Practicing Thinking

A coworker of mine and I were talking about philosophy and he asked me, “How do we avoid errors in our thinking so that we know whether our ideas are true?” I did not have an answer for him at first. After pondering for a while I realized that refining one’s thinking is a discipline that requires dedicated practice and constant vigilance, not simply a mental trick or thought that will verify whether another concept is true beyond all doubt.

Pluralism in Starcraft II

Blizzard Entertainment released their latest expansion to their science fiction real-time strategy game Starcraft II about a month ago. I played through the story campaign since I am a big fan of science fiction and Blizzard’s games. I knew it would be entertaining, and the ending was a bit corny, but surprisingly the story was also thought provoking.

Free Will Part 2

After finding that disregarding the causes behind my motives would not leave me free in my post Free Will Part 1, I had to think of a new way to define free will that was not inherently contradictory. Trying to think of a better concept of freedom made me remember my own experiences around free will to see if that would yield any insight.

Free Will Part 1

In a previous post about determinism I established that even if the universe in general is not deterministic and predictable, for all intents and purposes I am. All of my thoughts, feelings, and deeds have causes. I can tell that if time turned back on any choice I made and I was in exactly the same circumstances with my knowledge, thoughts, emotions, and surroundings, I would make exactly the same choice again for better or worse.

Arriving at the realization that I am governed by cause and effect made me wonder if being deterministic meant I do not have free will.

Perception and Reality

A philosophical idea that I find fun to play with is that what we perceive is not what actually happens in reality. For example, when I hear music being played, I perceive a beautiful chord or a groovy beat. What is physically happening is that the air is vibrating in waves that align harmoniously and have a rhythmical pattern.

Determining Determinism

Most people are familiar with cause and effect. My throwing a stone over a lake, the cause, has the effect of it skipping over the water. Even if I failed to make the stone skip, that failure would also have causes. Perhaps I did not give the stone enough spin, or threw it at an angle that was unsuited for skipping. Cause and effect are everywhere in the natural world, and philosophers have translated that into the concept of determinism.

What is Morality?

The nature of good and morality is a perennial question for philosophers, and recently I realized that while I use the term good all the time, if someone asked me what I meant by that I would not be able to give them an answer that satisfied me. In this post I am interested in describing the results of my investigation into what I think of as good or moral, rather than trying to defend it as the one true concept of morality.

Communication, Listening, and Empathy

After composing my post on empathetic thinking, I wanted to say more about my experiences with empathy in general. I was first introduced to intentionally practicing empathy through workshops on nonviolent communication, a communication technique developed by Marshall Rosenberg. There are many different aspects to nonviolent communication, but one that has always been especially significant to me is creating an understanding based on human observations, feelings, needs, and requests.

Empathetic Thinking

Improving my thinking is one of my personal goals, and one of the ways I strive to accomplish this is to consciously practice thinking in an empathetic way. What I mean by empathetic thinking is thinking that adopts multiple perspectives or viewpoints on an issue, similar to how empathy in feeling allows for a greater understanding of others through placing oneself in their position. This allows me to find the value and limitations of any perspective on a question, including my own, without becoming stuck or attached to it.