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SophistiCat

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While I welcome your approach and think that it is among the more promising ways of looking at the problem, I must object to the remark about "missing...
February 24, 2017 at 12:16
My comments were directed at your OP and some following posts. It seemed to me that your dissatisfaction with Cantorian mathematical theories of conti...
February 23, 2017 at 21:05
It seems to me that you are laboring under a simplistic mereological and atomistic understanding of topology. In topology a line is not just a bunch o...
February 22, 2017 at 21:32
I think that you are making some unconscious metaphysical assumptions here. Why does continuous motion preserve identity and discrete motion does not?...
February 19, 2017 at 11:52
I am afraid that you just can't get past the concept of counting, or rather to see it in its context. There's no point in me trying to explain it to y...
February 19, 2017 at 11:37
Yes, this nicely illustrates the very confusion that I've been talking about. True enough, but this has nothing to do with counting. You are saying th...
February 18, 2017 at 20:54
Because I was responding to your own line of argument, e.g. here. You haven't argued that moving is somehow related to counting, you just imagined som...
February 18, 2017 at 20:26
Such a machine would not be possible. But we are not talking about this machine specifically, we are talking about any thing that moves, so this is a ...
February 18, 2017 at 20:10
You are begging the question. You are essentially saying that motion is just like this impossible thing, therefore motion is impossible. You must show...
February 18, 2017 at 16:18
Like I said, passing all rational coordinates in order is not a problem. After all, there is a (total) order relation for rational coordinates, so tha...
February 18, 2017 at 15:53
That's what I said. But you are asking more than that. You must recognize the difference between there being an order and there being a sequence.
February 18, 2017 at 15:43
Yes. That "1 must be part of the sequence" came out of nowhere.
February 18, 2017 at 15:38
The superfluous assumption here is sequentially. It would be reasonable to say that for motion to be continuous the position of the body must pass eve...
February 18, 2017 at 15:38
That makes no sense.
February 18, 2017 at 15:20
"This thing is just like that thing" is not an argument. The best that I can make of your attempt is basically the same as before: you are saying that...
February 18, 2017 at 14:48
An analogy can only be useful for illustrating an argument, and you have yet to offer an argument. You assert that moving from place to place is possi...
February 18, 2017 at 13:35
I suppose that etymology can be of use if you are interested in the history of ideas, and in particular in exegesis of old philosophers, which is what...
February 12, 2017 at 08:19
You are making two mistakes: 1. Suppressed premises. You are assuming that your scenario is a stochastic process with a non-zero probability of failur...
February 11, 2017 at 19:22
Well, the HUP has been experimentally confirmed, so that means we can perceive its predictions, albeit indirectly - but isn't that the case with any m...
February 11, 2017 at 11:04
I don't see what Schrodinger's cat has to do with a coin flip. Of course, probability is involved in both cases, one way or another, but that's not mu...
February 08, 2017 at 06:48
It's not just futile to change a well-established vocabulary, it seems senseless. Is there any particular reason that the word "probability" should no...
February 07, 2017 at 20:43
Guys, you are both swimming upstream, and for no good reason that I can see. There are ways of talking about probability in both senses. Probability i...
February 07, 2017 at 17:24
That's just what we mean when we say that the probability of a coin toss outcome is 50%. So the answer to your question in the OP: it doesn't matter w...
February 07, 2017 at 06:57
Has anyone here read any existing literature on the subject? There's lots! First it should be noted that nothing about evidence and confirmation is ne...
February 06, 2017 at 16:41
Physicalism As you can see, there isn't anything like a common agreement on what the term means, and the prospects of it amounting to a coherent stand...
January 30, 2017 at 21:59
Physicalism isn't necessarily framed in mereological terms (I personally dislike this approach). Asking "how experience is made up of physical stuff" ...
January 22, 2017 at 21:23
Yeah, one wonders how it is that people found out that they had brains in the first place. Or hearts. That's a real puzzler :-}
January 22, 2017 at 13:32
Physicalism also can't explain why some physical systems are cars and others are not. Take any summation of Physicalism as a philosophical doctrine, a...
January 22, 2017 at 13:30
Where is the problem? Some systems are cars and others are not. Is that a problem too?
January 22, 2017 at 06:57
This is genius.
January 21, 2017 at 21:13
Well, you appear to be a competent speaker of English, don't you already know what people mean when they say that something exists? I didn't have any ...
January 21, 2017 at 21:08
The brain doesn't generate color, it experiences color (or rather, your entire organism experiences color, since the brain does not function in isolat...
January 21, 2017 at 21:01
Or, more directly, does the word "exist" necessarily implies having a location? How could you argue for that? (You haven't even tried, as far as I can...
January 20, 2017 at 08:33
But what motivated the Chinese Room and similar thought experiments is the very idea that without conscious experience there is not "true" understandi...
January 19, 2017 at 16:30
Well, a paper computer executes instructions just as a microprocessor computer does. So what is true of the one ought to be true of the other. To be c...
January 18, 2017 at 20:35
Well, if you stipulate from the start that you are merely imagining a thing, you are, ipso facto, stipulating that the thought is not about, does not ...
January 17, 2017 at 21:14
So you think there is a problem specifically in the case where we are contemplating something imaginary? I should note that physicalists do not all sh...
January 17, 2017 at 16:57
Can you explain in more detail what it is that you see as a problem for physicalism wrt intentional content?
January 17, 2017 at 14:59
That quote was fabricated by yours truly ;)
January 01, 2017 at 14:40
It is not unprecedented, but it feels like it is becoming more common and accepted. As for "a collection of groups" - tu quoque again in lieu of addre...
January 01, 2017 at 14:38
Again, I'm wondering what the evidence for this is. The evidence is the straightforward proof by contradiction. That the Liar sentence is not truth-ap...
December 31, 2016 at 20:56
No, that's just a transparent attempt at a tu quoque and ad hominem: people who talk about "post-truth" are themselves poopy-heads, and that being the...
December 31, 2016 at 12:04
Nick Bostrom has done some fairly involved investigations in epistemic probability, starting with his PhD thesis. That's not to say that he is right, ...
December 28, 2016 at 16:58
A computer program is an abstraction, just as an idea, a formula, a narrative. The world cannot literally be a computer program: if it is a computer a...
December 28, 2016 at 15:05
I read the novel as an adult, and to be honest, the "big ideas" interested me much less than the literature. And it is great literature, no doubt abou...
December 11, 2016 at 15:23
What sense is that? Does it have anything to do with what I asked? ("How can you possibly prove physical laws with a calculation?") How do you figure ...
November 26, 2016 at 06:54
Right, of course, you even have transgender friends :-} Look, if you want to be "truthful," why these disingenuous excuses? If you think that there's ...
November 25, 2016 at 14:43
How can you possibly prove physical laws with a calculation? Being computable or otherwise neither proves nor disproves anything. Nor does this have a...
November 25, 2016 at 12:28
OK, but what kind of an explanation are we looking for? If we are looking for a motivation (why ought we be afraid), that's one thing. If we are looki...
November 21, 2016 at 13:23
A relevant guest post on Sean Carroll's blog by philosopher David Wallace: On the Physicality of the Quantum State
November 20, 2016 at 21:36