Unseen

I saw the e. E is not close to I on the keyboard. It is not the first time i had a strong suspicion that Enco is not first hand familiar with his bugaboos. Regurgitation is unworthy of you.

Enco how about living some of the ideas you espouse? As it stands you are religious without being religious.

Nebulous Categorical Emperative (sic)

The categorical imperative in practice, is the absolute opposite of nebulous. I simply don’t see anything remotely fuzzy about forming a moral law and never breaking it. Enco…honestly, do you ever read up on or learn about any of the stuff you seem to dislike? Honestly, don’t you think it would be helpful to…[Read more]

More or less, but to be clear, I’m not just talking colloquial usage.

If we track historical definitions, it’s a word that’s been steadily shifting meaning. There was a time where it probably meant something more like haphazard or erratic. Over time it’s come to refer to a sort of disconnect between an event and any specific outcome. There is…[Read more]

Unseen wrote:

But, of course, a lot hangs on what you mean by “random.”

A definition that uses it in some absolute sense would be the outlier to standard usage. ‘True’ randomness is difficult to parse. I’d take it to mean an event that is intrinsically not predictable—something that can only be described as a statistical model, not as a deter…[Read more]

I once told somebody that the odds of me winning the rollover lotto in Georgia are the same whether or not I buy a ticket 🙂

Unseen wrote:

As long as deterministic physical laws are in control, is anything above the quantum scale ever totally, truly, and demonstrably random? Also, I’ll toss in Benford’s Law, a law applying to many sets of naturally occurring numbers. The law states that in many naturally occurring collections of numbers, the leading digit is likely to…

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That’s another shortcoming of Religion, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Not enough life-hacks.

Yeah. Political theory only led up to many of the rights and freedoms we enjoy everyday. But that pales in comparison with political theory’s terrible lack of life hacks: like how to keep a bag of rice properly closed or the best method for keeping y…[Read more]

When possible software random number generators often employ a “seed” input to help keep the result as random as possible. Sometimes the seed is something like a voltage noise measurement (good) or the current time and date (not as good).

I feel like this fits the same linguistic pattern as ‘free’. In the abstract, we can define them in absolute terms. But in practical application, we use these words in a relative sense. I play D&D with friends. A die roll or a digital roll generator are random with respect to our influence and predictive abilities. The roll is random in the…[Read more]

If you get the computer to produce the sequence then it is not really a random number as it is based on a program written to generate the numbers.

If you were to rearrange the numbers on the number pad ( The zero key could be anything from 1-9) and then allow your office cat to walk on the keyboard (as they do!) then is that number “more random”…[Read more]

TheEncogitationer wrote:

Davis, All right, so where am I wrong on CRT?

A good start in criticizing critical race theory would be to criticize critical race theory. Crazy, I know. But that’s how I roll.

At present, you haven’t really made substantive claims against what it is. You’ve made claims against characterizations of it. You’ve made claims…[Read more]

Davis that was purdy good.

And, yes, Davis, if Philosophy is to be any better than Theology, it needs to come correct with something better than “Critical Theory” which is re-heated, re-packaged Marxism, a worldview whose stock in trade is corpses, and in particular “Critical Race Theory,” which is nothing but old-fashioned racism re-heated and re-packaged after sitting…

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Always have time to make Christians feel the Paine…….

Thomas Paine, in 1775, when he wrote his article on “Justice and Humanity,” was the first to demand emancipation in a lucid manner. The campaign for liberation of the slaves was therefore inaugurated by a freethinker, and triumphantly closed by another freethinker, Abraham Lincoln. In this…[Read more]

@jakelafort – How does theology advance?

Kant destroyed the “proofs” for the existence of god(s) and that was a crowbar to divorce theology from philosophy. Modern philosophy is secular by nature and has no concerns about ancient gods.

Thomas Paine advanced theology to its correct place in intellectually reasoned thought.

“The study of t…[Read more]

How does theology advance?

Burn fewer witches and assorted heretics? Stop murdering apostates? Stop dictating depraved morality? In short its path forward is through its extinction.

False binaries and zero-sum games such as what you’ve cited are part of the reason why Theology, Philosophy, and Political Theory haven’t advanced like Science and Technology.

Are you seriously lumping theology and philosophy into the same category? Ugh.