THe thing that's scary about doing what I love is how excited I feel on a daily basis. It's scary how talking to people who are interested in the same things and engaging in the wider community gives me so much energy. It's like drinking 3 vodka shots down in a row or something. I get this heady excitement and nervousness about almost everything I ( Read more... )

" Consider what you mean when you tell someone: be realistic. It's another way to say: lower your expectations. It's also connected with a view of maturity that holds growing up to be a process of becoming resigned."

-Susan Neiman

It suddenly dawned upon me, as I was strolling in the park today and listening to my podcast, what all humans, regardless of their preoccupations, might be seeking. Of course it wasn't nearly as dramatic as I made it sound. Maybe it was something about the beetle I was idly staring at that made some disembodied voice of a Thomas Hobbes scholar had ( Read more... )

The journey from my house to the gym is usually very boring. So to entertain myself, I decided to listen to podcasts during my commute, and yesterday was the first day I implemented this awesome plan. I subscribed to this podcast called "philosophy bites" and decided to check out this podcast called "humour and morality". And to be honest I was ( Read more... )

People who have taken some kind of intro psych course would have probably been introduced to the concept of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the idea that people feel very bad when they experience inconsistency within themselves. For example, I felt conflicted in evolution class as a then-staunch Christian. Inconsistency might also ( Read more... )

Some scholars believe that believing in freewill is important, not just because we need to believe that we have the ability to change things and make meaningful decisions, but because we need, to put it bluntly, blame someone. And these scholars go so far as to say that the need to distribute responsibility is a metaphysical requirement. But what ( Read more... )

recall again, that I've talked briefly about how neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to study the topic of freewill too. Their findings are very exciting, because even though the process of figuring things out by introspecting with my own intuitions and reasoning can be productive, I'm not sure if the topic of freewill is best examined ( Read more... )

Recall I blogged about how determinism is necessary for (meaningful) freewill? That is, if there is no general laws to hold that X leads to Y and so on, and if everything was purely random (indeterminism), then our freewill will have be random as well. But how meaningful is freewill if our willings are random? Surely, freewill is meaningful only if ( Read more... )

just read my past 5 entries. im such a lame person. (y)

What is freewill? I've been reading up about this topic recently, and I'm surprised at how little consensus there is about the very definition of freewill. There have been a few answers put forth to answer my question , but taken together these answers are also not very coherent, and I havent been very satisfied with them ( Read more... )