Philosophy – Page 3 – William M. Briggs

There’s More Than Physics: A Review Of Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos. Guest Post by Bob Kurland

Kurland provides us with a succinct review of Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False. This will ease us into the week with…

Book review Philosophy Statistics

An Introduction To Uncertainty: Probability, Statistics, and Modeling of All Kinds

This is a teaser, the first part of a 3,200-word narrative outline for the book that I've started to shop around. The current title is in the headline. Regular readers…

Book review Culture Philosophy

Making Gay Okay Reviewed. Part I, The Acts

Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, by Robert R. Reilly (Ignatius Press: sample chapter). It's common in medicine to track men who have (or who simulate)…

Book review Philosophy Statistics

On Truly Random Numbers

Party trick for you. I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 4. Can you guess it? Two? Nope. Three? Nope. And not one or four either. I know what…

Book review Philosophy

True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism Reviewed

Answer me honestly. How rational is it to believe any of the following: Science can explain everything, even itself; The reason anything exists is because of the laws of gravity,…

Book review Philosophy

To Coyne A Review: Did Jerry Coyne Really Read David Bentley Hart’s Book?

It took Jerry Coyne a while, but it appears---or rather, I should say there is weak and not overly convincing evidence---that the man has finally read David Bentley Hart's The…

Book review Philosophy

You Are Who You Think You Are: Hart’s The Experience of God, Part III

Read Part I, Part II. Stand by for news! You're not going to believe this, but I swear it's true. It's one of those things that's so psychedelically stratospherically hyper-dimensionally…

Book review Culture Philosophy

You Can’t Get Something From Nothing: The Experience of God, Part II

Read Part I You can't get there from here It's difficult, thus far impossible, to get Enlightened persons to understand nothing. Lord knows it's been tried. Some physicists---Larry Krauss, Vic…

Briggs on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 9, 2025
JH, My IQ is simplicity itself to estimate. I have no IQ. Pick up any stats books and look under…
JH on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 9, 2025
Is there evidence that people believe probabilities, parameters, or mathematical objects exist physically in nature? The fact that mathematicians use…
JH on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 9, 2025
Relevance is made more difficult when Y is allowed to vary, but the underlying idea is the same. Probability offers…
Tim on Class 49: Relevance & Importance Of Evidence In ModelsMay 8, 2025
What are you playing at, Briggs? Some high-falutin' model equation junk that'll get twisted by politicians in the end anyway?…
Milton Hathaway on AI Cannot Hallucinate Nor LieMay 8, 2025
I have been making heavy use of the more well-known LLMs lately. I use them almost exclusively as "regurgitation engines",…