: Oh, certainly...what I'm referring to here is the idea
: that QM shows human consciousness directly influencing
: the world, via experiments such as that described by
: Forrest. A sort of "there is an external world,
: but it's not mind-independent" idea. That, I
: think is unfounded.
Yeah, you won't catch me arguing in that direction.
: I don't really know. I suppose I think that the mental
: world is an expression of certain interactions in the
: physical world. Each mental state is an observation of
: the physical system the interactions within which
: evoke that state. Or something. Or something.
I'm a (fair weather) materialist (everthing that exists is physical), and think that in some way the mental has to be a subset of the physical. That's an assumption, of course, but I'd call it a forced move. The apparent physical causes of mental illness for example, are too regular to be coincidence. And I hold that the physical world is closed wrt causation. Ergo....
: Never read any Kant outside of the World Book article,
: but if you'd care to provide a summary, I'll gladly
: try to follow along.
The first thing that popped up on google was this:
http://www.xrefer.com/entry/551291
Which seemed decent at first pass. The source is Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which is not a fun read overall, but the section on the antinomies is great and is highly recommended. He puts forward arguments for both sides of the four antinomies, and his resolution is a real via media. As Quine says at that url above, it's a repudiation of tradition. If that web page stirs your interest, I suggest checking out the antinomies in Kant. It's somewhere in the middle of the text as I remember. Each one is only a few pages long, and is readable (as opposed to much of the text).
Since reading it, that's been my method for dealing with apparent paradoxes. The nature of substance, for example.
: Russell I haven't read in a few years (my grandfather's a
: philosophy professor, so I was somewhat better-versed
: in this stuff when I lived with him), but I believe he
: arrived at that conclusion after attempting to work
: out his perception-based scientific theory. If you've
: read all that and don't see it anywhere, then I'm just
: pulling it out of my ass.
I'm not a Russell expert by far. I can't imagine having read all of Russell--what a body of work!
By the way, where does you grandfather teach? What's his name? I was in a PhD program in philosophy for a few years (Rutgers), and escaped with a Masters.
: As for the question of simplicity--well, I'd treat it as
: analogous to, say, starting with a polynomial and then
: converting it into a factored form. The second form
: contains more terms, but it still makes many
: calculations much much easier. Simplicity is dependent
: both on the number of entities and on the ease of
: calculations involving them.
It's also dependent on constraints of the language chosen to express the idea. Ever notice how something can be easy to say in, say, English and difficult in French? I remember learning the French word 'selon', which means 'according to', and found 'selon' so much simpler and elegant that I used it in taking notes for classes, otherwise writing in English. Similarly for mathematics. What's a complicated expression is due in part to convention.
: Care to expound upon that strong prima facie case?
:-) I can explain why the sun rises each morning. You see, there's this guy, call him Apollo, and he rides a chariot across the sky....
Prima facie reasons to exclude non-observables absolutely ABOUND!
: Well, I'm in the company of the entire human race in
: trusting to the inductive principle, so I don't feel
: much embarrassment there. :-) And I'd follow
: simplicity on the grounds of convenience rather than
: truth, as I said.
"Convenience". I like that answer. That's pretty much what I'd have to say, too.
: You consider scientific theories to be a subset of
: testable statements...for me it's the reverse. I
: classify math as a science, whereas I suppose you
: would not?
Semantics at this point, I'm sure. I never really thought about it. But we agree there's a difference between something's being testable and something's being a part of a larger scientific system. I think your proposed number list is testable but useless, and I think you agree.
