alan1000

If it gives you any encouragement, I will comment on the original post. You assert that value can "neither be fully quantified nor rank-ordered. Conse...

Dfpolis, I need some help. The abstract of your article contains such outrageous grammatical errors that I am inclined to suspect either that it was w...

PS a moment's reflection suggests that, on any definition of consciousness, "human consciousness may be an illusion" must be self-contradictory.

To go back to fundamentals: I guess one thing you need to do is to define "consciousness", after which, you may find that the question is more easily ...

I respect the labour you have evidently put into this question, Art48, but before I invest 51 miinutes of my life in watching a video, I would like to...

Hint: "fake" is not an inherent, fixed property; it is a relation between two terms. We may say that x is a fake in respect of its relation to y; but ...

The general thrust of your post is unintelligible, but, at the level of iron flakes, there is obviously no reason to suppose they possess consciousnes...

The elephant in the room, of course, is that it is impossible to identify an unobservable cause. As Bertrand Russell once said, when you have said eve...

Exactly what I've been saying all along, but would they listen? I ask you, would anybody listen?

I think it was a huge mistake to stop sacrificing virgins at the solstice. That was where we went wrong, in my opinion. Of course, there were others w...

You could be right. And he's still waiting for answers.

Actually, I was too rash in stating that Flannel Jesus' reply did not call on any infinitesimal values, ie, did not depend upon h. Of course, his conc...

I'm sorry, but none of the replies so far seem to evidence any familiarity with number theory or basic set theory... in fact, I can't really identify ...

Forgive me folks, but the title of the post reminds me of an old, old joke: a Polish person goes for an eye test. The optometrist says, can you read t...

Actually, nude bathing is my favourite form of naturalism... (shut up, alan)

"A mathematical point is a definition of nothing. We can't use 'nothing' as a building block." The second sentence is granted, but the first sentence ...

Ain't no such thing. Choose one or the other.

"I believe a fixed percentage of men are born gay. It's not a large cohort--maybe 2% or 3%." I think 5% is likely a more accurate figure, although the...

I recollect that Dawkins tells us somewhere (was it in The Selfish Gene?) that according to computer modelling, the survival of the species is best gu...

"But, for the moment, cannot tell us anything useful about how dark matter prevents the collapse of stares near a black hole," Apologies for the bad g...

I would say that, at the current level of our technlogical development, ChatGPT has got it just about right... but that in ten or twenty years more, p...

I don't know what replies the question may have garnered in other forums, but I was hoping for something a bit more interesting than my own in this on...

A further (whimsical) thought: if we understand "terms" to include symbols, what is the etymology of "+" and "x"? Have you noticed that "+" refers to ...

A valid question although, to be honest Tony, unnecessarily verbose! The question you raise is central to Fermi's Paradox. it could be condensed as fo...

I vote for "axiom" as the term which, as much as any other, crystallises this question. For the ancient Greeks, "axiom" meant a proposition for which ...

"An endless string of just 1s or just 0s (or the same 1 or 0 endlessly measured can contain no information)." An endless string of 1's will convey dif...

What you are talking about is subjectivism and objectivity. It's covered in Philosophy 101.

You might also consider the desirability of expressing your main thesis in 200 words or less, developing further details in response to subsequent com...

A surprisingly tricky question! One sense of A is always synonymous with B. Therefore, it will ALWAYS be the case that one sense of A is interchangeab...

I'm glad Mihai got some meaningful replies, but was this ever a question in mathematical philosophy? If the moderators had been more vigilant, they wo...

Like if you're not wearing underpants?

In my view the original question is a classic example of "overthinking the problem". The proposition, "This statement is false" does not embody any si...

I've always found that downwards causation correlates positively with the quantity of Semillon consumed... sorry, I know I'm being facetious, but I th...

Much of your post is not clearly intelligible without considerable further elucidation; what is intelligible, would seem to prerequire and presuppose ...

Thank you everybody... when I posted the original question, which was really addressed to the moderators, I had no expectation of such a lengthy, inte...

That's true. I have read that some high school teachers tell their students that (for example) infinity minus infinity, or multiplied by infinity, or ...

By the way, I would ask, are you aware that the infinity of the real numbers between 0 and 1 is a different kind of infinity to the infinity of the na...

We can argue against the logical possibility of a miracle, because the definition of "miracle" given here presupposes the existence of a Godlike being...

According to the Curry-Howard model - with which I admit I am completely unfamiliar - what takes the place of the axioms in mathematical science?

A hit! A palpable hit! (Hamlet)

Yes. What's your question?

Bertrand Russell's own "Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy" is the text you are looking for. Written while he was serving a prison sentence as an...

By the way, please don't fall into the trap of supposing that Aristotelian logic is a valuable guide to truth in the modern world. By all means study ...

If anything is an appearance it is known mediately, One assumes, through the senses? The individual knows that he (or she) acts non-mediately Whoa, ba...

An interesting question, but I am a lazy person, so without research I will just point out one common fallacy which occurs too often in Wikipedia and ...

Your use of the word "regard" is problematic. Do you mean to say "makes possible" or "facilitates"? I think if you accept that A Priori knowledge is p...

On the other hand, the monoclastic neutrinal differentiation of the autosomatically-determined spin value inherent in all such equitational bivalent t...

I'm sorry, what was the question again?

On the other hand, the common notion that God's nature is "unknowable" or in some sense "hidden" presents severe logical problems. It is obvious that ...

fdrake, I think the preceding message was actually written by the author of "Christoff", Christoff being a half-baked bug-ridden AI program. Does "pro...