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andrewk

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I cannot know what the difference is, as I have never been a bird, and have only ever been one human out of many billions. I see no reason to suppose ...
October 07, 2018 at 21:58
I don't know what you mean by a 'determined reason'. How does that differ from an ordinary reason? I am also don't see any reason to suppose that peop...
October 07, 2018 at 21:50
I can't see the deception in the behaviours described. To say there is deception is to say that there is an objective state of affairs that the deceiv...
October 07, 2018 at 21:30
@"Pierre-Normand" I've thought some more about why I have been defending The First Law's ability to prevent bifurcation when looking backwards in time...
October 07, 2018 at 21:23
Having reflected a bit, I don't think I'm motivated to defend Newton's laws against suggestions that they don't always allow unambiguous projection in...
October 07, 2018 at 07:41
In that case the path that involves the ball having always been at the top of the dome will not be consistent, under the 2nd law, with the current sta...
October 07, 2018 at 05:30
In that case it is impossible for the ball to have rolled up the dome, because there is nothing in the system that could have given it the necessary u...
October 07, 2018 at 05:07
Why do you think that? You asked a question about the future and I replied about the future. I didn't say anything about the past in that latest reply...
October 07, 2018 at 04:28
Yes. Say it reaches the apex at time t2. Then there is a path compatible with the 2nd law in which it remains there for the period [t2,t2+h) for any h...
October 07, 2018 at 03:53
My expanded first law prohibits the ball rolling down (a solution not in U) because there exists a solution in U, ie in which it does not roll down, a...
October 07, 2018 at 02:23
I'm not sure I understand the question. The above law would require that a ball sitting stationary exactly on top of the dome would not roll down. The...
October 07, 2018 at 01:39
Hmm. I think removing backward-looking bifurcations would necessitate a further lengthening of the law statement. Perhaps something like this: 'Let P ...
October 07, 2018 at 01:11
What is the difference between a cause and effect, if not their ordering in time? A common attempt to remove temporal ordering from the relationship, ...
October 06, 2018 at 23:21
Thinking about this a bit more, they don't need to be separate economies to raise challenging questions. Say Lakshmi can produce wedding cakes or fune...
October 06, 2018 at 21:56
Ah, that makes more sense. I think I'd approach it this way: First we observe that Newton's laws were aimed at explaining real phenomena and so did no...
October 06, 2018 at 09:15
I got a bit lost here. Newton's third law is that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. I can't see how that law is relevant to th...
October 06, 2018 at 08:53
True. I realised that what I wrote above, as powers of (t-T), is not actually the Jounce, Jerk etc but rather the higher derivatives of the radial coo...
October 06, 2018 at 05:49
I suppose if we send it sliding up with exactly the correct initial velocity, and no touching it after we release it, all higher derivatives of displa...
October 06, 2018 at 05:01
The curve is constructed so that the displacement function is a constant multiple of (t-T)^4 for t>=T. The same would work for a displacement function...
October 06, 2018 at 04:37
I don't often read external sources. But I trust your recommendation, so I had a look. It's an interesting setup. What is not immediately apparent in ...
October 06, 2018 at 04:23
OK. I don't find assigning causality a productive exercise, so I'll leave the field to those that do.
October 06, 2018 at 03:53
That is my view. The ball fell because when it was released by whatever was holding it on the apex, its centre of mass was not exactly above the point...
October 06, 2018 at 02:03
You're right. I thought exactly that as I wrote it and then - arrogantly - thought 'nah, this is a philosophy forum, not a finance one - nobody will p...
October 05, 2018 at 22:11
I have only read part of this, and even that has raised some interesting questions for me. (1). Marx talks about divergence of price from value. Does ...
October 04, 2018 at 22:46
: It is standard practice in online forums that aspire to a certain level of depth to merge discussions that are similar. This happens all the time on...
October 04, 2018 at 10:26
I can think of at least two real life examples of this. 1. Ella Enchanted, who is under a spell that forces her to do whatever anybody commands her to...
October 03, 2018 at 23:04
In: Hell  — view comment
October 01, 2018 at 09:18
October 01, 2018 at 08:58
I think the necessary characteristics for an effective currency are: 1. supply is limited but not TOO limited; 2. general agreement of the society tha...
October 01, 2018 at 06:43
The person that wrote the article sounds like a fanatical crank. Their arguments are facile, disingenuous and not worth the trouble of rebutting. I su...
October 01, 2018 at 02:30
This thread has been restored from the inadvertent closure that happened to it. Anybody that wants to post in it should now find it possible to do so.
October 01, 2018 at 02:08
The thread 'do you believe in the actually infinite', which I inadvertently closed, has now been restored, and is in the Metaphysics sub-forum at the ...
September 30, 2018 at 22:03
This discussion was merged into Do you believe in the Actually Infinite?
September 30, 2018 at 11:49
Yes I do have the view that it rarely ever convinces anybody. I also agree that that is generally the case when people come to a discussion with entre...
September 30, 2018 at 07:25
Only if one is curious about that, which seems to bring things back to Mariner's point about curiosity. Is that the purpose of the thread - that you a...
September 30, 2018 at 06:28
Pascal's wager reminds me of the lovely old joke about the Irishman who lay dying, and a priest came up to give him the last rites. The priest asked '...
September 30, 2018 at 01:50
I expect so, but do you expect it to ever convince anybody to change their view, other than the occasional rare exception? You sound, from the rest of...
September 30, 2018 at 01:43
What details? I'm simply asking whether you are telling us something about yourself - which is how the OP reads - or making a judgement on anybody tha...
September 30, 2018 at 01:35
For any opinion one holds, be it ever so little grounded in reflection, one can say the same about people who don't share it. So the statement doesn't...
September 30, 2018 at 01:23
I see no reason to criticise your position, because in the OP, you do not suggest that people are mistaken if they have a different position. Taken li...
September 29, 2018 at 05:10
You have discovered my personal religion. It is based on the following rules. 1. Everything that moderates must be moderated, unless it's the special ...
September 26, 2018 at 09:32
You have defined a new term in relation to sets - 'fully defined'. What then?
September 26, 2018 at 09:28
This works for a logical theory in which the only objects in the domain of discourse are natural numbers. In that case, we can just use the following ...
September 26, 2018 at 03:32
One can deduce a contradiction from the assertion that a Riemannian manifold can have a square circle drawn upon it. My point is that it is not a cont...
September 26, 2018 at 02:33
Yes, only somebody that does not understand mathematics or logic could believe there are contradictions. It is a matter of personal taste whether one ...
September 26, 2018 at 02:25
That is not the mathematical definition of a set. The mathematical definition of a set is that it obeys the axioms of the set theory in which we are w...
September 25, 2018 at 22:37
A square circle. It is not, as some think, a contradiction in terms because a circle is defined as the set of all points on a two-dimensional surface ...
September 25, 2018 at 08:09
Somebody above (I forget who) said mathematics is not clear about what 'infinite' or 'infinity' means. In a sense that's true. The symbol: \infty whic...
September 25, 2018 at 05:00
To be more precise, because the use of ellipsis can sometimes create ambiguity: \sum_{j=0}^\infty 2^{-j}=2 or, for the benefit of those that have an a...
September 25, 2018 at 04:51
Well that's a definition of 'actual infinite' that is clear and understandable. One can actually work with a definition like that. I suspect however, ...
September 21, 2018 at 08:47