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alcontali

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Of course, I am sure that there is a state-run university that will pay him good money for spreading his highly ideological views. The ruling elite in...
September 10, 2019 at 00:38
The video shows exactly what is wrong with his views. It takes over thirty pages of annotated first-order logic to prove just one single, knowledge cl...
September 10, 2019 at 00:13
Why do some belief communities reproduce while other ones do not? I think that the question is rather interesting. If you believe the wrong things, yo...
September 09, 2019 at 17:15
Yeah, they do not believe it, and they have lots of kids. Everybody who believes it, does not. So, let's conclude that not believing it, is a prerequi...
September 09, 2019 at 15:36
Societies who in all practical terms are no longer making children are at a distinct disadvantage in spreading the very ideas that cause their problem...
September 09, 2019 at 12:49
Well, after negotiating with the Taliban for over a year in Doha, Qatar -- the deal was finally going to be announced this week -- the Donald still ma...
September 09, 2019 at 06:06
Long-term survival is the overriding concern here. Few people would deny that the religious communities are at a very visible advantage on that matter...
September 09, 2019 at 04:35
Well, from what you are saying, it is not clear who exactly is the "fanatic", and a "major troll", and so on. You would benefit from reading Nassim Ni...
September 08, 2019 at 05:00
I've run into the following search result, somewhere at the top: The Best Philosophy Books. I haven't read many of the books listed in that page, but ...
September 08, 2019 at 04:13
It's complicated. If there is nobody is waiting for me to finish some work, I know from experience that I will abandon ship within one month, because ...
September 08, 2019 at 03:22
I have never said that I think that your answer is false. I am saying that I am absolutely sure that your answer is not even false.
September 08, 2019 at 02:34
The Creator of the real, physical world cannot be existentially contained in it. So, it is not a question of about the real, physical world. The quest...
September 07, 2019 at 17:05
Well, yes, the ontology of logic and of mathematics are up in the air, and will probably remain so for the foreseeable future. I was only referring to...
September 07, 2019 at 16:16
Yes, agreed. It is a formal language along with transformation/rewrite/inference rules. The EBNF grammar of a particular language of logic does not ca...
September 07, 2019 at 15:14
The true understanding of neuroscience must be considered limited to the problems that they can really solve. Neuroscience can obviously solve some pr...
September 07, 2019 at 10:41
I am pointing out the issue of the addressability of the question. You seem to have pre-1936 views on this matter. Unlike what you seem to believe, di...
September 07, 2019 at 05:59
Well, everything you are saying, is simply not decidable, unless you manage to point out a purely mechanical procedure that calculates your conclusion...
September 07, 2019 at 05:06
So, do you believe that Alan Turing's and Alonzo Church's answer to David Hilbert's question is not reasonable? On what grounds would you then believe...
September 07, 2019 at 04:54
Where is the purely mechanical procedure that would answer your question? You see, a machine must be able to come to the same conclusion as you do. So...
September 07, 2019 at 04:47
Well, I am only pointing to the history of "smartass" questions in mathematics. After adding a rule to fix Bertrand Russell's "smartass" question, sim...
September 07, 2019 at 03:56
I have found another example, and actually a quite interesting one, from the cryptography subdomain at stack exchange: What is a “witness” in zero kno...
September 07, 2019 at 02:42
There is a rational element and a transcendental element. Quite a few people cannot assess the soundness of the rational element. So, they mostly igno...
September 06, 2019 at 15:56
Logic is a formal language. There is a mismatch in power between what we can say (formal language) and what we can solve (system). The solution in the...
September 06, 2019 at 14:43
The simplest solution is to forbid the political invention of new laws. That also automatically solves the problem of new, foreign-import laws that th...
September 06, 2019 at 12:18
In quite a few Islamic-majority countries, they do not even make such new foreign-import law, simply, because it is against Islamic law to do that, an...
September 06, 2019 at 12:06
To an important extent, it is. For example, the legislature in those countries often comes under pressure from the so-called western democracies to ad...
September 06, 2019 at 11:58
I just found an example, but in a different context: Most Countries Have Environmental Regulations. Very Few Actually Abide by Them. A new U.N. report...
September 06, 2019 at 11:36
In practical terms, it often depends on the composition of the population. Politically-invented law always applies to the unbelievers who believe in t...
September 06, 2019 at 11:21
Maybe in some places they can. There are a lot of places, though, where that does not work. You need a very gullible population for that to be possibl...
September 06, 2019 at 11:10
The Quran is a text with directives and guidelines, meant to be implemented by the believers in the text, at their earliest convenience.
September 06, 2019 at 10:58
Of course, I do not believe that politicians are allowed to invent new laws. Is it even in my interest to believe a thing like that? We were talking a...
September 06, 2019 at 10:56
Islamic law does not allow for liberally inventing new extensions. Read the page on Sharia. The consensus of religious scholars will never defend the ...
September 06, 2019 at 10:50
Well, if you look at the alternative, you will detect gullibility that is much worse. What to think of people who believe that politicians are allowed...
September 06, 2019 at 10:24
Not in Islam. Mohammed, may he rest in peace, was the last prophet. No, what a prophet says, needs to appeal to an otherwise unknown mental faculty. I...
September 06, 2019 at 10:09
I will raise a counter argument of syntactic, formalist nature, by juggling with definitions. You see, according to the Dunning-Kruger research into i...
September 06, 2019 at 06:47
Miracles are indeed a bit controversial. In the Islamic narrative, the prophet was often asked by unbelievers to perform miracles to give them evidenc...
September 06, 2019 at 05:45
The first issue is always the decidability of the question. A good, historical example of an undecidable question is Russell's paradox: Does the set o...
September 06, 2019 at 04:53
You are asking a question. On what grounds do you believe that this question is decidable?
September 06, 2019 at 04:47
No, it is an objection involving the limitations of knowledge itself. With all knowledge necessarily constrained within the boundaries established by ...
September 06, 2019 at 04:40
TLDR; It is a problem of logic as a tool. You see, logic is not omnipotent. On the contrary, first-order logic is notoriously full of issues. You can ...
September 06, 2019 at 04:22
Well, first there is the understanding that the "=" symbol pretty much never means "identical". The symbol is much more permissive than that. It usual...
September 06, 2019 at 03:38
I've found a machine-verifiable version of the Banach-Tarski proof for the Coq proof assistant. It looks endless. I first thought that this is because...
September 06, 2019 at 02:42
Atomizing individualism is a social disease that is rather unrelated to economic issues. If you want a functioning kinship structure, you will need so...
September 05, 2019 at 16:34
I have no clue ... (seriously)
September 05, 2019 at 10:31
Well, I do not speak from personal experience, as I resolutely resigned from the ongoing experiment in the so-called "western democracies" over a deca...
September 05, 2019 at 08:34
What I wrote, was not in relation to the alphabet soup but to a new strand of articles that have appeared such as this example, "27 Percent of Califor...
September 05, 2019 at 04:53
Being rich can be a side effect of being a good manipulator, proficient at producing believable deceptions. Still, not all rich people have gained the...
September 05, 2019 at 03:59
Agreed, but that is exactly what is not possible. These other, unknown mental faculties are out of reach of any ability to inquire them rationally. Fu...
September 05, 2019 at 03:19
It is the axiomatic epistemic domain which works like that. The question then becomes: Why do you accept the axioms of an axiomatic theory? In my opin...
September 04, 2019 at 17:56
I see arbitrary in this context as "further unjustified". For example, I do not trust what a literary critic says about why Charles Dickens wrote a pa...
September 04, 2019 at 11:35