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100% I teach math to college students, and part of the work is cutting against the grain of an implicit metaphysics. To see the formalism as such is n...

Well played.

That's not an argument, and it's spine is 'these two are in the bath tub together.' The bath tub is also a path dump, since language is a system of in...

I dig the humor, though I'm 25 years deep into my first real relationship. We evolved together, paid some serious dues, and now it's a fairly smooth r...

This sounds like Tucker talk, bought to your buy these sponsors, the rich that prey the poor against the poor with their bunk which deserves a snore. ...

Oh, so we get to make up our own meanings ? My girl soak inky. I appreciate this weeps mail over potty. A roach beep some witch? A go sinner claws it ...

I think it was around my third semester, with my schedule full of math and physics all the way there, that I got the 'main idea' of differential equat...

It's so late here that it's early again, so I gotta get to bed soon!

Does it help if I tell you I have a nice big quad HD monitor and not a smartphone, and I used that instead?

Here's one more answer to your question about what makes you you and me me. Also touches on qualia, I guess. All this seems very pre-Wittgensteinian t...

Not anything unexpected.

I'll just drop one link, 'cause it's well written and suggests what some might call an atheistic mysticism, though it's not mysticism in my book but j...

Yes indeed. I'd like 1000 years, maybe a million. I want to know some languages, all of them maybe. Oh the list goes on and on. Don't get me started.

That's actually not unusual. I look forward to you sharing it, friend.

Caligula inside, but only a few of us know it ?

Our friendly conversation together is part of that head. We (with our individual brains) are like neurons linked together in by English into a larger ...

That's not how the word is used by most. If you make up your own usages, you'll likely be misunderstood, especially if you are demonizing/misrepresent...

You got a laugh out of me with that twist. Well done, sir.

It takes some time to grok differential equations, so it was a bit of a fool's errand for me to even try to dish it out in a post (a fun one, though.)...

Yeah, I love the novel discovery part. I guess theoretical physicists are searching through the space of all possible video games for one that looks l...

Bruno Bauer is one of the people like this that interests me. He was a left Hegelian, and he was part of the attempt to transform Christianity into so...

Haven't read those guys, no, but I'm open to the hypothesis that there was no Jesus, or no particular Jesus (maybe a type of prophet/rebel who was con...

We could make up all kinds of mathematical models without data even. We could then transform them according to the grammar of math and call it a prior...

Well now you're coming over to my filthy 'instrumentalist' camp which isn't so concerned with the really really real. From a realist perspective, and ...

That was taught to me as a definition of force, but not all teachers do that. The larger issue is maybe whether 'laws' are ever proven wrong, and we'v...

It seems clear to me that we are projecting the structure of the past onto the future. Inductive, yes? This is how I understand the assumption of 'the...

The measurements refer to the past, as indicated by the grammar, unless you know something about time that I don't. <no rudeness intended, just saying...

I've never studied bridges in particular, unless it was a textbook problem. Definitely there are diffeqs 'in there' at some level of magnification. I ...

If you believe that the laws of physics are correct models in a context of the uniformity of nature, then I think yes. That's why folks went crazy for...

I'd say: our bodies and the way they are trained by unique histories with unique reactions within a biological and cultural range of possibility. Imag...

Differential equations will offer more interest and fun. You can solve them numerically, watch a virtual cup of coffee cool.

Well, a really terrible but cheap model is to have the program say 'yes' for collapse if the input is greater than 2000 pounds and no otherwise. (It's...

If you want them to, yes. It could be a very simple program without graphics that answers yes or no to the weight of a vehicle or it could be some ric...

With a bat, it seems hopeless. With geniuses, I think we slowly 'become' or assimilate part of them as we keep reading and thinking and writing. They ...

In the simplest situation, the model will be fit to a set of measurements, which always refer to the past. The data underdetermine the model. If a mod...

I expect this applies in all kinds of cases. As Hegel might stress, philosophies just cannot be summed up into aphorisms. Words in a conversation accu...

Maybe monotheism just modulates (has modulated) so that yesterday's holy ghost is today's blob of rationality. Perhaps monotheism was (is) so successf...

Could be. And perhaps we are too stupid to appreciate just how stupid we are. Is stupidity not relative? This touches on another metaphysical chestnut...

I think this applies to some metaphysical issues, and I can't bring myself to fret anymore than Hume could. It's a glitch in the matrix. Still some of...

You make that sound easy! We've evolved to worry ourselves, friend. The dead don't breed.

I think the necessity is in the mathematical formalism. If you tell me y = exp(bx) , then 'necessarily' or 'logically' or 'grammatically' I know that ...

Not my field, but I do understand that a mathematical model can be transformed into a mathematical equivalent that might nevertheless be more useful o...

I think an argument can be made that some kind of uniformity of nature was in play during our evolution at least so that our 'irrational' (non-deducti...

I agree that you can find some thinkers like that, but on the other side we have people who take folk psychology entirely for granted (not saying you,...

Well put. This is implicit in our appeals to 'logic' and 'rationality.' This is also implicit in (1) our strong desire to have our thoughts recognized...

I say let's drink the whole glass of acid. How they know that they are trapped in the box with windows that might just be dreamscreens? How do they kn...

I suggest dropping that framework and thinking instead in terms of individual-indepedent reality. How is science applied? That's a clue, I think. We w...

Nice setting up of the 'heard problem of conch is this' ! Lots of complexity in 'what by all appearances is something more ontologically primitive.' O...

Joyce focused on the ordinary, leaving the exception to the journalists. His big message was something like 'the ordinary is fucking wild, ya'll.' I t...

Ah, OK. So perhaps the vision of the universe as a vast, dead machine that disappoints you. If you don't cling to life after death and aren't that int...