Read May 2019
Notable Concepts
- What makes a good explanation:
- can’t be varied arbitrarily
- is falsifiable
- Rather than assuming our best explanation is true, be confident only that it’s a better explanation that the one it replaced, and is not as good as the one that will replace it.
- Bad philosophy: “philosophy that is not merely false, but actively prevents the growth of other knowledge.”
- The Principle of Optimism: All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.
- Anything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is achievable, provided we have the knowledge to do so.
- Configurational entity:
“For example, if the balance in your (electronic) bank account is one dollar, and the bank adds a second dollar as a loyalty bonus and later withdraws a dollar in charges, there is no meaning to whether the dollar they withdrew is the one that was there originally or the one that they had added â or is composed of a little of each. It is not merely that we cannot know whether it was the same dollar, or have decided not to care: because of the physics of the situation there really is no such thing as taking the original dollar, nor such a thing as taking the one added subsequently.
Dollars in bank accounts are what may be called âconfigurationalâ entities: they are states or configurations of objects, not what we usually think of as physical objects in their own right.”