Recent content by cpollett

I haven't posted in ages, but my password still worked, so yeah! As a human, I imagine if you see things enough times so that you give it a name, because it is easier to use the name to express that given instance of the category events, then it is no longer a coincidence.

Logic is the study of types of inference. Knowing what kinds of inference are applicable is useful because we often have partial knowledge about a domain of discourse and yet we want to say something about the whole domain. I.e., what possible worlds are consistent with what I currently know...

I like to think of things in terms of the meaning of X to Y where we imagine X and Y are two mainly disjoint systems. Then we can take the meaning to be something like how much useful information can Y extract from X. For example, there is a lot of information stored in the relative jiggling...

When I read the original post, the first thing I thought of was the Ship of Theseus paradox, as you modify something when does it cease to be that original thing? Your question is more like: "I know y is not x", "y has many of the same properties of x", "a simple property tester T can't...

I agree the reincarnation aspect of the discussion seems to be bringing out people's baggage concerning reincarnation rather than serving as a tool by which to analyse the moral question in terms of game theory. In a single iteration of a game, with pay off matrices like those I gave earlier...

If being a mosquito is bad, and an adversary is choosing, they will continue to choose the bad choice for each death. You wouldn't ever end up a puppy. The point is a law is fair/ an action is just, even if you play the game and end up as the player you don't want to be, you would still view the...

I agree these are all problems that would have to be considered. To the degree that I know any game theory/decision theory, which is not my area, the models I have seen considered are not that complex yet. But I don't see any impediment to better models that would handle these things from...

Assume it is an adversary who is deciding how you are reincarnated. I.e., assume the worse case, and then ask would you still think the (law is just)/(action is fair). I brought reincarnation in because, I have known people, and may even had done this myself from time to time, to be careful to...

The starfish's snout has length 0. I appreciate the point that the theory might not be very meaningful for some domains. An objective moral theory would probably have results of the form, if these conditions are met, then this is a model of such-and-such moral problem, and here are some...

I think it will be interpreted subjectively/heuristically until people come up with better models for the moral questions at hand. I believe that at some point it will be possible to analyze a wide variety of ethical/moral questions and come up with definite answers with respect to a given...

Here's a set up I can think of where it might be more to squish the mosquito... One round of the bite the human game has payoff H -0.1 M 1 If you don't squish the mosquito, another round is played. If you do squish the mosquito, the game stops. If you didn't know in advance whether you were H...

If there can be an objective theory of morality it should work when we have to deal with insects, space aliens, etc.

What I wrote above is not completely thought out, which was why I was asking if people had seen game theory analyses of this type carried out. But it is not completely removed from the rest of Rawl's argument either. Suppose we have two players H (human) and M mosquito and two outcomes S...

It's summer time here in North America and there are plenty of mosquitos to bite around. My first question is it moral to squish them? One way to judge the morality of an action is to consider it in terms of something like Rawl's original position. That is, you consider the starting space of...

It might not hurt to tack on the definition of class... Since its short here goes: a class consists of those sets which satisfy some fixed formula of set theory with one free parameter. I.e., given a formula of set theory, F(x), the class corresponding to it is x \in C iff the F(x) formula...