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Absurd Being

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Recent Articles

Aug 14, 2024     Reflections on Time - Infinity     New

The word ‘infinity’ is used to refer to something endless or without boundaries. If you believe that the universe has no outer boundary, so that you could travel outwards forever and never reach the end or return to where you started, this would make the universe infinite in space or size. If you subscribe to the multiverse theory, on the other hand, it might be the number of universes that you would take to be infinite. Another thing that is commonly taken to be infinite is time, in the sense that time extends endlessly forwards into the future and endlessly backwards into the past. It is this sense of infinity – the temporal kind – that we will be concerned with in this article....


July 09, 2024     My First Book - The Philosphy of Reality

Some of you may have noticed that I have been a little quiet on here recently. A part of the reason for this is that I have been working hard on getting my first book ready for (self-)publication. I’m happy to report that the battle is finally over, and The Philosophy of Reality is up and looking good on Amazon. It is basically the sum total of my thinking over the past decade, during which time I have been making long-form, in-depth, explanatory video series on key philosophical texts while writing articles containing more original ideas, some of which have gone into certain parts of my book. To give you a little idea of what The Philosophy of Reality is about, in this article I will reproduce the blurb I’ve written for it along with three excerpts, one from each of the main sections that make up the book...


Dec 17, 2023     Evolution from a Metaphysical Perspective

Let me begin this article by clarifying that I will NOT be doubting evolution as the theory that life forms change over time and different species share common ancestors. No scientific theory (I also won't be wasting any time refuting the silly objection that evolution is just a theory that has yet to be proven) has as much supporting evidence for it, from the fossil record to carbon dating to homologies (including anatomical, vestigial, and molecular features) to developmental biology to genomics, and on and on. With that said, evolutionary theory is not perfect, although what it lacks, strictly speaking, doesn’t fall within the mandate of what the theory (or science, in general) studies...


Nov 04, 2023     Time and Its Three Tenses

Like my last article, this one takes its cue from an article I read in the magazine, Philosophy Now. The article in question was written by Letizia Nonnis, a philosophy undergraduate at the University of Roehampton, and was entitled “Kant on Time.” My aim here is to take up some of the key points Nonnis extracts from Kant regarding time and discuss them in more detail, leading, hopefully, to a deeper understanding of this horribly misunderstood aspect of reality...


Sep 30, 2023     Exploring Moral Relativism

This article explores moral relativism through an article in the online philosophy magazine Philosophy Now written by Paul Stearns, a philosophy professor at Blinn College, Texas, entitled ‘Right and Wrong about Right and Wrong.’ Note that the moral relativism which Stearns is arguing against here is not the claim that there are no universal standards from which we can judge the behaviour of people in different times or cultures from our own...


What is Philosophy?

Possibly the most common answer heard to this question comes from the simple dissection of the word "philosophy". In Greek, phileo means "to love" and sophia means "wisdom" so the literal meaning of philosophy is "the love of wisdom;"" a broad subject area to be sure.

While this definition is certainly not inaccurate, it does need some refining. To the ancient Greeks, such a broad meaning was perfectly apt since philosophy encompassed all of what we would today classify as science. Post-scientific revolution, when science and technology really came into its own based on the scientific method, philosophy has come under attack, to the point where physicists as eminent as Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking can feel justified in asserting that philosophy is dead, or at best, obsolete.

If we think of philosophy as a bunch of people sitting around posing questions to themselves ("What is this cup made of?" or "What is a thought?") and suggesting answers ("Atoms" or "The firing of neurons"), then yes, philosophy is dead and what's more, we ought to have killed it. But this is a straw man. While these kinds of questions used to come under the auspices of philosophy, they are now scientific ones and can be best pursued through the scientific method. But only (some) scientists think philosophy is like this.

I think of it like this; there are two broad realms, the world and the human. Both of these are best investigated through science, the 'hard' sciences for the former (physics, chemistry, etc.) and 'soft' for the latter (psychology and sociology), but science cannot address the unique human questions about these subjects (that science elucidates so well) that arise from our unique human perspective.

Science can tell us that our thoughts come from the interactions of neurons in a physical organ but what does this mean for us? Does this reduce us to nothing more than sophisticated biological robots? (If yes, why should we treat each other any differently than we treat any of the other machines that surround us?) Does our experience of these thoughts as coming from a localised "me" therefore mean nothing? How does this affect our relationships with others? How about with ourselves? There are no experiments we can conduct to answer these kinds of questions because they are qualitative, not quantitative. And what's more telling in this context is that these questions would be meaningless in a human-less universe (and of course, by 'human' I mean any limited but self-aware consciousness structured in such a way that it shares certain features of human consciousness). In other words, philosophy addresses 'human' questions.

This reveals something important about philosophy. If there were no humans there could be no philosophy either… but there could still be science (in theory at least, setting aside the question of who would be doing the science). Even when philosophy is at its most abstract, in say, analytic philosophy (logic, language, etc.) or metaphysics (God, being, etc.), the questions invariably turn on specifically human concerns and/or features. In contrast, science explicitly aims to exclude the human from its considerations. Any version of philosophy that attempts to compete with science in this respect will ultimately end up impoverished and unable to avoid making a mockery of a subject that has an extremely distinguished pedigree and deserves a central role in our lives, not necessarily because it gives definitive answers, but because it makes us think about the questions.

If we were nothing more than the organisms science reduces us to, questions about life would be easy to deal with… because there wouldn’t be any. To achieve Y, do A, B, and D. Simple. But this will never satisfy us as humans. We have more concerns than this. Does my doing A affect anyone else?, should that matter to me?, do I even want Y?, are there any other options?, why or why not?… and the list goes on. Anytime you find yourself asking questions that can’t be quantified or answered definitively after performing a well-designed experiment, you are doing philosophy. And I’m willing to bet that they will also be the questions that matter most to you.