Something Instead of Nothing

Here he is talking about choosing between different colours and textures and whether free will can be exercised
In that respect it can definitely be exercised so it is a value judgement between competing sensory perceptions

However while he may have red as his favourite colour that does not mean he can turn any object red at will
Equally while he may have soft as his favourite texture that does not mean he can turn any object soft at will

On a more fundamental level the logical conclusion of this is the ability not to change reality but to perceive it in the most positive way
To make value judgements between choices and consistently know the right one to choose and therefore improve the quality of ones life

Limitations. That is basically what it always comes down to in the end. The limitations of language. The limitations of philosophical discourse. The limitations embedded in the gap between what we think we know about “something instead of nothing” and all there is that can be known about it.

But, really, what else is there other than “to the best of our ability” making an attempt to demonstrate that what we think is true “in our head” is in turn true for all other rational men and women? A demonstration that involves actual empirical evidence that can be tested [and perhaps replicated] by others.

In other words, “to the best of our ability” attempting to close the gap between assumptions made in arguments that are basically just intellectual contraptions – a relationship between words – and more substantive demonstrations that connect the words we choose to the world that we live and interact in.

Which is what any number of neuroscientists are attempting to do by going well beyond the intellectual contraptions embedded in arguments: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience

The debate may be beyond demonstration if the evolution of life on earth has resulted [so far] in a human brain incapable of grasping a TOE able to be connected empirically to whatever explains existence itself.

We just don’t know.

But if not the attempts of empirical science to grapple with this, what then? God? Deism? Pantheism? This seminal “mind” you speak of? How are you able to go beyond the argument that your own assumptions here encompass a reasonable answer?

Sooner or later such things as “causation, numbers, logic, being, substance, and God” become factors in our flesh and blood existential interactions — or they remain merely abstractions.

The mystery still goes back to mind as matter able to concoct such things with or without some measure of autonomy.

Sounds rather fated, destined, bounded, decreed to me. Unless the part encompassed in “meta” is able to be fully disclosed.

That is QM as we think we understand it today. We just don’t know what physicists will think they understand about it a thousand years from now. Let alone in regard to closing the gap between what any particular human mind thinks it knows and all that actually can be known going back to an explanation of existence itself.

What appears to be instances of non-determination may well just reflect our incomplete – perhaps woefully incomplete – understanding of these interactions.

And there is always the possibility that all of it is nothing more than the laws of matter playing themselves out only as they ever could have.

And here I also like to speculate about the mindful matter of beings that may well inhabit any number of planets throughout the universe. What would they have to contribute here?

As for all of this…

…I’m still pretty much at a loss in understanding why you think this is significant given a world in which abolutely nothing above was ever going to not happen.

And, sure, the problem may well be me not understanding something being conveyed here that, were I able to understand it, my own thinking might change.

But then back to whether or not that in itself was never not going to unfold only as it ever could.

True. But it makes all the difference in the world if one day it is determined definitively that it was all only as it ever could have been.

A thought experiment…

Imagine that hard deteriminsm exists only on planet earth. Everything that happens on the planet could only have happened as it did.

Intelligent creatures from a planet in which free will does exist observe us. They note us using words like insanity, freedom, justice, true, false, good, bad. They see us relating to each other in countless different ways. One of them says, “Look at those creatures going about the business of interacting with each other day after day. They don’t even realize that they were never able to think or to feel or to do anything other than that which they were oblgated to do given the material laws that govern them.”

Okay, how would you explain to them the part where the physical laws are, instead, governed by an even more transcending “mind”? Or how might someone like Descartes react to it? Mind separate from matter? Mind creating matter? Mind and matter seamlessly intertwined in one or another teleological explanation for existence? For something instead of nothing?

The part I can’t wrap my head around is whether or not I was ever able to wrap my head around it in any other way than I did given that everything that I think and feel before, now and later is merely intertwined necessarily in the laws of matter unfolding in a wholly determine universe. In other words, what if I could not not have “believed subjectivity can exist unless it is freely chosen by the experiencer.”

My mind [like the yellow banana] is just another prop in whatever the ontological explanation for existence is. An explanation that nature may or may not permit us to grasp someday.

Or I can point out that, in a wholly determined universe, anything I might say is only that which I was ever only able to say.

But, if there is an element of autonomy in this exchange between us, any argument I might attempt to reconfigure is still going to be embedded in the gap between what I think I know about these relationships and all that would need to be known in order to understand them in a fully coherent manner.

