At what point do we start to feel alone and abandoned? Because I get the sense that's an older child thing, not a baby thing or a toddler thing and, f...
Well good :) The data we're concerned about is, of course, scientific data. If science is telling you you're destroying the planet and you ignore it, ...
Oh definitely, for us, particularly as it presents a limit. Whatever else happens, we know the world must appear classical and coherent to us. This em...
That might be a little too speculative for a physics text. Personally I think it's overwhelmingly likely other intelligent species exist, or have exis...
Precisely my point. You can do unethical science quite easily, as totalitarian states and corporations attest. Just take the bits you want and ignore ...
On any major ethical issue, there is always vocal, indeed strident opposition to implementing change for ethical reasons, sometimes for maintenance of...
Except you didn't. Also, I cited paranoia as an example among others, not the unifying trait. There's also insane people and idiots, remember? But tbh...
Isn't that postmodernism? ;) While the ontological interpretation of the wavefunction hasn't been much in favour, recent experiments suggest that if y...
Exactly. Therefore of practical value. Even theology serves a purpose. Meanwhile the lay interest in science is largely diversionary (viz the aforemen...
Need for what though, to what end? If that has an answer, that's practical enough. How you think about the world either has an effect on how you inter...
:up: The universe probably does have an origin, as it appears to have starting conditions, but that doesn't veto counterfactual worlds with infinite h...
Not sure. A brain that has encoded information about its mother is obviously different from one that has not, a different configuration of neurons. Th...
Anti-vaccination isn't really an individual position: it's a social phenomenon gestated among the paranoid, the insane, and the terminally stupid. Mos...
On the contrary, for the most part it's more practical than science. Okay, philosophy outside of science isn't going to produce agriculture, bridges, ...
Hi, been back in the studio, now blinking at the light of day. Some of the wonders of science you cite in the OP are also causes of the evils: fossil ...
Well no the point of locking down is to minimise people getting sick and dying. That would rather be thwarted by people getting sick and dying due to ...
I'm not advocating a socialist utopia. But let's not forget all the medical tourism from the US to Cuba that went on before Obamacare. Cuba was taking...
I think this is why conservativism is always on the wrong side of history. "Yes, we were wrong in our beliefs about slaves and women and race and sexu...
The example of traders wouldn't fit into that, but there are plenty of examples where that's the case, yes. Look at British politics... A gauntlet of ...
I didn't have much issue with quantum field theory, at least until perturbation theory which can get a bit hard to keep track of, but classical field ...
Another example from the UK: We had a terrible fire in an apartment building a few years ago due to illegal, flammable cladding being used on the exte...
Doesn't seem odd to me. If you want to do applied physics, do a physics degree. If you want to do theory, do maths. At my uni we had to take our elect...
That is not right. It is empiricism which is at play here, not naturalism. What I said was theory- independent. But then again the Bible says nothing ...
It's common, but no sense involved. Any study you care to look at tells the same story. Another interesting one was Kahneman's study of stock traders....
This is just right wing propaganda, though. There's no actual truth to it; it's just something privileged people promote to justify the perpetuation o...
That's not a reason to perpetuate systematic inequality, though. Minimising something bad isn't pointless just because 0 is unattainable. If you tried...
Demand is created, not pre-existing. The demand for Apple products is manufactured by Apple. The demand for fancy hats likewise. Every sweatshop-made ...
I'm not sure what you mean by "to form a single particle on the screen". It interferes with itself. Not to do something: that's just what it does anyw...
Sure. My point was just that when he says "vice", I don't think he means doing great evil to others, rather he means being systematically mistaken. --...
Aye, it's a band of the pattern formed on the back screen. The key result of the paper is that only one electron is diffracted at a time, meaning that...
To play my role as Dawkins apologist, which I'm not entirely sure why I do: seems a tad dishonest. In that part of the book, Dawkins is answering the ...
That's interesting. I read it more as a bad habit, an addiction. The first vice he speaks of is "the vice of credulity". I expect he means to use the ...
Ah okay. Basically the interference pattern on the screen is determined by how the wave propagates to it. The pattern is what's called a Fourier trans...
That's not the same thing as a decision to act. To act is to affect a change in the world. You might act on the basis that belief that the action is c...
The interference pattern is the evidence. That's how they know particles are waves. The single-electron experiment was performed in 2002: https://phys...
I'm not arguing whether p-zombies are simpler (fine) or even whether they exist. I'm arguing that you can't start from assuming physicalism true then ...
The definition of a p-zombie is something that behaves exactly as a human but does not have consciousness. But in physicalism consciousness is physica...
It's easier to see it in the case of photons. The photon must travel through the undetected slit and not be destroyed or the detected one and be destr...
A physical system is more complex if it has more parts, yes. But the argument you refer to relies on their being some non-physical element to human co...
Okay, now for some fun. Ultimately we want anything we say about flat spacetime to be relevant to the real universe with curved spacetime, and that me...
In the textbook example, i.e. in conventional quantum mechanics, each particle goes through every slit, which is why there's an interference pattern. ...
Success of the market is supposed to follow from the drive toward success of the individuals in it. It is therefore in the market's interest to ensure...
It wasn't a recommendation, just noting that the argument has been employed before. I have mixed feelings on The God Delusion; aspects of it are compe...
Yes, I meant more of an unambiguous moral rule. Let's say two of the people are surgeons who need to get to theatre immediately to save the life of a ...
The whole molecular consciousness thing seems to be a part of panpsychism, a retreat of dualism away from homocentrism where the monists hopefully won...
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