SophistiCat

The default for me was "Auto", which tracks system preferences. I think that's the friendliest option.

Just a couple of brief notes: This is going to confuse a lot of folk, because what Anderson describes as "reductionism" is more commonly known as supe...

What were you expecting? (Just curious)

Andersen does not talk about strong emergence, or indeed any emergence - these terms gained traction later.

OK, so you really have no idea of what you are talking about. For anyone who is actually interested in the subject, here is Mark Bedeau's influential ...

Speaking of, you should probably do that yourself. Emergence is a slippery term, but no one would call this any kind of emergence: Read Bedau, who coi...

That's not at all helpful as an analogy. So, some stuff can make up water and other stuff can't. What's the lesson here? Look, I kind of get the intui...

Coordinate geometry does in fact represent a line as a combination of points. Of course, it is not just a combination of points, it is points plus str...

???

You don't understand how language works. Numbers don't have colors, but to say that numbers are colorless would not make any sense. Come on, Hallucino...

Yeah, because the student doesn't understand basic math. If resistance is infinite then you can't tell what voltage is being applied - unless, of cour...

You are making this sound more esoteric than it is. This is freshman calculus that has been studied by generations upon generations of students. In ou...

I think you are still confused about reference frames. Time dilation is an observer effect. If you are traveling at a constant speed of 0.99c relative...

This only invites confusion, I am afraid. At any given time, we are moving at a speed close to c in some reference frame. And, at that same time, we a...

Evidence in this context is not just any reasons. 2+2=4 is true within its "language game," and no evidence can change that - only changing the rules ...

These are not all equivalent. The statement that I bolded above is correct: "If it is unfalsifiable, it cannot have evidential warrant for its belief....

It doesn't even work for finite sets. Think what it would mean if you could only compare the sizes of sets and their subsets. You couldn't say, for ex...

Strange as it may sound, Peano arithmetic does not require you to accept natural numbers as a "completed" set. You can have your successor function, y...

Explicitly specifying a function is acceptable as a constructive proof. Constructivism shares some concerns with finitism, but it is not as bonkers st...

This is not even an extension or enrichment of finite counting: all counting is based on bijection. In the finite case, whether you use your fingers, ...

Criminal gangs and armed groups already control large swathes of Venezuela, and they actually seem to do a better job of it than the central governmen...

It looks like "adults in the room" are betting on VP Rodriguez being more pliant and reasonable than her (former) boss. So, to them, "running the coun...

Glad you liked it. I thought that Chirimuuta's account handles the problem of divergent perceptions well - dependence on viewing conditions, interspec...

Sorry, I probably won't wade into this discussion, but I just so happened to have been listening to a New Books in Philosophy podcast on a related top...

The question of the OP invites a kind of view from nowhere, unconditioned by any framing or assumptions. Is there anything necessary tout court? My co...

I did not love Jane Eyre, but I liked it well enough. I suppose that when it comes to this sort of literature, you need to calibrate your expectations...

The Great Gatsby I first read this book a long time ago, when I was just coming to grips with the English language. I had only a vague recollection of...

Hume was an austere kind of empiricist (not unlike Logical Positivists in the 20th century, who valorized him). He accepted that we could, albeit fall...

Yeah, I agree, bitmasks are a holdover from the early days of computing. Nowadays, you probably won't see them much outside of C. But C is so deeply i...

That's not thinking about math. Nobody does calculus when throwing a spear, any more than the spear itself does calculus when it flies through the air...

Yes, Kripke suggested "possible states (or histories) of the world" or "possible situations." The latter may seem most vague, but that's for the bette...

@"Ludwig V" Kripke himself regretted his choice of "worlds" terminology for that very reason: he acknowledged that it invited a conflation of metaphys...

Just finished Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels (My Brilliant Friend, etc.) Fantastic.

If this is supposed to be an argument for p -> ?p (if p then possibly p), then it does not work. Notice that (p or ~p) is a tautology: it is true rega...

Well, I did select a rather awkward quotation for my example - this is Kant, after all, so of course, of all the ways he could have expressed his thou...

Well, the actual world is either possible or impossible (necessarily not actual) - this is the equivalent of the law of excluded middle in standard mo...

We already have motorsport, don't we? The incidence of fatal crashes actually used to be much higher than it is now, after safety improvements were im...

I wasn't talking about black and white characters, either. "Morally gray" characters are nothing new, nor is the critics' hand-wringing over the "mora...

Well, the issue is not new. Homer's heros are no angels, by anyone's measure. Even the otherwise rather prissy Aeneas did a bad thing with Dido, and d...

These exact words may not be used all that commonly in ordinary language, but I think that cognate concepts of freedom and responsibility pervade all ...

I don't really understand why you think that. Let me be clear in turn that I think that this is a tenable position (that free will may not be a valid ...

In time for COP30, New York Times published some nice charts that show 10 big things that have happened on the climate front in the last decade: 10 Ye...

I am not even certain that we should be talking about revision here. That Harris's concept of free will is out of touch with its common meaning is obv...

I rather think you should begin by asking the bolded question. You may even find that the question of determinism vs indeterminism isn't as relevant t...

Is this why you think that the concept of free will is incoherent? Why?

The OP is not worth commenting on, but I just want to note that to this day, the existence and the nature, as it were, of the laws of nature are debat...

To clarify, my question was not rhetorical. Where I was going with this is that causal analysis is a choice that we make, and so is the form that it t...

Before asking this question, or @"J"'s original question (Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?), I think we should ask ourselves: Do we need to analyz...

Ned Rorem's violin concerto is a recent discovery for me. It is featured on this recording with Gidon Kremer and Leonard Bernstein, together with Phil...

How about this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJf5r1ZjwTY