103
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
Your reasoning would be sound if you picked any random human who ever lived and checked whether they would be alive today. This chance would indeed be rather low. (Because today's world population is ...
- 1,011
41
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
Shuffle a standard deck of 52 playing cards and look at the arrangement you end up with. Assuming your sorting was completely random the probability of you getting that exact arrangement is about 1 in ...
- 511
9
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
The first time I recall encountering this argument was in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, where the probability of what you describe is likened to “events with odds so astronomical they’re effectively ...
- 231
8
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
The probability of an event X happening, GIVEN THAT IT HAS HAPPENED, is always 100%.
I hear thinking like you give used in many flawed arguments. For example, I once got into a conversation with ...
- 269
7
votes
What is time for Bergson? And how is it different from duration?
Time, for Bergson, is not different from duration. On the contrary, Bergson's view is that time is duration.
Explanation: Bergson uses the word "time" like all of us do. That is, he uses the word "...
- 7,311
7
votes
What other philosophers I read before taking a class on “being and time”
Given that you have about a month and a half to prepare, in which you estimate you can read two or three books, I would not recommend starting with Aristotle to understand Being and Time.
Instead, I ...
- 24.6k
6
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
A couple of brief pointers on how to think about this:
First, in your question you are assuming that the passage of time is an objective feature of reality. That is, in order to give a full ...
- 2,647
6
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
Right now I am looking at a pair of scissors laying on my desk. What are the chances of that?!?? Think about it: that pair of scissors had to be created; the desk had to be created. The house that ...
- 2,689
6
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
Dead or unborn people don't ask themselves : "Why am I not alive today?".
By contraposition, you've got your answer:
You can ask yourself the above question, it means you're alive.
- 1,100
4
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
Your question is, why does your lifespan occur now rather than at some other time? But if it did occur at another time, then that would be your "now" and you would be asking the same question. ...
- 41
4
votes
Explanation of Dasein and Da-sein in Heidegger
First, one needs to understand how Dasein should be understood in Sein und Zeit (SuZ in what follows). It stems from the German word "Dasein" that can be translated by "existence". ...
- 238
3
votes
Did Adorno retain anything from Heidegger's Being and Time?
Asking about "anything" is rather vague especially in this case - Adorno and Heidegger share too many things: both wrested with Hegel, both had interests in aesthetics and despised postivism and that ...
- 3,696
3
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
A reason why you might find it surprising/improbable, is having a view that you (i.e. "your mind, your soul, your very awareness", and your body) is a self that's independent of its present ...
- 631
3
votes
Are physicalists at all in agreement what happens to conciousness if the rate of time is changed?
If all of time was reversed, we would not perceive any difference. We would remember the "future" (positive time direction) and try to predict the "past" (negative time direction)....
- 11.1k
2
votes
What is time for Bergson? And how is it different from duration?
The concept of duration is most developed in Bergson's Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1899), freely available online. Duration is the qualitative continuum of "...
- 42.5k
2
votes
What is time for Bergson? And how is it different from duration?
The concept of duration is in its most simple presentation qualitative multiplicity or the fusion of this experience of nowness with the those that follow. What is commonly called "time" isn't ...
- 876
2
votes
Accepted
Is there a better answer to this argument claiming the impossibility of time extending infinitely into the past?
Whether or not time can extend infinitely into the past depends on the truth of a particular theory of time.
Parmenides denied the reality of space and time, which is a metaphysic that begot Zeno's ...
- 401
2
votes
What is the purpose of a high in terms of it being created or intended by a creator
You assume, I take it, that God is all-powerful and perfectly benevolent, so that (at least on the face of it) there should be no evil in the world. You also, I assume, consider a 'high' - resulting ...
- 35.4k
2
votes
Accepted
Did Adorno retain anything from Heidegger's Being and Time?
There are a few key points that Adorno brings up:
"Authenticity" is a spirituality that follows no doctrine. This way a way for someone, suggestive of heidegger, to prevent him from falling back into ...
- 526
2
votes
Accepted
What is the purpose of a high in terms of it being created or intended by a creator
There are many possible answers, depending on the nature of God and God's relationship to creation:
One relatively orthodox answer is that drugs are here as a test, an
unrighteous pleasure present in ...
- 26.9k
2
votes
Why must everything have an origin, but not an ending?
If you do some research, you'll find that the assumption that starts and ends exist is not always the default. For example, many religions have a cyclical model of time which explicitly does not ...
- 17.5k
2
votes
Why must everything have an origin, but not an ending?
There are many things which we are confident at some point in the past did not exist, like the language "English", or "flying Earth creatures", or "human beings", or Dubstep. Since these things exist ...
- 735
2
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
If you want to go even deeper into the formation of an embryo, millions of sperm are released each time someone ejaculates. Let's take this number as 400 million (400,000,000).Source The average human ...
- 31
2
votes
Being alive today: the most improbable coincidence?
The question is essentially, "I am alive right now, and I am alive at the exact same time that I am alive. Isn't that impossibly unlikely?" No, it's a tautology. It's the same as saying "Isn't it ...
- 21
2
votes
How did Heidegger argue for the certainty of death?
I would often agree that death cannot be actualized, is always not yet, but not because it is certain and indefinite, only because it can't be experienced by who dies.
In a sense, you are not all ...
- 2,137
2
votes
Accepted
How does phenomenology deal with time-consciousness？
SHORT ANSWER
Phenomenologists redefine consciousness to include the past, present, and future as subject to its inspection. Therefore, sleep, which may lead to an interruption of perception doesn't ...
- 22.6k
2
votes
Does Eternalism imply looping consciousness?
I think you are misunderstanding Eternalism, which to my eyes is essentially just another way of thinking about a deterministic universe.
If the universe is deterministic, there is nothing special ...
- 373
2
votes
Meaning of these words in Heidegger's "Being and Time"?
Heidegger uses "ready-to-hand" to refer to the kind-of-being that equipment has. It's more than just "useful". Structurally it offers us affordances. For eg, the hammer calls us to ...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible