I'm quite happy with it as regards extraterrestrial life. Other people are prejudiced in favour of the possibility and would assign a 'best guess' of ...
OK - by 'the whole thing is baloney' I meant 'it's my hunch that there's no extraterrestrial life and we are wasting time looking for it'. I did not m...
Now I think you're on a wee wind-up. From someone's believing that something is baloney it does not follow either that that thing is baloney or that t...
I'm stating - not insinuating - that mathematical models will produce only speculative results when only speculative data are entered. Even when data ...
Almost right. If we had data we might be able to estimate probabilities rather than dressing up our speculations in mathematical terms. The Drake equa...
Nor will counting Earth-like planets help. The answer we get will be exactly in accordance to the prior assumptions we put in. We need to know the pro...
True. If you want to quantify probability then you need to compare one thing with another. One way to quantify a comparison is to express it as a prop...
@"Agent Smith" I could have a go. But I'm not interested in aliens. I'm only vaguely interested in Trump's form at the bookies. I'm interested in dist...
You might just mean that you'd be willing to lay a bet against Trump winning, without being able to say why you'd be willing to do that. But you might...
Now I can suggest the hiding denominator. We're thinking about probability, not (yet) conditional probability. What are the chances of you catching a ...
Because a probability (in maths) is a proportion and a proportion has a numerator and denominator. In the case of the OP the denominator is not define...
I think you are running ahead too fast. Before we think about conditional probability we need to think about probability. For the kind of calculation ...
Sure, but the ancients weren't too fussy about the nationality of the gods and perhaps we shouldn't be either. "Eros, draw back your bow" is not a gre...
That means they would be happy to receive the obligation, if I place it. But they may not take the initiative. They may not volunteer, in that sense. ...
@"universeness" OK, but it takes all sorts to make a world. Every project team needs someone whose main contribution is to point out the flaws and say...
I would say I have the right to end my own life. But I am not sure that I can place an obligation on anyone else to help me do it. There may be people...
Mathematics teachers apply the thought experiment to lower dimensions than three, e.g. imagine what a circle would look like if we lived in two dimens...
I believe that some people seriously do, yes. Given that there are eight billion of us, then you could select almost any thought, however outlandish, ...
Ach! I hadn't thought of that. I thought the grand scheme, were it to be grand enough, might give life a point. Perhaps it's too early to judge. We do...
. Thanks for the heads-up. I shall bear it in mind. I thought your post was leading to the conclusion that all is vanity and all is pointless. Then in...
Santa exists because Gifts are only produced by Givers; Gifts exist and Santa is a Giver. The premisses are everything after the word 'because' and th...
I sometimes cook up a magic potion in my kitchen and I use things like eye of needle, tooth of comb and finger of fish. I'm hoping to become king of S...
Evolution favours efficiency: maximum benefit for minimum effort compared to the next best alternative. This explains why the best adapted animal on t...
There is a problem of just what is to be established or refuted? I mean, compare these: A. I had a clear, sane and reliably reported perception of con...
I don't think that follows. The absence of a phenomenon in one context does is not in itself evidence of absence in another. The absence of turtles on...
Exactly. It might suggest exactly what you say. And equally it might not. There is no way of empirically distinguishing those two cases. So it's specu...
Fair enough. That would be a case for saying to my visitor - "Well, I believe there are no such things as £19 notes but I can't prove it and in fact I...
No. Just everyday proof - as I say, outside the philosophy schoolroom. Think how you would sincerely answer a visitor's question whether there are twe...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GkxCIW46to In this video Mathologer explains why the two spirals running clockwise and counter-clockwise in a sunflow...
That's because they do. I can prove that £19 notes don't exist in the world. I mean, really I can. Outside the philosophy schoolroom. And if it can be...
Is that true? I thought I had £20 in my wallet. I looked and there was £0. I think I just proved something doesn't exist. The 'something' was £20. Its...
Why would most people's not having an experience count as evidence against some people's having it? Most people haven't experienced zero gravity. But ...
Alanis gets an unfair bad rap for calling non-irony irony. Nelly Furtado told us she was like a bird and she could fly away - not so. Aloe Blacc still...
Would we? How superficial of us, thinking that unanswered questions mean sloppiness. Pinker is a different philosopher, distinguished by his large mop...
I don't think academic vs non-academic is the place to put the boundary. Peter Singer is an academic, for example. There is a lot of woolly thinking o...
Millenia. I'm thinking about Athens. The philosopher can be seen as a wishy washy airhead, as you say - Thales falling into a well because he's lookin...
Ways of clarifying questions to which there is going to be no indisputable answer. Ways of weighing up the costs and benefits of coming out firmly on ...
I think the point (whimsy aside) is to distinguish the original trolley problem, where deaths are caused incidentally to saving lives, from a situatio...
Sure. My query was whether freedom from sexual interference can be described as 'one that has worked'. To believe that think I would have to stop list...
An obscure reason to keep your weight down, if you need it, is that if you stay slim then you will be safe on bridges where some disaster is happening...
"Post-modernism - worth a mention or ignore completely?" Ignore. "Any philosopher living in the last seventy years - name-check or not bothered?" Nah....
Scary. Either they think they are responsible for things they haven't caused or they think they aren't responsible for anything at all. Glad I'm not a...
It seems a reasonable challenge to any philosophical claim that appeals to intuition about concepts. Whose intuition? And how to decide between confli...
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