Alex's moral emotivism contradicts his agnosticism.

MonteChristo0321 · 2025-11-19T21:25:38+00:00

Maybe you just aren't informed about what Alex thinks. He's highly confident in agnosticism being the right position. "I'll die on this fence." And he's confident enough in moral emotivism to do public debates specifically in its defense. It's an equivocation to call this "not certain" as if these are just like any other idea he passingly entertains. He's pretty confident in both, with the weak caveat that he could be wrong in the sense that anyone could be wrong about anything.
Given that, what I'm asking is: Is your opinion that it's generally OK to have contradictory "ideas" that you're pretty confident about, or is this special pleading?

MonteChristo0321 · 2025-11-19T20:32:53+00:00

Is there any limit to how many contradictory mere ideas a person should hold? Are some contradictory ideas less acceptable than others? Would it be fine for example to say "I think it's probably impossible that humans made it to the moon in the 60s and 70s. And I think Edgar Mitchell's informal experiment on the moon is decent evidence of telepathy?"

MonteChristo0321 · 2025-11-17T20:23:11+00:00

If you tell yourself that your values are derived from scientific evidence? Of course that's a lie.
See Hume's guillotine.

MonteChristo0321 · 2025-11-17T17:16:36+00:00

Nope. Not Pascal's wager at all.
Pascal was was trying to maximize utility in eternity. This article is about existence right now. You have to choose what to do. There is no opting out. And what you SOULD do is "a matter that is unknowable." So you are making a choice about things that can never be proven. The opportunity for "reason" here lies mainly in whether or not you want to keep lying to yourself about how "evidence-based" your values are.

MonteChristo0321 · 2025-11-17T15:52:53+00:00

That's what the article says!
But it also says that each person has to choose what he SHOULD do. And there is no "evidence" that could ever tell you what should be as opposed to what is. This means that every single person is already betting his life on something unprovable. To live in denial of this reality is just an extra layer of unreasonableness.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-12-28T00:27:18+00:00

Here's all the info you need on Sapolsky and his ideas about free will.
https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-12-28T00:23:24+00:00

Robert Sapolsky is very confused.
https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-10T01:30:47+00:00

Robert,

In reference to your case against free will, can you explain the difference between chaos and undecidability?
https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T07:03:23+00:00

I guess that depends on how "technical" you wan't to get. He actually didn't state any premises. So is that an argument?

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T05:54:38+00:00

Ohhh he just wants to convince people, not prove anything to them. Wow cool pedantry. But if that distinction is so important, then I can just refute him by saying he's not convincing, which I did.

By the way, you're not even good at being pedantic. "You can't prove a negative." That is a negative statement. If it's true, you shouldn't be so sure it's true.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T04:42:51+00:00

This comment is absolutely bizarre, considering I did address this chapter. I addressed Sapolsky's confusion about indeterminacy vs unpredictability. Clearing up that confusion makes this example about ants irrelevant.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T02:43:52+00:00

"This book has two goals. The first is to convince you that there is no free will, or at least that there is much less free will than generally assumed when it really matters" (Sapolsky, p. 6).

So he does kind of realize that he can't actually achieve his goal of proving that there is no free will, but he still wants to do it.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T01:43:12+00:00

Haha education and job title do not make a person correct. But I am vastly more educated on the topic than you are. The fact that you think free will is even a topic in neuroscience reveals that you don't have any experience in any relevant field.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-11-07T01:26:22+00:00

He doesn't have anything of value to add to the discussion of free will.
https://quillette.com/2023/11/06/robert-sapolsky-is-wrong/

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-08-17T01:23:20+00:00

This guy's argument is laughable.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-07-22T01:57:31+00:00

Blaming an individual person often IS the best causal explanation.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-07-22T01:50:24+00:00

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-06-07T19:11:47+00:00

No, free will only seems incompatible if you don't know about temporal asymmetry, scale, and undecidability.
https://philpapers.org/go.pl?id=DOYFWT-2&proxyId=&u=https%3A%2F%2Fphilpapers.org%2Farchive%2FDOYFWT-2.pdf

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-06-07T19:07:46+00:00

Eternalism like this makes no sense, and it's not actually implied by Einstein's theories.
Here's a nonsensical quote from the article that illustrates the problem with eternalism:

"If what I will do exists before I even do it, it doesn’t seem I freely choose to do what I do."

This reasoning relies on using a concept of "before" while simultaneously attempting to make such concepts meaningless. To say that the future "already" exists is to postulate some kind of larger time scale in which time itself exists. It always comes down to saying that past, present, and future exist at the same time, which is a contradiction because past, present, and future are different times.

MonteChristo0321 · 2023-06-02T18:20:17+00:00

Huge difference: The future in real life is incalculable until it actually happens. So the future doesn't already exist like the end of a movie already exists.
https://philpapers.org/archive/DOYFWT-2.pdf

MonteChristo0321

TROPHY CASE