Comments

  • How does probability theory affect our ideas of determinism?


    Super determinism was what I was referring to in my original post.

    Yes, you can preserve determinism with the many worlds interpretation, but although I respect that you have a very different view, the reason why I didn't even think of it when I wrote my original post, is that I don't take it seriously.
  • How does probability theory affect our ideas of determinism?


    I doubt I fully understood what you just wrote. "QM without collapse." - Are you referring to the many worlds interpretation?
  • How does probability theory affect our ideas of determinism?


    Ok. Then I misinterpreted what you originally wrote.
  • How does probability theory affect our ideas of determinism?


    "If you are saying that the state of the universe, together with the laws of nature, fix some event with only 50% probability"

    It may fix an event with 50% probability from the perspective of a conscious observer, but still be determined by the universe itself. It's the one refuge for determinism after quantum mechanics. The Aspect experiment ruled out hidden variables, but you may still maintain that whatever happens is determined, just not predictable with any information, hidden or not.
  • If there was an objective meaning of life.
    Acquiring insight is the main purpose of life. And if you need a reputable source for that, you only need to look at my profile.
  • What is intelligence and what does having a high IQ mean?
    In order to even suggest that IQ tests measure intelligence, one must define intelligence as the ability to learn, rather than the ability to problem solve. Someone can learn well throughout their entire lives without being very creative, especially when they're coached through the learning process in an educational system. To be a good problem solver, however, you need to be creative, and IQ tests do not measure creativity.
  • Atheism is far older than Christianity
    "Why didn't humans stop at atheism? What went wrong?"

    There is an obvious distincition between not believing in a deity and not being religious. As unstrustworthy as wikipedia may be, here is its definition of religion:

    "Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements."

    If declaring oneself as an atheist means not believing in deities, metpahysics, magical thinking, superstition, or anything in that category,, then it might be that the prehistoric world didn't inhabit a single atheist.

    If, however, being an atheist only means that one doesn't believe in deities, which is the standard definition, then it's fully possible to be religious and an atheist at the same time.

    So instead of asking why humanity didn't stop at atheism instead of developing Christianity, it's rather a question of why not stop at earlier forms of religion. -But I can't see how Christianity was a step backwards in that sense.
  • Is Kant justified in positing the existence of the noumenal world?


    As Bertrand Russell pointed out in "Problems of philosophy", the induction principle is an example of synthetic knowledge a priori.
  • Arguments for discrete time
    Assumption 1:

    Time is discrete.

    From this follows that space must be discrete, where one unit of space equals one unit of time multiplied with the speed of light.

    Assumption 2: Every physical process can be expressed mathematically.

    Then it follows:

    The logical framework that underpins a theory of everything must be based on natural numbers. This means, by the incompleteness theorem, that this system cannot be complete and consistent at the same time. Meaning, there are two options:

    There exists phenomena in this universe that cannot be described by a theory of everything,

    or

    the theory of everything must produce false predictions.

    Or, in other words, a theory of everything for such a universe cannot exist.
  • Monism
    One way to narrow down what matter is, is that is has the property of existing independent of any individual's consciousness, which allows us to make a distinction between the external and introspective world. My conscious experience of an emotion doesn't exist independently from my consciousness, but the physical processes in the brain that are related to this emotion, do.

    More simply put, stating that everything is matter isn't the same as stating that everything relates to matter one way or another.