Interesting question. Can't we interpret the story you told as one in which you never exist but someone quite similar to you does instead? Why would such an interpretation be unreasonable? You list six conditions that you seem to regard as jointly sufficient for someone's being you: (1) having exactly your DNA sequence; (2) being born on your birth-date; (3) being told that your parents are his parents; (4) being given your name; (5) your parents' having no biological child; (6) all else being equal. None of those conditions is individually sufficient for someone's being you. (1) Given identical twinning or cloning, someone else (your twin or clone) could have exactly your DNA sequence; (2) plenty of other people share your birth-date; (3) someone else could be told that your parents are his parents (and has been if you have a brother); (4) someone else could (and may actually) share your name; (5) your parents' having no biological child is certainly not sufficient for someone's being you; (6)...

Your question concerns Question 4929 , which you quoted. Have a look at the Morriston and Wielenberg articles that I linked to in my answer there. In the case of Wielenberg, you have an atheist who emphatically rejects the idea that "morality is only objective when your current language community agree on its precepts." Another example is Russ Shafer-Landau ( Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? , 2004; Moral Realism: A Defence , 2004). A great many atheist philosophers think that truth in ethics isn't relative to culture or community. It's a topic of much contemporary debate, as you'll see if you search the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy under "moral realism" and "moral anti-realism."

The literature on this topic is huge. Much of the work in theoretical ethics and metaethics in the last 200 years has been an attempt to provide a non-theistic foundation for morality, whether a foundation within ethics or a foundation outside ethics. If you look under "ethics," "metaethics," and "moral" in the table of contents of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (linked in the right sidebar of this site), you'll find dozens of entries that give non-theistic treatments of ethics and ethical issues. Two good recent journal articles on the non-theistic grounding of ethics are this one by Wes Morriston and this one by Erik Wielenberg . You might also find this forthcoming paper of mine to be relevant. Best of luck in your research!

Even asking "Is there a way to prove that logic works?" presupposes that logic does work at least at the level of its most basic laws, such as the Law of Noncontradiction, because the question itself has meaning only if the most basic laws of logic hold. To put it a bit differently: No sense at all can be attached to the notion that logic doesn't work (or even sometimes doesn't work). See also my reply to Question 4837 and Question 4884 . So we have what philosophers call a "transcendental" proof of the reliability of logic: If we can so much as ask whether logic is reliable (provably or otherwise), then it follows that the answer to our question is yes . You might say that this proof won't impress someone who doubts the most basic laws of logic in the first place. But I'd reply -- predictably -- that no sense can be attached to the notion of doubting the most basic laws of logic.

In my opinion, it's no harder to reconcile freedom (free choice, responsible action) with determinism than to reconcile it with indeterminism. On the contrary, it may be easier; see, for example, this SEP entry . According to compatibilists, we can act freely even if determinism should turn out to be true and hence even if the indeterministic interpretation of quantum mechanics should turn out to be false. But no one thinks that the truth of indeterminism (whether quantum indeterminism or some other kind) by itself would suffice to give us freedom. The debate is about whether indeterminism is necessary for freedom. In my view, incompatibilists bear the burden of showing that it is and have failed to discharge that burden.

Far too few, unfortunately.

I hope philosophers of math on the Panel will respond with more authority than I have. My understanding is that G ö del showed that arithmetic contains pairs of mutually contradictory statements neither one of which is provable within arithmetic. Assuming the standard logical law that exactly one of every pair of mutually contradictory statements is true, we get the result that some arithmetical truths are unprovable within arithmetic. I can't say whether those truths include statements to the effect that such-and-such is the solution to an equation, but if they do, and if their being unprovable within arithmetic makes the associated equations "fundamentally unsolvable," then the answer to your question is yes . Someone might reply that an unprovable arithmetical statement can't be true , but I think that would be to mistake truth for provability.

To be candid, your question seems to embody some confusions. I'll try to address them in this reply. 1. I think it's fair to regard philosophy as the analysis (if you like, the logical manipulation) of concepts , although that view of philosophy is rejected by some philosophers. In any case, concepts can be expressed in any number of languages, so I wouldn't regard philosophy as the manipulation of words as such. 2. Scientists, as far as I can tell, don't in general examine the relationship between language and extralinguistic observations. Instead they try to explain or predict patterns of observations in as unified and elegant a way as they can manage. 3. I don't see how it follows ("Thus") from your first sentence that "truth [is] primarily a language concept according to which consistency between words would exist." First, what does "consistency between words" mean? Are "red" and "colorless" mutually inconsistent words because red and colorless are...

Yes. Completely. The tricky question is why . It's tempting to answer that necessarily everything is bound by the laws of logic because the alternative -- the claim that something isn't bound by the laws of logic -- is necessarily false. But, as I suggested in my reply to Question 4837 , no sense can be attached to the claim that something isn't bound by the laws of logic. So the claim can't be false , strictly speaking. Perhaps all we can assert is a wide-scope negation: it's not the case that something isn't bound by the laws of logic, just as it's not the case that @#$%^&*. Necessarily everything is bound by the laws of logic because the alternative is literally nonsense? I wish I had a better explanation!

I'll try to answer the second of your three interesting questions. The proponent of the dream argument for skepticism (imagine rehearsing this argument to yourself) could say, "For all I know, this allegedly scientific claim about right and left hemispheres is merely more stuff from my dream; I can't tell that it's not. Even if it's a true claim, I can't know that it's true until I rule out the possibility that I'm merely dreaming it up." If so, then Bruce Wayne's reasoning wouldn't be an effective reply to the dream argument. This isn't to say that it's clear sailing for the dream argument. My view, for which I argue here , is that the dream argument is self-defeating unless it's no different from (and hence no improvement on) the evil demon argument.