Yes, as you note above, we can “at least give it a shot”. But “shots” of this sort are exchanged regarding any number of philosophical antinomies we come upon in venues like this.

The distinction I then make is between those who recognize just how profoundly problematic our own arguments must be, and those who insist that their explanation really does pin “something instead of nothing” to the mat.

And that’s before we get to the question that most intrigues me: how ought one to live in a world bursting at the seams with conflicting goods?

If there is a measure of autonomy in the choices we make.

You’re playing a sneaky word game here.

If I choose to eat cornflakes instead of not, it still is the only event that actually occurred, and by virtue, the only event that could have occurred, that automatically happens the instance the choice is made.

This sneaky trick you’re using, in no way removes agency.

Beat it, Kid!

Oh, right, I already tried that. :wink:

Pick your poison.

I don’t even try. I just believe on a mix of reason and faith.

I don’t know why they call it “meta”. I guess because it refers to freedom from physical laws, which are abstractions (metaphysical). Psychological freedom on the other hand would be empirically verifiable. It’s the difference between a purse snatcher who steels an old lady’s purse and an old lady who willfully gives her purse to someone (say her husband). In one case, the old lady is “forced” to give her purse away. In the other, she “chooses”. You can verify this empirically in any number of ways (bring in an fMRI machine if you need to). In my opinion, this is the quintessential scenario that describes the layman’s understanding of the distinction between freedom and unfreedom, and the original philosophical concepts of being “free” and “unfree”. Originally, the debate was never about physical laws. It’s always about being free from something, or free to do something, and no one ever cared about being free from physical laws, just from purse snatchers, militias, and corrupt governments. ← That’s why a separation of the different kinds of “freedom” in debates like these is so important. But yes, technically, we are never free in the metaphysical sense of being free from physical laws.

For someone who claims to be the first to admit his fallability, you sure seem pretty certain those quantum physicists are wrong.

And you’re avoiding the question (again). Just suppose, for the sake of argument, that non-determinism could sometimes happen in nature. Would the emergence of consciousness and minds in those instances suddenly become intelligible to you?

Significant in relation to what? We’re on the topic of meaning, and whether or not it matters that absolutely nothing above was ever going to not happen. I’m explain why it doesn’t. There’s not really anything significant beyond that.

Not really.

I don’t know how Descartes would explain it to them, but for my part, I’d offer them my book. But after listening to them complain about how it’s too long, and couldn’t I just give my abridged version, I’d say the following: physical laws, as we observe them, are material (or sensory) representations of the “logic” of experiences being had by the universe. It isn’t the formal logic of thought (i.e. that which logicians study in university) but all experiences have their own flavor of logic, and it is expressed to us via sensory experience, and we (our brains) interpret that as matter interacting with matter and matter undergoing change. Once we discover that there are repeating patterns in these interactions and changes, repeating patterns that don’t seem to ever break, then we have discovered the “logic” of those experiences, and in the representation, which is all we’re given, we call it “natural law”.

Well, I tried.

But you’re not saying anything. You’re avoiding the question. And yes, I know that if you are avoiding the question, it is only because you were never not going to avoid the question. But it’s still avoiding the question. And I am left just as unclear about whether you believe you have subjective experiences or not. This tactic doesn’t help clarify your point. It just helps you to continue feeling justified in using the tactic.

If you really believed what you just said, you wouldn’t even be saying it. You’d remain silent. If the point you’re making is about the futility of explaining anything in virtue of the gap between what you think you know and all that you would need to know in order to pin the topic under discussion to the mat, or perhaps that such an explanation was never not going to be given anyway, then what you just said is no exception. If you really believe in all that, you might as well not say anything. But yet, there are things in this exchange you choose to explain, and there are things you avoid explaining like the plague (hiding behind these “futility” tactics). I don’t buy it, Biggy. I wonder if you buy it.

It isn’t that you’re wrong in anything you say; it’s that there are motives behind the things you say, and you’re trying to hide those motives behind a mask of impartiality and mere inquisition. But there are things you want to believe and things you don’t, positions you want to hold to and positions you want to deny. You have no problem agreeing with and giving answers to the things that support your positions, but when it comes to the things you wish to deny, you avoid acknowledging and giving answers to them.

I think Ecmandu is right, you play word games. The only thing I wonder is: do you play them with yourself?

