fishfry

See I have a problem with this. There's philosophizing like we used to do late at night in the dorm, or as we can do in an online forum; then there's ...

Haven't been following discussion but noticed this. If I may jump in, I would say that this is THE core question. I put it in the following even stron...

Is personhood sufficient to do brain surgery? No. Is personhood sufficient to sit on the couch and watch tv? Yes (plus owning a tv, having electric se...

Value can be subjective but based on fact. One person makes their living running a grocery store. Another person wants dinner. The hungry person value...

We already have plenty of real world experience. We don't need a magic conveyor belt. Any run of the mill pharmaceutical will do. Your local chain dru...

You deny all abstract existence? Numbers, justice, beauty?

We could sit in a circle together and sing Kumbaya. Yeah, that's the ticket. Just someone who remembers the 60's here.

Right you are. I was referring to American psychologists, the American Psychological Association, and good old all-American torture. USA! USA! USA!

Psychologists did a lot more than "study" torture. If you're unfamiliar with the voluminous body of evidence of the complicity of the psychological pr...

How about complicity in torture? https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30792344/

I never like these predictor-type puzzles. If you have a predictor you can ask it to predict if its next statement will be a lie. If it says yes then ...

Do you have a source for your claims as to Newton's philosophy? I'm not familiar with his direct expression of the ideas as you related them. Could be...

When the computer chip in your clothes dryer receives data from the humidity sensor and decides when your clothes are dry, do you think it has feeling...

John von Neumann was a famously social genius, as was Richard Feynman. Einstein, for all his eccentricities, was social. In the case of Feynman and Ei...

If you ask a woman out, buy her dinner, and have sex with her, that's a date. If you ask a woman out, have sex with her, and give her money so she can...

As I thought about responding, I soon got into thickets I couldn't figure out either. Here are some idle thoughts for what they're worth. Exactly. Thi...

All the misnamed "butterfly effect" means is that in a discrete deterministic iterative system, very small changes in the inputs can lead to huge chan...

There's a decimal-like notation for the hyperreals, called the Lightstone notation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._H._Lightstone The Wiki article on...

This process can be continued indefinitely as in the Cayley-Dickson construction. There's another generalization of the process called Clifford algebr...

I did think I read what I posted but if I'm wrong so be it. I don't dive too deeply into all the claims and counterclaims. So much conflicting informa...

I agree with you and concede your point that rather than my claiming "this isn't real capitalism,"; on the contrary, what we have now is the inevitabl...

And Ross Perot was right! He talked about the loss of jobs from the US and he talked a lot about our crazy aunt in the basement, the national debt. Wh...

I'll concede your point that people have been calling for this crash for a long time. Krugman is a fool. I mean that sincerely. And he got his Nobel p...

So when Cuomo was asked by his brother, on tv, whether he's running for president, that was not actual news? They just made it up? Do you think that B...

You'd be factually wrong about that. Here are the latest betting odds on the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination. These odds reflect beliefs that ...

Thank you for the kind words. You're absolutely right. I meant to write "declared." Why have the media declared a national hysteria? In another post I...

I didn't think I'd have to explain to anyone that our economic system is as far from capitalism as can be. I've seen it described as corporate sociali...

Gradually changing for the worse by the day over the past several months. A cruel charade. The Dems are in such deep denial it's something to behold.

People have been predicting the burst of this 2008 Fed-induced bubble since 2008! The virus was a convenient excuse. If it had collapsed of its own we...

She is a bit reptilian, don't you think?

Ok. So do you think it's reasonable to speculate that the Dems might try to replace him? And that if that were to happen, that She Who Must Not Be Ind...

Very interesting reading! MMT is neo-chartalism. Today I learned! I actually understand MMT a bit now. Maybe they do have a point. Thanks for the link...

Thank you for keeping track so assiduously. So may I ask you: How do you feel about Biden these days? Think he's the Trump slayer?

Oh did they? That's good. I don't think it's a good idea for the government to have a direct stake in companies. Bad enough the Fed's buying corporate...

Just wanted to keep you abreast of the latest Hillary speculation. Micheal Goodwin of the NY Post notes that Democrats need to recruit Obama to bench ...

I don't think the historians will have too long to wait. This ship's going down. This bailout is 2008 on steroids. It's truly obscene. Bailouts for th...

I find the phrase "Trump lovers" the mark of a TDS sufferer. I would say that people who make an effort to understand Trump's appeal, without being bl...

Not at all. You could still be right. At best the Chaitin number shows that there's a normal number among a class of numbers we can define in first-or...

Yes. He has a tremendous connection to the common people of this country. He connects with them. Yes he acts like a carnival barker with his rubes, bu...

I believe I've read that Chaitin's Omega is known to be normal. It's not actually a specific number, just a class of numbers; and you can't write down...

Because if there's one thing an observant person learns in a crisis, it's the fecklessness and unreliability of "experts." And have you noticed all th...

Yes thank you for reminding me. Excellent point. Many people, myself included, believed QE1, 2 and 3 would blow up the dollar and send gold to the moo...

Well the real question is, in the awful and hopefully unlikely even that this covid insanity is still going strong in November, how the heck are we go...

Good distinction! The technocrats. I will check those out. Thanks.

I can't argue Trump. People have their opinions. He's incredibly divisive. Nixon was that way. Reagan was politically divisive but very personally lik...

Not if the ruler is moving very fast relative to the speed of light. This was actually known before Einstein. It's the Lorentz contraction.

If that's been your personal experience I can't tell you otherwise. I have no idea what to say to someone who doesn't believe in fences or boundaries ...

So you concede the point. While the Dems were impeaching him and calling him a racist, he was seeing ahead of the "experts." I don't see that at all. ...

My God, haven't you seen the Biden clips the past couple of days? Stumbled through his webcast as he lost track of his thoughts when his teleprompter ...

It's often been a tool of powerful to suppress the powerless. Lately I'm coming to understand what I take to be this postmodernist point of view. The ...