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tom

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A different word could have been chosen - how about "integer-like" or "zahlen", but that would change nothing. The non-zahlen infinities are vastly bi...
February 19, 2017 at 23:34
I love the Khan Academy with pizza https://www.khanacademy.org/math/math-for-fun-and-glory/vi-hart/infinity/v/proof-infinities
February 19, 2017 at 19:50
Why don't you just look it up, or Google it? Plenty of stuff on cardinalities, countable and uncountable infinities, the diagonalization argument, Can...
February 19, 2017 at 18:58
OK, so you can count integers, but you cannot count the real numbers, even in a tiny subset. There is an uncountable infinity of reals within any subs...
February 19, 2017 at 18:07
Mass was so fundamental that they needed two different types of it.
February 19, 2017 at 16:22
Countable and uncountable infinities are different. You said you couldn't count a subset of the reals. Do you think you might be able to count a subse...
February 19, 2017 at 16:19
Try counting the real numbers between 0 and 1.
February 19, 2017 at 14:21
Countable infinities are precisely those which can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the integers. This is a definition, and no, no one expec...
February 19, 2017 at 13:35
Appealing to a degree of granularity to space probably makes matters worse. How do you get from one step to the other if there is nothing in between?
February 19, 2017 at 12:40
An alternative view is to accept Zeno's paradoxes as lessons of the impossibility to deduce how reality behaves a priori, from mathematics or any othe...
February 19, 2017 at 12:03
If you are going to quote, then the name is "Consistent Histories" or "Decoherent Histories". The first is explicitly epistemic, the second equivocate...
February 17, 2017 at 17:12
Then why do you care about Everettian quantum mechanics? Tegmark did not invent the Level I multiverse, he just gave it a catchy name. If our consensu...
February 17, 2017 at 00:46
Wikipedia, the font of all that is true. Well, try this Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse Pay particular attention to "Level III" mu...
February 17, 2017 at 00:13
There isn't. Everettian QM adds zero worlds to those already proposed by cosmological theories. Denying Everett does not reduce the number of worlds.
February 16, 2017 at 23:13
If you resist the temptation to invoke "collapse", QM is a fully deterministic theory. Copenhagen is not a theory of reality, so has nothing to say ab...
February 16, 2017 at 22:58
Truth cannot be established by the method of science. Errors can be detected and corrected with imagination. The purpose of argument is not to support...
February 16, 2017 at 19:24
Not so! The Boltzmann brain, or rather a Boltzmann person, would simply have false memories, and the words "vat" and "brain" would refer to the real t...
February 16, 2017 at 16:45
Except of course, it is the very theory that reveals the block-universe to us - i.e. that the B-Theory of time is true - that explains the formation o...
February 16, 2017 at 15:28
That is simply false.
February 16, 2017 at 15:13
Criticism of propositions. Most scientific theories die that way. e.g. no observations have ever been made which contradicts either the Standard Model...
February 16, 2017 at 13:09
Another problem with the principle of induction - the future shall resemble the past - is that it's false in general. The Sun may rise every day, but ...
February 16, 2017 at 13:05
Dualist crackpottery, you say? Semiotic interaction between the realms, you say?
February 16, 2017 at 11:03
That's what allows thought, and life.
February 15, 2017 at 23:21
Well, that's a small step in the right direction at least. Of course theories are speculative - to be more precise conjectural. But for that precise r...
February 15, 2017 at 22:19
Then explain how our theories can tell us stories about things we will have to wait 50 to 100 years to observe? If you look at any scientific theory, ...
February 15, 2017 at 21:41
I had no idea you really did that. Quite a trip eh?
February 15, 2017 at 20:32
You are in a state of irrational denial. The Earth really does orbit the Sun, and the Earth really is not flat and it's not turtles all the way down, ...
February 15, 2017 at 20:18
I forgot, gravitational waves were revealed by theory 100 years before they could be measured. It only took ~50years to observe the other features of ...
February 15, 2017 at 19:35
Apart from entanglement, the geometry of the universe, the big-bang, cosmic microwave background ... Sure, the laws reveal nothing.
February 15, 2017 at 19:00
The distinction I am drawing is between the physics and the abstraction. At the risk of repeating myself, it has been proved that all real universal c...
February 15, 2017 at 17:08
The brain is computationally universal, but the mind certainly is not. There are many operations a mind will not perform, for reasons as diverse as mo...
February 14, 2017 at 12:44
According to known physics, our descendants will be able to simultaneously simulate many trillions (surely an underestimate) of universes simultaneous...
February 14, 2017 at 11:40
Denial is always an option I suppose, but history will not be on your side. Of course, if you managed to formulate an argument that the brain is not c...
February 14, 2017 at 09:12
And "everyone" touts Libets 1980s experiments as evidence of the absence of free will, and ignores his 1990s experiments, where he demonstrated a mech...
February 14, 2017 at 08:50
That all computationally universal hardware is equivalent is not an analogy. The human brain has to be computationally universal. That's not an analog...
February 14, 2017 at 08:46
Why do you think there would have to be a second universe?
February 13, 2017 at 21:21
The probability that you were born a human and not any other animal is the same as the probability that you were born with a human mind and not an ani...
February 13, 2017 at 21:04
I don't mind having my preconceptions challenged, if you don't mind elaborating?
February 13, 2017 at 17:19
What! Have you heard of George Soros? The top donors to the Democrats at the election were: University of California $1,945,782 Alphabet Inc $1,576,06...
February 13, 2017 at 10:31
I think the idea is that there is one universe and it is the inhabitants of the future that are simulating the past, and they are doing it an enormous...
February 13, 2017 at 10:05
No, I mean the mind IS software. According to known physics, it can't be anything else. Consciousness is a software feature, and the software programs...
February 12, 2017 at 21:42
Is that not analogous to the claim that the chess program is the computer? Software needs hardware to run on, and if you disturb the hardware with ana...
February 12, 2017 at 17:09
It would go something like this: The abstract mind, instantiated on the computationally universal brain, decides to move an arm. It does not know the ...
February 12, 2017 at 12:12
In that case, the mathematics is perfect - its use however is not. As systems become more complicated, in order to make them tractable, it is inevitab...
February 12, 2017 at 10:15
No Most mathematical truths cannot be proved. The overwhelming majority of mathematical relations cannot be known. The overwhelming majority of number...
February 11, 2017 at 15:35
And despite this, we aren't exactly overwhelmed by competing scientific theories are we? It is trivial to write down endless ad-hoc modifications to o...
February 11, 2017 at 15:02
The stability of atoms has rather significant "macro-impacts". And you can demonstrate HUP at home with a laser pointer and some aluminium foil.
February 11, 2017 at 14:39
Perhaps this is a good opportunity to remind ourselves of the difference between marginal and conditional probabilities?
February 11, 2017 at 14:30
The laws of physics are completely deterministic.
February 10, 2017 at 22:44
The laws of physics are fully deterministic. Given the state at any time, the future can be retrodicted and the past can be predicted.
February 10, 2017 at 21:44