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Count Timothy von Icarus

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I never said all historical arguments can be justified in this way, and certainly not that they're all good. You can use any method to make bad argume...
July 09, 2023 at 10:48
There's plenty of reasons to go into the history of ideas. Off the top of my head: It's a good way to rebut appeals to contemporary authority or appea...
July 09, 2023 at 02:47
You don't need to presuppose time, or strictly four dimensions. I mentioned Floridi's maximally portable ontology thinking of just this objection, but...
July 09, 2023 at 01:03
Yes, because there is a connection. Take the normal argument for Fine Tuning. If the constants of our universe and its initial entropy are such that t...
July 09, 2023 at 00:47
I really don't see how that follows. If the universe develops teleologically why does that entail that God is guided by the same goals? I don't even s...
July 08, 2023 at 22:28
ProPublica has had pretty good coverage of wage theft and labor issues in general. Their finding that US employers steal more money from employees eac...
July 07, 2023 at 15:35
Absolutely. That's why the pivot is to just think in terms of all the possible coherent systems. There isn't one set of immutable axioms but rather a ...
July 05, 2023 at 16:21
Exactly. However, the problem of whether or not consciousness can actually be fit into such a physicalist model, which is something such models need t...
July 05, 2023 at 00:13
Sure, computation has been operationally defined since Turing's "On Computable Numbers With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem," and Church's ...
July 04, 2023 at 23:41
Quite a few pancomputationalists also seem to embrace ontic structural realism, that the universe is the mathematical structure describing it, so I'm ...
July 04, 2023 at 18:09
I feel like Platonism is so heavily ingrained in mathematics that even those trying to run from it can find themselves simply lapsing into it from ano...
July 04, 2023 at 17:52
I meant to respond to this when the thread first came out because I am working on a different sort of argument from reason. I do not think this argume...
July 04, 2023 at 16:30
Wagner is just one of the "private militaries" that exist within Russia. There are actually a large number of "volunteer," forces that are not integra...
June 27, 2023 at 11:06
Maybe. Or maybe he did receive support? The air assets brought against Wagner were not considerable, rotary wing craft held at low levels. It would be...
June 26, 2023 at 20:28
The coup was always stoppable if it was just Wagner (and a fraction of Wagner at that). It's just that it was quite unclear if it was stoppable before...
June 26, 2023 at 13:57
Right, I didn't mean RQM has direct relevance to this particular issue; IMO that is explained quite well by the arguments laid out in the quotes in my...
June 25, 2023 at 14:22
There is an argument to be made that you cannot deprive the sibling of a politician of their liberties, but I don't think this precludes a law where a...
June 25, 2023 at 14:09
I find it hilarious how both parties will make endless hay over intimations of corruption and yet, while there is common ground on this issue, they re...
June 25, 2023 at 12:52
Exactly, I was just assuming he might have allies in the MOD who he knew would jump in if he made it that far and that was part of the decision-making...
June 25, 2023 at 01:37
Well, he's had centuries of help. Serfs, the vast majority of the population, didn't get their freedom until around the time the US ended slavery and ...
June 25, 2023 at 01:11
Yeah, although he faces a tough choice. He needs to empower competent leaders to turn the war around and stop the problems that led to this, but any s...
June 24, 2023 at 22:44
Unclear. Prig ruling Russia as a warlord is in some ways potentially scarier than Putin, but doesn't seem like a likely final outcome even if Putin is...
June 24, 2023 at 16:08
From the pics it looks like all Rosgvardiya; essentially police. Outside of parking vehicles on the road they seem to have been unwilling to engage so...
June 24, 2023 at 15:56
Seems that is the plan. I figured they would stay in Rostov but they are already halfway there and have only faced resistance from the air. This hasn'...
June 24, 2023 at 14:16
And to think, everyone made fun of Kojima saying the plot of Metal Gear Solid was unrealistic...