I think it’s more than simply word games with iambiguous…

I think he’s field testing synthetic philosophy built in an lab, that is going to be used to make drones over the world.

I find it very interesting his projection on me: he calls consent violation (the most visceral feeling all beings have in existence) “a world of words” “not down to earth”. synthetic philosophies will always suffer projections and contradictions. He is the world of words he’s accusing me of.

I’m more terse with iambiguous because I do not appreciate his psychopathic intent to circumvent living philosophy.

Meaning what exactly? Either the words that we choose to encompass an argument about “something instead of nothing” can be connected somehow to the lives that we live or they can’t.

That’s what we are really grappling with here: the day to day lived relationship between words and worlds.

Well, in that case there’s not much then that any particular human mind can’t speculate is true.

It makes for fascinating discussions, sure, but sooner or later what you think is true [or what you think you know] “in your head” is either able to be substantiated or not. After all, where you draw the line between reason and faith isn’t likely to be where others will. Instead, what is exchanged by and large are assumptions. Intellectual contraptions as it were.

But we have no way of establishing definitively if the verification process is not in itself merely an inherent manifestation of a determined universe. If mind is just brain and brain is just more matter, it would all seem to be essentially/objectively intertwined in whatever laws might exist that makes matter – necessarily – what it is and always will be.

Yes, that is how most make the distinction. But if the distinctions made were never able not to be made by each individual they are “for all practical puorposes” distinctions without a difference. I think and feel this way about it. You think and feel that way ablout it. But neither one of us were ever able not to.

Originally? In a world where all matter [mindful or otherwise] interacts necessarily as it only ever could, how is this distinction in and of itself not just but one more intrinsic manifestation of Existence.

Again, to the extent that I understand you, you make a distinction here that I am simply unable to grasp. That “separation” we make is in turn just another manifestion of matter intertwined in what we call “existence” or “reality”. Some think that they note this distinction/separation “freely” but that is only an illusion built into however one goes about explaining how physically/materially/phenomenally brains configured into minds given the evolution of life on Earth.

Well, in a wholly determined universe, my certainty is only as it ever could have been. As for QM back to this:

In 1900, the British physicist Lord Kelvin is said to have pronounced: “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.” Within three decades, quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theory of relativity had revolutionized the field. Today, no physicist would dare assert that our physical knowledge of the universe is near completion. To the contrary, each new discovery seems to unlock a Pandora’s box of even bigger, even deeper physics questions.

And that was only 118 years ago. Do you really imagine that a 1,000 years from now physicists will be coming to the same conclusions about QM that are being made today?

This entails understanding things about the emergence of consciouness and mind that is still beyond our grasp. And, again, you need to note a particular context involving particular minds choosing particular behaviors. Aspects of which are construed to be more or less intelligble from particular points of view.

If significance and meaning pertaining to the interactions above are essentially in sync with all the other domioes toppling over onto each other in the march of matter through time, how is your explanation [and my failure to understand it] not just another teeniest and tiniest part of it all?

I can only assume here you are making an important point that I keep missing. But: was there ever any capacity on my part not to miss it? Am I actually “destined” to get it at some point in the future? Would anything at all here have ever been other than what it is if either of us had some measure of autonomy?

I don’t know. And to the best of my knowledge, no one else seems to either. We just take our existential “leaps” to one or another frame of mind.

To you maybe. But if how you think you understand all of this here and now is the only manner in which you were ever able to think you understand all this here and now, well, that seems pretty significant to me.

How is this not just another intellectual contraption in which words define and defend each other by going around and around tautologically in presumptuous circles? The logic doesn’t seem to be connected to any empirical interactions such that experiments and predictions can be made. Such that others can replicate them pertaining to other physical interactions out in the world that we live in.

How do the points mainfest themselves in nature manifesting itself in turn through “natural laws”?

This is the part that still completely baffles me. You seem to be acknowledging the possibility that, in a determined universe, I was never not going to avoid the question. But my point instead is that I was never not able to avoid the question.

Yes, that is still avoiding the question, but, well, come on! I’m back in a world in which we know that the Terminator was never able not to attempt to kill Sarah Connor, but we are still justified in calling his behavior immoral in a world where we were never able not to do so.

Note to others:

What crucial component of “compatibilism” am I missing here?

If the manner in which I think and feel about my own subjective experiences is the only manner in which I was ever able to think and feel about them “here and now”, what exactly would be established in making yet another attempt? Wouldn’t that in turn be just the next series of dominoes to topple over in this exchange? In what constitutes the wholly determined trajectory of my own particular “I” from the cradle to the grave?

