Blog: My Bread

Many people are aware of the fact that logical posivitists' treatment of metaphysics was harsh, but they seem to underestimate how harsh that treatment was. I am rereading Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic, and it's almost hilarious. Ayer treats metaphysics dryly like any good English man would. The view that the metaphysician is to be reckoned among the poets appears to rest on the assumption that both talk nonsense. But this assumption is false. In the vast majority of cases the sentences which are produced by poets do have literal meaning. The difference between the man who [...]

Huacachina Coercion is physical enforcement of one's own will on others against the wishes of the people. In this post, what I would like to explore is the notion of environmental coercion and its legitimacy. Environmental coercion is coercing someone with the use of the surrounding environment. As a side note, I would like to mention that environmental coercion has no association with environmentalism. Friedrich Hayek argues that environmental coercion is a real coercion like any other. As an example, he lets us imagine an oasis in a desert, and this oasis owned by [...]

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Modality is a philosophical branch of study that deals with necessary or contingent properties of existing things. I think the whole way of thinking is rooted in the idea that somehow laws of physics can be divinely altered in a miraculous manner. What is the standard in which we can determine whether some property of something is possible or necessary or contingent? It is only by physics we can know this. And only physical matter declares itself the necessary property, not us. Therefore, our lack of understand of the world should not be the motivation for us to judge that [...]

It is true. Canadians do have mob psychology. Unfortunately, this disgusting mindset isn't simply an infestation of simple minded sheeps. No, the leader of the Liberal Party, Michael Ignatief writes * : "America and Canada are both free nations," Ignatieff writes. "But our freedom is different: There is no right to bear arms north of the 49th parallel and no capital punishment either; we believe in collective rights to language and land, and, in our rights culture, these can trump individual rights . Not so south of the border. Rights that are still [...]

I had my last exam today for this term. And I finally found a summer co-op job at Merrill Lynch!

Richard Bastien wrote a brief critique of libertarianism from a conservative point of view for the National Post. His argument against libertarianism boils down to the following as expected. Personal liberty isn't the only value people share. Bastien writes, "( ... ) it assumes that all political philosophies can properly be gauged on the basis of a single criterion – respect for personal liberty. This might seem reasonable to libertarians, who assume that liberty trumps all other values. However, many people living in free societies simply do not share that [...]

Is Chomsky fucking serious ? After decades of fighting against the unjustified power and authority, is he giving into the current status quo in political science? Is he not the one who has exposed how even democracy unjustly serves the interested of the state by propaganda and manipulation? I no longer side with Chomsky's version of anarcho-syndicalism nor left libertarianism, but one thing that I always admired about him is his uncompromising stance against unjustified power. Now he has given in. Professor Chomsky, you fail.

It seems like every news, celebrity gossips, songs and others are alluding to the incidence that I would break up with Ariana. Could this been something like what Marxists would've felt seeing injustice and inequality everywhere? Class struggle? Well as some Marxists would say, for the greater good, some blood must be spilt through struggles.

While I try to be libertarian in the most unfattered sense possible, I think I still bear the tendency of being fascist time to time. My lack of sympathy for other populous in general, ideological mindset, strong desire to bring about changes in radical means, etc, I can see why fascism could be attractive in many ways. Since fascism is not an ideology that is often shared by common people, it creates an illusion in the fascist that he alone is the enlightened one. This makes a hero out of oneself. In fact, I've openly supported the view of a [...]

I've finished Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind just yesterday. The book ended with a section titled, The Limits of Physicalism , and it looked like a whole tube of Colgate won't be enough to clean out the dirty taste in my mouth after reading the section. The presumption I had in mind all along was that the choice of ontology is really either/or ? Shouldn't it be either dualism or physicalism? Or something else or physicalism? I've got over that fetish of labeling I want to keep. Being something like 99% physicalist doesn't mean that you [...]

I can finally understand what Kim means by the title of his book " Physicalism, or Something Near Enough " as I reached the final section, The Limits of Physicalism , of another book written by him, " Philosophy of Mind ". Kim writes that we physicalists ought not think that reduction of mental states is applicable to all and every mental states. Kim writes: "(...) one pitfall to avoid is the tendency to think that the mental in its entirely must be either reducible or irreducible. It may well be that some mental properties are reducible [...]

" Consciousness Online was founded by Richard Brown and is dedicated to the rigorous study of consciousness. The goal is to bring consciousness researchers together in an online venue to promote widespread discussion and exchanging of views/data related to the scientific and philosophical study of consciousness."

Why do philosophers think that qualia should be just about phenomenal experience? Any literature you read on this topic gives the example of seeing an apple and sensing red. Doesn't any conscious state come with phenomenal experience? Thus qualia as well?

There are so much literature regarding Searle's Chinese Room argument , so I did not get to go over all of them. But from ones I've encountered so far, arguments against Searle's Chinese Room argument have been disappointing. Although many of Searle's critics uniformly agree that Searle is dead wrong about impossibility of Strong AI from machines, most of them seem to implicitly agree that the thought experiment has a strong intuitive appeal that is difficult to deny. Assuming that Searle's thought experiment is valid, how does meaning ever arise from anything at all? I am [...]

photo taken by PhotoGraham Graphophones cannot make a sound that is not present on the record. Therefore any change in sound that a graphophone makes must entail the change of needle location playing the record. This example captures the gist of supervenience, and its slogan, "there cannot be an A-difference without a B-difference" * . Philosophers of mind applied this reasoning to the relationship between mind and body. Can we think thoughts without making some corresponding changes in our brain? If this is possible, mind-body supervenience (MBS) does not occur. If [...]

Jan Narveson I uploaded Jan Narveson 's picture to his Wikipedia article . The picture is originally taken by Institute for Liberal Studies , and my gratitude goes out to them. Jan Narveson is a professor of philosophy emeritus at my school,University of Waterloo. He is liberitarian moral philosopher, and he has greatly influenced me in shaping my thoughts on moral philosophy, politics, and economics.

Harry Frankfurt I came across Harry Frankfurt's essay called, On Bullshit , while I was reading stuff on compatibilism , and I must say that it was an enjoyable read. I think Frankfurt shares my frustration of bullshit that is so prevalent in our culture ranging from academia to cheap Eastern mysticism. However, Frankfurt retained his anger really well dealing with bullshit. Frankfurt never mentions postmodernism in his essay, but I think this was done intentionally on his part. Cults are best left alone. To be fair, not all anti-realists [...]

Patricia Churchland Patricia Churchland reaffirms the importance of experimental data offered by neurobiology to philosophy in general in her recent article, The Impact of Neuroscience on Philosophy . She criticizes the tendency of philosophers to declare something to be absolute with a priori reasoning. She probably has John Searle's thought experiment, Chinese Room argument or Frank Jackson's Mary the Scientist argument in mind. To certain extent, I agree with her. I think many philosophers are doing something similar to what philosophers of early 20th century did with Einstein's theory of relativity. Philosophers in their armchair speculated that [...]

1. People have rights. 2. Companies cannot infringe other people's rights. 3. Companies have rights. 4. People cannot infringe the companies' rights. 5. Companies have rights to act in anyway they desire to fulfill their interests as long as they don't infringe the rights of others. 6. Companies have rights to hire people they think are the best for a position. 7. Companies do not have duty to hire people. 8. Companies do not have duty to hire people of certain background. 9. Affirmative action infringes the rights of the companies. Perhaps, one way to attack this argument [...]