I feel that Einstein eludes classification. He was undoubtedly deeply philosophical, and I think his ideas changed greatly during the course of his li...
This sounds like the sort of thing Stephen Hawking would say, and it is wishful thinking on the part of people that would like to co-opt science in th...
My understanding is that fear of death was present in Ancient Greece, but not because they thought it was non-existence. It was because they thought t...
Excellent opening post. It had never occurred to me that the widespread fear of non-existence is a relatively new phenomenon, but when you put it like...
That was a joke one of my schoolfriends told me back in about 1975. His answer was 'One of its legs is both the same' I found it hilarious no matter h...
Normal is a probability distribution with density function exp(-(x-u)^2/2s^2)/sqrt(2 pi). Normal is a vector pointing away from a plane at right angle...
@"Michael" @"Srap Tasmaner" It occurred to me that there may be a parallel between this puzzle and Nick Bostrom's simulation hypothesis. We are analog...
This looks correct, except that: - on line 1 you have written P => Q => R but it should be P => (Q => R) - on line 8 you have written P => Q => R => R...
Here's some Monty Hall code in R num.trials <- 10000 car.location <- 1 + trunc(3 * runif(num.trials)) # assume contestant chooses door 1 at first firs...
Yes, if you switch you are effectively choosing two doors, which leads to the accepted solution that it is optimal to switch. That's what I said above...
I read it as chatterbears feeling that, if God made it clear that She wanted to punish homosexual acts, chatterbears would conclude that God was immor...
I think that people from majority Muslim countries that had their requests to travel to the US denied by the new administration, on the sole grounds t...
Line 6 looks wrong. It looks like you are trying to close a subproof commenced on line 3 but you can't do that until you've closed the subproof opened...
re the Monty Hall problem If the door you had selected has the car behind it (call this event C) then it is not relevant information. But if your sele...
First let me say that my inclination is to being a halfer, and I argued for that 'cause' on physicsforums last year, so here I'm arguing not against h...
We can assume without loss of generality that she decides before the experiment begins what she is going to guess when awoken. Say she chose heads. Th...
In line 4 it assumes that P(Heads) is 0.5, That would be reasonable for the probability space of an independent observer. But this probability space i...
I don't feel that this changes the situation, because although there are two events at which saying Heads can get Beauty killed, if she decides to say...
A simple, discrete probability space consists of two things - a sample space, which is the set of all possible outcomes, called Events, and probabilit...
I don't know betting terminology, so I may have used the wrong words. What I meant by 'wins $2' is that she gets her own dollar back, plus another dol...
This is Betting Game 2 from this post. My calculation is that expecting that profit is the same as if there were a single $1 bet at even odds that the...
The trouble is that 'today is Monday', for which you have used the label 'M', is not an Event in the Kolmogorov sense of being a well-defined subset o...
One way to attack the question of what 'credence' or 'degree of belief' means is to interpret it in terms of 'what would you bet, if you were Beauty'?...
The trouble is that we cannot use conditional probabilities. A conditional probability P(H|A) is the probability of event H given the probability of e...
Unlike the others, this one is not a misunderstanding of a well-understood and resolved problem. There is an interesting discussion to be had about it...
The bachelor statement is not a direct contradiction. One has to deduce the contradiction by a series of steps, so the only difference between that an...
This statement is false. If we are working with a logic that allows proof by contradiction, it is false because it allows deduction of contradictory p...
My concept is the same as yours. I reached the conclusion a few years ago that the only concept of 'physical' that made sense to me is an epistemologi...
This analogy doesn't fit. Scaffolding does not support the structure being built. Scaffolding is erected to enable the workers to stand safely next to...
What paradox? You have described a mathematical structure. If you think there's a paradox in it that needs to be resolved, you need to explain what it...
That's the fourth dodge. I imagine there are plenty of Star Trek discussion boards and that on those boards, each thread has a point, that is generall...
That is a feeling. The 18th century British invaders of Australia had a similar feeling when they first saw a platypus. When they found that the objec...
Wise advice. Fortunately, it is impossible to sit on it, because it has no tip. The pointy bit just recedes endlessly, never culminating in a spike. T...
No. It's just people trying to put words in Hume's mouth that he never spoke or wrote. If Hume had been arguing against Newton, he would have been wri...
I didn't say that. I wouldn't, because I don't know what it means. The closest I came is to echo your use of the term 'a reality', which I did in the ...
This was answered in post 2, and has been answered again in the post immediately above this. You say you find the response 'circular' but you have not...
I think you might have a misunderstanding of MWI. There is nothing in it, so far as I know, that says anything about a relationship between consciousn...
This reality is apparent to the sensory apparatus of P McP that is in this reality, and the reality in which P McP wins the lottery is apparent to the...
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