Terrapin Station

In any event, I'd answer "Yes" to this, but in that I think we're still far too uptight and puritanical when it comes to sex and nudity, we're still f...

Neither seem at all wrong to me. I don't think so, and certainly not any more than any business does, say, with respect to our interaction with the pe...

My stance on that is that in order to buy that speech, text, etc. can amount to force to particular actions, beliefs, etc., we'd need to demonstrate, ...

There are two things that are typically going on with "atheism is merely disbelief." The more innocuous track is a view that if someone simply has no ...

Verification is always provisional at best, and all it amounts to in this case is that the mathematics in question isn't clearly falsified by observat...

"Spacetime curvature" isn't a real thing, because space/time aren't anything like substances. "Spacetime curvature" is at best a manner of speaking to...

Solving equations has nothing to do with positing real ontological entities.

It seems weird (as in dubious) that your dad, as you've described him, would say, "Yeah, you should definitely vanity-publish this." If your dad is as...

In my opinion it should be a service organization that makes sure that everyone has all of the basic stuff they need--food, shelter, healthcare, educa...

With the caveat that I don't believe that it's something plausibly quantifiable, no, I don't believe that you have any more control over how you feel ...

This might just have been an artifact of my generation trying to make sense of the phrase--I don't know how far the phrase actually goes back--but my ...

Although it seems to me that if the probability of getting heads or tails is really 50%, then if we have a bunch of one side in a row, that should inc...

I don't believe there's any need to pick a single thing one values most. We're not making a top 100 film or album list or something where we need to p...

That they're consistent with GR doesn't make them a prediction of GR. We invented them so that they'd be consistent with GR, otherwise we'd need to re...

I'm not arguing that making shit up simply to plug something thought of as a theoretical problem isn't common. In fact, I'm saying something rather ic...

Sure. But what does that have to do with anything anyone has said?

The structure and apparent motion of stars doesn't match what we're expecting given our gravitational model. Hence the need to invent black holes.

The only thing that's definitely there is numbers from our instruments that don't match what we're expecting given our current gravitational models. S...

That was my second sentence: "Making shit up to solve something that's seen as a theoretical problem isn't a good reason to believe anything. "

In my opinion we don't know exactly what's causing it, but what we should worry about is how we could counter it if it starts getting too out of contr...

The only objection to panpsychism that one needs is that there's no good reason to believe it. There's zero evidence for it. Making shit up to solve s...

Facts: states of affairs. They exist by virtue of there being existents of any sort, as well as those existents' dynamic relations with each other, et...

Well, society is kind of unavoidable, especially once you have enough people in a small enough area that they have to interact. But it's also unavoida...

I don't at all believe that black holes aren't simply mathematical constructs at this point.

Facebook has 58 gender options now. Other than male and female, they have: Agender Androgyne Androgynous Bigender Cis Cisgender Cis Female Cis Male Ci...

If one doesn't buy type realism or logical identity through time this really isn't much of an issue no matter what you do.

I'm not sure I understand the idea you have in mind with "sacrifice the way things are." At any rate, I think that people should be allowed to consens...

One thing that makes it difficult is that those are weird colors. It's kind of an array of grayish or "dirty-looking" teal.

What is "the atheistic problem of evil"? Christianity traditionally addresses evil with free will, by the way.

It's not that logic/math are wrong, it's that people are getting wrong--or they're getting confused about, mislead about, etc.--what logic/math are. L...

No. I'm just saying that if claims about a god's mind are solely based on what you're imagining, you're really just telling us about your own mind/you...

Isn't it clear that that only provides evidence for claims about your own mind then? You're telling us something about what you imagine. Not what any ...

Okay, but whether it's a valid counterexample has nothing to do with whether you believe that it is. Yelling "Fire" isn't causal to panic, say, becaus...

One counterexample falsifies a causality claim.

It's a question. Conventionally you'd respond by answering it.

The idea that choices have to be rational to be choices is bizarre. They don't have to be rational. The ass would go to one pile or the other. This do...

Arguments are important if you want to persuade other people that something is the case, and they can be helpful for (self-)clarifying just what you b...

A problem with this is that we can't actually create anything two-dimensional.

The simulation would be part of the universe, no?

??? Just what evidence are you talking about?

What would be the basis to even begin making any claims about a god's mind? Where are we getting any information about it from?

. . . When you have examples of panic, say, not following someone yelling "Fire," you know that yelling "Fire" wasn't the cause of panic.

Synchronized crests and troughs are not objectively preferred or better, though.

The difference is that with the death penalty, we're intentionally cutting someone's life shorter than it would have been naturally. I'm not in favor ...

In my opinion this is a more widespread problem with the sciences in general, not just qm. It's rampant throughout physics, including fields like astr...

I'm a naive realist, by the way. What I always point out is that naive realists are not saying that perceptions are not perceptions. And we're not say...

Right. I don't believe there's anyone who says that the red of a dress, say, is literally, identically in anyone's head. Thinking that anyone would be...

What I thought Tom was getting at is that it doesn't have anything to do with sense/sensing/etc. until it gets to you.

Again, causality is not simple likelihood. It's inevitability, unless something is prohibiting the forces involved. You could say it's 100% likelihood...

If B doesn't always follow A, then it's evidence that A doesn't cause B. Something else does.