What is moving will be still What is gathered will disperse What has been built up will collapse These lyrics are an adapted quote from Lama Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. Impermanence (aniccā in Pali) is an important idea in many forms of Buddhism. It is one of the three marks of…
Category: Philosophy
Thinking about infinit(ies): The math tea argument
Are there undefinable numbers? Numbers that exist, but that we can’t identify or talk about? According to one argument, there must be such numbers, since there must be more numbers than definitions. Preliminaries First, some background about infinity. We’ll start by talking about the foundations of math using set theory. A set is an unordered…
Naïve realism and American folk science
The following post is a critique of a particular class of worldviews and perspectives. What is naïve realism and what do I mean by folk science? Realism is a class of philosophical positions that assert the bona fide existence of certain objects, or that certain objects have certain discernible properties. The definition is vague because…
The imperfect Chinese room (a note on the conditions for AI consciousness)
First, a note about the obvious racism: western philosophy has long used China as the prototypical example of the foreign. In the Chinese room thought experiment, the Chinese language is used because it is not understood by the person. Ultimately, Chinese is being likened to machine code, notoriously unreadable by humans. This is not the…
Why do unlikely things happen?
I find that people often seem to have trouble understanding how an unlikely event can occur. I have heard people ascribe supernatural causes to such events, and I have also heard people express incredulity at the event occurring at all. This is one of many ways in which probability can be counterintuitive. We usually expect…
Free will, personal responsibility, and fault
I want to outline my view of these topics. First, I’ll address some major mainstream positions. Most people believe in free will; within academic philosophy, the modern free will debate is characterized as compatibilism vs. incompatibilism. The “compatibility” in question is between free will and determinism. Technically, neither of these views necessitates certain beliefs about…
An analysis of biological arguments against transgenderism
One of the principal types of arguments against LGBTQ+ rights is the appeal to biology. Specifically, these arguments say that humans are divided into two biological sexes and the sexes are inherently different in ways we can understand scientifically, gender corresponds exactly to biological sex, humans evolved to engage in monogamous heterosexual relationships, and so…
thoughts on mind 