Srap Tasmaner

Everything it occurred to me to talk about clearly went in the "weak emergence" bucket. Am I right in thinking that part of the motivation for the str...

That you is @"T Clark" not me, I believe. Do you know the Fodor article on the special sciences I mentioned? It's from right around the same time as P...

But that's exactly what the claim is, not that the very world we live in is impossible, but that it was not necessitated simply by the laws of physics...

Ha! I've said this a number of times on the forum, and never knew I was plagiarizing Russell. (I'll check out the source.) As I said before, this to m...

This isn't the first time I've described the sciences as philosophy's children, and every time the description seems more apt. The sciences are like a...

Oh yeah. I don't see it, not in the suggestion that there are these assumptions that imprison science. The goals of scientific research are inherited ...

Here ya go: Wish the psychology and biology departments well. That's it. I don't think there is much of a role for philosophy in consciousness studies...

Eh. (I'm still surprised every time someone has read something I've written.) The physics was over my head, but I still found it fascinating. Certainl...

It wasn't meant to, and I don't think Dewey thought of moving on as a neutral move, but a necessary one. (I'll likely come back to this in a minute.) ...

Ahem. I already quoted from and linked Philip Anderson. ;-) A typical, and unconvincing, philosophy paper! I'm going to reread it more carefully, and ...

Thanks for pointing this out. It's a very curious piece of work, that paper. Not what I was expecting.

I think it's related to the rise of "I feel like ..." as an alternative to "I think ..." or even "I believe ..." In 21st America, your feelings are no...

Dewey says this somewhere, that there are philosophical problems that are just no longer "live" for a new generation, in new circumstances. He endorse...

How many "kinds of properties" are there, in your view?

In case you ever want to consider evidence against your view.

I thought this might say something like this. Your plan is to say that your voice is different from mine because there are identifiable physical diffe...

I don't find this question as helpful as you do, because I think the "stuff" model used here doesn't capture what we're interested in. There are no no...

I'd have to spend some time on Baseball Reference to give a good answer, but my first pick would probably be Greg Maddux. He's currently only #28 on t...

You're on a roll tonight.

Almost everything, depending on how you flesh out "explained by". Not really a discussion I was looking to have, but this has been really helpful, so ...

Points, though, for the most-to-least advanced list. That gave me a chuckle.

We've met, Josh. I am well aware who's on your fantasy baseball roster.

Okay, I think I get it now. You and @"Clarendon" believe that all natural science can be reduced to physics, and that all natural phenomena can be exp...

"Account for"? Meaning what, exactly? That you could deduce the great variety of living things on earth just from studying carbon and hydrogen and oxy...

I'll go further than that. The tragedy of Wittgenstein is what was missing from his toolbox. For instance, an awful lot of Wittgenstein's puzzling ove...

I'm not sure how to proceed here. Against my better judgment, I glanced at the SEP article on emergent properties to see if I could get a handle on th...

I see. I was wondering if you had other examples of deductions that rely on this principle: With other examples, we could compare the case of consciou...

Reminds me of a nice Wittgenstein aphorism:

Uh huh. Is it just consciousness? Are there any other properties of things that, in your judgment, would require strong emergence?

FTFY.

Depending on how far down you go. It's obviously everything, if you get to subatomic particles.

Examples are not only plentiful, I suspect almost everything, living or nonliving, that everyone on this site has ever interacted with has properties ...

@"wonderer1" need not say it; you have presented a textbook example. Read the wiki page he linked. It is educational.

Yes, I think that's right. In a sense, what the formalism of FOL identifies is that being a member of a domain, or not, and satisfying a predicate, or...

You know, Quine's dictum is a funny thing. On the one hand, it seems to treat "there exists" as univocal, when discussions like this seem strongly to ...

Yes, I attach value to mathematics, but that's like saying I attach value to logic or to language or, you know, to thinking. The basis of mathematics ...

You're talking about dogma, I get that, but I think you're missing another possibility. The other possibility is the sort of thing suggested by Mercie...

Gee, I don't know, frank. Isn't that mostly what people do here, no matter what the topic? Or: isn't that the claim of their opponents, should there b...

It was a short post, making a single point, which answers exactly this question. It's also an answer to this, I think.

I know you're not a foundations guy, but I for one would appreciate a rap on the knuckles if I get the basics wrong. (Decades, it's been decades since...

It's the difference between saying (1) here is an approximation of the value that is within some tolerance you have specified (or precision, or signif...

Maybe this is won't help, but "rounding" is something you do when all you need is an approximation. It's not that the adjacent members of a sequence b...

This is really cool, but I'm not convinced. The gist of it is that there is a dominant strategy iff the sequence has a limit. If you countenance class...

The Eye of the Heron is another short, preachy one. I'm not sure how she gets away with it, but I think part of it is that she's so smart, you trust h...

Maybe. I'm still mulling it over. If, as I've suggested earlier, you think of mathematics as the long working out of how to join two sorts of intuitio...

Hyperobjects, that's another hip new member of club.

You left out classes, often in this context called "proper classes," I believe (since the word "class" has many uses), collections that are too big to...

I don't think anyone in this thread had forgotten, or that anyone was confused. Some people reject talking about infinite collections, I think, or rej...

Which some authors prefer, but it means what other authors mean by "countable". So long as we know what we mean, "The natural numbers are violet" woul...