I hope that you are wrong in your account of what Stephen Hawking writes in The Grand Design , because it is so obviously wrong and uninformed. There is no freewill, Hawking writes, according to you, and the reason is that stimulation of particular regions of the brain results in certain desires, such as a desire to move one's right arm. Consider an analogy. One might want to argue there is no such thing as a free or random roulette wheel, because magnetic "stimulation" of some number on the wheel will make the ball want to land there. Of course to say that a human action is free is not to say that it is random, but to say that a human action is free has something in common with saying, of a roulette wheel, that it is not rigged or that the ball is somehow forced to land where it does. From the fact that I want to raise my arm when my torturer's make me want to does not show that when I am not being tortured my desire to reaise it is not free. Even if some human actions are not free, in cases...

The positions and numbers of branches and leaves of trees and plants are governed by Fibonacci series: 1,1,2,3,5,8.13 . . . . , so there is order in their arrangement. Whether this pattern exists seems to have little or nothing to do with how used to it we are.

I believe that your question is a good one, and that there is a further one that it suggests. The further question is where the dust particles might have come from. Or if we mean by "the universe" absolutely everything, including dust particles, then the universe did not come from a few dust particles or anything else, as, if it did, then the universe came from a part of itself, which is clearly impossible.

Right on the money! It is extremely improbable that with say four dice I shall roll four sixes (1/1296 against, if my arithmetic is right, and there are no biases.). But I have done it, with dice that otherwise showed no evidence of being biased. What does this show? Nothing at all! In particular, it does not show the existence of a dice controller who favours me - assuming more sixes are better than fewer. Suppose human life is extremely improbable. What does that show? Alas, again the answer is, absolutely nothing at all. The improbable sometimes happens, although, of course, not very often! We should thank heaven that it did!

There are several sense to the word "life", which derives from a Norse word having to do with the body; in German we have Leib , body. (1) There is a biological sense, which used to be taken to say that things possess life only if they possess respiration, excretion, reproduction, growth, irritability - I like this one - and cells. Locomotion is also characteristic of animal living things. Physiological life is life in this sense. (2) Life can also be taken to be consciousness or psychological life, so that only conscious beings have life; but I think that this should be taken to mean that only conscious beings have a life. Grass is alive, practically eternal, but it does not have a life, and we do not say that the different kinds of grasses lead separate lives because they don't lead lives at all. A derivative sense here is a life, meaning a biography, as in "A life of Churchill". A life in this sense is a book. (3) "Life" can also mean "way of life", so habits, customs and attitudes,...

How about this? Entertainment value is diversion (certainly a good thing), aesthetic value is engagement.

Time is a physical dimension. The dimension in which something exists is just the minimum number of co-ordinates that are needed to locate the point at which it exists. So three co-ordinates are needed to specify a point in Euclidean space, and accordingly Euclidean space has a dimension of 3. In the physics of relativity theory space and time are not 'independent', as you put it. On a relational or Leibnizian view, such as relativity theory, a space is merely the order of the space occupants. Time, on the other hand time, is one-dimensional. All we need to do to locate an event is to specify one time, say Tuesday: 'The murder happened on Tuesday.' (Some philosophers have discussed the question whether time itself could fork, and whether there could be disjoint times, as distinct from distinct possibilities within time.) Psychological events are also scaled in time. The horrified reaction to Tuesday's murder might take place on Wednesday, say, as one reads the morning newspaper. Accordingly...

I would like to continue the discussion by saying something about Allen's response. I agree that there might be a question about why position coordinates get bigger and bigger. Answer: we are heading North. But then we are moving. My concern is that if we think in this way, we are already thinking of time as something in which we move and travel. So why not backwards as well as forwards? My orthodox and perhaps crude belief is that time travel is impossible because of the grandmother paradox: if a time machine is possible, then I could use it to travel back two generations, and then kill my maternal grandmother. In that case, my mother would not have existed. But then nor would I. So then I couldn't go back in a time machine and kill my grandmother. So I both would go back in time and kill my grandmother and I would not go back in time and kill my grandmother. This is impossible. The logician Kurt Gödel has a nice version of one response to this paradox. A time machine is possible, but as a matter of...

I agree with everything that Allen writes in his last comment. Some time travel scenarios are ruled out a priori : these are the inconsistent ones, and there may be others, for all I know. Are the consistent ones ruled out by anything? I can't see that they are, as the only reason I am clear about for thinking time travel is possible is the grandfather paradox. But it may only rule out the inconsistent cases. So I am in agreement with Allen here too, and in the dark as to whether anything in physics allows or rules out non-contradictory time travel. Time is a dimension, and dimensions are things that allow you to scale. A direction in the structure of the dimension itself seems a slightly incoherent idea to me, as opposed to the direction of the thing moving in the dimension, e.g. a place moving through colour space, such as the sky going from blue to red, or a bullet moving from there to here.

In general, the fact that everyone agrees on something is not really enough to make it true. The fact that everyone believes that Brazil is the best team in the World Cup doesn't mean they will win the Cup, or be the best team. On the other hand, if I believe that Jennifer is my best girl, then she is my best girl. If we all thought that blue was the best colour, then it would be: "our best colour", so perhaps it could be said to be the best colour. So I think "the best" is used in two ways in your excellent question. (1) It just means "the best" by some external standard , goal-scoring perhaps, so that "Brazil is the best team" means that Brazil will win the Cup. (2) It means that blue is our best colour, the best colour of all of us, the one we all like the most, then it is the best colour - of all of us - though not in the first sense. I think perhaps it is a little difficult to know how to understand what the fact of being the best colour is. There is something good about each of...

Why should the redness of a red object not be a fact? We say of this tomato here, "Look, it's red." We know this proposition is true because we can see that the tomato is red, just as we know that the tomato is heavy - heavy for a tomato, anyway - because we can weigh it in our hand. The same thing applies to shape, supposing that we come to know the shape of something by visual inspection rather than by measurement. Now if our red object is viewed in green light, it turns black, because the light with colours at the middle of the spectrum, the green light, is complementary to the red light that the tomato "reflects", if we can say this. (In what way is a tomato not like a mirror?) The red tomato "absorbs" the green light. I think that your question goes deeper, however. This redness of the tomato might be thought not to be a physical fact, if you believe those philosophers who are impressed by the existence of an "explanatory gap", as it has come to be called, between physical and phenomenal...

Here is a side note to your question. Soft determinism consists of two propositions: (1) the the thesis that determinism is true; (2) that it is compatible with freedom. Compatibilism on the other hand is merely (2). So soft determinism includes compatibilism, but there is more to it. I am a compatibilist but not a soft determinist (I am a compatibilist indeterminist), as I believe that there are some events that have no causes (denial of universal causation), and I also believe that the state of the universe plus the laws of nature do not determine the next state of the universe (determinism), and I also believe that some human actions are free. The only other compatibilist indeterminist I know of is David Lewis.