Out of where?
Once they figure out the pointlessness of why-chains, children learn to accept local explanations and move on. Explanations are stories that satisfy us and stop us from asking further questions. Most...
View ArticleReading and writing
While he considered self-evident that everything has a cause, Laplace knew that causes themselves are not self-evident. Events do not come with their causes and effects attached. We are not demons: we...
View ArticleQ.E.D.
A simple event – dropping a ball on the floor – is sufficient to generate a why-chain that stops not because we have reached the end of the chain, where there are no more questions to be asked, but...
View ArticleDer Herr Warum
Like all children, little Kurt Gödel kept asking ‘why‘ – so much so that his parents called him Der Herr Warum, Mr Why (Goldstein, p. 54). Unlike most children, however, he was hard to satisfy with a...
View ArticleInverting Weyl
The Principle of Sufficient Reason is crazy. But what is the alternative?Let’s see. If every event has a cause, then whatever caused it was itself caused by other events, which in turn had their own...
View ArticleLeibniz and Baloo
‘Ok, I get it (sort of). But what I really mean is: Who cares?‘Which of course is a curt rendering of the second solution to thaumazein. In Baloo‘s immortal words: Forget about your worries and your...
View ArticleNall
Parmenides‘ trouble with ‘nothing’ was nothing new. The ancient Greeks thought the world started with Chaos, a variably imagined primordial mess, where the principle of all things (Arche) eventually...
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A weird dad
Why do people believe weird things? The easy answer is: because they are dumb or, more politely, irrational. But one doesn’t need to be particularly intelligent to avoid weird beliefs. And weird...
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Get your priors right
As evidence accumulates, it may result in proving a hypothesis true or false, irrespective of prior odds. When the evidential tug of war has a winner, prior odds are no longer relevant. No matter our...
View ArticleOut of where?
Once they figure out the pointlessness of why-chains, children learn to accept local explanations and move on. Explanations are stories that satisfy us and stop us from asking further questions. Most...
View ArticleReading and writing
While he considered self-evident that everything has a cause, Laplace knew that causes themselves are not self-evident. Events do not come with their causes and effects attached. We are not demons: we...
View ArticleQ.E.D.
A simple event – dropping a ball on the floor – is sufficient to generate a why-chain that stops not because we have reached the end of the chain, where there are no more questions to be asked, but...
View ArticleDer Herr Warum
Like all children, little Kurt Gödel kept asking ‘why‘ – so much so that his parents called him Der Herr Warum, Mr Why (Goldstein, p. 54). Unlike most children, however, he was hard to satisfy with a...
View ArticleInverting Weyl
The Principle of Sufficient Reason is crazy. But what is the alternative? Let’s see. If every event has a cause, then whatever caused it was itself caused by other events, which in turn had their own...
View ArticleLeibniz and Baloo
‘Ok, I get it (sort of). But what I really mean is: Who cares?‘ Which of course is a curt rendering of the second solution to thaumazein. In Baloo‘s immortal words: Forget about your worries and your...
View ArticleNall
Parmenides‘ trouble with ‘nothing’ was nothing new. The ancient Greeks thought the world started with Chaos, a variably imagined primordial mess, where the principle of all things (Arche) eventually...
View Article
