Why do you think that? To me the story has always been very simple and has nothing to do with personal identity. It is simply that Thomas does not bel...
How do you reach that conclusion? It doesn't look reachable to me. IIRC we can conclude C: 'Statement A is neither true nor false', but that's very di...
It can't be inferred, but it can be stipulated, ie: defined to the case. You are free to adopt that definition of 'equivalent' if you wish. Is it a us...
Xenophon is a popular member of parliament that is Independent - ie not aligned with either of the two major parties. He has a great knack for using p...
In symbolic logic, we say that two well-formed sentences, call them A1 and A2, are logically equivalent iff A1--> A2 and A2-->A1. 'Well-formed sentenc...
The response: "You believe because you have seen me. Blessed are those who believe without seeing me" You need to put that reaction in context. It was...
'Pussyfoot' is a meaningless concept based on the mistaken notion that people are under some obligation to achieve big things with impacts that reverb...
When Davies says there is an asymmetry, he is thinking of the laws as being prescriptive, rather than descriptive. Prescriptive laws tell processes wh...
A ring? Good choice! It is not possible to mock a ring. At least, I have never seen a ring mocked, and cannot imagine how one would do that. Nor do I ...
The question is what does 'contained in' mean? The question cannot be resolved because in Kant's time - and it was he who was so terribly insistent on...
The prohibition of worshipping another god is a way of insisting on loyalty to the tribe. Different tribes had different gods and, according to the bo...
Yes, when it's a million ravens it becomes almost obvious. I wonder what underlies this. I'm trying to formulate it in terms of statistical hypothesis...
Yes, I can readily accept that statement. What I'm having trouble with is finding a reason to believe the antecedent - that observation of a black rav...
I'm having trouble seeing why a green apple is evidence that (forall x) (not black x) --> (not raven x) Prima facie, it seems to be no evidence at all...
I imagine that to answer this one need only look at how a retiree, who has a reasonably comfortable pension, spends their time. My impression is that ...
Russell interprets (4) in expanded natural language as something like the following: - There exists a person that is currently king of France - If any...
I don't know what 'The F is G' means either. Can you give a concrete example, using natural language predicates that people would understand - like 'i...
(1) says that there is exactly one object (x) that satisfies unary predicate F. (2) says that there exists some unary predicate (X) for which there is...
There seems to be very little acceptance of Marquez's 'Epistemic' argument for conservatism, and I certainly am completely unpersuaded by it. What I d...
Hello Darkaristotle. I think the problem is that the issue you are concerned about was incorrectly described in your original post. In that post you s...
The only people I have ever seen ask what the definition of a word is are children that have encountered a word they do not know, and want to learn ab...
Well in fact, under that criterion, not only does a God exist (you didn't specify which one) but almost every god ever conceived exists, because they ...
If philosophers can't agree on whether a person instantiated in a human body today is the 'same' person as the one that was instantiated in that body ...
Slavery. This post used to be much longer, until I saw that unenlightened and csal have already eloquently covered this obvious test case. So all that...
I don't regard Intelligent Design as a credible argument, but I find Amio's argument unconvincing. She sets herself too hard a burden of proof by conc...
Yes, I wondered about Fire, and the wheel (there's also Sliced Bread, as in 'the best thing since...'). Really by pencil and paper I mean writing, by ...
If I'm understanding you correctly, you're surmising that the way that an algorithm is implemented matters to the outcome, as well as the abstract nat...
This is a point in which I'm particularly interested. I wonder a great deal about whether people are generally happier now than they were say 150 year...
Yes. In fact I often rely on my romantic partner to know when to shower, if I haven't had one for several days. She has a more sensitive olfactory sen...
Quite right, they are not the same uncertainty and, as far as I know, Heisenberg had nothing to do with the time-energy relation. The explanation of t...
That's fine. I am sympathetic to everything you report him as saying there, and it's a widely held interpretation. All I was concerned about was wheth...
Thank you, that clarifies it nicely. Given that it's about the 'measurement problem', the references to uncertainty will have nothing to do with the H...
Good question. The rough answer is that it 'operates on' kets. A more mathematically pure answer is that the name 'Hermitian operator' is simply a for...
I like your questions. This one touches upon an important issue. When we say there is a unique ket for each physical state, we are saying that the rel...
The sentence is way too vague to be considered a claim. 'Uncertainty' could mean any of several very different things, each of which involves a comple...
Brilliant pick-up MU! I love it. I'd never noticed it before, as I only skimmed the rest of the chapter once I'd worked through the derivation of the ...
Yes, I have no idea what he is saying, let alone what he meant to say. I am suspicious of all prose presentations of QM. QM is mathematics and needs t...
I expect he just expressed himself poorly - not an unusual occurrence for scientists trying to communicate to a non-scientific audience. The Uncertain...
Even if we could make enough measurements simultaneously to know the exact state of a system, it would not dispel uncertainty. It is a common misconce...
I don't think you made a mistake. Although wikipedia lists 'normative moral relativism' as one of three categories of moral relativism, I have never e...
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me that if the quantum computer can contain 2^1000 bits of information, and it is in the observable (from...
That's an interesting approach. I don't share it, but it's fascinating to me because it's like the inverse of Presentism. Presentism says that the onl...
We have current raw experiences. I feel warm. My back is sore. I would call the example of a tree an interpretation of an experience. Dan Robinson, in...
I don't think we can be mistaken about our current experiences, but we can be mistaken about past ones. That is, we can believe we had a past experien...
If the quantum computer is in the visible universe, why would the answer to the first not be more than the answer to the second? (assuming they are co...
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