I saw this post by Mark Lance over at New APPS and he brought up one of the issues that I have recently been concerned with: What is a logical domain? He said: So our ignorance of our domain has implications for which sentences are true. And if a sentence is true under one interpretation and false under another, it has different meanings under them. And if we don’t know which of these interpretations we […]
Category: epistemology
IF Logic and Cogito Ergo Sum
(∃x∃x) → ∃x Descartes Law If something has informational dependence upon itself, then that thing exists. For example, thinking that you are thinking is informationally self dependent and therefore a thinking thing (you) exists.
Rewrite of Evolution
New theory of evolution! Hooray! Patched a bunch of things together to make a nice story. Fixed the little issue about fitness being circular. Expanded natural selection to apply more generally. Causal structure. Epistemological foundations. ooOoOO0Ooooooo. And it’s good fun. I swear. Epistemology, history of physics, evolution… makes me happy. You should really read it. Download here. [pdf, 304kb]
Against Physics as Ontologically Basic
1. Biology is epistemically independent of physics: Let’s assume that biology is not epistemically independent of physics, i.e. to know any biology we must first know something about physics. However, consider evolution as determined by natural selection and the struggle for survival. We can know about the struggle for survival and natural selection without appealing to physics — just as Darwin did when he created the theory — and hence we can fundamentally understand at […]
Monty Redux
In the Monty Hall Problem a contestant is given a choice between one of three doors, with a fabulous prize behind only one door. After the initial door is selected the host, Monty Hall, opens one of the other doors that does not reveal a prize. Then the contestant is given the option to switch his or her choice to the remaining door, or stick with the original selection. The question is whether it is […]
A Rabbit in a Forest of Mushrooms
Today I was in a shop and a young mother came in with her stroller and a handbag with an image of a sleeping rabbit in a forest of mushrooms. The rabbit had a thought bubble that read, “A rabbit in a forest of mushrooms.” I told her I liked the bag… I don’t think she realized that it had reminded me of the last paragraph of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty: 676. “But even if in […]
The Non-Reducibility & Scientific Explanation Problem
Q: What is a multiple star system? A: More than one star in a non-reducible mutual relationship spinning around each other. Q: How did it begin? A: Well, I guess, the stars were out in space and at some point they became close in proximity. Then their gravitations caused each other to alter their course and become intertwined. Q: How did the gravitations cause the courses of the stars to become intertwined? Gravity does one […]
Of Duckrabbits and Identity
Of late I’ve become increasingly concerned with the meaning of identity. When we say, ‘x = x,’ we don’t mean that the x on the left is exactly identical to the x on the right because the x on the left is just that, on the left, and the x on the right is on the right, not the left. Since equality would be useless without having 2 different objects (try to imagine the use […]
Argument Structure
Basic argument structure goes like this: Premise 1 Premise 2 ———————– Conclusion Knowing how to argue is great, except when someone you disagree with is proving things you don’t like. In that case you have to know how to break your opponent’s argument or provide an argument that they cannot break. First thing that most people do to break an argument is to attack premises (assuming no fallacies are present). To avoid accepting your opponent’s […]
What are Quantifiers?
What are quantifiers? Quantifiers have been thought of things that ‘range over’ a set of objects. For example, if I say There are people with blue eyes this statement can be represented as (with the domain restricted to people): ∃x(Bx). This statement says that there is at least one person with property B, blue eyes. So the ‘Ex’ is doing the work of looking at the people in the domain (all people) and picking out […]