A talk on understanding 27 Jun 2019 I will be presenting this one at ISHPSSSB in Oslo in a couple of weeks. Comments and objections received with the usual ill grace… [embeddoc url=”https://evolvingthoughts.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Comprehension.pdf” width=”100%” download=”all” viewer=”google”] Epistemology Philosophy Theories
Ethics and Moral Philosophy Can an atheist have a code of ethics? 5 Dec 20115 Dec 2011 I posted this on Quora, but I thought I might put it here as well, and add a couple of things: A while back I gave a talk to a group of theologians on the question of Darwinian accidents. It had no ethics content. The first question I was asked… Read More
Epistemology Peirce on Darwin (1877) 18 Aug 2009 The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic. Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing had been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases. Though unable to say what the movements of any particular molecule of… Read More
Philosophy Defining religion 27 Oct 2009 In line with my putting passing thoughts down as they occur to me, in this post I will discuss some of the questions regarding how to define religion such that it becomes an explicandum for natural accounts of religion. Read More
Schmidhuber (LSTM etc) https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360; Friston etc Where this might have a difficulty is when one discusses mathematical understanding. This comes up with computer generated proofs, and in mathematical education. It is objective, but a property of a learner (one can explain a proof, one can generate a new theorem, one can apply a particular method to a new area or recognise a dual). This obviously overlaps a lot of modern physics, and partly addresses de Regt’s problem about simplified “false” models that are actually deeper mathematically, though it does ring with his description of understanding as a skill. But no equivalent to causality, ISTM, especially if one is a constructivist in these matters. In the example of population genetics, I think it is the “higher” level where selection etc is happening – the molecular genetics is too “low”. It is the coarsening of the description that allows one to see what is really going on (sim thermodynamics, QM) in a complex system.
I don’t know Hempel, no idea who he is or the context. I don’t think i want to know any more about him. It conjures the image of a man sitting on a spike or a Dalek.