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andrewk

['Member']Joined: November 15, 2015 at 01:00Last active: January 30, 2026 at 02:046 discussions2104 comments

Discussions (6)

Hell

October 01, 2018 at 09:15 115 comments Philosophy of Religion

Pascal's Wager

October 01, 2018 at 08:59 48 comments Philosophy of Religion

Comments

You're perfectly reasonable to reject both ATI1 and FTI1. Rejecting a premise does not require you to have a counterproof, as the truth table response...
February 08, 2025 at 01:02
The problem set-up, which gives the axioms of the system we are working with, does not provide enough information to decide. Hence the statement, for ...
April 24, 2024 at 23:46
Before making such a statement, we'd need to define what we mean by "the ground". Very difficult, because it needs to be a specific point that is infi...
April 24, 2024 at 03:14
Thanks MU. yes, all well here. I rarely post now, leaning towards expressing my musings about the world through music rather than words. But I periodi...
April 24, 2024 at 03:01
Nice thought experiment! There's no paradox in the sense of a contradiction. It just seems weird. When we analyse it closely, we see that all the set-...
April 24, 2024 at 01:24
As formulated, I don't think it proves anything, because it doesn't tell us WHY Ned decided to not go for a walk. Typically, interest zeroes in on the...
June 15, 2023 at 06:00
Having been strongly influenced by Korzybski and by e-prime - the work of his disciple David Bourland - I sympathise strongly with your post. As a mat...
August 25, 2022 at 07:42
Australia does not have compulsory voting. The law only compels you to attend a polling place of your convenience (and unlike in the US, they are very...
July 25, 2022 at 03:12
The OP relates to a point that is important in mathematics, yet rarely taught. In short: an equation, by which I mean two sets of symbols connected by...
January 27, 2022 at 21:51
I presume Deutsch means to restrict 'every physical process' to only processes for which the initial conditions can be encoded in a finite sequence of...
November 27, 2021 at 23:08
The concept of Turing Computability applies to functions between sets of words in a formal language. We cannot apply that concept to the physical univ...
November 26, 2021 at 23:54
Under Newtonian mechanics, perhaps. But not in other imaginable, mathematically consistent universes. I will describe a trajectory with a definite sta...
February 20, 2021 at 23:37
The solution lies in the meaning that we silently assume for the word 'paint', which is to cover an area with a layer of liquid paint with a constant,...
February 18, 2021 at 21:35
For any given initial location X of the ball in a Galton box, there will be some positive number delta(X) such that a measurement of initial condition...
July 09, 2020 at 08:43
Yes, that seems to me to be a fair characterisation of why Godel's incompleteness theorem is no barrier to progress in mathematics in most areas of in...
February 16, 2020 at 01:02
I don't know that I see Cthulhu as a potential deity. But if you want to start a thread to discuss it, that should be great fun!
July 04, 2019 at 12:21
indeed. It seems to me that the people who worry over trying to prove the existence of their particular conception of God are just demonstrating their...
July 04, 2019 at 09:55
I don't accept premises 3, 4 or 5. 3 is contrary to what most cosmologists believe, which is that the universe is infinite. 4 and 5 are assertions of ...
July 04, 2019 at 05:15
I am not aware that Banno or anybody else said it would be redundant. It is logically redundant, and hence redundant if one believes the only use of w...
July 03, 2019 at 22:14
I don't know that many people hate her. 'Pity' is perhaps a more apt word. She was a very troubled woman and seemed to have a lot of unhappiness in he...
June 30, 2019 at 03:11
To whom does it appear as a shining beacon of greatness? To some people in poor countries that would like to be as wealthy as the average American, su...
June 19, 2019 at 23:21
The Consolations of Philosophy, by Alain de Botton. Not to be confused with The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, written about 1500 years earlie...
June 18, 2019 at 01:10
I agree too. Sadly, it looks like you may not be able to get a debate on this point.
June 14, 2019 at 01:56
Cultural appropriation lies on a spectrum. Most people, regardless of their politics, would find acts at one end of the spectrum reprehensible, and wo...
