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Pierre-Normand

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It isn't a bad name, it seems to me, if the idea that only the present exists from the perspective of an agent can be given a reasonable sense. The se...
April 16, 2017 at 04:56
This is not quite what I was arguing. I wasn't contrasting the language of pure mathematics with the language of ordinary experience. I was rather con...
April 15, 2017 at 22:15
It's not so much that B Series reduce to A Series but rather that the conception of time involved in B Series descriptions of events abstract away (fo...
April 15, 2017 at 20:43
I don't think GR supports eternalism anymore than the special theory of relativity (STR) does. One reason why STR can be taken to support eternalism o...
April 15, 2017 at 19:29
I think this objection only properly applies to some strong forms of presentism -- e.g. Augustinian "knife edge" presentism, maybe. Weaker forms of pr...
April 15, 2017 at 18:06
Indeed, indeed!
April 15, 2017 at 17:55
I don't know; I'm not familiar enough with Leibniz's metaphysics. I wouldn't go as far as saying that picking a point in time is actually picking an e...
April 15, 2017 at 00:35
Yes, if what is being denied under the label "relative time" is the intelligibility of the idea of an absolute positioning of events in time, then the...
April 14, 2017 at 23:46
I assume you mean "(regional) gravitational collapse(s)" and not global collapse. Yes. The maximum entropy of a system isn't supervenient on its actua...
April 13, 2017 at 16:26
I am not sure why the worm theorist ought to be committed to that. She is committed to the temporal stages of a person being parts of that person. Tho...
April 13, 2017 at 06:06
According to worm theory, those future and past experiences would be experiences had by stages of yourself that are part or you now in the ontological...
April 13, 2017 at 04:45
What you call "opposite" often is called "contrary". Contrariety and contradiction are two sorts of opposition. Look up Aristotle's Square of Oppositi...
April 13, 2017 at 02:22
Did you read The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception? Gibson is the most philosophical of all the psychologists. My understanding of Aristotle's ...
April 13, 2017 at 00:26
But this seems prima facie false, assuming only that your existence extends both to the past and to the future (or even, only to the past). It only ap...
April 12, 2017 at 15:21
This model makes much sense to me, but I am not in a position to assess it against competitors. (In fact, I don't even know what the viable competitor...
April 12, 2017 at 15:05
First, apologies, when I said "when the temperature of the newborn star is lost...", I meant "heat" not "temperature". I was picturing the temperature...
April 12, 2017 at 14:57
Yes, that might have been your intent in the original post of this thread. (Your argument, back then, seemed to hinge on something like the synthetic ...
April 12, 2017 at 05:10
"Let's say that the entire duration in which I exist is limited to an instant."
April 12, 2017 at 04:55
In this paragraph you enjoin us to assume that the existence of the experiencing subject is restricted to a moment in time. This is an assumption that...
April 12, 2017 at 04:51
Yes, this sounds a bit paradoxical when one is used to consider examples of low and high entropy restricted to systems that aren't dominated by gravit...
April 11, 2017 at 12:34
I would have thought that "here" refers to the location of the speaker at the time of utterance. (This is how, at any rate, I would make explicit what...
April 11, 2017 at 11:56
This strikes me as a very sharp diagnosis of the motivation of the stage theory.
April 11, 2017 at 11:15
But this is just to say that the time at which you are having an experience doesn't figure explicitly as part of the content of this experience. You c...
April 10, 2017 at 20:23
Yes, and the worm theorist need not dispute that. But then, at a later time, you go out and see a tree in the garden. You are having another experienc...
April 10, 2017 at 18:46
I think Ernestm was merely paying you a compliment.
April 10, 2017 at 17:57
I quite agree. But I think both the views of endurantism (closely associated with stage-theory) and perdurantism (closely associated with eternalism o...
April 10, 2017 at 17:08
That's because the eternalists (or the perdurantists) aren't saying that there are different conscious subjects along your world-line. You are the who...
April 10, 2017 at 16:57
Welcome to the forum! This note is indeed an important concession for you to make to the proponent of the worm-view, (which is a view about identity a...
April 10, 2017 at 16:07
As far as I know, the acoustic oscillations are a result of gravitational instabilities. Once this is accepted, you don't need a further mechanism to ...
April 09, 2017 at 21:23
Those would be the Blue and Brown Books. The Red one is from Chairman Mao ;-)
April 09, 2017 at 21:02
Many of the puzzles, as well as many of the insights, were real, it seems to me. There are both deep differences and deep similarities. If you read th...
April 06, 2017 at 18:14
Maybe someone else, not me. I didn't touch on the issue of the arrow of time. I was only considering the intelligibility of the idea of shifting the t...
April 06, 2017 at 13:44
The same question arises. Relative to what is everything happening four hours earlier? You have to imagine some undetectable framework of time (rather...
April 06, 2017 at 12:49
Well, I was assuming all the micro-physical "events" to be shifted as well, not just the macroscopic ones. Since the entropy of a physical system supe...
April 06, 2017 at 11:58
Can't you ask essentially the same question about time? Anything that occurs (e.g. the construction of a house) could have occurred four years earlier...
April 06, 2017 at 11:46
I'll only comment on your last two questions. If what you seek to achieve is an explanation, or philosophical elucidation, of the concept of truth, th...
April 06, 2017 at 11:33
(Y) (Y)
April 06, 2017 at 11:07
That would seem to be the same problem afflicting the idea of displacing the whole of space. You can shift a house 100 feet to the North. Can you move...
April 06, 2017 at 11:01
Yes, this issue may not be exactly on the point of this thread. But I agree with you that the reasoning is both interesting and relevant to features o...
April 06, 2017 at 09:48
I agree that it is a non sequitur! It is Weinberg's non-sequitur. It is a non sequitur because there actually are lots of reasonable explanations why ...
April 05, 2017 at 06:12
Which is precisely why you must seek some deeper reduction base -- a more "fundamental" theory -- in order to disclose at least one of the multiple "a...
April 05, 2017 at 05:58
The Maxwell equations don't constitute a reduction of the four laws that you mentioned in anything like Weinberg's sense of reduction. That's because,...
April 05, 2017 at 05:37
Steven Weinberg uses the phrase "autonomous law" in "Two Cheers for Reductionism", one of the two book chapters that you enjoined me to argue against ...
April 05, 2017 at 05:16
It's not generally the case that the empirical concepts that figure in a theory already were in use prior to the development of the theory. This would...
April 04, 2017 at 20:18
Sure. In that case you can't achieve reduction through appealing to a more fundamental theory that regulates interactions between smaller material con...
April 04, 2017 at 20:02
Well, yes. The classical theory of electromagnetism indeed incorporates its mathematical expression in the form of Maxwell's equations. Thank you for ...
April 04, 2017 at 19:36
You were postulating that your question regarding the autonomy of those laws was being asked in 1835. One would have to look up what the status of eac...
April 04, 2017 at 08:46
This complaint is rather fuzzy. In what way should the sense of the word autonomy "include instruments and experimental set up"? Each theory has its o...
April 04, 2017 at 08:33
That's not true. I took some pain to explain the sense in which individual laws can be said to be autonomous relative to the laws that govern the inte...
April 04, 2017 at 08:23
You often present alleged examples of reduction, which I then proceed to analyse. You then ignore my analysis, ask more rhetorical questions, and then...
April 04, 2017 at 03:15