Douglas Alan

If he did, he's probably not slumming it in these parts anymore. |>ouglas

I think not. He was definitely an influence on the logical positivists, but he was not a positivist himself. I can find no source on the Internet that...

I really don't know what to say to you that I haven't already. A proposition written in formal logic is sometimes a tautology but is typically not. If...

I didn't use existence as a predicate. And neither would have Russell. Existence in predicate calculus is specified via the existential quantifier. I ...

Russel's project was to convert propositions into formal logic. One cannot determine the truth of a statement expressed in formal logic a priori when ...

No, that's not right. The project of reducing all propositions to formal logic is orthogonal to logical positivism, which is the thesis that only prop...

If you want to, I can ask my friend who has a PhD in number theory and is a professor at UPenn if he thinks that mathematical truths are facts or not....

I understand the purpose of an encyclopedia perfectly well. I just expressed a personal preference about the value to me in particular of what I read....

My point is that in "ordinary language" mathematical truths are typically considered to be facts. Nothing more. I have shown this by talking to someon...

Having a degree in Philosophy, I am all too aware! I didn't get that from the article. What I got out of it is that a lot of philosophers throughout h...

Feel free to use "fact" however you want. As Humpty Dumpty said, "When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." Bu...

I'm not sure when I'll have a chance to respond to your other points. Real philosophizing takes a lot of careful words! But as for physicalists being ...

Well, it's complicated. In some accounts they are. In others, they aren't. I'm no expert on the history, but my understanding is that the contemporary...

I will refer you again to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: I have already pointed you at this, and at Wikipedia. I have told you of my educati...

Personally, I am highly disappointed in it. I find it to be a deep mystery as to why there is something rather than nothing. And given that there is t...

I just went and polled four scientists, one of whom is the Director of R&D of the lab where I work, which is part of a world-famous research institute...

My boss has a PhD in Linguistics from the aforementioned Linguistics department, and I just asked him if 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact. He replied that yes it i...

I've worked with scientists my entire adult life. As far as I'm aware, they would all agree that 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact. I work with scientists right now...

Even preschoolers know that 1 + 1 = 2 is a fact: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cR_1Qi-tP4 |>ouglas

My car exists in the world. My car is a fact? |>ouglas

Is this a jest? I'm not religious, but I know some basics. The traditional explanation is that the devil was made by God in order to provide humans wi...

Additionally, having studied Cognitive Psychology, I can assure that that more than 99% of what goes on in your mind never reaches the level of consci...

There used to be a popular theory of consciousness called the HOT theory. HOT stood for "higher-order thought". If you had higher-order thoughts (e.g....

Zombies can have minds and they can have cognition. What zombies are missing are phenomenal states. I don't see any reason at all why having phenomena...

For someone who is such a stickler about proper word usage, you seem to have absolutely no idea about the proper usage of "precise" and "accurate". Pr...

Thank you for some history on The Knowledge Argument of which I was unaware. At this point, having spent way too much of my life pouring over many res...

What an absurd thing to say. I never claimed that philosophers in these parts wouldn't recognize the distinctions of which you speak. They would just ...

Yes, that makes sense. I haven't seen the argument worded that way before, but I presented above, in a little magnum opus, a way in which this putativ...

Yes, I am claiming a zombie can know things. Let us say, for instance, that we build an incredible AI to help us with all the problems of the world. W...

So, you are asserting, for instance, that people don't exist. Only quantum probability waves exist? |>ouglas

Let S = the set of all x where x is a sequence of English sentences. Let T = the set of all s such that s is an element of S and s forms a story with ...

This line of reasoning leads to madness. You end up with nothing but quantum probability waves existing and nothing else. |>ouglas

Colors are properties, and properties exist. |>ouglas

3+2=5 because it can't equal anything else. We have no power to let it equal anything else. |>ouglas

Quite to the contrary. All the evidence supports that much more is possible than is actual. And that math is inevitable once there are beings intellig...

There's nothing supernatural about necessary truth, such as that which is expressed by mathematics. Any intelligent space-faring beings will need to h...

If and when we meet space-faring aliens, I guess it will come to you as quite a surprise to you when they have "invented" the same math that we have. ...

If one is a modal realist, then of course Moby Dick has always existed and always will. I'm not a modal realist, but I guess a Platonist of some sort....

I wasn't equivocating, I was elaborating. Invention is discovery of something in the abstract space of that which can be invented. The word "discovery...

I couldn't disagree more. Logic, like math, is discovered, not invented. Though I believe that everything that is invented is actually a form of disco...

Mary's Room (or as it is more commonly called, "The Knowledge Argument") was actually by Frank Jackson, not Chalmers. Though I'm sure Chalmers must ha...

That's why I spent years studying the issue. Don't expect any satisfying answers, however! Unless you turn out to be a functionalist physicalist/repre...

I guess to me, to say that something exists is merely saying that there is a predicate that when applied to everything yields some results. E.g. The s...

Philosophy of Mind. (And Computer Science.) |>ouglas

I spent my entire undergrad education at MIT studying this very question, and I'm no closer to an answer today than when I started. |>ouglas

I take it that nothing is ever settled in Philosophy. But I've also noted that if you swim against the tide, the onus then is usually on you to make a...

Apparently you don't know how to read plain English. The sentence, "This sentence contains words" is a tautology. It is true in all possible worlds. I...

And you are asserting that MIT carefully selects all of the reading material assigned so that it only confirms MIT's and Harvard's parochial view? Con...

In what sense do chairs live outside the mathematical equations? |>ouglas

Let us assume for a moment that modal realism is true. Let us consider a possible world in which there are no humans, but chimpanzees have managed to ...