I am deliberately "retreating to syntax," because that is the most basic function of things: as (grammatical) subjects. We can talk about "such things...
What you call "relative velocity" does not apply in Special Relativity. You need to understand how velocity addition works in Minkowski spacetime. The...
In the broadest sense, a "thing" can be any subject of a sentence, anything to which we refer. The more specific senses depend on the context of the d...
I think you should make explicit your definition of Objective Morality. You treat this as something self-evident, but it is not - unless you are simpl...
Based on what, exactly? It is not clear on what grounds you match the words Objective Morality with the platitudes with which you conclude your post. ...
It's what comes from a thoughtless application of formalisms. The premise "Whatever should be done can be done" is only plausible in the context in wh...
If the domain of quantification is empty (there are no choices), that entails determinism and denies MFT, shortcircuiting the argument. Anyway, this i...
It should be mentioned that Huemer's argument is supposed to be a proof by contradiction against "determinism," which he defines as the contradictory ...
In the conclusion the authors also try to present their work as being relevant to astronomy, but it should be noted that the problem that they actuall...
I won't hunt for a reference, but as I understand it, a reversible system would pass a reversibility test: Allow the system to evolve for some time T,...
A while ago we had a thread on Norton Dome - a simple Newtonian setup that (arguably) gives rise to indeterministic (and therefore irreversible) behav...
It is indeed true that between two real numbers there is always another real number. The same is true about rational numbers. This property is called ...
You know about time-energy uncertainty, right? It is less straightforward than the other Heisenberg uncertainties, but it is a feature of quantum mech...
This property has been conjectured for pi and certain other constants, but it has not been proven. In any case, knowing that a certain sequence is bur...
Classically, the three-body problem is time-reversible, and this result doesn't prove otherwise. Indeed, qualitatively this result doesn't prove anyth...
Thanks, this is interesting! Here is the full paper: Gargantuan chaotic gravitational three-body systems and their irreversibility to the Planck lengt...
I can readily believe that they never said that, because they wouldn't even know what that means. You can't even explain what you mean, so I suspect t...
I don't recall reading either of these, although I am aware of such sentiments by reputation. It is odd though that you should expend so much energy d...
I haven't read Notes From The Underground, but I have read some of his other works (C&P, Karamazovs, Idiot, and a few others), so I can comment on tho...
Well, no, it doesn't, because there isn't any problem so long as we stay with Euclidean geometry (as rightly noted). The apparent problem only arises ...
There is always some time frame in which data fits an exponential growth curve! Or logarithmic. Or linear. Or better yet polynomial - it can be made t...
Yeah, the scientific community describes things as growing exponentially for as long as they grow exponentially. You may insist on exponential growth ...
It's great, isn't it? If you keep readjusting your model as you go along, you can do pretty much anything. You can make your model linear, or logarith...
Yeah, those sick old people had it coming - good riddance! (I hear this "point" surprisingly often from people who argue that the threat has been blow...
OK, I didn't notice that you said continuously differentiable in a later post, so sorry about that. But the staircase function is worse than not conti...
Er, your terminology is all over the place. A continuous function has left and right limits converging to each of its points. The staircase function i...
The half-circle wave is smooth though, i.e. the tangent (first derivative) exists everywhere. I used it for simplicity, but if we want an honest to go...
It's in the second half of . There must be some neat identity for elliptical functions at work here, because otherwise I wouldn't know how to calculat...
I thought back to Parasite after seeing another film with a somewhat similar theme. To be honest, for all its sleek execution and obvious talent, Para...
Well, if someone says something to the effect of (A or B), and it is not the case that (A or B), then a logical fallacy has been committed. How damagi...
That's a nice example of a self-undercutting argument. If the premise is assumed, then everything that follows from it can be dismissed as confused ra...
I was looking for something in the way of critical reflection, but I find only free-floating metaphors here. I've also been thinking about the metaphy...
I don't even know what either of these statements are saying. It seems like they make some substantive claims about reality, but when I try to nail th...
There is no error, hence the apparent paradox. Here is another take I just thought of. We can define two functionals, one that gives some measure of t...
Nice. The difference is that in the case of polygons approximating a circle, with each successive step the error decreases (don't ask me for a proof -...
Our nature is not identical with our physical state. I am not making some dualistic statement here - I am just agreeing with what you said earlier tha...
Making right moral decisions. What is right is, of course, the very subject of morality. So any procedure for answering moral questions will do, as lo...
There is nothing to redefine here, because there aren't any commonly established definitions for physicalism or materialism. All these arguments over ...
It's hard to say what free will is. It's hard to even get people to think seriously about the question: they would rather argue endlessly about "free ...
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