On this day in 1277 Étienne (Stephen) Tempier, bishop of Paris, declared that God could have made worlds other than this one, perhaps the first time anyone publicly argued for possible worlds.
Category: science
An Introduction to the Game Theoretic Semantics view of Scientific Theory
What is a scientific theory? In an abstract sense, a scientific theory is a group of statements about the world. For instance the Special Theory of Relativity has, “The speed of light in a vacuum is invariant,” as a core statement, among others, about the world. This statement is scientific because, in part, it is meant to hold in a ‘law-like’ fashion: it holds across time, space and observer. The Popperian view is that we […]
You think this has nothing to do with you.
Philosophy is disparaged often enough, and by people who ought to know better. As of late, every time this happens I think of this scene — but with the text (something like) below….. Oh. Okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your desk and you select, I don’t know, some statistical mathematical model, for instance, because you’re trying to show the world that you take science seriously […]
On Matthen’s Intelligibility Argument
Mohan Matthen’s post Teleology in Big Systems brought up two options explaining how someone — Tom Nagel in Mind and Cosmos — would choose a teleological explanation over a naturalistic one. The first, below, got me thinking: First, he might be saying that though it is physically possible (by a fluke series of mutations, for example) for mentality to have come about, it would be better explained by teleology. (Let’s call this the “intelligibility” argument.) […]
Aether Discontinuity
Assume space-time is quantized. This would mean that space-time is broken up into discrete bits. It then follows that time is broken up into discrete bits. This disagrees with basic experience: we can start counting time at any arbitrary point. “Now” could be any time whatsoever. Moreover, we run our physical experiments at any given point; we don’t have to wait to start our clocks. But what if our ability to run experiments at any […]
Яandom Logic
If we try to represent tossing a coin or a die, or picking a card out of a deck at random, in logic, how should we do it? Tossing a coin might look like: Toss(coin) → (Heads or Tails) Tossing a die might be: Toss(die) → (1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6) Picking a card: Pick(52 card deck) → (1♣ or 2♣ or … or k♥) This begs asking, do […]
Book Review: The Genial Gene
The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness by Joan Roughgarden In The Genial Gene Joan Roughgarden seeks to replace the competitive understanding of evolution, known as sexual selection, with a cooperative one. The first sentence of her book reads, “This book is about whether selfishness and individuality, rather than kindness and cooperation, are basic to biological nature” (p. 1). So what is the argument? Taking this first line, she wants to conclude something about basic biological […]
Working Hard on Special Biological Relativity
I’ve been working hard on Special Biological Relativity and it is taking up most of my blogging energy. However, I do have some fun results: Define Biological Energy as the ability to do work, the ability to change the environment. Then Fitness can be related to Energy because the higher the fitness the greater the ability to change the environment. E ∝ f If we consider an organism that lives in a place with infinite resources […]
Occam’s Razor and Entropy
I was trying to understand Occam’s Razor, specifically I wanted to know its justification. There are posts over at Wikipedia and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy worth looking at, but neither left me satisfied. Instead, I came up with “Death Implies Economy”. What this means is that we are fundamentally limited in time and resources, and hence we cannot afford to waste what little we have on unnecessary complication. DIE is a metaphysical justification of […]
Deriving Natural Selection = Fitness × Acceleration
As you can see from my previous post, I now have postulated a direct relation between Natural Selection and Fitness (N.S.=F.×A.). This relation follows from the theory. The short short short version of the theory is this general postulate: one organism’s traits are another’s environment and vice versa. Hence all competition can be viewed as environmental phenomena. This gives Natural Selection as a result of Fitness and an environmental factor, which I refer to as […]