The Human Question

It doesn't seem that there could be a utilitarian argument against murder that would be applicable if there were only two people.  That is because, if only one is left after the murder and the murder is quite happy about it, then, such a murder would be for the greater good of all who are left.  Or maybe the would-be victim's utilitarian argument against being murdered would amount to "Think of how lonely you'd be if you got rid of me!"  An even more compelling point could be made re murder-suicide.

"All speech is metaphor." "Is that literally  true ?"

What if a person claiming to get messages from God was examined and found to have brain activity quite like that of persons who are diagnosed as mentally ill... what if all of this is true, yet it is also the case that the purportedly prophetic messages repeatedly proved true?

Someone should do an fMRI scan of a reductionist and find out if, when affirming his belief in reductionism, the limbic (emotional) part the brain becomes highly active.

It seems remarkable to me that Pierre-Simon Laplace, probably the greatest scientist in the century between Newton and Darwin and the first to propose scientific determinism, is also responsible for developing probability theory.  Scientific determinism is a hypothesis that every state of affairs entirely determines the state of affairs that immediately follows it and is entirely determined by the state of affairs that preceded it, so that LaPlace's demon (a hypothetical intelligent being with complete knowledge of nature at a particular point in time), could both predict and retrodict any state of affairs in the same time continuum.  Probability theory was developed by Laplace in order to overcome indeterminacy in his knowledge of the movement of heavenly bodies.  He relied on different sources of data regarding this movement, and since these sources were inconsistent with each other, he had to find a way of making a most reasonable approximation.  In othe...

Isn't human finitude noteworthy only because of how it flies in the face of our desire for more?

Oftentimes he argues ala Turing that because it functions like it is conscious, therefore it is so. Couldn't we describe this as an "If it looks like a duck, then it is a duck" argument? Is that scientific? Shouldn't reductionism, if it's true, start with the lower level of causality/description and infer the higher from the lower? Isn't that how reductive explanations work in other cases? Wouldn't the lack of such a deductive algorithm "reduce" reductive materialism to mere speculation?

How can an operation that is one emerge from that which is many?