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Robots that make "perceptual errors" are only epistemically wrong in the sense of behaving in a fashion that their owners find undesirable. So if huma...
March 12, 2024 at 10:12
I understand everyone else's experiences in accordance with the logic the indirect realism that is in relation to my world that i grasp directly. In s...
March 08, 2024 at 16:59
The old man's position isn't surprising to read, given his defunct beliefs that the structure of syntax reflects universal aspects of neurological pro...
February 27, 2024 at 15:38
But if iteration isn't permitted, then is sending information backwards proof of a loop? Isn't the hypothetical possibility of a temporal contradictio...
February 27, 2024 at 09:46
I think that the concept of non-local causal cooperation that you allude to is interesting and useful, but i think CTCs are empirically inconsistent a...
February 23, 2024 at 16:48
According to the philosophy of intuitionism, a sequence that is said to be "without an end", is only taken to mean a sequence that is without a define...
February 20, 2024 at 11:23
In: Infinity  — view comment
Two types are extensionally equal if they reduce to the same set of values when the abbreviations used in their respective definitions are expanded ou...
February 18, 2024 at 12:56
The above Chat GPT examples concern logical behaviourism rather than physicalism. For example, a solipsist who doesn't believe in the literal existenc...
January 31, 2024 at 12:11
If the past is assumed to be potentially infinite as opposed to either finite or actually infinite, then it isn't necessarily the case that every caus...
January 30, 2024 at 12:45
There is a difference between the concept of changing the past versus the concept of affecting the past. Changing the past is that which only a time-l...
January 27, 2024 at 12:49
I'm disappointed that nobody has invented time-travel Monopoly. As in the ordinary case, a game consists of players traversing a spatial loop by rolli...
January 27, 2024 at 09:52
It can be a fun exercise to consider how one might change the rules of the board game Monopoly, in order to turn the spatial loop into a time loop. Wh...
January 25, 2024 at 09:15
But that's stretching the meaning of "first" to the point of vacuity, for the concept of "first" is only meaningful in relation to a recognizable orde...
January 23, 2024 at 20:44
You need to clearly distinguish spatio-temporal causality from your murkier concept of meta-causality. In a similar fashion, Stephen Hawking once prop...
January 23, 2024 at 14:53
What makes you think that you can conceive of a first cause? I can for example, conceive of, and indeed witness, a pencil line that has a beginning, a...
January 22, 2024 at 15:09
To be clearer, I meant that an infinitesimal is "tangible" if it can be finitely described as a total computable function,which implies that the tange...
January 20, 2024 at 17:41
The classical theory of real numbers interprets 1.000... and 0.999... as referring to the same equivalence class of different Cauchy sequences. So it ...
January 20, 2024 at 14:47
A resource-conscious set-theory that only expresses transformations between existent sets, could in principle be developed by introducing "negative" s...
January 20, 2024 at 10:51
"According to functionalists, mental states are identified by what they do rather than by what they are made of" - IEP Yet functionalism leaves the ve...
January 20, 2024 at 08:12
If functions are regarded to be nothing more than tools, then it would seem that the intensional meaning of functions is entirely dependent upon the i...
January 19, 2024 at 15:21
The philosophy of mind (which in spite of appearances isn't a particular subject but concerns the whole of the subject of philosophy) is part of scien...
January 17, 2024 at 09:09
I think you are giving idealism a realist interpretation, by interpreting " the mind" as a speculated theoretical object or posit, with your infinite-...
January 15, 2024 at 09:51
You've misunderstood me. Yes, there can be multiple causes for an effect, but when testing for the existence of a causal relation in a series of repea...
January 10, 2024 at 11:05
The modern understanding of causation as used by the sciences, might involve inductive reasoning, but isn't reducible to inductive reasoning. For exam...
January 07, 2024 at 15:00
As Russell observed, a temporal order per-se does not imply causation. For example, the orbits of the planets are describable by a differential equati...
January 06, 2024 at 14:53
According to the 17th Century Catholic priest Nicolas Malebranche, all effects are spontaneous whether or not they are attributed to causes, due to th...