June 24, 2023 at 13:44
Yes, but they punished protestors by conscripting them to the front, so it seems the lesson wasn't totally learned Not so much this time though. His p...
June 24, 2023 at 13:42
BTW, Relational Quantum Mechanics handles this sort of "paradox" quite well, even if we consider that any full theory must deal with gravity and atten...
June 24, 2023 at 12:30
lol, I guess I was right about Putin speed running the Russian Revolution. Before this all blew up, I did find myself asking: how were the overwhelmin...
June 24, 2023 at 12:03
I don't think it's a paradox at all. It's only a paradox if one assumes the absolute Newtonian serial time must exist. It's consistent with local beco...
June 23, 2023 at 15:54
"Information" is very tough term because it is defined loads of different ways. I suppose here I should have used "Kolmogorov Complexity," in every in...
June 23, 2023 at 12:18
This seems somewhat related to the (seemingly) paradoxical fact that you can increase the algorithmic complexity of a set by removing elements. For ex...
June 20, 2023 at 17:30
Lots of good points here, I'll try to get to them all eventually. I thought it might be most immediately applicable to physics. The claim that the alg...
June 20, 2023 at 16:57
That's a tough question. Religion does attempt to explain the transcendent, and that is where religious inquiry tends to focus today, but historically...
May 18, 2023 at 07:47
You are correct. Although both terms are used, more so "natural selection," in terms of initial domestication, and "selective breeding," in terms of o...
May 13, 2023 at 13:03
That intentionality effects genetic selection. If dog breeding isn't natural selection than either humans are supernatural, magic, or all mutualism, p...
May 12, 2023 at 23:19
Yes, that is exactly the sort of analogy I have in mind. Attractors have been invoked as a more rigorous description of the mechanism of apparent "nat...
May 12, 2023 at 10:48
Yes to the latter question. This isn't just a supposition of the Enlightenment, but a core component of ancient and medieval philosophy. For Aristotle...
May 11, 2023 at 14:28
Religion certainly served pragmatic functions in many societies. It can serve to legitimize the state (e.g., the deification of Roman emperors), it ca...
May 11, 2023 at 11:26
It's a process that appears to have occured in many cycles. You have evidence of a process of self-domestication within other members of the homo genu...
May 10, 2023 at 15:07
I guess I should caveat that claim by pointing out the scientism actually seeym to have a few sectarian rifts itself, and the common argument to hurl ...
May 10, 2023 at 13:35
I think you are right, but only half right. Philosophy helps tear down dogmas, but it also helps construct and sustain dogmas. Opposite any critical p...
May 10, 2023 at 11:19
I'm not quite sure what you mean here? I can't prove the antecedent here. If I could, I'd be out collecting my Nobel Prize for the "theory of everythi...
May 08, 2023 at 20:18
When ascetic mystics starve themselves to death looking for the truth they are doing it for advantage? When Augustine left his upper class profession,...
May 07, 2023 at 02:36
The concept of self-organization might interest you. In this book, a theoretical physicist looks into the cosmology of Jacob Boehme. He makes the argu...
May 06, 2023 at 17:21
"All of Christianity is my interpretation of Scripture," is, while common in Christianity itself, not particularly well justified. Saint Augustine's "...
May 06, 2023 at 16:09
On another note: Hume's assumption that people think the future will be like the past because, in prior cases the future has indeed been like the past...
May 06, 2023 at 15:38
Sure, but as to whether these laws actually describe our world is another question entirely. One good example is Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe H...
May 06, 2023 at 14:08
I'm not sure if I made my point clear. I'm not saying "I believe the world progresses based on logical entailments." I'm saying that, IF this was true...
May 06, 2023 at 13:13
What would be the point? If I give you my answer now, and you accept it as you read it, what grounds do you have for thinking it will still hold in a ...
May 05, 2023 at 10:58
Would this be religious pluralism? To quote Wikipedia: "Religious pluralism holds that various world religions are limited by their distinctive histor...
May 05, 2023 at 00:56