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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

Defense of the Poor Whipping Boy. Interesting critique of the SEP article on Free Rider Problem Also read his prior post.

Defending Millikan’s referential theory

Defending Millikan’s referential theory. I love arguments over reference.

Perils of Unregulated Supplements

Ironic this comes out as I made my cognitive enhancers post. Terra Sig on repealing the DSHEA. People assume all those things in “health” food stores are what the label says they are. Often they aren’t . Usually there’s too little but if it’s too much you can get overdoses of [...]

Cognitive Enhancers

Everyone is talking about Nature’s new story on cognitive enhancers. Basically a study of scientists who had used drugs to enhance mental performance.
One in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory. Use did not differ greatly across age-groups (see line graph, right), which will [...]

Lightbulb of the Future?

Lightbulb of the future. More efficient than an LED. Also at PhysOrg.

Kuhn

Philosophy magazine’s issue on Kuhn (HT: Language Games)

Brains like Computers?

Are brains like computers? Over at Developing Intelligence Chris Chatham has two interesting posts on this. The first is about differentiating brains from computers. The second is responding to a set of criticisms over at Conscious Entities.
Now most of these I don’t disagree with. (Of course I’m anything but [...]

The Collective Mind

The problem of the collective mind.

Monty Hall problem and psychology

Monty Hall problem and psychology. A possible problem for cognitive dissonance.

Get Rid of the ID Meme

I’m pretty convinced by this argument that we should stop focusing in on how ID isn’t science. “The primary scientific criticism of ID is that the specific assertions made by ID folks, about irreducible complexity, complex specified information, the alleged holes in evolutionary science, and so on, are universally false. That’s why scientists reject ID.” [...]

Useful Meme

Now for something completely different. HT to Richard who first did it. You can see all the posts responding to this meme with their own suggestions here. (Which right now appears to just be me)

Clarification of Zombies

Richard has up a very nice clarification of the zombie argument. If you found zombies ridiculous in philosophy check this out.

Death of a semi-colon?

Death of the semi-colon? France blames English. Avoiding semi-colons? Try this simple guide.

Pronouncing Philosophical Words

If, like me, you’ve read far, far more philosophy than you’ve spoken you’re always nervous when presenting papers. Why? Because you know you might screw up some obscure German word or philosopher. (Or worse yet a Greek or French word or name) What is there to do?

Gell-Mann on a theory of everything

Video of Gell-Mann on theories of everything.

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