Do we have to have the same damn discussion year round in five different threads? "What does it mean? How can consciousness be an illusion? What is it...
I should note that of course there are other senses of "action," and one can also come up with their own definition for some purpose. I only insisted ...
My point wasn't that you can define action however you want. It was rather the opposite: action has an established definition in Lagrangian dynamics. ...
@"fishfry" already addressed a number of your misconceptions. You ignored his patient explanations and are now repeating the same mistakes here. And w...
Standard set theory includes an axiom that basically says that given a set, any collection of its elements is also a set. Since sets that are not memb...
I am not going to comment on the "definition," but for those who are actually interested in science, action can be defined in any theory that admits a...
The article tells how much we actually do know about "dark matter." What we don't know may well turn out to be something pretty boring, like a WIMP. O...
Nice article in Vox though, and the thrust of it is, if anything, the opposite of Wayfarer's perennial pitch. As a slightly nerdier companion piece I ...
You missed my point. This wasn't about showing how much more I know on the subject. Although I happened to know a little more than Webster's definitio...
Do you really think that people who study life have never given any thought as to what life is? Never ventured a definition? Your OP cites one definit...
I am not denigrating philosophy. But since we have this specialization and division of labor, philosophers should be using scientific results and idea...
That's a terrible idea. I just can't think of a single advantage in rejecting the fruits of the most productive period in the history of scientific th...
Well, what would we base it on then? We obviously cannot assume that the current state of science is the last word and the whole truth about nature. B...
As per Cramer (and his predecessors), there can be no emission without transmission in the absorber theory, whether classical or quantum. "Absorber th...
One can't usefully make general statements about the state of philosophy, but it is not like the progress of science is universally ignored - certainl...
If you are thinking of such things as multiverses in cosmology or the many-worlds interpretation in quantum mechanics, then it's the other way around:...
To be fair, I don't think that these disciplines are very distinct. I don't know any mathematical physicists well, but some theoretical physicists tha...
You are engaging in a strange exercise. You have no idea what philosophy of physics is, and you are trying to figure it out from what you think the wo...
So ok, you are clueless. I don't blame you for that: one cannot and doesn't need to know about everything. But if you are interested enough to join th...
There was never a firm partition between science and philosophy. As academic disciplines they only became distinct relatively recently. Natural scienc...
So if the holes (at the screen and elsewhere downstream) don't participate in the conspiracy (indeed, such an extended conspiracy would seem problemat...
Mods, this is dangerously stupid. I don't think that our board should be adding to the Covid disinformation on the 'net. (And I don't care if some shr...
The problem that Block considers is how to define the mind in a non-circular way, which would mean avoiding mentalistic terms and concepts as part of ...
In our example of a diffraction through slits the wavefunction is non-zero almost everywhere on the back screen, so that is not an issue. If an electr...
You seem to be groping around the idea that massive objects exhibit irreducibly quantum behavior, which is expressed in the equation for the De Brogli...
Well, the confirmation wave is just an echo of the offer wave: its amplitude is proportional to the amplitude of the offer wave at the would-be absorb...
Yes, this sounds like where I am at as far as ontology is concerned, though I could never put it as gracefully as Grice does here. I'll have to dig up...
Is it just me or are Peirce fans rather a cultish bunch? I have yet to meet anyone with a moderate and critical interest in Peirce. It seems like anyo...
Let's take an extreme example: 1. The emitter (of electrons, photons, ...) is under experimental control, so that for instance we can ensure that a pa...
Getting back to this topic (sorry, this is tough slog for the old cat-brain): So the bolded part is what I am having difficulty with. We do, of course...
Yes, you are right, if you look at the numbers, the good old times were pretty terrible compared to now. State and even some non-state actors have bec...
Some of that fear of the "chaotic 90s," as well as the nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet rule has been helped along by state propaganda. S...
It was violin in my case. Intervals have a distinctive sound to them that has to do with the size of the interval rather than the pitch (that is with ...
Brutalizing civilian population on enemy-controlled territory still seems to be the standard tactic in modern conflicts, from soldiers and rebels slau...
Well, how would you define a rational decision? Any reasoned decision is anchored in values, and values as such are not rational (I don't think). I wo...
In commercial lotteries the expected return is much less than the bet, so if your utility function is just the expected return, then most lotteries ar...
I had* an absolute pitch as a kid, before any musical training. I don't remember how my first music teacher diagnosed it (since of course I didn't kno...
The answer is obvious I think. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6d/Egyptian_-_Statuette_of_a_Standing_Bastet_-_Walters_54408_-_L...
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