Srap Tasmaner

Okay, that was funny. Thanks for keeping your sense of humor. Anyway, I have already given, in this thread, a reason or two to think math is quite dif...

I think if your approach to philosophy is such that there is nothing especially odd about mathematics, then you're doing it wrong.

I think "play the game" is a little tendentious. There is uniformity, but we have no idea why. Maybe it's cultural, maybe linguistic, maybe it's hard-...

I used to love going out to dinner with my Dad and his brothers, because when the check came, there was what I called "the dance of the 20's," as they...

Of course, symbols like "1" and "2" and "+" aren't inherently meaningful, but I would say they acquire meaning for us when we are taught how to use th...

Thanks for slugging it out with me. I'll get the check!

I would vote "duckrabbit."

What if the girl were standing alongside the bull, boldly starting down the future? What would the bull mean then?

I'm going to keep saying, "except math." @"Terrapin Station" might assert that truth is whatever he says it is, in both the general and specific sense...

That's an interesting view. I still think you're wrong, but now I'm intrigued by this idea of math as fact. Why do I think you're wrong? Well, you got...

That of course is not an argument about the math, it's an argument about "what's fair."

I think you're right about that last point, and that's worth looking at closer. I think you're wrong about the other bit. It's just as easy to imagine...

One of us is missing the point, maybe it's me. We're exposed to lots of definitions, and people argue about those definitions, except when it comes to...

Um, yeah. Math alone is treated as objective, as objectively true, by all parties to all arguments. That's ever so slightly an overstatement--I'm leav...

There is something quite natural about the approach you took. I think for a lot of people, the argument for the existence of God has just one step: (1...

One thing I find curious is the near universal acceptance of mathematics. You can, of course, fake data, misrepresent data, tendentiously interpret da...

Whatever this is, it no longer looks much like a proof of the existence of God.

This is good stuff, Andrew. It's good to hear the thoughts of someone in the data trenches. I have a few more questions though. I think there was a bi...

I don't have a horse in this race, Tim, and there is a certain sort of relativism I find worrisome, but I think we often have more to worry about from...

One use of the concept, though, is to help us weed out spurious correlations.

Mind. Blown. Actually I just assumed that "Share" would bring up a selection of social media buttons like it does on loads of other sites, so I avoide...

Along with reply, share, and flag, posts should have a link button, so you can refer to specific posts.

So two examples: consciousness and pharmaceuticals. As for the second, I would have guessed that if you asked most researchers, they assume there is a...

So does your thesis of "conservation of properties," if we're calling it that, come down to a restatement of the first law of thermodynamics (with a n...

Okay. I thought you had been saying energy transfer is not causal.

Sorry--I was unclear. In the typewriter example, there's no causal connection between what I do and what the typewriter does, right?

Is there any place in this description for the word "cause"?

Okay. So how do you see the connection between what I did and what the computer did? (Still just clarifying here, not arguing.)

I think the natural ground to look at is communication, since the relativist and friend are talking to each other, understanding each other's assertio...

I'm not quite convinced. Do we retreat to predictive talk just because of the difficulty of adequately specifying the ceteris paribus conditions in ca...

Just to be absolutely clear, you're saying that (1) I created the meaning of the sentence, but (2) the computer created what's usually called the "ins...

Yes. What you got from Hume, as summarized here, doesn't support the conclusion you draw, namely that everything we can conceive of must exist. (Hume ...

Hume claims that (1) any complex thing we can imagine is built up out of simple things, and (2) any simple thing we can imagine is directly derived fr...

Makes sense to me.

To send the PM somewhat anonymously you'd also have to create a shared mod account.

Maybe it's rare enough the mods could just have a policy of sending the deletee a PM. OTOH, that would probably invite debate, and a further policy li...

Yeah but then there's lying. I think there were claims about military service that were demonstrably false. He may have done it just to mess with peop...

One of Faulkner's hobbies was lying about his past, as I recall.

Though the details have changed, concern about the effect of modern civilization on our world has been around a while. When I was kid, the concern was...

It's as if you derived Fx and derived Gx, then used &-introduction to get (Fx & Gx), and then told us that you could prove Fx from (Fx & Gx). You can ...

You're missing the point. You have claimed that "one truth about x proves x exists," and given a reconstruction of the cogito along these lines. Presu...

I have been unable to find a source for the clause beginning "thus." I don't think Hume says anything like this, and it clearly does not follow from t...

Nevermind, I've got it. I just caused that sentence to exist. It has the property of being composed of words; I am not composed of words.

Suppose I claim there is a smallest positive real number, call it k. It's easily proven that k < 1, right? Does that prove that there is a smallest po...

The law of contradiction would say, roughly, that nothing is both caused and uncaused. You're using the law of the excluded middle. I know it might se...

Maybe you could give me an example of an object causing another to exist, so I know what you mean.

I'm still in the "patently false" camp.

Not according to Quine.

We can clean this up, even without resorting to quantified modal logic, into an actual Barbara like so: Everything that can exist can be conceived of....

I don't know what to say about the event vs. object stuff. Causation between objects--or all this talk about objects having or not having a cause, whi...