Recent content by NickJ

A popular way to accommodate pain within a materialist framework is to say that pain is a mental property: even if mental properties are not reducible to physical/materialistic properties, mental properties can be had by material objects. So materialism is unthreatened, so long as one...

Although you cannot choose to do an action that makes 'A' not occur, I don't see how it follows that you do not choose for 'A' to occur. Perhaps the omniscient being's foreknowledge that 'A' will occur is the result of the being knowing that you will choose to do 'A'. If so, then if you had...

yup. no luck.

Does anyone know of an accessible reference that sketches a proof of Poincare's recurrence theorem? (This is not a homework question.) I'm coming up short in my searches -- either the proof is too sketchy, or it is inaccessible to me (little background in maths, but enough to talk about...

More technical philosophers of mathematics -- those who address "foundational issues" -- also debate things like how to understand the set-theoretic hierarchy (is it iterative?). And another general question: what entitles one to accept mathematical axioms? Also, among those who accept the...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mereology/ Perhaps reading this will be helpful.

Is a satisfactory answer to your question as simple as the observation that a tire is a part of a car? Whatever is part of a tire is also part of a car: tire parts are a proper subset of car parts. Express this fact in set notation, and you've got your mathematical relationship. There are...

I disagree. "Some box contains 11 or more balls" should be translated as "There exists a box x such that either x contains 11 balls or x contains more than 11 balls." Then, when this is negated, we get: It is not the case that there is a box such that either the box contains 11 balls or the...

Oops! Now I know...and knowing is half the battle.

Rule of thumb: whenever you're trying to prove a conditional claim, the first assumption you make should always be the antecedent of the conditional. You didn't follow this rule; that's why you're having trouble discharging your assumptions at the end. And the argument is valid: I did a...

I think you're understanding -- the rest of the argument after step 2 is trying to show in a rigorous way that, given the further assumptions of claims I, II and III, these claims are contradictory. But I think that if one were to reject one of those other claims, (1) and (2) would be...

What if I make the claims about possibility more specific and say that I mean possibility in the sense of physical (nomological) possibility, so that the range of possible worlds I am considering are all and only those possible worlds that have the same laws of nature as this world? Also, I'm...

How's this for a reason Newton was definitely wrong: mass is a frame-dependent property of objects. Newton's mechanics treats mass as if it is a frame-independent property of objects (cf. the second law). Therefore, Newton's theory is false. I don't see the point in saying that Newton was...

Perhaps the best reaction to problems with peer review in the medical profession is to do away with paper journals and publish everything online: let every voice have a say, and let there be the possibility of replying to every article (sort of like this forum, but "more professional"). If you...

Reply There is a typo in my statement of I. It should read: for any event e, if e occurs THEN it is possible that ... I don't intend claim I to be a possibility claim: I intend for it to be a claim about what is true in the actual world (or even in every possible world -- a necessary...