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About this blog

My views about philosophical and scientific matters.

Entries in this blog

Philosophy

On the existence of chairs

What inspired me to write this entry is this video. Before watching it I haven't realized there is so much controversy over a seemingly simple statement that objects like chairs exist. So let me explain what I think about all this. First, we need to define what "exist" means. What I mean here is physical existence, as opposed to mathematical existence, which is a different thing. My definition is as follows: If something exists physically, it means it's a part of a valid description of
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

10
Philosophy

Free Will Makes No Sense

So, for some people (I think I'm using 'some people' too much in this blog) free will is a very important thing. They feel that if everything is deterministic, then it's already decided what they are going to do, so they can't decide it themselves. It's like something is forcing them to do things, and they don't have a will of their own. So determinism is a bad thing, and free will should exist to make the human existence meaningful. This is wrong. We are a part of the universe, and th
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

4
Philosophy

Do We Live in a Simulation?

Some people argue that advanced civilizations should be able to run simulations with beings like us in them, and, due to the fact that one civilization can make many simulations, and there can even be simulations within simulations and so on, it's most likely that we live in one of these simulated realities. My approach to this question is related to the subject of my last week's entry: consciousness. Can simulated beings be conscious? Well, for those who think consciousness requires only a
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

9
Philosophy

But What is Consciousness?

(This blog entry is the longest of all that I made so far, but it's about something very important to me, so I need to be thorough with it.) That's a hard question. Actually I think it's the hardest question of all. We don't have a mathematical or physical equation to describe consciousness. So, let's try to use a very powerful tool, that is able to explain almost everything in our universe. It's called reductionism. What is reductionism? It's a process that is used very often in scien
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

3
Philosophy

What Makes the Difference

Continuing the subject of multiple universes, I think we can divide them into two kinds: those that have 'observers' in them (probably the minority), and those that don't. The 'observerless' universes exist (at least I believe they do) only to satisfy the principle I wrote about two weeks ago, that any logically consistent system exists, because there is no reason why it shouldn't exist. But does its existence really matter? I think it doesn't, because if there is an universe and there is no one
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

4
Philosophy

The Anthropic Principle

This time we're going to figure out if there's anything special about our universe, but let's start with another question: Do we live in a typical place in it? By 'typical' I mean the kind of place that we will most likely end up with if we pick one at random. The answer is of course not, because a typical place in our universe is just empty space. And we happen to live on a planet where there are good conditions to support life. And the reason why it is so is obvious: as far as we know, in the
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

3
Philosophy

The Big Question

Welcome to my blog. I'm going to cover a wide range of philosophical and scientific topics here, but don't expect walls of text, my goal is to make the entries brief and straight to the point. I welcome discussions and feedback in the comments, as well as suggestions what I should write about in the future. We'll start with the most important question in philosophy: Why does anything exist at all? My answer to this question is simple: Because why not? In other words, there shouldn't be any
Silly Druid

Silly Druid in Philosophy

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