tom

So, what happens to the millions of "confirmations"? And, why am I still seeing them? I can literally look at green apples whenever I want.

The irony being that, according to quantum mechanics, quantum coherence cannot have any bearing on the operation of the human mind.

Isn't dualism simply the assertion that, despite all the things we know that supervene on matter, including film festivals, there is one thing, namely...

Just curious. What happens to the millions of "confirmations" that "all ravens are black", by observing not only black ravens but literally every non-...

Green apples also "confirm" the universal statement "all ravens are white". I covered that earlier. It's not counterintuitive it is just wrong. If gre...

We have a situation where the observation of a green apple purportedly supports an enormous number of unrelated universal statements, including the st...

Well spotted! A couple of things: The truth value of H and HE are the same, because H logically implies E p(HE) = p(H)*p(E|H) The probability of E giv...

And, strange as it may seem, such probabilistic statements, which make no prediction about what will happen, are normative.

Probability is a complete red herring until someone states the prior and tells us how to update it. Then they need to explain why we should set our cr...

How many non-black things do you need to select to show that your assertion that the probability of selecting a non-raven is 0.5?

Since you won't consult an elementary text, let me help you: A universal statement is one in which no individual names occur. Got it?

In the proof I gave, observation of your own pockets would constitute background knowledge. The hypothesis would be the universal statement "all pocke...

Sure, all ravens in Vienna in 1938 were also black. Perhaps you should consult an elementary text on universal statements?

My apologies! Anyway, the paradox is solved.

I have just proved that observational support for for a universal statement is impossible. If you think such support exists, and in particular that th...

I beg to differ! If there is such a thing as probabilistic support for a universal statement, then green apples do indeed support "all ravens are blac...

And the paradox is resolved by recognising, with Hume, that there is no such thing as evidence for a universal proposition. The "paradox" reveals the ...

2. Is false. There is no such thing as evidence for a universal statement. What's more, you can't apply probabilities to universal statements. In the ...

Newton's law of gravitation accumulated a vast amount of evidence in support over many years. Applying the purported probability calculus to it, it mu...

What probability would you ascribe to Newton's theory of gravitation in 1915?

Not sure substance dualists believe that though, if there are any that is.

I think it is wrong to characterise Dualism as a metaphysics which has made zero progress. Did we not think once that life and non-live were different...

At least one has to be false, presumably both are. But, we have scores of predictions from the theories, all of which are true. E.g. All the fundament...

Quite, but perhaps it might be more accurate to say that there are no good non-physical accounts. By "good" I mean an account that is difficult to mod...

Evidence? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdaY2I1vSpc

If a computer is controlling a power station or a refinery, is that "controlling a power station" our abstraction or is it really controlling a power ...

Is the computer playing chess or not? If so, how?

The interaction is by what we call forces. Three of them are by particle exchange, two of which only operate on the sub-atomic scale. The fourth inter...

I don't think you need to make any assumptions, or appeal to cause and effect. According to our knowledge there are only 4 forces that describe all in...

You don't happen to have a reference for that do you? Anyway, it's perhaps a little too much to expect anyone from the 1700s to anticipate modern scie...

It would be nice to know in what sense the non-computable numbers and similar entities exist. Also, even in the case of a computer, where exactly does...

Turn the volume up! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEYYI1ii0AU

I'm not sure the situation is quite symmetrical. Physicalism explains life, computation, and offers an active research program into consciousness. Dua...

You mean like the brain is a mind-detector receiving instructions from outside space-time?

How about this: 1. If physicalism is true, then physical matter produces the mind and consciousness. 2. It is the case that physical matter produces t...

It can't be epiphenomenalism, because the mind in this case is exactly the causal physical structure. It's almost indistinguishable from physicalism, ...

Why can't the mind be spatio-temporal? Of course you mean the human mind, but why can't the human mind be a physical representation of this mind-stuff...

I've been puzzling over this. Is there a name for physicalists who admit dualism, but not in public?

Sure, and Benghazi was about a video on youtube .

But bombing the sh*t out of those countries is OK? This is what I don't get. America has been complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of inno...

Creatures that possess qualia have radically different behaviours to those that do not. Perhaps a better phrasing is that in order to explain animal b...

There is no substitute for the word "purpose" in neo-Darwinism, because purpose is explicitly absent. Teleology is anathema! The test is comparative b...

For any dynamical system to be chaotic, it is necessarily deterministic, by definition.

I think I've already explained: 1. Bohmian mechanics is deterministic 2. All Everettian Interpretations are deterministic e.g. 2.1 Many Worlds 2.2 Man...

Apart from the ones that happen to be asleep.

I just spit my herbal tea all over my laptop! There are no good reasons, induction is a myth, falsification is all we can achieve (Duhem-Quine thesis ...

Animals don't possess qualia. You can prove they do?

What is your alternative explanation of biodiversity?

I guess you are so anti-evolution that you just make stuff up. No, neo-Darwinism is the explanation of biodiversity, none other exists.

Neo-Darwinism is mostly metaphysical. That is why it applies to such diverse fields as life, culture, and quantum mechanics. Scientific theories can n...