ydoaPs

Why isn't gravity repulsive as well? Why do the neutrons seem to matter when we figure out the gravitational force between two things?

You're not the one using IE.

Here, it doesn't matter what "god" means. "God" could mean "clicky pens" and the modal logic still doesn't work. If something is "necessary or impossible", it doesn't exist.

Who is making fun of what? Also, that's not true. Creationists and Tea Baggers, for example, are easy to make fun of precisely because they don't know jack.

It's sometimes claimed that God is neccessary or impossible (this is the basis of some modal arguments). That is, if God exists, its existence is necessary and if it doesn't exists, its nonexistence is necessary. I got bored, so I decided to play around with that. If we take the first conditional ("If God exists, it necessarily exists") to be true, we can break down all of the possible worlds in which it is true into three classes of worlds. If we take the second conditional ("If God doesn't exist, it necessarily doesn't exist), then we also get three classes of possible worlds in which it is true. If we take both to be true, then we get nine classes of possible worlds in which God is either necessary or impossible. When we do that, magic happens. In all but two classes of worlds, the worlds are inconsistent even assuming no world is accessable to any other world. But in the modal logic that deals with necessity, every world is accessable to every other world. From that, all possible worlds in which it is true that God is either necessary or impossible are contradictory. For funsies, I made a chart: The arrows are where a proposition was taken from an accessable world. The lines are just "therefore" signs.

There is no understanding of atheism to be had; there's nothing to understand. It's not a worldview in and of itself. When you add the "why I'm an atheist", THEN you have something to understand. THEN you have the buildingblocks of a worldview. When someone says they're an Ignostic Agnostic Weak Atheist Secular Humanist Materialist Empiricist, then you're cooking with gas and have something to understand.

Some forum software allows you to disable your rep altogether. If you do that, you can't get rep either. I don't know if this software has that feature, though. That's a question for Cap'n. I think this is true now more than it was when they had to nurf if since swansont was giving out OVER NINE-THOUSAND rep points per click. With one point per click, it's a bit of a better indicator (especially if you do posts/rep). For example, swansont gets one rep point for every 8.47 posts and I get one for every 8.41 posts. I did like it when we had the options to send a little message with the rep. Can we do that with the new software?

I think you mean "chemistry".

In that case, you may want to go old school and look into the work of Bishop Berkeley (pronounced Bark-lee, despite how the town (and thus the school located there) named after him is pronounced).

That's probably more amenable to blogging than my blog is. I just sporadically rant about philosophy/science, but I've just started what will be an unbelievably long series of posts just to get to talk about one (81 year old) paper at the end of it.

There's also a function that let's you see what other people are doing. How do you find new site content without these features? Do you actually go to each subforum page? Speaking of "Online Users", is there a way to default it to "Show Registered Only"? I am a citizen of the universe.

/me points to the button labeled "View New Content".

But the "new content" page....it's disgusting. Aside from that, yeah, just new. But, come on, who picked that colour scheme?

Also, a low neg rep limit minimizes the amount of "drive-by" neg repping. I still think that making votes public would also help, because it makes people think before they click.

It's actually a pretty huge difference. Per type-ID theory, only things with brains can be conscious. So, any attempt at strong AI is doomed to fail. It also means that a race of extraterrestrials far superior to us in intelligence wouldn't be conscious. For functionalsim, mental states are literally a function of brain states; it's just not isomorphic. Any one mental state can be realized by any number of brain states, but any given brain state can only realize one mental state. Mental states aren't the same as brain states. It's a materialist attempt at a solution to the mind-body problem, yes, but to say "mental states are physical states" is off the mark. Per functionalism, they're more like information states. Three great papers on the functionalist narrative are Dennett's "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity", Velleman's "Self as Narrator", and Ishmael's "Saving the Baby".

FYI, swansont is a professional physicist and has been disagreeing with you the entire thread.

I just had a bit of accidental chemistry. I'm in a study where I'm not allowed to drink any caloric beverages. So, I'm allowed water, black coffee, zero calorie soda, etc. They also give me this stuff called Crystal Light. I decided to try to make my Sprite Zero taste better by adding some of the Crystal Light to it. That was a bad idea-instant volcano. It reminded me of the Mentos-Diet Coke reaction, so maybe it's the same thing. I don't know the active ingredients in that reaction, though. Crystal Light: citric acid, potassium citrate, maltodextrin, aspertame, magnesium oxide, <2% flavoring, acesulfame potassium, soy lecithin, red 40 Sprite Zero: carbonated water, citric acid, potassium citrate, natural flavors, potassium benzoate, aspertame, acesulfame potassium Citric acid, potassium citrate, aspertame, and acesulfame potassium are common to both, so I don't think they were involved. And "natural flavor" is vague to the point of uselessness. Any ideas on what happened?

No. Bad. That is not Dennett's view. Dennett is a functionalist, not a type-identity theorist. Type-identity theory is that mental states are brain states. Functionalism, on the other hand, is that mental states are what brain states do. In fact, Dennett is more radical than many functionalists in that he denies qualitative experience as actual experience. For Dennett, your 'self' is just the main character of the story your "Joycean Machine" is writing. It can't get any more clear than how he said it in his paper "The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity" where he says, "The chief fictional character at the center of that autobiography is one's self. And if you still want to know what the self really is, you're making a category mistake". As for qualitative consciousness, his view is that it isn't something to be explained, rather the belief that one has qualitative consciousness needs to be explained. He uses the example of the zombie to make his point. A zombie, in philosophy, is a human that is no different than any other human except that it has no qualitative consciousness. His example uses the zombie twin. If you are conscious, your zombie twin is a molecule for molecule duplicate of you which acts identically to you should you be in that situation. If you are asked "Do you have qualitative consciousness?", you answer honestly "Yes". However, this means that your zombie twin will as well. Your zombie twin honestly believes it has qualitative consciousness. So, says Dennett, not only is there no third person difference between you and your zombie twin, but there is no first person difference as well. By all means, read a lot of Dennett, but don't misrepresent him. And especially don't misrepresent him to that extent. There are, however, people who do think that all matter has a mental component. This view is called "Panpsychism" and is held by people such as Galen Strawson.

It's displayed in the actual post, but not by default in the editor. If you want the BBCode in the editor, there's a button at the top left of the editor that looks like a lightswitch. Click it, and the code appears.

I have no warnings to display :'(

I don't think he's enabled it yet.

I think only you can see your warning points.

I think there's a fair chance that public votes would lower the number of petty neg reps.

It seems they disappeared again.

I liked public votes.