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Pfhorrest

['Member']Joined: September 24, 2019 at 23:11Last active: February 22, 2026 at 14:2383 discussions4559 comments
Location: Ojai, CA

Bio

My name is Forrest. I have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Philosophy with Highest Honors from the University of California at Santa Barbara from 2007. I've been slowly working on an amateur work of philosophy called the Codex Quaerentis since then, available in its current state at my website below.

Discussions (83)

Against Fideism

February 03, 2020 at 07:57 40 comments General Philosophy

Comments

In: The Shoutbox  — view comment
:heart:
October 27, 2025 at 11:05
In: The Shoutbox  — view comment
You can see when I'm just looking at the forum somehow? I glance over here about once a week just to see if anything relevant to me is going on.
August 25, 2025 at 07:29
In: Disambiguating the concept of gender  — view comment
In response to both of your responses to me, please note that the whole point of the disambiguation in the OP of this thread is to tease apart matters...
May 24, 2025 at 00:24
In: Disambiguating the concept of gender  — view comment
Swinging by because someone DMd me here and wow, this old thread of mine is still going... ain't got time to catch up on the 15 pages I've missed, but...
May 18, 2025 at 23:31
In: Banno's Game.  — view comment
Because you asked so nicely and I can't help myself, I'll chime in briefly on the topic of whether mathematics is created or discovered: I think that ...
July 18, 2024 at 07:22
In: Banno's Game.  — view comment
Wow I had no idea that my offhand contribution here would still have such a lingering impact so many years later... (FWIW though, my name isn't P. Fho...
July 15, 2024 at 23:00
In: R. M. Hare  — view comment
The thing that I like about Horgan and Timmons is that they salvage a lot of of what I think Hare has of value to offer, but also retain cognitivism a...
February 12, 2023 at 04:51
In: R. M. Hare  — view comment
May I recommend Hare’s successors, Horgan and Timmons, the only other people to ever get metaethics correct, in their nondescriptivist cognitivism. (I...
February 06, 2023 at 06:17
In: Any academic philosophers visit this forum?  — view comment
I dunno that I'd really call myself "an academic philosopher", as that sounds like I have a PhD and publish papers in journals and stuff. I just have ...
February 03, 2023 at 19:29
In: Forrester's Paradox / The Paradox of Gentle Murder  — view comment
Wow people are still responding all these years later? I think in the original paradox the idea is that you can inflict varying degrees of pain in the...
July 21, 2022 at 05:32
In: WTF is Max Tegmark talking about?  — view comment
Thank you for that link, it was a fun read, and nice to know that I understand Tegmark's position correctly. :-)
January 18, 2022 at 03:42
In: My profile pic?  — view comment
Thank you very much! Though I'm not sure how this ancient thread came to your attention. :) I don't know. Sorry, I meant: "I don't know." I.e. it says...
January 18, 2022 at 03:27
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
I'm increasingly disinclined to continue this conversation as it's clear that you lack dialectical charity (which is the main reason I no longer visit...
November 27, 2021 at 21:59
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
That just means an agent of the state did something contrary to what the state said they could. It's the laws themselves that can be arbitrary. Docume...
November 27, 2021 at 20:17
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
And it does not have to be spelled out for everyone, only for itself. If part of the state (e.g. the legislature) says that such-and-such is mandatory...
November 27, 2021 at 19:42
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
Each state constitution and the US constitution has a clause granting their legislature the power to create and enforce laws in general; often with so...
November 27, 2021 at 17:16
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
It's not immoral, precisely because it's not arbitrary. It's the arbitrariness of the claimed authority of the state that makes it morally illegitimat...
November 27, 2021 at 01:48
In: The (?) Roman (?) Empire (?)  — view comment
In the sense that we're talking about with states, if Alice is walking down the street and sees Bob attacking innocent Charlie, and commands or even f...
November 26, 2021 at 19:50
In: WTF is Max Tegmark talking about?  — view comment
I like that comparison. I'm adamantly anti-Platonist but I think Tegmark is on the mark, because rather than talking about there being some other kind...
August 30, 2021 at 09:26
In: Greatest Power: The State, The Church, or The Corporation?  — view comment
A related question for discussion: religions are epistemic authorities and states are deontic authorities, but what are corporations? If by corporatio...
July 31, 2021 at 20:28
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
:100: :up: :clap: Then he’s free to keep it to himself, or publish it in an attributable way on his own.
July 31, 2021 at 00:04
In: Kavka's Toxin Puzzle, and the future of reality!  — view comment
There cannot be perfect prediction in principle because of dynamical chaos: the act of making a prediction of a system that includes the predictor cha...
July 30, 2021 at 00:21
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
I had a thought today about the technological implementation of this, although I'm not sure how exactly it would work with this forum software (@"jama...
July 28, 2021 at 06:54
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
Yeah, I don't really know how to go about making something like this happen, which is why I'm floating the idea to places like this. I'm more than wil...
