108 ideas
| 23269 | Philosophy must start from clearly observed facts [Galen] |
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 23248 | Early empiricists said reason was just a useless concept introduced by philosophers [Galen, by Frede,M] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 19482 | Current physics says matter and antimatter should have reduced to light at the big bang [New Sci.] |
| 19483 | CP violation shows a decay imbalance in matter and antimatter, leading to matter's dominance [New Sci.] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |
| 18852 | A Meinongian principle might say that there is an object for any modest class of properties [Rosen] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
| 18856 | Non-Standard Metaphysical Necessity: when ¬P is incompatible with the nature of things [Rosen] |
| 18848 | Something may be necessary because of logic, but is that therefore a special sort of necessity? [Rosen] |
| 18855 | Combinatorial theories of possibility assume the principles of combination don't change across worlds [Rosen] |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 19737 | A system can infer the structure of the world by making predictions about it [New Sci.] |
| 23266 | The spirit in the soul wants freedom, power and honour [Galen] |
| 6003 | Galen showed by experiment that the brain controls the body [Galen, by Hankinson] |
| 23219 | Stopping the heart doesn't terminate activity; pressing the brain does that [Galen, by Cobb] |
| 21799 | We just use the word 'faculty' when we don't know the psychological cause [Galen] |
| 23264 | Philosophers think faculties are in substances, and invent a faculty for every activity [Galen] |
| 19736 | Neural networks can extract the car-ness of a car, or the chair-ness of a chair [New Sci.] |
| 23220 | The brain contains memory and reason, and is the source of sensation and decision [Galen] |
| 23265 | The rational part of the soul is the desire for truth, understanding and recollection [Galen] |
| 16419 | No one has yet devised a rationality test [New Sci.] |
| 16417 | About a third of variation in human intelligence is environmental [New Sci.] |
| 16418 | People can be highly intelligent, yet very stupid [New Sci.] |
| 19484 | Psychologists measure personality along five dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 7453 | Galen's medicine followed the mean; each illness was balanced by opposite treatment [Galen, by Hacking] |
| 6030 | Each part of the soul has its virtue - pleasure for appetite, success for competition, and rectitude for reason [Galen] |
| 23268 | We execute irredeemable people, to protect ourselves, as a deterrent, and ending a bad life [Galen] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 21167 | Gravity is unusual, in that it always attracts and never repels [New Sci.] |
| 19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
| 21176 | In the Big Bang general relativity fails, because gravity is too powerful [New Sci.] |
| 21147 | Quantum electrodynamics incorporates special relativity and quantum mechanics [New Sci.] |
| 21155 | Photons have zero rest mass, so virtual photons have infinite range [New Sci.] |
| 19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [New Sci.] |
| 21161 | In the standard model all the fundamental force fields merge at extremely high energies [New Sci.] |
| 21146 | Electrons move fast, so are subject to special relativity [New Sci.] |
| 19474 | Quantum states are measured by external time, of unknown origin [New Sci.] |
| 19473 | The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of an object's wave function in Hilbert space [New Sci.] |
| 21148 | The strong force is repulsive at short distances, strong at medium, and fades at long [New Sci.] |
| 21151 | Gluons, the particles carrying the strong force, interact because of their colour charge [New Sci.] |
| 21152 | The strong force binds quarks tight, and the nucleus more weakly [New Sci.] |
| 21142 | Classifying hadrons revealed two symmetry patterns, produced by three basic elements [New Sci.] |
| 21143 | Quarks in threes can build hadrons with spin ½ or with spin 3/2 [New Sci.] |
| 21150 | Three different colours of quark (as in the proton) can cancel out to give no colour [New Sci.] |
| 21153 | The weak force explains beta decay, and the change of type by quarks and leptons [New Sci.] |
| 21154 | Three particles enable the weak force: W+ and W- are charged, and Z° is not [New Sci.] |
| 21156 | The weak force particles are heavy, so the force has a short range [New Sci.] |
| 21164 | Why do the charges of the very different proton and electron perfectly match up? [New Sci.] |
| 21170 | The Standard Model cannot explain dark energy, survival of matter, gravity, or force strength [New Sci.] |
| 21145 | The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong) are the effects of particles [New Sci.] |
| 21140 | Spin is a built-in ration of angular momentum [New Sci.] |
| 21149 | Quarks have red, green or blue colour charge (akin to electric charge) [New Sci.] |
| 21158 | Fermions, with spin ½, are antisocial, and cannot share quantum states [New Sci.] |
| 21165 | Spin is akin to rotation, and is easily measured in a magnetic field [New Sci.] |
| 21157 | Particles are spread out, with wave-like properties, and higher energy shortens the wavelength [New Sci.] |
| 21163 | The mass of protons and neutrinos is mostly binding energy, not the quarks [New Sci.] |
| 21168 | Gravitional mass turns out to be the same as inertial mass [New Sci.] |
| 21138 | Neutrons are slightly heavier than protons, and decay into them by emitting an electron [New Sci.] |
| 21144 | Top, bottom, charm and strange quarks quickly decay into up and down [New Sci.] |
| 21141 | Neutrinos were proposed as the missing energy in neutron beta decay [New Sci.] |
| 21169 | Only neutrinos spin anticlockwise [New Sci.] |
| 21166 | Standard antineutrinos have opposite spin and opposite lepton number [New Sci.] |
| 21171 | The symmetry of unified electromagnetic and weak forces was broken by the Higgs field [New Sci.] |
| 19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
| 21178 | String theory is now part of 11-dimensional M-Theory, involving p-branes [New Sci.] |
| 19476 | String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions [New Sci.] |
| 21179 | Supersymmetric string theory can be expressed using loop quantum gravity [New Sci.] |
| 21175 | String theory might be tested by colliding strings to make bigger 'stringballs' [New Sci.] |
| 21177 | String theory offers a quantum theory of gravity, by describing the graviton [New Sci.] |
| 19953 | In string theory space-time has a grainy indivisible substructure [New Sci.] |
| 21162 | Only supersymmetry offers to incorporate gravity into the scheme [New Sci.] |
| 21173 | Supersymmetry says particles and superpartners were unities, but then split [New Sci.] |
| 21159 | Supersymmetry has extra heavy bosons and heavy fermions [New Sci.] |
| 21172 | The evidence for supersymmetry keeps failing to appear [New Sci.] |
| 19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
| 21160 | The Higgs field means even low energy space is not empty [New Sci.] |
| 19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
| 19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [New Sci.] |
| 19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
| 19949 | Quantum theory relies on a clock outside the system - but where is it located? [New Sci.] |
| 19951 | Entropy is puzzling, so we may need to build new laws which include time directionality [New Sci.] |
| 19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
| 19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
| 16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [New Sci.] |
| 21174 | Dark matter must have mass, to produce gravity, and no electric charge, to not reflect light [New Sci.] |
| 17604 | We are halfway to synthesising any molecule we want [New Sci.] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |
| 17603 | Chemistry just needs the periodic table, and protons, electrons and neutrinos [New Sci.] |