Notes

I like to use language in a correct way. So I happened to Google accidentally quite a long time ago now that if you use 'like' with a phrase that includes a verb, it is wrong. 'Like' is a preposition, and 'as' is a conjunction. Hence, you use 'like' with a noun or a noun phrase, whereas you use 'as' with a clause that includes a verb. So you can say something like, 'you look like a monkey', or 'you look as if you swing through trees', but never 'you look like you swing through trees'. Sounds all very well, but I don't know of any English writer who actually uses this rule. Everywhere I read 'like' used as a conjunction. In fact, when I Google the exact phrase 'looks as if', all I get are pages that talk about how to use 'like' versus 'as if'. This seems to defeat the purpose of using the phrase. In the end, grammarians do not determine the rules of language, speakers do. And if they...

I think that philosophy in general has problems with falsifiability. Philosophers rarely if ever argue on each other's terms, or concede their opponents' premises. What would even happen if philosophers specified the evidence it would take to dissuade them? It reminds me of my empirical theory of ethics. If someone could produce a cogent argument that hypocrisy was viable, I would be dissuaded. When Robert Wright did this in The Moral Animal, I was dissuaded — and admittedly dismayed. How would falsifiability work with the idea that ethics were subjective or objective? I think that most people think that at least to some degree ethics is subjective. So to hard-core realists, I ask you, what evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? I have to be an anti-realist, although I don't think I'm a very hard-line one. I think that ethics inheres in subjects, but I don't think that that makes it arbitrary. But a realist can rightly ask me, what evidenc...

What evidence would it take to convince you that you were wrong? This was a question that I Googled. This is a good website I found in the results, and this is a good article in it, with a good principle. “It is irrational to hold any view so tightly that you aren’t willing to admit the possibility that you might be wrong.” “The rational response is to actually engage contrary information and truly consider whether or not your view is correct.” The principle that you must be able to answer this question is the principle of falsifiability . This reasoning is of relevance to the problem of induction . According to the principle of falsifiability, inductive scepticism is inherently irrational. An inductive sceptic can accept nothing as evidence that she is wrong. She cannot accept a deductive argument because induction is by definition not deductively valid. She cannot accept anything that occurred in the past because it might change in the future. She cannot accept anything that is o...

Got an idea yesterday afternoon for an approach to philosophy that I call "constructive scepticism". On my incredibly long train trips to and from work I wrote about three thousand words about it. By that time I had said everything I had wanted to say about it. That usually means that nothing more happens with it, because I have simply decided that I don't have enough to contribute to the subject. But in this case it seems different enough to me that I will post a link to it, right here .

As someone who builds a lot on his own work, I rely heavily on links back to previous blog entries. I discovered today that many of those links are now actually stale! They refer to impenetrable bookmark numbers that when followed, lead me to the wrong blog posts. Not only is that a disservice to my readers (when I get any) but also to me this long after the fact. It's not so bad when the text for the link mentions the blog entry by name because I can search for that. But when I merely use a word like "elsewhere" to refer to one of my previous articles it helps me not at all! I just fixed up the links in the entry for De Officiis  by Cicero, but there are doubtless others there as well to do. There is also a handy stats section to give me some feedback on who is visiting the site when. I see I got a visit from someone searching for a summary of Cicero's De Officiis . I do not actually provide any article with such a summary. But my titular article about that book ca...

I remember a book in the SF Masterworks series that I read, Earth Abides, by George R. Stewart. By the time the protagonist was an old man he was considered a god, but was paid "no great reverence." I decided to Google that exact phrase looking for the full passage for that quotation. Found I had to make it "him no great reverence" before I got correct results appearing. The top-ranked result is currently from a Tumblr blog. I can view the blogs on Tumblr, but I can no longer log into it. I had created a blog on Tumblr a long time ago but abandoned it after a while, yet when I returned I discovered my account had been terminated due to "spam or affiliate marketing"! It made me think of something strange that had happened to my Twitter account. I was galled to discover one day after I had not been there in a long time either that it was regularly tweeting spam. Some nonsense about how I had done some surveys and was making hundreds of dollars a day. I k...

The most beautiful feeling of nostalgia that I ever experienced was over ten years ago . I had been trying to resolve questions in my mind that had been left unanswered in my Masters thesis. I was using this blog as a notebook to help me do that. I lived in Newtown in those days, so it was a reasonably short walk for me to get to the University of Sydney, my alma mater. I wanted to go to their Fisher Library to get a library card to let me borrow books from their library again. I started at the Wentworth Building, and walked across the campus to the Fisher Library. While I was doing that, and looking at the buildings as I was walking by, the nostalgia hit. I felt all of the good things I had ever felt while studying there, and none of the bad things. And I just thought, if I actually felt  this way at the time I was actually here, I never would have left! But that's what nostalgia does: it protects you from the pain of the past. It let me, in the present day, simply enjoy this ...

Various books I have read claim that willpower is a limited resource . People who perform an exercise requiring willpower do worse on another willpower exercise immediately afterwards. This phenomenon is known as "ego depletion". But as I was perusing an APA article on willpower, I came across an article by Veronika Job contradicting this idea. Job suggests that the literature on the subject does not take into account individuals' beliefs about willpower. Furthermore, once those beliefs are taken into account (or manipulated with biased questionnaires) the results change. People who do not believe that willpower is a limited resource do not show signs of ego depletion. So put that in your pipe and smoke it! I was thinking of willpower in terms of trying to practise the ethics of Peter Singer consistently. Singer's views of social justice on a global scale are draconian. To do justice to the Third World we in the First World must reduce our standard of living to b...

Was thinking about a conversation that I had had with Robert Elliot at the University of New England. I  mentioned to him something I had read a long time ago in The Science in Science Fiction by Peter Nicholls. It was the Principle of Causality, stating, essentially, that effects happen after causes. This was the basic problem with travelling backwards through time, that it would violate the principle of causality. Robert said he thought that that was just a prejudice. He saw a cause as an engine that created an effect, which could just as easily occur in the past as in the future. Well, I know that the Principle of Causality is a cornerstone of physics, and I don't really think that it is a prejudice. I think it would be a prejudice if physicists were trying to define  causes in terms of temporal position, but they are not. Their claim that effects happen after causes is a posteriori, not a priori. He went on to talk about what logically consistent time travel is. Basical...

It's been a long time since I've seen fit to post anything here. But I felt that I needed to act to preserve a list that deserves to be somewhere on the internet in a form that is publicly editable. Not that it is publicly editable in my blog. But I will read all the emailed submissions that I receive for additions to or modifications of the list, and will update the list accordingly. The list is Liddle Facts, and comes from the Wikipedia, where it is about to be taken down. Liddle Facts are little factoids Spring Valley Juice prints on the underside of its juice bottle lids. They're really cool, and because they're numbered, you can check whether your list is complete. If I modify the list at all, I will keep it on this page. The first 140 facts of the  2004  series were printed in the bottle lids in black colour. At the end of 2005, they started with a second series, presented in a green cap. Those collected to date are as follows: Pre-2004 20. The howler monk...