January 06, 2024 at 05:29
There is no a priori reason as to why the past should be either finite or infinite, for the past might be potentially infinite and grow in response to...
January 03, 2024 at 15:39
One can interpret circular causality as saying that there is no initial cause, or as saying that what is considered "initial" is subjective or relativ...
January 02, 2024 at 11:04
Fixed-point iteration, i.e. F(z) = z, is the mathematical description of circular causation, which can be considered a non-finite conception of causal...
January 01, 2024 at 10:23
Did we figure it out in the sense of figuring out the truth of a proposition, or did we merely define "consciousness" as referring to what brains do?
December 29, 2023 at 10:06
It sounds like you are merely enumerating trivial tautologies that convey no information in being true-by-definition. Give us an example of a non-triv...
December 27, 2023 at 12:43
The meaning of modalities is in their use, which is inadequately represented by picture-theories of modalities, especially the silly Venn diagrams ste...
December 22, 2023 at 10:29
A language consists of a trade-off of semantic ideals that includes (among others) universality versus domain-specific authenticity, expressiveness ve...
December 21, 2023 at 12:47
Yes, roughly speaking. I understand the tenses to be closely related to modal distinctions made in relation to the present, but I don't deny the modal...
December 14, 2023 at 17:04
If I speculate that the past might change, then aren't I contradicting the very definition of what i mean by "the past"? And If i speculate that the f...
December 13, 2023 at 08:27
If a weather-forecaster states that tomorrows weather is possibly heavy showers, i interpret his sentence to be an empirical report regarding his mode...
December 12, 2023 at 10:25
Possibility is an empirical notion. In the case of QM, possibilities either refer to directly observable interference patterns, or they refer to stati...
December 12, 2023 at 05:10
True, but the distinction is easily lost in communication. To see a robot as a mind is not to infer that the robot has a mind. By contrast, to see tha...
December 10, 2023 at 11:03
But presumably human cognition, emotion, awareness, and behavior are equally describable in terms of adaptive algorithms , data, environmental feed-ba...
December 10, 2023 at 09:45
Isn't the concept of other-minds reducible to the concept of empathy? In which case, the sentence " a rock doesn't have consciousness" isn't a proposi...
December 10, 2023 at 08:11
Yes, very much so. The successes of Machine Learning generalisation are entirely the consequence of ML models evolving over time so as to fit the fact...
December 07, 2023 at 14:22
Anselms's ontological argument is mine, in spite of it's theological pretenses, for it is an example of a logically valid constructive argument that i...
December 07, 2023 at 09:11
Does Permanence/Impermanence of the soul necessarily refer to a fact about souls, or might it refer to the grammar of the word "soul"? (Theology as gr...
December 06, 2023 at 07:43
I'm not sure what neuropsychology means by 'brainstates' exactly - but then isn't that the point - that the types and tokens referred to by neuropsych...
December 04, 2023 at 10:37
Physics could dissolve any particular "hard problem" of consciousness, by simply expanding the rules of it's language to accommodate any perception, i...
December 02, 2023 at 08:46
Recall that Euler's postulates weren't given in relation to a system of numbers; he took lines and points to be primitive concepts. Relative to his in...
December 01, 2023 at 11:59
In: Free Will  — view comment
Probability Theory actually supports what i'm saying. First recall that Classical Probability Theory is said to speak of 'events' of Probability 1 tha...
November 20, 2023 at 14:54
In: Free Will  — view comment
I think that alternative interpretations of 'chance' is the key to non-classical compatibilism, where by "non-classical" I am referring to considerati...
November 18, 2023 at 14:40
In: Free Will  — view comment
Yes, but if determinism is accepted by the compatibilist, then probabilities can only be given an epistemic interpretation, while teleological concept...
November 17, 2023 at 20:42
In: Free Will  — view comment
Retro-causality is a generally vague and controversial concept, to the point that it seems to rule very little in or out (recalling the fact that QM, ...
November 17, 2023 at 15:55