Philosophy – Page 61 – William M. Briggs

Summary Against Modern Thought: Chance Is Not A Cause

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. Be careful!…

Philosophy Statistics

A Brief Explanation Of Occam’s Razor

We're interested in whether some proposition Y is true. One explanation, perhaps causal or deterministic, or even only probabilistic, is X. Thus, Pr(Y | X) is high or equals 1.…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: Arguments Against The World Being Eternal

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. We had…

Culture Philosophy

Animals Aren’t Men, Even If Government Says So

I once saw, with mine own eyes, a squirrel steal an acorn from a second squirrel. This shouldn't be surprising; squirrels are career criminals and everybody knows it. Think of…

Philosophy Statistics

The Bayesian Metaphor Can Do More Harm Than Good: Update

Quoting from a post on vampires, "In Bayesian inference, you start with some initial beliefs (called 'Bayesian priors' or just 'priors'), and then you 'update' them as you receive new…

Philosophy

Stream: Pretend to Believe In Free Will Or Else You Will Make Bad Choices

Today's post is at The Stream: Pretend to Believe In Free Will Or Else You Will Make Bad Choices. I want to be nice about this, but believing that we…

Philosophy SAMT

Summary Against Modern Thought: Failed Arguments For The Eternity Of The World II

See the first post in this series for an explanation and guide of our tour of Summa Contra Gentiles. All posts are under the category SAMT. Previous post. Format change…

Culture Philosophy Statistics

Why Is Economics Plagued By Math?

The answer is easy: because math is numbers and numbers are measurement and measurements are necessary to make a subject "scientific" in the modern sense of that word. Why should…

N.S. Palmer on Hume’s Guillotine, Euclid’s Catapult: Induction, Axioms, and Objective EthicsJuly 17, 2026
"Some moral beliefs are universally true because they are based on human nature. However, these beliefs are essentially factual beliefs:…
PonderPoints on A New Physics Arises: Irreducible by Federico Faggin ReviewedJuly 17, 2026
You argue that Faggin is right to reject mechanistic emergence but wrong to award consciousness to every field or “seity,”…
John Pate on University of California Prof Tries To Save System From DIEingJuly 15, 2026
I don't believe China to be hampered by such nonsense or, for that matter, much of S.E.A. in general.
Rudolph Harrier on My Horrible Interaction With AIJuly 15, 2026
I don't find LLMs to be particular bad at D&D in comparison to other things. For example, I queried an…
JohnK on Hume’s Guillotine, Euclid’s Catapult: Induction, Axioms, and Objective EthicsJuly 15, 2026
Does one detect the sea-captain's lurking circularity in this "we" who "need air, gravity, food..." etc.? And don't "we" also…