July 27, 2021 at 23:01
In: Objective Morality: Testing for the existence of objective morality.  — view comment
Claims about reality involve observers every bit as much as claims about morality do: that's what empiricism is all about, there's nothing more to rea...
July 27, 2021 at 21:00
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
That is half of the aim of this idea, too: for people to learn more about the ideas that have already been had. Care to summarize that for us? And, ag...
July 27, 2021 at 00:25
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
Yes but presumably those who disagree with it will give some explanation as to why. You cite Ecclesiastes. Surely someone has commented somewhere in t...
July 26, 2021 at 21:15
In: "I've got an idea..." ("citizen philosophy")  — view comment
Yeah, or else heavier moderation for those kinds of threads to keep responses in format. Thanks! And I sure hope so. That’s basically what I wanted wh...
July 26, 2021 at 20:34
In: (Close to) No one truly believes in Utilitarian ethics  — view comment
More or less, yes. There are variations on utilitarianism that are less demanding, and proponents of those probably often comply with them on that fro...
July 26, 2021 at 10:35
In: (Close to) No one truly believes in Utilitarian ethics  — view comment
The demandingness objection is one of the common critiques of utilitarianism.
July 26, 2021 at 06:04
In: What’s The Difference In Cult and Religion  — view comment
:100: Conversely, a cult is just an unpopular, shunned religion.
July 25, 2021 at 18:14
In: The end of universal collapse?  — view comment
Does not every observation, as an interaction, cause entanglement? (Leaving room still for partial observation; see below). Is this while Wigner and h...
July 25, 2021 at 18:11
In: The end of universal collapse?  — view comment
So now I'm confused if the interpretation that I've supported under the name "Many Worlds" all these years actually was Many Worlds or not. That inter...
July 25, 2021 at 10:04
In: The end of universal collapse?  — view comment
Is not the above exactly what Many Worlds says happens? No, wait... Many Worlds says the first person remains in superposition until (so far as the se...
July 25, 2021 at 08:30
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
The law of the excluded middle is still applicable. Everything is still either true or false. But that's a separate issue from epistemic possibility o...
July 23, 2021 at 07:20
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
You're applying the wrong standard of justification. "This definitely doesn't happen unless you can prove that it definitely does" would require a ret...
July 23, 2021 at 03:13
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
Doesn't it? Why would you think it didn't? Anyway, the point of my explanation was to undermine your claim that probability is entirely a human constr...
July 22, 2021 at 23:40
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
For illustration imagine a toy model like the black and white bitmap image discussed earlier. Given that there’s only one white pixel in it and any ot...
July 22, 2021 at 09:07
In: Inconsistent Mathematics  — view comment
My only, somewhat tangential, thought to contribute here is that in my own proposed extension to logic, you incidentally get something kind of like a ...
July 21, 2021 at 23:08
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
Nope. Dark energy is whatever is causing space to expand. It's a product of space itself, so once there's more space there's more energy... which make...
July 20, 2021 at 20:15
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
Nope, just dark energy. Phantom energy is something on top of that, that may or may not exist. Dark energy definitely does.
July 19, 2021 at 22:30
In: Memetic Inbreeding  — view comment
This reminds me of something that I like to say about philosophy in particular, that is analogously applicable to inquiry and discourse more broadly: ...
July 19, 2021 at 08:44
In: The Postmodern era: Did it happen?  — view comment
that’s quitter talk
July 19, 2021 at 08:36
In: The Postmodern era: Did it happen?  — view comment
Modernism vs postmodernism is a false dichotomy to begin with. The problems that postmodernists rail against are not inventions of modernism per se bu...
July 18, 2021 at 22:47
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
Addendum: imagine we begin the toy model earlier as a 1 pixel long 1 dimensional 1 bit depth image. That’s basically just a single bit, a 1 or 0, an e...
July 18, 2021 at 02:50
In: Dog problem  — view comment
Why then cannot dogs own themselves? You’re right that if ancap principles were to apply and dogs were owned by humans then those humans could fuck th...
July 16, 2021 at 23:21
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
An additional thought that just occurred to me: in a string-theoretic model that requires higher dimensions that are presumed to be just very small an...
July 16, 2021 at 23:06
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
I'm not really sure; the stuff about gravity was an afterthought to the stuff about expansion, and if that part doesn't pan out, we can move past it. ...
July 16, 2021 at 21:09
In: Entropy, expanding space, Noether's theorem, and conservation of free energy  — view comment
I can't really draw a 3D structure well enough, so I'll just try to elaborate. Let's imagine you have a bitmap image one pixel tall and n pixels wide....
July 16, 2021 at 10:28
In: Where is the Left Wing Uprising in the USA?  — view comment
I suspect he just means that we (leftists like you and I) have no real political representation or power. There are some people like us with left-wing...
July 16, 2021 at 07:34
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