Marchesk

Stanislaw Lem's sentient ocean in the book Solaris which has been made into two movies. He was critical of popular science fiction depicting aliens as...

Frozen block-time comes from the physicist Brian Greene. I don't know whether he came up with the interpretation, or just wrote about it in one of his...

This isn't about what might happen. Your already have your data set. The theory is that there are hidden factors explaining your data. You might be me...

Let's use a hypothetical example. Human civilization lasts for a billion years, and it continues to advance over that time, until our descendants are ...

Regardless, why does it work is the question. FA assumes there are such possibilities to be discovered. The math is based on that assumption.

Wrong or incomplete? Newtonian gravity is incomplete, not wrong in the sense that Relativity invalidates everything laid down by Newton. I guess it's ...

I believe possibility is an epistemic situation when we don't know for sure what the factors are. It's possible that working memory is a factor in exp...

Does physics admit to the possibility of making a perpetual motion machine at some point in the future, or is it ruled out as impossible? There are di...

As opposed to Humans, yes. There's other weird creatures walking amongst us, like the Kantians and the Witty folk.

The problem is the lack of explanation for why they might never be actual. Or more fundamentally, all the patterns we observe are brute. There's no re...

Non-zero probability of multiverse interference? Human free will violating laws of nature? Trump campaign got hold of Man in the High Castle video ree...

Yeah, and our imaginations are not constrained by what nature can or can't do. We can imagine a perpetual motion machine (and people try to claim they...

A short way of putting this is from the realist POV is that factor analysis should not work for actual data, unless there are real unobservables expla...

But we have never observed this to be the case, so it could be just our imagination at work. Hume did point out a real problem with induction, but tha...

My opinion is that when and if we fully understand the laws, we will see that it could not have been otherwise. I think entropy is that way, although ...

Have you not seen the science fiction movie out in the theaters right now called Arrival, or read the novella it's based on? Anyway, the future having...

What if it's the relationship between things, events, patterns which are the laws, and not something making anything behave or exist? If things are re...

Seems like a really large bullet to bite just to avoid supposing there is some sort of unobservable causality we infer from the patterns we do perceiv...

If you wish to apply computer science terms to a biological organ that shares some similarities with computing devices, then okay, I guess. Lots of pe...

It from bit?

Which is the dependent, mind or matter? Which can be reduced or explained in terms of the other?

Even under the ordinary distinction, we note the difference between dream experience and waking, but you do point out an interesting problem, which is...

There needs to be empirical evidence backing it up at some point, or else it will always remain an interpretation. If no empirical evidence can ever b...

So this isn't a violation of Occam's razor?

So they believe in a real, physical infinity, as opposed to a mathematical infinity? I thought infinities in physics meant there was a problem with th...

You mean a particular form of Idealism. If you had gone with subjective idealism instead, then there is no world independent of mind. Which would mean...

It's interesting how Trump's election has ended up with a discussion on being gay in a Muslim country. Kind of funny.

What's the point of your reply? Any society consisting of more than one individual is going to entail limitations on absolute freedom. If one wants to...

What are dreams without waking? What is inner dialog without dialog others can partake in? What is consciousness without lack of consciousness? What i...

You can also be shot in your sleep, and experience nothing.

I don't feel particularly oppressed despite all the diffusions of power. I can go wherever I want (money permitting), buy whatever I want, say what I ...

Do they die from that or the resulting physical ailment?

And which one would consider abolishing slavery? Would that occur to the conservative? Or would the conservative just argue that is the way God intend...

The physical one can kill you, I'm not sure whether the perceptual one can, even though some movies like the Matrix made it out to be so. I've yet to ...

The conservative would have a much more persuasive case to be made in ancient China, or Egypt, or the Roman Empire, during the periods of stability. B...

That's most unfortunate. Different views need to be heard, especially ones challenging the official doctrine. That's what academia should be about. Or...

You said a lot of interesting things, some of which I would agree with or ring more or less true, but this part is troubling. Institutions do change o...

How do your academic colleagues respond to your conservative deconstruction of liberalism?

It would have to be a hell of a lot more protest for this to have any chance. But let's say the electors could be motivated to vote Hillary in instead...

Sure, but let me ask the question a different way. From the POV of physics, does any of that exist? Or, to describe the physics of a computer, is ther...

Is it also independent of the rules needed to translate it between physical media or types of symbols?

And to be clear, thinking of oneself as white in that you have light skin, and your ancestors are European, and you may even celebrate eating French c...

So you agree with Searle that it's a biological property, and not something that can be functionally recreated in a computer.

To the extent that brains/minds give them the same meaning, which some are happy to do, like Dennett and Kurzweil, and others, less so, like Lanier.

Or let's say, aliens show up, and they've taken human form to make colonization easier on us, but they don't have any pigment in their skin, because m...

Sure if it's just a word game and has no social implications, like who gets favored treatment in a society, and who gets looked down on, based on skin...

Since I apparently love equivocating so, let's say this white racial category had played out between the Northern and Southern Europeans. Would we sti...

What is the cause? Convert me back to proper belief in the reality of whiteness?

It depends on what we are talking about. The idea of being white is a fuzzy notion that can be extended or retracted to included various groups and ev...

It's not about being of European descent or a light skin pigment. It's about the concepts of whiteness, blackness, yellowness, etc that we inherited f...