I find his criticism of universals most persuasive where he attacks the very question. He questions why someone would even suppose that in addition to...
Well, you can understand why many people take a dim view of the philosophy of religion if you take a look at the eponymous forum here, which is filled...
Sorry, I haven't read the rest of the discussion. Just wanted to say that your introduction aroused my curiosity, so I read a couple of his papers to ...
Well, exactly. If there is nothing to individuation of an entity but the composition of its property bundle, then there isn't any obvious criterion of...
Hello and welcome! While I find the idea of self as a psychosocial construct compelling (as opposed to an indivisible metaphysical essence), the bundl...
Selfless heroes of the press have already suffered through it so that you don't have to. Read the juicy bits in their reports and be glad that it's th...
What does this have to do with anything? Are you trying to foist another silly strawman on reductionism, or are you just throwing random shit against ...
Yeah, that kind silly example is a good illustration of how useless this slogan is (or any slogan for that matter). That is, if your interest runs dee...
There are different forms and theories of reduction, but the general pattern is to say that A is nothing over and above B, or A is explained by B, or ...
Well, you leave a loophole when you qualify the prediction as almost perfectly accurate. With this loophole in place, there is always a possibility th...
It's only isotropic in some reference frames. On Earth, if you point your spectroscope in different directions, you will get different temperatures of...
Yes, the choice of a privileged frame in the sense that is required here cannot be dictated by any physical observations. Although, digressing a bit, ...
According to the principle of relativity, laws of physics don't privilege any reference frame. But that doesn't mean that a reference frame cannot be ...
You tell me. Reductionism is not peculiar to materialism, and neither does materialism entail reductionism. Idealism is reductionist with respect to t...
You could say that again... and again... ;) What's ironic about the argument that there is no motion in eternalism is that Zeno's famous arrow thought...
Completely wrong. The weakest possible reductive relationship is that of supervenience: "No A changes without B changes." So if A is reducible to B, t...
Again, epiphenomenalism is not the same as reductionism. You can maintain that A is in some sense reducible to B without denying the reality and causa...
Yes, some people are comfortable with such breathy, substance-free rhetoric that amounts to little more than "Boo reductionism!" ("Boo materialism!" "...
There isn't a generally accepted meaning of reductionism, but yes, there is a widely shared view that presents the program of scientific unification a...
You don't really say what you mean by reductionism, nor is it clear who the target of your vague criticism might be. Like materialism and scientism, r...
What on earth are you talking about? Is this something to do with American football? Why is this in General Philosophy? If you just want to post some ...
I know what a phase space is. A phase space describes relationships between free variables in a particular theory. A different theory will give rise t...
It is fine to ask for an explanation of something that you already know and have a word for; we do that all the time, whether in physics or in philoso...
But before you can conceive of a phase space, you have to conceive of a theory that gives rise to that phase space. The phase space is just a slice of...
Let's not put the cart before the horse. "Span across phase-space..." - which phase space? The phase space of classical thermodynamics, apparently. Yo...
By "entropic anisometry" I assume you mean entropy gradient in the forward time direction, aka the 2nd law of thermodynamics? You realize that's circu...
You are overthinking it. We should just raise everyone in the world as non-racist. There, problem solved. This may sound like a joke, but that's becau...
At the time when you are making your decision the money either already is or is not in the box. Your decision cannot change this fact (unless you ente...
Yeah, that's how most people react to it. The paradox is that half of those people who think that the answer is obvious do not agree with the other ha...
Vacuum energy has to be positive, according to the quantum field theory, and its presence is supposed to explain the experimentally observed Casimir e...
The predictor may be limited to predicting that one thing and nothing else, so you can't defeat it that way. Also, the predictor doesn't have to be in...
If the energy of space itself (vacuum energy) is positive, then expansion produces more energy, in the sense that a volume that expands with the unive...
Yeah, I don't know. Simple metrics like these don't say all that much. Here's an example: consider a finite volume of gas within a larger volume of th...
Not a cosmology expert by any means, but as far as I know, expansion of the universe is every bit part of the heat death scenario (how could it not be...
Not infinite, the number of superposition states in a finite system would be finite. And assuming that we are in a superposition state at any time (or...
The OP question is not as stupid as it sounds. I would reformulate it as "What does it feel like to be in a quantum superposition state?" There is som...
On this forum I have come across quotations from classic works that are sourced from that site; unless there is reason to doubt their reliability, I s...
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