Srap Tasmaner

Suppose I'm an earlyish hominin, and a wild dog is biting me. I involuntarily make a sound of pain. Members of my group who hear my cry will take this...

But what the machine actually does is physical, right? Just because a human designs a machine to serve a human purpose, doesn't mean the machine itsel...

@"mcdoodle" noted the mechanical nature of the translations in your example. So mechanical in fact that a machine could clearly perform these translat...

It's an explanation. He lists characteristics of the song that he believes are causes of him liking it, rather than reasons for him to (choose to) lik...

Hey Sam. Thanks for posting some links. Here's a quote from the first paper: So these folks think NDEs are hallucinations rather than confabulations. ...

Not even a mathematician can draw a generic triangle, nor can you think of one. Every geometry or trigonometry textbook you will ever see has illustra...

You should conduct multiple polls with the answers arranged differently so as not to influence how people vote.

Yeah, "number of entities" posited is not a good measure. (Unless positing God is positing one more than you need.) It's really number of types of ent...

Something else I felt my model captured was our sense that adhoc explanations are a kind of cheating, printing your own money as needed.

Yes, I agree with everyone's alternative characterizations of the razor. What's missing is why we should care. For instance, why should you want to ma...

So this would explain Ockham's razor with one more step, that it is rational to select the theory most likely to be true, and that relates to the othe...

The Wikipedia article also gives the "original":

There is a nice edition of David Hume's Enquiries available free online here.

I've spent almost all my life here, just outside Athens.

One more note: the psychological facts are not in dispute. That people do have these memories is not being challenged, and having such memories is a p...

Does blowing into a balloon cause it to inflate? I observe a guy blowing into a balloon, and I observe the balloon inflating. Then I do this 10,000 mo...

Fair enough. I'm just tired of threads where people say that television, as it has been explained to us by the Establishment, is actually impossible.

I stand and put my hand on my heart because that's how I was raised. I stand and put my hand on my heart, because whether this country really was foun...

Heretic!

You're confusing use and mention.

I think some of what's happened socially is just a numbers game. There was a time when a white guy competed for the best jobs with the best pay and be...

Priceless.

I think philosophy has been helpful in sorting science from non-science, but that's mostly foundational work that's long since done. These days, I thi...

My problem with a number of posts around here is that they're not philosophy of science at all; they're science. Philosophy of science deals with the ...

If the mental representation changes, and the information does not, then how can the information be said to be mental?

Bingo. REDMAP gets an honorable mention. I believe we are the only democracy on Earth that allows elected officials to draw electoral maps.

It's an interesting puzzle, Sam. I have lots of stuff I'm having trouble getting into good enough shape to post, but here's something. Your hypothesis...

That makes good sense. But I wasn't kidding. I was thinking of the stuff about measuring the information content of a theory-- better, a prediction. I...

Any chance there is some relation between the object out there and the image of the object in my mind?

Had an empty field of maybe half an acre by a house we lived in for a while-- this is semi-rural North Georgia. One time, instead of bush-hogging the ...

This sounds reasonable, but isn't the surest way to minimize surprise to reduce the information content of your beliefs?

In the old days, when people forwarded jokes to their friends in email, a friend of mine received a joke that he himself had typed and sent to a frien...

My version of this: Particle physicist is pulled over, cop comes up and says, "Sir, do you realize you were going 65 mph and the speed limit here is 4...

So here's the thing. We have the problem of universals. Two things have the same property, being red, say. Gracious, how is this possible? Is there so...

Actually, no. Your data is that the same information can be encoded multiple ways; more precisely, that it is possible to translate from one system of...

You're just restricting the word "information" to mean "something a person thought of", making it a synonym for "semantic content". On your usage, the...

Whether the dog is biting the man or the man is biting the dog is not a question of semantics. Look again: it is arranged. Or are you suggesting there...

That's because you choose to ignore that the arrangement of these physical components is also physical.

How close? There's a physical difference between a dog biting a man and a man biting a dog, although these two possible systems have the same total ma...

I guess you could let an admin log in using your account, so they could see the message, and then change your password after. Not a great solution, bu...

Blindfold chess is a thing. It takes a ton of energy.

Information appears to be massless, is perhaps what you wanted to say, and that is interesting.

In my case, since you asked, the main inputs to keep me running are caffeine, nicotine, and peanut butter. I think maintenance of my memories is paid ...

One two three four I declare a thumb war

Seriously guys? The usual model among humans would be that I'm making a copy of a piece of information I have, and then giving you the copy. My copy i...

He's good with lists, that Peirce guy.

That would be the other reason to approach the issue the way I am.

Yeah I get that. The problem people have with Frege's third realm is that it's platonism, which kinda blows. I'm looking to work my way up from the bo...

Yeah exactly. And once you're aware of the out-of-band signal, you can avoid sending one (for instance, if sinking a ship would indicate you've been r...