SophistiCat

Well, if there is a problem with a premise, there is no point in going further until that problem is addressed. As it is, your premise comes out of th...

I didn't vote. The options of "too strict" and "not strict enough" are too broad to be meaningful. Besides, since posts are deleted and edited stealth...

That still doesn't make sense, but no matter. I see that people are largely satisfied with the forum as it is, and that shit-posting will continue unc...

A man and a dog walk into a bar. Barman: Sorry, dogs aren't allowed. Man: But it's not an ordinary dog, it is a talking dog! Barman: Oh yeah? Man: Let...

Come now, you won't say that nothing distinguishes our cognitive faculties from those of other species, or that there is a smooth transition? But sure...

Oh god... musical orgasm! You must love the opening movement of Beethoven's 5th piano concerto, am I right?

I have a terrible memory for names, but there's this silly old joke that helps me remember Orff's. Do you know the one?

Bach is the (unrequited :P) love of my life, and the solo cello and violin works are at the top of my list. I never tire of hearing them and replaying...

Right, I understand and agree. But the nature vs. nurture debate is not really about whether people have any mental traits and predispositions in comm...

Yeah, that's basically my concern. @"Bitter Crank" made light of the way I had put it elsewhere, but I don't think that my stance is ridiculous. If pe...

To communicate with people like yourself, on subjects more-or-less philosophical. Yikes! I take back my words :P

I wonder why you think that "DNA completely useless," but let's set aside DNA for a moment. DNA is a specific biological mechanism of inheritance and ...

I don't understand what you mean. What is my "ideal solution" and my "method," respectively (you imply that these are two distinct things)?

It was not my intention to debate crackpots. Quite the opposite, in fact.

That can be seen as giving more options to people. Those who prefer a more curated experience could either browse specific subforums or filter out wha...

I understand that that's where your interests lie, but I wouldn't be so restrictive. Science informs metaphysics, and conversely, metaphysical underpi...

I agree with myself :) What made you think I wouldn't? I still think that one or two subforums where "non-standard" posts could be moved would be pref...

By "dying" I mostly mean degrading. There is a large and thriving community in Youtube comments, for what that is worth. Yes, messages are still being...

Really? What do you mean by "human nature," anyway? What would be the difference between possessing and not possessing "human nature?"

It may just mean that this forum, and web forums like this, are dying. Perhaps they really are past due, like the BBS or Usenet of old (anyone still r...

I have read what you have written in this thread up to this point, and I still don't see what difference you are getting at here. What makes you think...

And like I said, just stating the claim is not informative or productive. "Mental," "physical" - these are just words that don't stand in relation to ...

Depends on what one means by mental events, I guess. Such canned statements are pretty meaningless without showing what philosophical scaffolding unde...

You don't understand what he is talking about. If you don't understand something, it is better to ask than to try and fake it, otherwise you will just...

No, you don't understand. The point is not about making consistent measurements, the point is about how we make any measurements. Your idea is that we...

Who is doing the measurement? How? And what for? When I measure the size of some object, I am comparing its size with the size of some standard ruler....

Here is a forum that would better suit your purposes: http://www.thescienceforum.com/personal-theories-alternative-ideas/ Your posts here are off-topi...

I think technology is a red herring here. What changed in the course of the scientific revolution is a specialization of scientific epistemology. You ...

Well, if Bayesian probability is supposed to model our reasoning, then there is an obvious connection between Bayesian models and AI, if the idea is f...

If philosophers are not current with their subject, I would say so much the worse for philosophers. I can only hope that things aren't quite as bad as...

I am sorry, my statistics and hypothesis testing background is too basic and rusty to fully appreciate your comments. I didn't mean to advocate likely...

I don't have anything on hand, and I cited Sober and Fitelson (his onetime student I think) from memory. But if you google likelihoodism you'll readil...

Yes, priors, their choice and justification are a vexed issue for Bayesianism, so much so that some would rather not deal with them at all (e.g. "like...

There's also a very good introduction to interpretations of probability in the SEP article Interpretations of Probability. (Though probably biased tow...

It would be helpful to start with what is probably the minimal commitment of reductionism, which is supervenience. Supervenience can be summed up with...

That would be something like the problem as you framed it in the OP: "A bunch of billiard balls are bouncing around on a table in a classically cliche...

Yeah, the weirdness objection is the worst of the lot, and does not deserve any respect. Quantum mechanics is weird. The world is weird. Get used to i...

All interpretations of quantum mechanics explain exactly the same observations, so in that sense they are explanatory to exactly the same degree. One ...

Well, again, you are just equivocating between "causal" and "deterministic." What you are really saying is that our theories ought to be deterministic...

So I still don't understand, what was the point of the exercise? To use the existence quantifier in a WFF?

No, you are right, I think I got carried away. So x exists iff there exists x (?x) such that it is equal to itself? The last bit seems unnecessary, bu...

And what do you mean when you say that the concept is not instantiated, has no instances? (I deliberately emphasized the verb "to be" in these phrases...

There have been a number of attempts to derive/justify the Born rule, including the self-locating uncertainty approach that Carroll and Sebens develop...

That's true. But having postulates is no sin in itself: any theory relies on some postulates. The important thing is that the Born rule postulate in t...

You do not need to assume causality, or anything else besides the operation of standard quantum mechanics, in order to obtain that result. You said so...

It is true that an infinite sequence of sixes is a possible outcome of an infinite sequence of die rolls. But that doesn't change the fact that the pr...

I don't understand. If an interpretation gives us the correct result (i.e. the result predicted by the formalism and validated by experiments), then w...

There's a nice apocryphal story about Wittgenstein there in the first lecture. For those who don't want to watch the vid, it goes something like this:...

Heh, that's a neat counter-argument. I don't think I've come across it before.

Answering for myself (I am not a theist, but I am not sure that I am a "moral realist," because this notion is not very clear to me), I don't seek to ...