Are you more strictly logical or intuitive in your thought processes?

No, that's fine. I just figured if you wanted to casually exchange a few ideas what's the hurt, but we don't need to go into a debate.

Seems pretty on topic to me. No worries.

Sorry kleelof. I'm a simple critter at heart that misses subtleties all the time.

Well, I studied philosophy formally and specialised in theory of knowledge. Not saying that I'm an expert ... just that I'm always right. :P

It's past my bedtime. I'll get back to you with a few casual comments about how determinism is an over-simplified idealism that expects the universe to conform to our simple views ..... but later.

Not sure if you are talking to me, Elubas or everyone. But, either way, that is fine.

Most of this is all about personal philosophy, not any real provable facts.

For me, personaly, my philosophies have some room for additions/subtractions. It is just a matter of finding a reasoning I can agree with.

Not sure how much you learned if you think taking a philosophy course gives you the answers :) I've taken some philosophy myself, and though it provides useful tools, it also provides tons of unanswered questions. And if you put a hare in a philosophy classroom, I still won't expect any insights from him :)

I think a lot of philosophical questions do have a findable answer; just that they are really hard to find because no one is smart enough :)

Concepts can get confusing, but obviously they must be referring to something for them to be meaningful to us, and that is a lot of what philosophy is trying to figure out. For example, paradoxes can be resolved by making sure we understand our concepts; paradoxes can't actually happen, so we know when it seems like we have logically deduced that a paradox is true, we've gone wrong somewhere in our understanding of the argument or its premises. That's not an empirical problem -- all the info is in front of us -- the problem is in understanding this info.

I can see why that would be a problem, sure, I'm open to that. I'm just not so concerned about it that at first glance it would make me give up determinism. But, maybe you have some ideas that I don't appreciate.

Doing a philosophy course doesn't give the answers, isn't that obvious? However, doing a philosophy degree prompts  people to look at questions more from a variety of potential standpoints and it provides a basic mental discipline so as to facilitate the anticipation of irrelevant objections and a possible decision to ignore them, for instance. :)

Regarding the determinism thing, a lot of people who believe that they're sort of "looking at the world philosophically" tend nevertheless to construct simplified models regarding how they think the universe operates. So, for instance, they may take up logical positivism, which is an ideal and simplified view that discounts ideas such as "the supernatural" in favour of the belief that since everything can be described as "natural" because it exists, the word "supernatural" has no meaning. Hence reality for them is a logical construction on the empirically obvious; no attention being invested in the potentially non-obvious. These people tend to conflate ideas of God with ideas of "supernatural".

Similarly, when some people reject the idea of God, quite often it seems they need some sort of replacement as a mental framework to "believe in" and their understanding of causality leads them to construct a mental image of an entirely mechanistic universe which proceeds entirely according to principles they can understand and which is basically no more than a "causality machine", so that even all their thoughts are no more than the physical results of previous states of the universe. This is idealism, however, because it in no way may be based on a consideration of empirical observations, since it's impossible to observe that only one outcome is possible for every cause. We do see causes leading to effects but we've no way of knowing whether other effects were actually possible. We don't understand, for instance, exactly what "chance" is and whether it may be real. Some people see the quantum wave as a statistical probability of certain outcomes and others may see it as a more physically real thing. These are ideas we have about reality and they can only be based on what we can see. We can't see, at least for the moment, sub-quantum mechanisms.

Anyway, if you believe in determinism, I suppose you're in good company but to me it does seem like a simplified, ideal view of the universe and its processes, which we construct because that is what we can understand rather than because it's in any way real. In that way, determinism seems to me to be exactly like God.

P.S., that was partly based on intuition and partly on logic!

my pa blessis heart alwayz sed that to me

Intuitive when I'm playing well. Logical when I'm struggling to keep up standards.

....and emotionally ?

In OTB I try at least to play a Bit logical ;)

Emotionally if I'm scared of losing maybe, Lola.

Intuitive logic half the time. Logical intuition all other times.

I just put the moves into my chess engine and make the move the computer plays in the game. 

In slow games, when I try to implement too much logic I get into time trouble and have to keep going with my intuition from that point, anyway ;)

In sharp tactical games, logic is very important (precise calculations) but intuition helps the logic by finding the right moment to come up with a combination. I have to admit I rarely miss tactical shots when they are possible because my intuition (pattern recognition) works well and I can fell that a position is ready for a sac.

When I was much more active player (many years ago) my intuition worked even better. I made moves which I could not understand but something told me to make them. Their meaning became clear after action proceeded (sometimes a piece occured at the best position for defence, sometimes for attack). When I refused to follow my intuition and chose a more logical move the game usually went worse for me.

Of course, there is no intuition without studying chess. I fed my with lots of books, playing through master games, analysing my own games, solving tactics.

"However, doing a philosophy degree prompts  people to look at questions more from a variety of potential standpoints and it provides a basic mental discipline so as to facilitate the anticipation of irrelevant objections and a possible decision to ignore them, for instance. :)"

Couldn't agree more.

Anyway, as to the rest of your post, the objections you have raised seem to be ones I've already responded to. I'm not assuming every cause must have one possible outcome; it just seems more plausible to believe that than to assume the opposite. I admitted before in fact that we can't disprove "extra possible effects," at least not by normal empirical means, but again I look at it similarly to saying we can't disprove that there is a giant green laser 50 trillion miles above us. I would agree with such a statement, but it wouldn't make me think that laser is likely to exist. I'm going to believe in things that are more plausible more preferentially than the opposite, even if I can't be sure :)

"because it in no way may be based on a consideration of empirical observations, since it's impossible to observe that only one outcome is possible for every cause."

Well, there is some empirical basis :) Take for example observing the same cause creating the same effect in many different instances (rather than just one). But I agree, it's possible that it was just a big coincedence :)

I do see where you're coming from. There are certain assumptions that have to be made with probably any theory. But at least I'm not begging for the laser to be true and so just assume it; I'm still looking for logical connections between my ideas before I posit something. Is that fallible? Sure, but it's the best I have and so I'm not going to disrespect it.