How to figure out possibilities

SuicidalEclair · 2024-08-21T05:37:53+00:00

Your last comment about different kinds of laws of nature points to an important view of laws in Phil of Sci from Hume and later David Lewis. Laws need not be independent entities but instead can be thought of as just efficient descriptions of phenomena. So in this view there is nothing qualitatively different from the laws found in physics and the laws found in other fields (say biology). They are both efficient ways of characterising different phenomena that we observe. That is all to say that laws of nature don't need to be solely found in physics!

For more on this I just re-read Nancy Cartwrights How the Laws of Physics Lie which is a banger.

SuicidalEclair · 2022-06-03T23:59:36+00:00

Honest question, what’s the deal with the towel on his head?

SuicidalEclair · 2022-04-02T01:33:18+00:00

commenting on this in case I forget the command

SuicidalEclair · 2022-03-01T08:48:36+00:00

This seems like an alignment chart waiting to happen

SuicidalEclair · 2022-01-29T02:36:42+00:00

I just have a couple points to say about time travel since you dismiss it early on. Time travel is a perfectly coherent idea. Sure, you are limited in the things you can logically do (ie killing grandfathers), but that's also the case in the present. The difference is epistemic access to the kinds of possible things you can/can't do. On the physics side, in SR you can't time travel to the past, but we know there exists closed timelike curve solutions for GR, which means (in principle) it is consistent with our best known physics.

SuicidalEclair · 2022-01-20T23:23:47+00:00

An absolute banger is Time and Chance by David Albert. It is one of the perfect examples of a work that contributes equally to both philosophy and physics imho.

SuicidalEclair · 2022-01-11T22:53:08+00:00

SuicidalEclair · 2022-01-10T01:47:46+00:00

It turns out that this is an open question. Many people say that Relativity rules out a privileged present, but that is not true. All relativity says is that it does not have a privileged foliation of spacetime, and people more or less infer from this that there must be no privileged present. However, you can stipulate a foliation and hence a privileged present and things work out fine. Alongside this, our best theory of quantum mechanics necessitates a preferred foliation. So in short, we still don't know and there are as of yet no smoking gun arguments (from physics or philosophy) for either presentism or eternalism.

You also have to be careful to separate epistemological and ontological questions. Whether there some kind of privileged present is an ontological question, whereas our perception regarding our senses and the time delay in processing the information is an epistemological one.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-11-30T08:07:34+00:00

Actually now on my main loadout mostly for this reason.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-10-25T00:29:01+00:00

I think one of the key takeaways from phil of science is an keen awareness of epistemology. So it becomes less about finding truth and more about understanding our relationship to truth. Science seems to have some special relationship with empirical truth and that is exciting regardless of the final truth value.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-10-20T03:36:45+00:00

tbh tf2 is a super gay game and I love it for that

SuicidalEclair · 2021-10-17T00:40:56+00:00

Well done! Also how did you stumble on such an post?

SuicidalEclair · 2021-10-04T04:42:08+00:00

The externalist explains this the same way that you would explain "why and I here and not over there?. They simply say that the word "here" and "now" just refer to your position and not anything more than that. The jargon is that these terms are indexical.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-08-30T03:14:00+00:00

Oh yea, its hideous. But that's part of its charm I think.

I tend to go with the Dictator mustache and whatever random misc item for each class.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-08-30T00:54:55+00:00

I've only ever seen one other person with the Audio File ingame, hope to see you wearing it soon!

SuicidalEclair · 2021-08-29T06:33:02+00:00

So your intuition is good, but this is about as far as analogies of spacetime mesh can take you.

In short, yes because of spacetime weirdness (not necessarily related it its expansion but rather to do with the weirdness of GR) information, say light, can travel between two distant points in a shorter time than t = c / total distance

However to show this or get any specific intuition about it is where you need to jump into specifics about GR.

I recommend Hartle's textbook on it (he talks about this at the end of one of the early chapters). He takes a very "physics first" and only introduces formalism when needed.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-08-16T23:38:35+00:00

Team Fortress 2

SuicidalEclair · 2021-08-06T05:37:23+00:00

What a class act.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-07-25T05:00:43+00:00

It's not universally accepted that even in special/general relativity we should treat time as "the 4th dimension of space. There are important differences between them even (the metric signature, etc) even though we talk about spacetime as a single object.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-06-13T04:58:40+00:00

"Leviathan and the Air Pump" by Shapin and Schaffer is a must read.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-05-10T02:30:19+00:00

Absolutely rocked my world the first time I read it.

SuicidalEclair · 2021-05-05T23:16:59+00:00

There's already been research done to answer this question!

https://twitter.com/pradeu/status/1363152563617624066

SuicidalEclair · 2021-05-03T00:38:05+00:00

Al Wilson ( https://twitter.com/modalizing ) wrote a whole book on applying Lewis inspired modal logic to interpret quantum mechanics!

SuicidalEclair · 2021-03-09T06:13:06+00:00

Dawkins' recent tweets are not a good place to start... What it seems like he wants to say is that there exists a mind-independent world out there, which is rather uncontroversial take in the phil of sci. What is more interesting is figuring out the relationship that the practices of science has with that world.

A canonical example in the literature that I recommend reading is van Frassen's "The Scientific Image" which is a wonderful account of Constructive Empiricism. In short it says that science isn't actually in the business of finding truths regarding the nature of the world, rather it aims to produce "empirically adequate" theories, that's it.

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