Determinism

....the irritation and unease that determinism can conjure in relation to the effort and commitment that we put into life. The emotional question is, “can I be bothered?”; can I be bothered to employ my higher faculties in earnest, or shall I simply recline in apathy? This more emotional question inevitably is concerned with emotional factors such as how wearying or how inspiring is the employment of these higher faculties, how stubborn or determined is our nature, and countless other human influences. It is not necessary to reconcile determinism and the concept of free will in order to appreciate that the argument that we might as well just relax because atoms will carry on colliding in a pre-determined way regardless of our effort, is clearly a sloppy one.

Robinson C P, comments - In our time!


......the issue of the distinction between subjective awareness and objective awareness when discussing consciousness. This is the heart of the problem that consciousness poses for materialism. Science understandably focuses on objectifiable awareness since science is optimized to study what is distributed in space and time and ultimately that is what we mean by objectifiable. Also objective awareness correlates strongly with the sensory mechanisms that enable our interaction with the space-time environment and these are easily studied by science. Subjective awareness however, cannot be understood by our present system of science and mathematics, not simply because we are trying to understand a complicated system, but because it has all the hallmarks of behaving as a singularity.

comments



I now realize why I sensed something was going wrong nanotech enthusiasms with the regulation pressure – as I began to review social issues of the past when science saw drastic discoveries. Social aspects of nanotechnology are essential part of the response to ethical issues of how far we can push such enabling sci-ence. The whole idea of free thinking is important before an era of revolutionary time of nanoscience unfolds itself in the minds of practitioners! We must learn how these particles affect us and are translated into thoughts by free endeavours to drive all the ideas to consequences.
What is particularity of nanoworld is increasing extension of surfaces! We are certainly much richer in the context of a nano-defined world as we have greatly extended the surfaces. Gassendi is the one philosopher that is needed mentioning for his ideas on surfaces, since he stresses that in response to Descartes on Mate-rialism - he says the question is all about measuring surfaces and tend to move away from the idea of the soul. However, according to William Blake the idea that we are only made out of particles, has left out huge amount of nature and beauty, and that our rich repertoire is indispensable.