Recent content by RexAllen

I'm not a determinist. I'm attempting to highlight the troublesome implications of determinism, and of ontological nomologicalism (the belief that the flow of events is governed by laws) in general. I think you've misinterpreted my posts. In general, I find Quentin Meillassoux's arguments...

Every event is either caused or uncaused. There is no third option. Is there? If the event is uncaused, then nothing further can be said about it. That which has no cause, has no explanation. If the event is caused, then it must be caused according to some rule or law. The rule is...

What is your justification for making this claim? There are several deterministic interpretations of quantum mechanics, so surely that's not what you're basing your assertion on...is it? Though, it doesn't matter, as you may have noticed that I address probabilistic laws in the second half...

What is the significance of intelligence in a universe with deterministic laws? Your performance on any IQ test is not due to your possessing some property called "intelligence", but rather is an inevitable outcome of the universe's initial conditions and governing causal laws. The...

Assuming physicalism, our brains are exactly the way they have to be given the initial conditions of the universe plus the causal laws of physics (which may have a probabilistic aspect). One event leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, and after about 13.7 billion...

I never said that they were. Did you not see my parenthetical: "(which may have a probabilistic aspect)"? The issue isn't determinism vs. indeterminism. Rather it's about causality. Does every event that transpires have some cause (even in a probabilistic form), or doesn't it? If there...

Hmmmm. I don't see the relevance of these first two paragraphs...? Does science tell us something true about the world as it really is, or doesn't it? What is your opinion? Evolution. So what is evolution in a deterministic universe? It's just a description of how things have turned...

My point is that the assumption that science tells us something true about the way the world *really* is (in an ontological sense) leads to the conclusion that we can't justify our belief that science tells us something true about the way the world really is. In other words: If Physicalism...

If physicalism (e.g. Scientific Realism) is true, then our beliefs and experiences are a result of the universe’s initial conditions and causal laws (which may have a probabilistic aspect). Therefore, assuming physicalism, we don’t present or believe arguments for reasons of logic or...

Why not? Where did Kant, Hume, and Berkeley go wrong then?

Excellent! Sean Carroll's "From Eternity To Here", Pg. 182 (my comments follow the quote): So it seems to me that physicalism (the proposal that our experiences are "caused" by an independently existing material world) is riddled with "cognative instabilities". As is any theory that...

Moving to philosophy: The main motivation in this post and my previous one is to illustrate that reason and observation aren't enough to pierce the veil of perception to reveal what really exists. As Kant pointed out, the difficulty is not that we can conclude too little but rather that we...

It might make more sense if you put this between the two paragraphs that you quoted:

Sean Carroll's From Eternity to Here has a good discussion of these issues. Particularly this chapter: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/03/16/from-eternity-to-book-club-chapter-ten/

Nothing in the original post contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. Read the wikipedia links and associated references. This idea isn't original to me. In fact, it's not even especially obscure...note the article in the New York Times listed in the references to the first wikipedia link.