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Can you observe my phenomenal experiences?

I was curious about the views of physicists because technical results (with which I have little familiarity) likely have important bearing on these questions, e.g. mathematical interpretations and experiments related to the Bell Inequality. Apparently Gerard 't Hooft has been bouncing around the...

Any physicists able to field this question? It seems reasonable enough. Why do we opt for randomness rather than hidden variables?

Re: ___this Whole Thread Comes Down To This___ (whilst also being a textbook example of artificial selection)

I Know a bloke who is in Nanotech at UNSW and from what he has said it sounds like they have a fair bit of freedom. As per the UNSW hanbook the program requires 12cp of physics in first year, 15cp in second year and 3cp in third, but you don't actually have to do any beyond that (~15% of the...

I've heard it hypothesised that this is why we so frequently think we see a person/creature lurking in our peripheral vision when in fact it is just a waving branch or something of that sort.

It's really not something I have much knowledge about (so a grain of salt please!). But by extension of what I know about stroke and early childhood brain damage you would expect most lesions to be permanent and relatively incurable. If the damage were very mild then, given the plasticity of the...

Typically no. You certainly wouldn't expect a sudden cure if one is available. However, the brain is rediculously complex and there is always the possibility that some function has been 'regained' whilst also being psychologically repressed (say, because one simply assumes that the limb is not...

Aye, paraconsistency certainly challenges our intuitions. But keep in mind that our intuitions also have a habit of generating contradiction (think naive set theory - which, funnily enough, could be resurrected in some form through use of a paraconsistent logic). If we continually find that we...

Fatality.

Aye, Godel's theorem is tres cool. It's worth considering the possibilities afforded by admitting the existence of contradiction. Naturally, classical logic has to be thrown out the window in this case (because a contradiction implies all wff's and so the logic breaks down), but this is why you...

And it is at this kind of impasse that I invoke the problem of imprecise/incoherent concepts. You say 'I simply cannot see how X could be the case', and I say 'I can indeed see how X might be the case'. We are both rational individuals taking a critical approach and yet we hit this brick wall...

Yeah, there is a certain elegance about cyclical models. I've had a couple mindfuck moments where I embraced the idea and meditated on the thought of having had the same thought an infinite number of times past and over again in the future (and then thinking that perhaps past/future start to...

Aye, it is a vexed issue. There is a lot of debate over the nature of possibility and necessity. For a notable but much debated on these issues see David Lewis' On the Plurality of Worlds. I don't have a barrow to push here in terms of the 'correct' account of the metaphysics of possibility ...

Again, I think conceptual issues enter here. For example, you are using a more restricted form of causation than is used in some religion/philosophy. In particular, many people work with a notions of dependence and contingency and some argue that anything contingent must depend on some kind of...

Where, and in what sense?

Sorry, I should have specified. I meant nothing in so far you are saying that there needn't be a cause. If you posit that some event occurs without a cause then, theoretically, you are opting for a framework in which something 'comes from nothing'. I am not saying that this is impossible (I...

Sure, science has faults, but most theistic theories have far more. I think that empiricism is far more intellectually defensible than any position which admits knowledge based on faith. This is where concepts become very problematic. Note that you have said "t=0 is in a sense eternal"...

Scope ambiguity. There's a difference between positing absolute nothingness (whatever that is) and treating 'nothing' as an object/noun (and yes, there are potential issues with this), e.g. 'there is nothing in the box'. The latter 'nothing as an object' issue applies to your arguments because...

That's fair enough if you're using the theist's concepts of time and causation to construct a reductio ad absurdum. (you just have to be careful not to fall into a stronger, positive, blanket argument against the need for a cause).