particles of their brain happen to be in.
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And the connection between experimental philosophy and religious murder is….?
I think the uses of the word “dweeb” and “stupid” degrade the quality of UD. Let’s try to make UD more professional.
I thought so too but maybe they’re used a bit ironically, it may “seem” wrong but how can we be sure?
Agreed re language. We were bracing ourselves for the “evolutionary psychology” reason and the “experimental philosophy” reason he murdered them. Sometimes the stupidity gets to us, especially when something serious happens.
By the way, Kingston is a nice town, once the home of our first Prime Minister. (Also famously, the home of a number of federal pens, but they will have seldom had in them anybody like this, assuming these accusations are true.) Columnist Mark Steyn went us one better when he said there is something not quite human about it, if they are.
While I believe we can empirically detect free will, I think you’re right. These “experimental philosophers” will just be using “empiricism” as an excuse to peddle their materialism.