When you are asking for the grounds of a position, i.e. "Why do you hold to that position?" you are, by definition, asking an epistemological question...
No, I don't see that, not in what you quoted. What determinism? There is nothing about determinism in that quote. But if you want to know how determin...
Thanks, I mostly agree with you. Yes, here the interpretation of the model is clear and the model may be a good fit (to that interpretation). Or is it...
Or the error function (different function, similar shape). There are a number of such functions, collectively known as sigmoid functions. As for the s...
I don't like the idea of deleting ("disappearing") posts. Moreover, I think that, faced with the choice of deleting a shitty post and leaving it alone...
We really need a dump sub-forum, like in the old place. When I come to the forum and see 7 (seven) threads started by TheMadFool just on the front pag...
Or, you know, you could just calculate the answer :) The sum of multiples of 3 below 1000: 3 + 6 + 9 + ... + 999 = 3 * (1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 333) = 3 * 3...
I don't know about more concise; in practice, for problems like this efficiency is a lot more important. There are more efficient methods of calculati...
Well, there are philosophical issues raised by quantum mechanics itself: its interpretations in general, and more specifically, things like quantum me...
This does not follow. You may believe that this is the case, but if so, this is in consequence to your understanding of ownership, personhood, freedom...
~p -> p is already a contradiction. Srap was right (and I wasn't paying attention): this second iteration of your argument made little sense. Your fir...
While "p" can stand for any proposition, you are not free to choose the meaning of logical predicates - that is, if you are appealing to logic for you...
That's what he wants to show, no? that (1) and (2) cannot both be true. Not that this trivial exercise reveals anything interesting, of course. If p s...
You cannot begin to cogently discuss a proposition when you cannot even explain what it means. All that symbol manipulation is child's play. You are n...
Well, the chapter from which this is quoted is entitled "The Apparent Incompatibility of the Law of Propagation of Light with the Principle of Relativ...
By formal analysis do you mean specifically the positivist approach of defining all theoretical terms through observable properties? I think it would ...
I am not sure what you are trying to do here. Are you saying that "c causes e iff..." is a theory and the same sentence with x and y standing for c an...
Not possible if the numbers represent an already given concept of "counting numbers" (or similar). The concept then shapes the pattern, gives the requ...
That is no clearer than the original sentence: you just rephrased it and replaced "come from" with "follow from." We don't know whether causality has ...
Forget proof for a moment, how do you even understand "nothing can come from nothing?" I think that your attempted proof only serves to illustrate you...
As said, the origin of the "meme" idea is in a Dawkins book, and indeed it is supposed to be analogous to biological evolution, not economics. As to i...
No, you were clearer before, and going back to vague expressions like "things don't come from nothing" or "just the sum of all things in it" is not he...
As far as pure mathematics and logic are concerned, their plurality is not even controversial. A mathematical or logical system is given by its axioms...
"Nothing" is not a term of art with a settled meaning, either in physics or in philosophy (as a whole). Depending on how you want to interpret it, the...
It's worse than you think. Math is fairly unambiguous once you lay down all the rules, but the rules are completely up to you. There is no the logic o...
This is just an analogy for what you wish to demonstrate. An analogy can illustrate an argument, but it cannot stand for an argument. The analogy is n...
Granted, you never did commit to it being a physical principle. But then you never did commit to any systemic explanation. Rather, for some specific e...
You can always rescue a vague premise by retreating to less controversial, though usually less interesting positions, and this is what you've done by ...
I don't know what you think you are getting out of this line. Your initial premise has been reduced to well-known conservation laws (i.e. if you care ...
This objector would not say this. What does it mean to say that this is improbable? Probability is meaningful either in the context of a statistics bu...
Yes, I like this approach as well. I think the key to naturalism/materialism/physicalism is not a commitment to a particular ontology, but a commitmen...
Sorry to have dropped out from the conversation. But frankly, your argument, which started from some puzzling and provocative premises, has unfolded i...
We agree on the facts, but the facts do not support your case. The energy transferred from fire to water is neither the energy of the cause (fire) nor...
Recall your own explanation: The fire underneath the boiling pot has neither the energy nor the temperature of the boiling water. It also does not pos...
Depends on what kind of possibility you have in mind. Nomological possibility combined with infinite probabilistic resources results in all possibilit...
Already had a go at this, and I would like to add that I also have a problem with both these premises. The first premise is, at best, a rather optimis...
No, let's not. I keep telling you that I don't regard the PSR, in any of its forms, as a necessary truth, something that any possible world must confo...
Ah, I see now, I didn't realize that the passage quoted here wasn't the entire poem. Thanks for the links, . I just finished chewing my way through a ...
This interpretation still goes against the grain of the poem: here enchantment is a mortally dangerous deception, not something quaint and charming an...
Can someone explain this titular metaphor to me? My Google scholarship and Graves' Greek Myths tell me this about Lamia: that she could pluck out and ...
"Everything that begins to exist requires a cause for its existence" is just a variation on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which I don't think we...
Your premise is that everything has a cause. It is very much debatable that this is a self-evident truth or that we have no choice but adopt this a me...
There recently was a New York Times article Can Prairie Dogs Talk? - entirely one-sided - in which one Dr. Slobodchikoff claims that prairie dogs poss...
It seems that you want to call difficult, uncertain decisions "amoral". All decisions, to the extent that they are non-random, are ultimately predicat...
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