Michael

My sister's moving there in August. And one brother's in Australia with another travelling the world on a cruise ship. I'm feeling wallowsome.

Yes, that's what's ruining the world.

Trump responds to leaked private communications between a foreign government and their ambassador by publicly insulting the ambassador and publicly in...

3. Going to uni is great for meeting people. Classes, halls, social activities, etc. It’s so much easier than when just a worker. This was the only th...

There's a difference between "God did it" and "using this collection of mathematical models we can correctly predict the behaviour of all physical phe...

Breaking Bad Appreciation Day.

I’m saying that America sucks and Britain is objectively better in every measure including the awesomeness of its citizens.

Actually, independence was declared by a vote in Congress on 2nd July and most historians believe that the Declaration of Independence wasn't signed u...

Put out what story? The shoes were announced June 24th. As best as I can tell Kaepernick contacted them after this date to complain, after which they ...

Some people are offended by a flag that was co-opted by racists, some people are offended by the pulling of a product that displays a flag that is mos...

The automated spam filter is flagging your post as spam and so it must be manually approved before appearing, which I've done so. Apologies for that.

Blaster auto aim.

It's the first time I've been aware that it's been on. Is it being marketed more than it used to or have I just been blind?

Would eating it be better? Smoking won't be doing your lungs any favours.

:brow:

You should check out Lojban.

I'll show up more often then.

You called?

Look into epistemic closure.

I didn't say they mean the same thing. I'm saying that if you believe that X because Y then you (also) believe X (and believe Y).

Yes it does. It just doesn’t account for all my beliefs. I might have lots of beliefs related to the issue. She’s moving to London because she has a n...

Beliefs have propositional content. I believe that (is true). See the SEP article on belief:

Beliefs aren't just some single monolithic thing that contain all the various avenues of reasoning such that if any one part is false then everything ...

I don’t believe that she’s married to someone else, I believe that she’s married to a postman. And in my other example I believe that you will punch m...

Try posting the entire comment. I’ll Do it for you: I’m asking you (somewhat rhetorically) if the argument is valid. I’m not asserting that both premi...

How does thar address my previous comment?

I haven’t said that. I’ve said that the argument is valid, not that the premises are true.

What self-contradiction? It’s a straightforward valid syllogism.

I believe X because I believe Y. Y is one belief, X is a second belief. Again, basic stuff.

I said that it’s valid, not that it’s sound. Valid arguments can have false premises. This is really basic stuff, creative.

No, it’s false because Mary isn’t married to me. My belief that you will punch me is true.

You seem to be saying that if I believe X because I believe Y then I don't really believe X, only Y, and that if Y is false then there is no true beli...

That's the false belief. But there’s also the true belief that Mary is married to a postman.

This is a Gettier example. Mary is a con-woman and married to someone else - who happens to be a postman.

So I have two beliefs. One is true and one is false.

So if I believe that I am a postman and if I believe that Mary is my wife then I don’t believe that Mary is married to a postman?

That doesn’t answer my question. Is the argument valid?

I think the issue with the Doomsday argument is its claim that each of us is equally likely to find ourselves at any position n of the total populatio...

Did you write this before the report came out that Trump ordered strikes (before cancelling)?

That's not right. The exact wording (from the Wikipedia article) is: "Denoting by N the total number of humans who were ever or will ever be born, the...

This seems backwards. These arguments are being used to suggest how probable the above scenarios are; e.g. the Doomsday reasoning is used to assign a ...

The Doomsday argument only works because we have information about the past (the number of people who have already lived) whereas in your analogy we d...

Here's a script to test the above: <?php $max = 0; $min = 0; for ($i = 1, $g = 100000; $i <= $g; ++$i) { $n = mt_rand(1, 100000); $r = mt_rand(1, $n);...

Only if the date of someone's birth is chosen at random, but it isn't as I explained here. I couldn't have been born in China 1,000 years ago. I could...

Although actually it isn't even what I said earlier. It's just that your argument is invalid. Premise 1: If you’re plucked out of a history that ends ...

It's what I said here.

Your conclusion doesn't follow.

The issue with the puzzle is that we're not disembodied souls that are randomly placed in one of any of the human bodies which will ever live. I just ...

It's true that we can only calculate the probabilities if we know the distribution, but the questions being posed in this discussion are in the form "...