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SophistiCat

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Because while you busy yourself with procedural details of how to reduce morality to a utilitarian optimization, you don't ask what any of that has to...
March 10, 2020 at 06:46
Thanks, I got it when I thought about it again. I got into a habit of thinking of numbers as abstract objects that just satisfy certain requirements, ...
March 10, 2020 at 06:13
Being correct and being clear is not the same thing. I took ten or so different courses of mathematics in college. It's been a long time and I have fo...
March 09, 2020 at 22:11
"Methodically" is the key word here. Yes, you have a method, but that's not enough to qualify as "science." If you don't understand why you do what yo...
March 09, 2020 at 21:43
This wasn't very helpful. It's still not clear to me how the use of this set theoretic representation explains "the number of functions from 2 into 2 ...
March 09, 2020 at 21:27
I don't understand. \biggl(2\biggr) \rightarrow \biggl(2\biggr) How is this four functions? (FWIW in calculus texts the exponential function is usuall...
March 09, 2020 at 17:53
Why do we need an "ethical science"? You never stop to ask yourself this question. This is cargo cult.
March 09, 2020 at 07:47
OK, but by the same token 2^2 = 1, because the number of functions from 2 into 2 is 1. What am I missing?
March 09, 2020 at 07:29
What do you mean by that?
March 08, 2020 at 21:46
In: Bannings  — view comment
Yeah. And I didn't even read any of the religion, gender, race or politics stuff, which is what usually gets people into hot water.
March 08, 2020 at 21:44
That's an odd wish, from my point of view, to have a camp of people that agree with you on everything. But you strike me as an opinionated fellow, wit...
March 08, 2020 at 20:56
You are conflating actual practice with its philosophical interpretations. Science is done the way it is done not because scientists have come to an a...
March 08, 2020 at 20:30
That's what I said. Death rate is estimated on the basis of confirmed infections. Adding a hypothetical number of untested and asymptomatic cases does...
March 08, 2020 at 09:50
You should get together with @"Sam26", another OBE "expert."
March 08, 2020 at 08:13
There are reasonable points here, but the article is too focused on massaging the fatality rate. Yes, if you include asymptomatic cases, the fatality ...
March 08, 2020 at 08:06
Science didn't wait around for its foundational questions to be solved before it could get off the ground - if it did, it would have been waiting to t...
March 07, 2020 at 15:22
No, you don't second-guess God, that's not how divine command works. All you need to know is that you must accept God's authority. This is where your ...
March 07, 2020 at 13:51
The relationship of science and philosophy is a complex one. Philosophy can and does take science as an object of study, just like anything else, but ...
March 06, 2020 at 21:49
If ideological spam is acceptable here, then responding to it with ideological trolling is fair game.
March 06, 2020 at 12:55
You are right about science, of course, but wrong about ethics. Whether ethical principles are right or wrong is an ethical question - a redundant one...
March 06, 2020 at 07:11
Which is why you should welcome the culling that I propose. I promise, it will be quick - not like dying from pneumonia. Or just kill yourself already...
March 06, 2020 at 07:03
I say we should start the virus containment program by culling antinatalists. OK, it's not the most effective means to combat the epidemic, but it's s...
March 05, 2020 at 21:51
Well, O'Reilly is a professional bullshitter, so what he says is on him (and why are you watching this garbage anyway?) But if you really think that "...
March 05, 2020 at 21:12
Yes, I understand that you have some pet utilitarian system, but this doesn't really answer the question. If my system of morality prescribes maximizi...
March 05, 2020 at 16:20
Enough with the spamming.
March 05, 2020 at 15:37
Time is an integral part of relativistic spacetime. If you need a specific measurement of time, you can use proper time in conjunction with a specific...
March 04, 2020 at 21:16
The flexibility and openness to change of secular moral systems can vary as much as the flexibility of and openness of religious systems (which vary a...
March 04, 2020 at 11:07
Well, morality is what people think in the same way in which electric charge, say, is what particles have. Morality (and language) is no more and no l...
March 03, 2020 at 21:58
Nah, there's no lack of moral certainty among secularists; you need to look a bit more into history and generally get out and meet more people. Being ...
March 03, 2020 at 21:28
Sure. But as you note later, proper time can be well-defined even in the absence of anything to mark its passage, and that is where I see a problem. Y...
March 03, 2020 at 17:42
No.
March 02, 2020 at 21:58
As is the alternative. It is widely understood that the universe (or at least the inflationary "pocket" that we occupy, if we go with the still somewh...
March 01, 2020 at 20:28
If you mean this article, then it doesn't say that, and it would be pretty incredible if it did, because the best established cosmological model to da...
March 01, 2020 at 17:59
I was talking about spatial extension. Simply put, if space is infinite, which seems plausible from what we know, and if the rest of it looks much lik...
March 01, 2020 at 16:06
The second law of thermodynamics gives a preferred overall direction for time, but the rate of time is established by any number of regular physical p...
March 01, 2020 at 15:15
Two percent is about the same mortality rate as the Spanish flu (I don't know where the 20% figure came from), which killed about 30 million people by...
March 01, 2020 at 13:49
The article says quite clearly, and more than once, that we don't know whether the universe is spatially finite or infinite. We can estimate a lower b...
February 29, 2020 at 22:02
@"Luke" didn't you go over this with noAxioms and others for ages and ages on the old forum? That did you no good: you are still stuck on this idea th...
February 29, 2020 at 10:38
You remember right, but that wasn't at issue - we've both acknowledged that this is the case. My point is that relativistic time is not identical to p...
February 28, 2020 at 21:37
How about instead of petulantly demanding answers to stupid questions you use your own head? You demand to know why a device like a monitor, camera or...
February 28, 2020 at 20:54
The problem that I see here is that there is no inherent connection between the direction of time given by the time coordinate of the relativistic spa...
February 28, 2020 at 17:21
If your monitor - or, say, any device or method for identifying distinct objects - can only register a limited number of objects, due to the way in wh...
February 28, 2020 at 11:45
Well, no, the number of distinct digital photos of a given resolution is finite. But so what? He might as well have said: I am going to count the numb...
February 27, 2020 at 21:32
Well, first it is unclear what it is that you claim to have proven. The question you claim to answer is "How many distinct things can there be in the ...
February 27, 2020 at 21:22
Doesn't it bother you that the number of distinct things in the universe is limited by an arbitrarily chosen resolution of your camera? With an 800x60...
February 27, 2020 at 16:34
GR doesn't know anything about entropy - it's not part of the theory. For those who base their theory of time exclusively on GR - call them "relativit...
February 27, 2020 at 13:36
I don't understand what your hangup is. "Static" is an unfortunate choice of a word in Miller's article, because it normally means that either there i...
February 27, 2020 at 08:05
But that would not be sufficient for a block universe either. Unless observers are spread throughout the entire spacetime, their past light cones swee...
February 27, 2020 at 07:23
Yeah, that was the point of the reductio. One black/white pixel can encode one bit. 800x600 24-bit pixels can encode 11.5 million bits. But that's jus...
February 26, 2020 at 17:58
Not sure what distinction you are drawing here. Are you suggesting that, unlike the presentist, for the eternalist the nature of space and time contai...
February 26, 2020 at 17:42