From my frame of mind, the part about subjective experiences is embedded existentially in the components of my moral philosophy out in the is/ought world.

A tactic? As though pointing out that there is certainly a gap between what either one of us think we know about these relationships and all that there actually is to be known about them, isn’t just plain old common sense!

Are you actually suggesting that, in regard to what you speculate about here and in your book, this gap is not really relevant at all?

But my point here is that I have no capacity myself to “really believe” any of my own speculations. At best “here and now” they can seem reasonable to me. But “I” am no less the embodiment of the gap I point to.

Exactly!!!

The real distinction here then is between the overwhelming preponderance of human beings who 1] don’t think about these things at all or 2] fall back on one or another God/religion, and that teeny, tiny percentage of folks like us who do think about them.

But thinking about the questions is one thing, actually imagining that our own answers are the right ones, another thing altogether.

You will either continue this exchange in an effort to further persuade me of your conclusions or you will conclude that you have gone about as far as you can and move on to others.

If so, no problem. Lots of folks here have taken that route. And, sure, that may well say more about me than them. I never dispute that.

All I can do [while waiting for godot] is to move on to the next one myself.

Now all I need then is someone able to convince me that any of this was ever really within my capacity to change, to reconfigure into something else. Otherwise I can only assume that I had no actual capacity at all.

Much like everyone else in other words.

How ironic. Over and again I keep trying to persuade him to bring his own words out into the world that we live in. For us though that revolves more around the issue of objective morality.

On this thread, he just posted this:

You tell me:

How is this post not just a bunch of words that some might even construe to be gibberish?

Did I really choose to eat cornflakes instead of scrambled eggs because it was within my capacity autonomously to weigh the situation freely and come to the conclusion that this time, cornflakes?

Or was I always going to choose cornflakes then because that “choice” was the only one wholly in sync with the laws of matter?

I merely insist with him that we take quandaries like this out into the world of conflicting goods.

You forgot the part where it’s all about me getting the philosophy chicks. :wink:

Note to Gib [and others]:

What really, really important point am I missing here? Make sense of it all for me.

I’ll address another one of iambiguouses tricks

(Iambiguous, read my post above your last one that I’m replying to)

You’re synthesizing endless doubt, that logic can only be infinitely regressive, even if people give you axiomatic solutions, you just say, “well is that what people will say a million years from now?”

And in a million years, iambiguous will say, “well is that what people will say a trillion years from now?”

Ad infinitum.

Like I said, I think iambiguous is like the manufactured war on terror that never ends, he’s trying to use synthetic philosophy and rhetoric built in a lab (beta testing it) for a one world government.

I’ve seen mind viruses like this before.

Really, my thanks to anyone able to demonstrate he is not just making this stuff up as he goes along. Or [worse] that he isn’t.

My own personal opinion is that it is posters of his ilk who have driven most of those who truly do love philosophy out of here. The Kids. Intellectual drivel by and large. Post after post after numbing post. Garbage for the most part.

Or, perhaps, the problem here is really posters of my ilk.

The bane of all “serious philosophers”?

Unless of course I’m wrong.

Isn’t that interesting ? You didn’t respond to the content of my post. Namely, the infinite regress troll that you do.

Sorry about that: :banana-dance: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :laughing: :banana-dance:

Lol

Ahh… I see.

So here’s the deal people.

Unless you can construct a non zero sum, non consent violating reality …

Well… let me back up.

Logic is more powerful than god. And logic is not aware of itself.

People who weaponize philosophy will be damned by their own spirits.

I come as a witness to having been through this before.

It is not my curse, it is a curse you place upon yourselves.

Admittedly, this actually is something instead of nothing.

If you count barely.

Seriously, though, do you honestly believe that this post encompasses a coherent point of view? Or are you just jerking my chain? Or maybe mocking the sort of philosophy that is, in fact, largely incomprehensible in regard to the lives that we actually live from day to day.

Or are you just being ironic?

After all, I have had folks in the past string me along with this sort of thing. I looked like a fool responding to stuff that was being conveyed in a completely unintelligible and meaningless manner. Deliberately, in other words.

Is that it?

On the other hand, if your points actually are brilliant, I’ll be the first to apolgize. Well, after someone is able to explain to me why they are.

Let me explain this a little better.

