Who Do You Think You Are? Constructing Identity in a World of Difference

"People [...] they come to me and say things like 'Oh I can't tell uh... are you mixed, are you Black? Oh you must be from the Caribbean! Oh, are you Arab?' And I'm like 'I'm a socialist, baby'" - Dr. Robin Kelly Identity is one of the broadest topics in philosophy, important enough to …

Putting Notions in Motion: Epistemological Leaps in Model Building

“Tarski has stressed in his lecture (and I think justly) the great importance of the concept of Turing's computability. It seems to me that this importance is largely due to the fact that with this concept one has for the first time succeeded in giving an absolute notion to an interesting epistemological notion, i.e., one …

David Foster Wallace Was Alive: An Infinite Jest Review

Infinite Jest is a masterpiece of fiction. David Foster Wallace writes first and foremost from a human perspective1. More than any other fiction writer I've come across, Wallace has convinced me surely that if anyone else ever, was really truly a conscious human being, and not some robotic philosophical zombie, it was him; he passed …

Birds Doing Ornithology: The Role of Beauty in Model Building

"Philosophy of Science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds." - Richard Feynman For obvious reasons this provocative quote is not very popular among philosophers of science, but Feynman certainly didn't mean it in bad taste. The fact of the matter is that most science can be done with little to no …

The Frustrating Success of Our Best Theory of Physics

If you were to ask most physicists about the success of the standard model of particle physics, you would get a very strange answer: that it is frustratingly successful. Odd indeed, that's like calling a painting frustratingly beautiful. Further prodding would reveal that in fact most physicists not only find the model frustrating, but also …

Epistemic Idealism Through Physicalism

Suppose you're a good honest physicalist, you believe that all that exists is physical. This is in stark contrast to philosophies (ontologies) like Berkeley's idealism, where all things are ideas, reality itself is a form of thought, and therefore the universe is mental or spiritual. The latter idea as a metaphysics has largely fallen out …

Will Future Civilizations Believe in the Rest of Our Universe?

Science is often seen as the modern way to obtain truths. We know the earth orbits the sun, it is true. Those who work closely in the field know the process of actually doing science, both theoretical and experimental, can be painstakingly tedious, but if we’re careful we’ll always reach the truth, right? The answer …

The Empirical Heart of Mathematics

Mathematics is often grouped together with the many other sciences, despite science supposedly being an empirical study of some domain; while math for centuries has been claimed by the rationalists. I argue however that math is indeed a kind of science, albeit a very strange one. While physics is the study of natural laws, chemistry …

Can we tell if we’re simulated, and why does it matter?

See part 1 here. So maybe we're living in a simulation, maybe we're not. Why does any of this matter? If we can't actually tell any way, we are just arguing over the likelihood one way or the other and why should any of us care? It doesn't change the taste of coffee; it doesn't …

Is Reality Really Real?

Two thousand years ago Zhuang Zhou fell asleep, and dreamed he was a butterfly. When he awoke he was faced with a conundrum: how could he tell with any certainty whether he had been a man dreaming of being a butterfly, instead of now being a butterfly dreaming of a man. This thought has haunted …