Unless he persisted with flaming after warnings and deletions, banning over one meltdown seems like an overreaction. And it's not like this sort of th...
I doubt that we can even talk about commonly held notions here. Most people have rather hazy notions of objectivity and of truth, and 'objective truth...
Sweden has more than twice the number of people than Ireland, so per capita they are about even. (It's arguable though whether per capita numbers are ...
I don't really understand what you are trying to do here. You give us three choices for 'objective truth', but there is no generally accepted meaning ...
I think @"Isaac"'s examples are clear. The thing is that information is not a thing - it is different things. Different disciplines approach the conce...
So what's the deal with Sweden? By all accounts, the shit should've hit the fan by now, but that doesn't seem to be happening. In terms of overall inf...
Yeah, because there hasn't been enough Christ myth stuff on the internets, we had to have some of our own. Actually I was wondering why it took so lon...
Not to be morbid or anything, but this is gorgeous: Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time) @"Noble Dust" https://www.you...
If you are into that kind of stuff, Rupert "eyebeams" Sheldrake has done a lot of "research" on this - his "The Sense of Being Stared At" is a classic...
I somehow missed that one, I just saw an article about the Russian group and didn't realize that it had a predecessor. I love these - if I wasn't fort...
If you only say that different levels or scales loosely supervene on or ground or compose each other, and aren't too particular about what that means ...
There is a bewildering variety of notions concerning reduction and emergence in the philosophical literature, but I think that the sort of hand-wavy w...
I intentionally slipped in chemistry in the list of examples, because it is often pointed at as a reductionism success story. But this is at best part...
It seems to me that you are rather arbitrarily drawing your partition at biology. Why not chemistry, for example? Or meteorology? Or just different ar...
And what qualifies as 'measurement'? Can we measure our way to having a good idea of what the inside of the Moon consists of, for example (without hav...
This is puzzling. Are you now doubting your own conclusion? The way you originally stated it gave me the impression that you yourself thought it to be...
Yes. If an event is a "complete description of reality," full stop, then what is left to describe? You probably want to say that an event is a "comple...
I saw Nausea, and the book is on my short(ish)list. I doubt I'll ever read any of his philosophical writings though, his is not the sort of philosophy...
Don't have to go far. Take this, for instance: Nope. Doesn't follow and doesn't even make sense. But to understand why you need to have basic mastery ...
If you postulate that time must have a starting point ("The idea of time, I believe, presupposes a starting point from which to measure its passing"),...
It's not cryptic, it's banal. Of course you did. Reread your OP. The only out that you leave is not knowing the probability, while presumably acceptin...
I don't see what these koans have to do with what is being discussed, unless you insist on interpreting my words super-literally. No, that is not a gi...
You already channeled the discussion towards Bayesianism when you identified beliefs with probabilities. If you want to have a broader, less theory-la...
I don't think that we have different definitions of "brute fact." It is just that by its nature, science is pluralistic and dynamic. There isn't a sin...
No, this is just completely divorced from reality. In every scientific theory there are brute facts: they are the assumptions and postulates of the th...
Well, I already explained why "changing laws" are an oxymoron. Laws are revised or retied if evidence calls for it, and not otherwise. Anyway, I won't...
Your last sentence contradicts what comes before it. If we can have evidence that constants and laws have changed, then we can have evidence for the c...
The role of "surprisingness" has been discussed in the context of fine tuning, drawing on more general epistemological considerations (e.g. in the wor...
Parsimony, obviously. If an explanation works well enough, why complicate it without reason? More importantly, if a law is changing over time, then as...
I don't actually take a strong position on these puzzles. I suspect that there may not be a good answer to them, or what's worse, there may not be a g...
I've been "guilty" of this in my younger years, but eventually I lost the appetite for arguing just for the sake of arguing. Apologists are often too ...
Life is "fine-tuned" in the sense that But here is the rub: as the paper above argues, this parameter sensitivity of complex structures is a mathemati...
But supposing, contra the above, that we can meaningfully answer the question about the probability of the universe being fit for life, I do get what ...
Well, I brought up one difficulty with any such mathematical description: in order to be able to talk about probabilities at all, we need to have rand...
You should look at how these figures are actually arrived at and you will see that there is a good deal of uncertainty. Just read any study of flu mor...
But you can also be patient, practice patience - as opposed to losing your cool and acting rashly out of frustration and anxiety. Or lashing out at th...
The "probability" of John being born as a result of chance circumstances is a rather iffy concept: you have to make a pretty arbitrary choice of rando...
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