If you’re a well informed person, you will know that taking a machete to your arm will chop it off.

I tell you the truth.

As you plead for others for chopping your own arm off, that you don’t know why it occurred. They won’t care. In this way, when your soul gets mangled by weaponizing philosophy, people will not care.

Among other things, define “better”. :wink:

I’m using it here in a utilitarian manner.

I’m telling you in no uncertain terms the cold hands of logic upon you. You still think this is some type of game. Games are ornamental in males, when males use ornamentation, it strangles the whole species.

I’m not going to destroy life to get a female to consent to sex with me. I already know the punishments. Just like chopping your arm off with a machete, I am no longer stupid there, or much of anywhere. Deal with it. You call me a kid. My processing speed is so much faster than yours that I can process thousands of years of cognitive age in a day.

And you know what. I’m beyond wanting followers, I’m trying to reconstruct existence itself. I’m using a biofeedback system to perfect my reconstruction.

Read my last post…

viewtopic.php?p=2712275#p2712275

The problems I’m working currently are about continuity of consciousness, narrative continuity and object permanence with hyper dimensional mirrors.

And to be honest, compared to that, you are twiddling pencils in your fingers.

I have to absorb and listen to every soul in existence, every moment of every day, and you wouldn’t even feign to imagine the shit that crawls out from under the woodwork. I put my spirit, not just my life, on the line, every moment of everyday to make life better for all existents forever.

It’s very hard work, and everyone wants to abuse you for it. It’s not a complex, it’s actually true.

We are? I thought we were just dabbling in a bit of abstract philosophy. Well, if you want an alternate method than science to resolve the determinism vs. free will problem, try philosophy (I guess). But of course, that don’t work either, does it. I guess we’re hooped!

That’s fine with me.

The point of separating out different meanings of “freedom” is to be able to talk about a kind of freedom that isn’t mutually exclusive with physical determinism (that’s why they call it compatibilism). If you perform an fMRI scan on a person who is asked to perform some action out of free choice, you will find deterministic operations going on in his brain. What I’m calling “psychological freedom” is simply the psychological state of making a decision to do, say, or think something and finding that this decision is carried out just as intended. ← But no one said this requires rising above the laws of nature as they would play out in the brain. It’s just a type of brain state that leads to certain behaviors.

It is, but I thought you needed some clarification on the distinction between metaphysical freedom and psychological freedom (weren’t you asking about that?).

So is your inconsistency.

And how is it you know what they will come up with 1,000 years from now? You could say this for anything you don’t want to concede in the argument. I’m telling you what quantum physicists are telling us today. But because it doesn’t fit with your deterministic picture of the world, you get to fluff it off with another one of your denial tactics? In your words “there’s not much then that any particular human mind can’t speculate is true.”

What this tells me is that you cherry pick. If I point to evidence that suggests our world may not be fully deterministic after all, you jump ahead 1,000 years when scientists will allegedly (re)discover a Newtonian clockwork universe. But if I agree with you that the world is fully deterministic, you don’t even bring up the fact that this view of nature was debunked that same 118 years ago (ironic that you brought up that quote).

The truth is, we don’t know if the world is fully deterministic or not. That you cling to such a view despite your alleged self-professed ignorance on the topic tells me you don’t know how to follow your own nihilistic perscription.

Ah, so there is more to understanding consciousness and mind than what you’ve lead on. If there is more to grasp about the emergence of consciousness and mind even in a non-deterministic context, then determinism can’t be what makes it decidedly problematic (though it probably doesn’t help).

Don’t think too hard about this. It’s not that important a point. We just disagree on the compatibility of meaning with determinism. You say: no freedom, no meaning. I say: no freedom, yes meaning. My run down on psychological determinism above was just to show how you could have meaning with determinism. When you respond: yes gib, but even your explanation is a part of the deterministic chain that governs the course of events, I read that as: but it’s still determinism. And I think: yes, that was my point.

That’s not my concern. This is simply the answer to your question. Philosophy is notorious for touching on topics that aren’t empirically verifiable. This is one of them.

Plato’s cave analogy is very fitting here. You can think of matter as the shadows cast on Plato’s cave wall, and the objects that cast the shadows as the experiences had by the universe that matter represents (the representational relation is quite the same; matter represents the universe’s experiences like the shadows represent the objects in Plato’s cave).

