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Glossary of free-will debate terms
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How to subscribe to LDS-Herm. An LDS theology and continental philosophy mailing list.
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Economics and utilitarianism
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The new Philosopher's Carnival is up.
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On the Null set
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The book Shopping for God and Mormonism. Interesting discussion in the comments.
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FPR on John's account of Christmas is Revelation. I bring up 1 Ne 11 which is tied to Rev 12.
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FPR on Myth analysis and Mormonism. I tend to take the poststructuralist skepticism although I confess I have a lot of myth-criticism books on my shelf.
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Against Evolutionary Psychology explanations of women with narrow waists and big hips. EP in my view oversimplifies things and produces "just so" explanations. I honestly can't figure out why they are so popular in the press.
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Should cousins be banned from marrying? Would anyone want to anymore? For some reason I always think of rural areas where people have lived stably for a long time with little outflow or inflow of populations. Where is that true now?
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Razib on the follies of economics. I don't know enough to say much beyond noticing that many economic majors have horrible math skills. Not all do of course. But when math is such a big part of modeling it always left me with heavy skepticism towards the profession. Undoubtedly unfairly so since there are many very well versed in math and statistics. I'm also skeptical of the "rational actor" model that is behind so much.
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... the production of spontaneous facial expressions of emotion is not dependent on observational learning but simultaneously demonstrates a learned component to the social management of expressions... (HT: Gene Expression) Not that surprising all things considered. I suspect most human phenomena ends up being about 50-50 learned vs. wired. But there's still a lot of folks who push the nurture basis way too much.
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Happiness and those around you. Argues your happiness doesn't depend upon your friends.
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Reading Burn After Reading. Coen meet Freud.
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Public vs. Public Morality
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Vallicella on Eliminative Materialism. Also see his post on what Eliminative Materialism is.
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Richard refutes Anselm. I think just thinking through all the ways to refute the ontological argument are interesting. It's an excellent problem to think through. I like Kant's existence is not a property approach best. Marion also has a discussion about whether the ontological argument is ontological at all. I'm not sure I agree with Marion (on numerous things) but it is interesting.
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Far Side reenactments (HT: BCC)
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What is the Mormon answer to the meaning of life? I always took us as more Nietzschean than Utilitarian. That is I think happiness isn't the meaning of life but merely something we obtain while pursuing it.
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Nauvoo polygamy. Fantastic discussion that made me reconsider several things. (Although the trolls come in after a while) Also a the earlier post on the same which has some great comments as well.
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FPR on the Divine Council in Hebrew literature.
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Brains and spirituality. Or why discovering cognitive units for spirituality should be expected and not be shocking to the religious person.
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Intuitions of free will. Not at all unexpectedly different people have different intuitions.
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The Sorites paradox and non-standard arithmetic. Great post. This issue of vagueness is one of my favorite philosophical topics.
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Volokh makes the case that voters of both parties are ignorant. The scariest thing about our democracy is how elections are rarely decided on the issues.
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More Entries

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Dreyfus Interview

Interview with Hubert Dreyfus (HT: Brood Comb)

Bonaventure on Spirit Matter

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Austrian Economics and the Recession

Austrian Economics and the current recession.

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Falsifying Aromatheraphy

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Rethinking Theology

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Eyring Biography

A Motley Vision reviews the new Eyring bio. Jared at LDS Science Review does as well. For non-LDS readers Eyring was an LDS apostle and one of the top chemists of the day. His son was a physicist and apostle and is now 2cd in leadership of the LDS Church. For [...]

Agents, Cognition and Free Will

As I said, I’m still rusty on these issues somewhat. However one thing I wanted to discuss was the relationship between our cognitive abilities to discern agents and our intuitions of free will. I think I’m convinced that, at least in terms of American intuitions, that Libertarian Free Will best captures how we [...]

More Trinity

A blog named Heart Issues for LDS has mentioned my recent posts on the Trinity (two at M* here and and one here at MM) It’s an interesting blog. It’s written by a Baptism pastor from up in Idaho as I believe partially a kind of outreach program to Mormons and [...]

Block Universes, Free Will, and Alternative Possibilities

OK, I’m pretty rusty on my free will debate. It’s been over a year since I’ve really had the opportunity to read much on free will. So let me add the caveat that this post is partially to help get me back into the flow of things. That caveat in place let [...]

Happy Pi Day

It’s π day today. Science Friday had a show on it. There’s even a π day web site. I wish I’d known about it earlier. I could have gone out and bought some pies.
As a coincidence it’s also Einstein’s Birthday. (14 March 1879) It’s too late [...]

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