June 13, 2019 at 22:55
I think Terra is referring to the very specific and unusual use of the word 'observation' that is employed in quantum mechanics to refer to what is so...
June 13, 2019 at 22:32
I do not regard them as being essential to science, and they are not part of the way I look at science. I am pretty confident the many religious, spir...
June 13, 2019 at 06:44
Really? Then why is it entitled: "The blind spot of science is the neglect of lived experience" rather than, for instance "The blind spot of reductive...
June 13, 2019 at 04:15
You are assuming without evidence that those who reject the OP are scientifically illiterate. I very much doubt that to be the case. I am scientifical...
June 12, 2019 at 22:53
Then why bother responding with an irrelevancy? Forgive me for being blunt, but it seems necessary. That magazine article makes claims about science t...
June 12, 2019 at 08:14
Did you not read my response? What you wrote has nothing to do with what I wrote. You seem to just dodge or ignore the points made against you and the...
June 12, 2019 at 07:45
'On the contrary'? What does your comment about peer-reviewed journal papers they have written on different subjects have to do with this non-peer-rev...
June 12, 2019 at 07:17
I agree with Bohm on that, and note that widespread could mean as little as 10%. The gulf between a belief being widespread and being universal and a ...
June 11, 2019 at 21:49
Regarding the claims they make in their article - that scientists (without restriction or qualification) believe such and such - they know as close to...
June 11, 2019 at 11:14
It is a blind spot of science in the same way that the inability to provide a good observation of Jupiter is a blind spot of a microscope. What do Gle...
June 11, 2019 at 01:30
They do. The usual way to ground electrical concepts in intuition is to treat potential difference - (PD) measured in volts - and current, measured in...
June 08, 2019 at 04:51
Are you under the impression that there is no such thing as base values - that every value can be deduced from some lower-level value? If that process...
June 07, 2019 at 01:55
It looks like where we differ is about whether death is the ultimate harm. I do not believe it is. I think enforced suffering and trauma can be worse ...
June 07, 2019 at 00:50
Are you actually going to put forward an argument to support your claim that we should force feed people, or are you going to content yourself with on...
June 07, 2019 at 00:18
There is nothing to argue against. You have only made a claim, and your only support for it is the word 'clearly'.
June 07, 2019 at 00:15
I very strongly disagree with this, and it seems many others on here do too, so at least you should concede that the 'clearly' in your claim is inappr...
June 07, 2019 at 00:13
For anybody favouring the forceful intervention route, I suggest you watch the scene in the recent movie Suffragette where a hunger-striking suffraget...
June 06, 2019 at 21:52
What are you suggesting they should have done, that they did not already do? Force-fed her?
June 06, 2019 at 00:31
Since nobody has suggested we do that, I can't see the relevance of this comment. No they don't. In fact the Independent's report is quite explicit ab...
June 06, 2019 at 00:25
Given the source is Fox News, that is way too big an assumption for me! Here is a reported from a news source that has some credibility: https://www.i...
June 05, 2019 at 03:40
I think when Quine refers to a bound variable he is not referring solely to a variable referenced in a formal, symbolic logic expression, but that he ...
June 05, 2019 at 03:32
There is no difference that can be identified in language, because by speaking about entities that are not taken account of, we are taking account of ...
June 04, 2019 at 10:54
It depends on what the objection is. Without the crucial 'bound' qualifier, one might object that Quine's statement means we cannot say that any dinos...
June 04, 2019 at 00:28
I found the following article, about the video in which 11-year old Kaylee gives a lesson on surviving an 'active shooter', mesmerising: https://www.a...
June 03, 2019 at 04:11
I would look towards someone with a bit more positive of a worldview than Schopenhauer. Thomas Paine was who I had in mind, or indeed any of the numbe...
May 20, 2019 at 08:00
Agreed, but I would add that atheistic =/= irreligious (notwithstanding the attempts of some pop atheist celebrities to argue otherwise).
May 20, 2019 at 04:42