The light which makes the shadows possible would be analogous to meaning. All experiences are meaningful, and this gives rise to what I call “flow” or “entailment”—the metamorphosis of experience from one quality to another. This is nicely represented by the flow of energy in matter, and in the brain, the flow of signals from one neural centre to another. When Information impinges on the eye, signals are sent to the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. This is where vision occurs. Then signals are propagated to higher cortical regions so that we can recognize more complex and abstract features—such as shapes, 3D cues, movement, and identities. Signals will further propagate to other brain regions so that we can think and feel about the things we see (or sense in any other way). Physically, we see a flow of energy. Subjectively, we experience a change in experiences. This change is driven by meaning. The meaning is each experience “entails” the meaning in the next. Experience A means experience B. <— The logic of experience. This “entailing” of one experience by another is represented by physical laws—one physical event “causing” another.

When we observe a fire, we see the flickering of flames, hear the crackle, and feel the heat. All this is possible because of the flow of physical energy—light, sound waves, and the heating of the air around the fire. Even before this energy flow impinges on our senses, it represents the entailment of experience—this time had by the universe, not us. All physical events between the flickering of flame and the stimulation of our senses represent experiences of some foreign quality being had by the universe. The way these physical events change represents the way the experiences morph from one quality to another, driven by meaning and entailment, until they finally take the form of a visual, auditory, or tactile sensation. <— That experience is represented by the signals that enter our brains from the sense.

Natural law is like the observation of repeating patterns in the shadows. If the prisoners in Plato’s cave notice repeating patterns in the shadows, they might come up with a concept similar to natural laws. But obviously, these patterns are themselves representation–not of objects per se but repeating patterns in the activity of those objects, which someone free to roam about the cave might identify as the real natural laws. In the case of my theory of experience, this would be analogous to patterns of entailment between experiences–qaulities of experiences which consistently entail the same subsequent qualities (similar to a syllogism: the two premises “Socrates is a man,” and “All men are mortal,” consistently entail “Socrates is mortal”… and they do so because of what the premises mean).

I realize this is not the answer you’re looking for, but it is the answer. You and I, Biggy, are like the prisoners in Plato’s cave. I’m trying to convey to you a theory about what creates the shadows. I have to bring in concepts like “objects” and “light”. You don’t understand so you ask: explain these “objects” and “light” in terms of the shadows. And I try to tell you that I did: the objects and light create the shadows, but beyond that, they don’t exist as shadows. If I could, I’d throw up my hands and say: what else can I tell you?

I think it’s the “compatible” part.

Woaw, hold on there now. While I grant your helpless role in a deterministic universe, I do not grant that your responses to my questions are themselves natural laws–as though your first response will inevitably be your every response. People change their minds all the time. They give different responses on different occasions. If on one day, they feel like avoiding a question, they can turn around and decide to answer the question the next day. You’re not special, Biggy, you can change your mind too. If you persistently refuse to answer my questions, that’s only stubbornness, not a law of nature. All you need is to want to answer my questions and you will.

Not to you answering my questions. Whether a tactic you use to avoid a question is common sense or not is completely irrelevant. Most tactics depend on some truth or common sense in order to be used (otherwise, they’d be totally ineffectual). What makes it a tactic, as opposed to simply a statement that helps the discussion move forward, is that your motives in using it are other than to help the discussion move forward–you’re trying to avoid answering a question which you know would put your main points into doubt.

(You need to read Nietzsche.)

Ah, then we suffer the same affliction. I too know what it’s like to not really believe my own speculations (which is why I have so much trouble answering your question about how I close the gap between what’s true in my head and what’s true out there). However, from what I gather, the difference between you and I is that you’re plagued by this while I’m at peace with it. I feel like we’re reading from a book–each a reflection of the thoughts that run through our minds–we both recognize our books as just words on paper with (possibly) no bearing on the reality outside the book. You’re bothered by this and wonder what then is the point of reading. I’m not bothered as I still think the book is a good read.

And I’m still curious what your book says, but alas, to you there’s no point in reading it (except the parts you want to read).

Hey, if you don’t want to take responsibility for your denial and your avoidance of my questions, be my guest.

Well, I can see what he’s saying. He’s raising Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction–a thing can’t be and not be at the same time. If you choose to eat cornflakes, you can’t, at the same time, chose to not eat cornflakes.

But I understand your point to be a little border than that. You’re saying that if you choose to eat cornflakes, you were always going to choose to eat cornflakes from the dawn of time (thus it wasn’t really a choice).