I agree, and I think that this is an underappreciated point. Note that relativity is compatible with absolute simultaneity as well* - it just doesn't ...
So, taking your "proof" to its logical conclusion, if you could encode all the information in the universe with a digital dataset - that is to say, a ...
When you put a provocative question in the title of the thread, most people are just going to respond to the title without bothering to read further. ...
As always, it's impossible to tell when someone claims to represent opponents' arguments made elsewhere, whether they are doing it accurately. Anyway,...
I love SEP, and I certainly wouldn't mind more of a good thing, but is it really a model for what Internet ought to be? It is a pretty small step from...
This also brings up another relevant question: does the coordinate time of a mathematical model (in this case the theory of relativity), physical time...
We get a sense that some theoretical entity is more than a mathematical contrivance if it does not go away when we change the model, i.e. if we find i...
You seem to agree that we must of necessity occupy some very special place in the universe (a habitable place in a universe that is nearly everywhere ...
Yes, that is a question that is often glossed over. Scientists in particular often implicitly assume the stance of scientific realism when talking abo...
No, relativity does not assume any of the questions that are at issue, such as whether the present is in some sense more "real" than the past or the f...
You have to be careful when you say "different times," unless they are all on the same worldline, which is not the case here. From what I gather (and ...
Our habitable conditions may be "average" in some sense, but certainly not with respect to their habitability! Your framing of the problem is absurd: ...
In order to talk about "balancing" moral actions, you need to somehow quantify the moral weight, or worth of actions, to be able to compare, add and s...
You have a tendency of taking words out of context and using them inappropriately. Stop that. Your comment, while expressing an agreement, has nothing...
That may not have been your intention, but that is what it amounts to. Even if you say that this moral arithmetic is loose, it still has the approxima...
Time travel is nothing more nor less than waiting. You are perhaps led astray by conventional word associations: waiting feels passive, while travelin...
That's a problematic reasoning. You can by the same token reduce everything to "animalistic features" - we are animals, after all; we are also physica...
Well, your point, as in the point of this thread, is rather elusive. But as to a more specific point that I was addressing, it is simply wrong. It is ...
I think I am getting a handle on this confusing bit that recurs in your posts. The problem here is even more basic than tensed predicates. You cannot ...
If Hawking and Smolin subscribe to eternalism, and I don't know if they do, that is on them and not on GR. GR has nothing to say on the question of ex...
GR does not imply this. You are thinking of eternalism, which is a metaphysical view. GR does not imply it any more than Newtonian mechanics does. GR ...
I think this is the clearest statement of your thesis (excluding the odd bit about "as if it never was," which is what I picked up on initially, but I...
But of course, that is one of the ideas that is lurking in the background: the unearned privilege of the upper classes. You don't need this to be spee...
Rather than Sam Harris (who, to be honest, isn't much of a philosopher), I would recommend Daniel Dennett as an eloquent proponent of an "illusionist"...
I still don't understand what you are trying to get at here. Granted, one can only predicate things about something or someone that exists. But what d...
Everything is either fascist or potentially fascist, if you play fast and loose with words and entertain far-fetched scenarios. Dogs are fascist. Ice ...
At a guess, there are probably even fewer philosophers who accept MUH (which Tegmark himself readily acknowledges), and Tegmark is probably its only c...
Here you go: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&cites=6942634181980308378 These are the Google Scholar cites for his original paper The Mathematical ...
Really? Someone being wrong on the Internet forces you to respond, even though you realize all along that you are being silly? That's pretty sad, not ...
I think you are conflating two different senses of counterfactual: 1. (adjective) Relating to or expressing what has not happened or is not the case 2...
Interestingly, that same method of inscribing or circumscribing polygons was used to prove some results in my integral calculus class. So there is a l...
That's an odd claim. I don't know much about the history of mathematics, but even I have heard of Alexandrian mathematicians who thrived well into the...
I'm not a physicist, I just play one on TV :) (Undergrad degree several decades old.) But what mess do you need untangled? Not the mess in MU's head, ...
There exists a relatively non-weird take on backward causation: Laws of physics are time-reversible; if you are physicalist who believes that physics ...
You are reading more into what @"fdrake" proposed than there is. He didn't say anything about numbers constituting a line; on the contrary, he was goi...
You are right: this isn't even cranky, this is just stupid. But I didn't say that only a crank could defend the idea that waves and fields require a m...
To me it seems like a quaint prejudice to insist that anything that is wave-like requires a medium. Maybe there is something to the idea; I wish there...
Are you vandalizing Wikipedia now? Seriously, unless you are very knowledgeable about the subject (which, no offense, you are not), don't touch anythi...
Oh, I don't mean anything different than what you mean: a particular kind of object in the world, an entity that, using certain diagnostic criteria, c...
Sorry to be abrupt, but it's not like you are breaking new ground here. Origin of life research has been under way for close to a century, and there a...
This rather demonstrates a poor understanding of natural sciences. And that in turn underlines the point that I made earlier: before you can understan...
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