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Kenosha Kid

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Science interrogates what appears to be an objective reality out there through indirect observation and modelling. While the means (knowledge, funding...
June 30, 2020 at 16:22
Okay, so on bipedalism, the benefit for us was that it freed up our hands in an environment conducive to upright mobility, particularly useful for car...
June 30, 2020 at 15:59
Just that the characteristics you cited weren't unique to humans but you were asking if aliens might necessarily have those characteristics and be lik...
June 30, 2020 at 14:32
Is there anything particular you have in mind that differentiates humans from other apes?
June 30, 2020 at 14:10
That was excellent!
June 30, 2020 at 13:10
No, motion is the gradient from a hyper-cylindrical (for a sphere) 4D geometry. You are conflating this gradient with movement with respect to the 4D ...
June 30, 2020 at 12:24
Then you are defining motion in 4D to be 5D, which is not standard kinematic motion. (We're going round in circles here.) I don't think this demands e...
June 30, 2020 at 11:43
Even well-accepted cosmological theory is future eternal. That's not speculative, it's consistent with empirical evidence.
June 30, 2020 at 11:01
In a nutshell, then, your solution to the overpopulation problem is to increase agricultural supply to meet the demands of an overpopulated world in t...
June 30, 2020 at 10:51
Global coordination has to be executed by leaders. Leaders who seek environmental reforms tend to get democratically replaced by leaders to wish to re...
June 30, 2020 at 09:52
But moving wrt the 4D universe would be moving wrt a fifth dimension. The 3D (2+1) representation I posted from Huw Price's talk would, if the 4D obje...
June 30, 2020 at 08:48
It is you that does the compelling on the basis of them. This is why abstraction, i.e. ignoring what the will does and how it works, is unhelpful. 'Tr...
June 30, 2020 at 08:43
In both, objective reality is inferred from human activity. In science, the existence of objective reality is the simplest possible explanation for wh...
June 30, 2020 at 08:25
Big crunch sequence? Rather ruled out by the evidence. It makes as much sense as an infinite but bounded universe, which is hardly a foreign idea in c...
June 29, 2020 at 23:44
Sorry, I missed this. Its own temporal axis. The ground sometimes grades up. Up with respect to what? Some fixed plane that doesn't. Likewise, motion ...
June 29, 2020 at 23:34
With respect to chosen mathematical axioms. I can give you an axiomatic mathematics in which 2+2=4 is unjustified. 1. There does not exist an empty se...
June 29, 2020 at 21:54
A rather histrionic request, but okay. Susskind is the obvious, such as in: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.5385 You can check Guth's 2007 review where he ...
June 29, 2020 at 21:42
I saw this, then lost it, now found it again. They are all different, and there a few ways of breaking them down, but the main characteristic is they ...
June 29, 2020 at 20:35
:up:
June 29, 2020 at 17:34
We are evolved to model everyday, human-scale phenomena. Limiting nature to be common sense is itself illogical. It is perfectly normal for scientific...
June 29, 2020 at 17:32
Scepticism, empiricism, pragmatism, and (I agree, ) Occam's razor, which I include under scepticism. In metaphysics and epistemology, I accept that th...
June 29, 2020 at 17:26
Well, yes, it did. It predicted a sizeable electric dipole moment for hydrogen. This wasn't found, so Bohm went back and put the charge distribution i...
June 29, 2020 at 14:27
It's not relativistic by design btw. It is mathematically equivalent to non-relativistic quantum mechanics (i.e. the Schrödinger equation), which is a...
June 29, 2020 at 14:25
Then it ought to yield testable predictions.
June 29, 2020 at 14:21
Well, it did, but not because of pomo. "Everything is a social construct" is a grand narrative that grew out of pomo, but it wasn't pomo. Pomo would d...
June 29, 2020 at 14:10
Hi Doppy! In answer to the first question, it's a case-by-case basis. Descartes' proof relied on, among other things, dubious personally testimony (I ...
June 29, 2020 at 13:58
It is an exceedingly simple theory, derived exactly from two postulates: 1. The empirically-verified observer-independence of the speed of light; 2. T...
June 29, 2020 at 13:37
GR is based on the Equivalence Principle (gravity and acceleration are indistinguishable) and special relativity (SR) which decentres the observer and...
June 29, 2020 at 13:25
A good way to do science is to test your hypotheses. Belief is always optional :)
June 29, 2020 at 13:08
They have to be proposed and tested. Tmk no testable theory contests GR. A testable theory must a) explain everything Newtonian gravity explained, b) ...
June 29, 2020 at 12:54
I think they need a stronger reason to than distaste. Relativity's predictions are numerous and empirically verified (black holes, gravity waves, Merc...
June 29, 2020 at 12:32
WAS EINSTEIN WRONG? <insert 4000 words here> No.
June 29, 2020 at 12:17
Emergency clarification: I mean Nagel's review, not anyone here! Phew!
June 29, 2020 at 12:15
If you equate 'real' with 'elementary', your error is understandable. But then translating that more reasonable language, we have: " What he says it i...
June 29, 2020 at 12:14
Velocity generally is an unhelpful concept in modern physics. It is little-used in quantum mechanics for instance. Momentum is the useful quantity of ...
June 29, 2020 at 11:53
In a sense. This is my historical perspective, others may think pomo played a lesser role, but it seems to me that more positive pomo criticisms and s...
June 29, 2020 at 11:36
It's older than that. The natural reaction to special relativity was to figure out what the invariant properties of objects were. Four-velocity is one...
June 29, 2020 at 10:51
Yes, with the caveat that, just because there is apparent convergence, it doesn't follow that there is some mind-independent truth at that limit. Conv...
June 29, 2020 at 10:45
Well yeah, value generally. I had theology in mind.
June 29, 2020 at 09:51
4D velocity is defined with respect to a different measure of time, rather than a different dimension. Within any given reference frame, a body's four...
June 29, 2020 at 09:49
Funnily enough, I didn't actually have Wittgenstein in mind because I wasn't thinking specifically of philosophical problems. I was coming more ftom a...
June 29, 2020 at 09:41
No, I don't accept it in the sense that they are compatible. The process itself is deterministic. The above has nothing to do with what what you wrote...
June 28, 2020 at 23:42
So long as you don't tell anyone about it :rofl: Although it's interesting to wonder how well we could even put together one's own philosophy without ...
June 28, 2020 at 23:05
Shut-up-and-calculate is a sort of atheistic position on the interpretation of QM as a whole, which describes me well. There are some I find intriguin...
June 28, 2020 at 20:47
It would be less surprising to me if 24% philosophers were anti-materialists.
June 28, 2020 at 16:03
This is probably a good explanation of the problem. A guy spends half an hour talking about a naturalistic explanation for consciousness and some douc...
June 28, 2020 at 16:00