Fallout 3

It’s one of those games that I’ve been waiting for since I finished the last game (Fallout 2).  Unfortunately that’s been almost a decade now.  Interplay’s Fallout series was, in many people’s opinions, the king and pioneer of open-ended RPGs.  You could be a righteous trooper for the Brotherhood of Steel and protect the post-apocalyptic Western united States from super mutants, or you could get married and pimp out your wife for a little extra spending money.  It was wonderful, it was beautiful, and it was well done.  With multiple endings based on what you did or did not accomplish, multiple ways of doing each mission depending on your character (blast your way through with a mini-gun or use your magnificently eloquent chatting skills to talk people into doing what you want), it was one of the trademark games of my video gaming career and will not be forgotten any time soon.  I waited so long for news of the next game coming out, but was disappointed again and again, first with Fallout Tactics, then with Brotherhood of Steel.  I was about to give up hope until 2004 hit.

A Continuation From Miniskirts

So now I’m stuck in this religious philosophy frame of mind so I figured I’d take my last post a bit further and try to sort some more things out.  In my last post I came down to the idea that in order for the Ontological argument for God’s existence to be true, one must be able to come up with a proof that shows that there is no set of properties that would negate existence and that would be better than existence.

 

So the next question to ask is that if something does not exist, then does it have to fall under the rules of logic?  For instance.  We know that it is not possible for something that exists to be both red and not-red at the same time. (that is to say that it is red and it is not the case that it is red, not simply that it is something other than red for it is possible for something to be red and something other than red at the same time, but it’s not possible for it to be red if it has no red in it).  But is it possible for something that doesn’t exist to be both red and not red?  Since we’re living within the rules of logic we’d have to say that no it can’t as contradictions are not logically possible.  Which means that my original question now becomes somewhat moot for if omniscience and free-will are inconsistent in existence, then surely they would be inconsistent in non-existence as well.

 

Miniskirts, Beer, and God

Okay, first of all I got a disclaimer to put out there.  I am not taking a religious view of God in this article.  I’m going to speak of God in a purely philosophical manner.  In no way am I saying that I believe in God or that I do not believe in God.  I’m simply putting the argument out there.

That being said, I’m gonna talk about the miniskirt argument against the Ontological argument for God’s existence.  Now I think a little exposition is in order before I start talking about the argument itself.  The miniskirt argument was first created by myself and Brian Greenslade in the Liberty Lounge at Mount Royal College.  The purpose of coming up with the argument, at the time, was simply so that we’d be able to drink beer in class.  The beer in class argument went something along the lines of, our argument against the Ontological argument for God’s existence deals with miniskirts.   You can’t have in-depth discussions about miniskirts without beer, therefore we necessarily must bring beer to class in order to fully discuss the topics that we are supposed to discuss.  We never actually got around to giving that argument to the prof I don’t think, but it was a damned good idea if I do say so myself.

Philosophy of Language

Once again I’m going to exercise my right as an undergraduate philosopher to talk out of my ass without having to worry about plagiarizing by accidentally talking about something that someone else came up with.  What I’m talking about today is a topic that I started thinking about after visiting The Force Holocron and reading a post about the identity theory of truth.  Now I’ve personally always been a firm believer in the correspondence theory of truth (the idea that a statement is true if it corresponds to a fact), but that’s mostly been because it’s been the best theory that I’ve yet come across.  The identity theory of truth is something more along the lines of a statement’s truth depends on the truth value of its bearer (a proposition for example).  The idea of the identity theory of truth is to get around the fact that with the correspondence theory of Truth, the statement itself does not contain truth.  I thought about this for a while and decided that that is not inconsistent with the way that I see things.

A defence for Dane Cook

Seems as though lately there’s a mob growing who claim that Dane Cook steals material.  You can take a look at the so-called “damning evidence” here and decide for yourselves.  Personally I don’t see actual material that’s been stolen.  Yes there are asides that are similar while he discuses similar subject matter, but the subject matter itself is matter that is discussed across the board in comedy routines.  It looks to me like nitpicking.  Like saying that Dave Chappelle stole material from Richard Pryor by doing an imitation of a white man in a similar fashion.  It’s silly.  But the main argument against this mob is simple.  If this was actually the case, why hasn’t someone credible covered it?  Who do these bloggers think they are?  The speak as though their Internet-based research is just as reliable as someone interviewing each comedian (or, at the very least, each comedian’s publicist) and getting their points of view on the entire situation.

Speaking of Richard Gere and dead babies

I’m cheating today and copying a couple of posts from my old msn blog that are very important for everyone to know about…

Intentions

An article presented by CBC news talks about how brain scans may actually be able to tell what your intentions are.  While it’s not nearly an exact science (at a 70% success rate it’s not even good enough to be able to ward off the ‘coincidence’ argument) it brings up some interesting questions in my least favorite area of philosophy: ethics.  What if the technology was perfected.  What if we were able to judge a person’s motives objectively (or as objectively as we can judge their actions in any case).  What would this mean for ethical theories.  Most theories of ethics do not take motives into account, some saying that it’s actions that matter rather than motives, but most saying that we can’t tell what a person’s motives are and so we can’t make a theory based on them.

Animal Farm

After a year of logging in almost every day (and more often than not more than once a day) I finally decided to quit playing Utopia . It had lost it’s fun as my imaginary province was tired of being one of the best imaginary provinces in my imaginary kingdom while putting less than enough effort into it. It’s funny how the kingdom collapsed. It wasn’t due to lack of orginization or straight forward leadership. It was from apathy. Everyone stoppped caring. And as soon as that happened it all fell apart. This is the last post I wrote in my Kingdom’s forums along with the necessary information to kill my province:

March 5th, YR10
Remember when the horse dies and they turn him into glue?

Candy mountain lies just yonder…….

- The Humble Sir Rilom