Dialogos of Eide/Home

  • Cognitive Inquiry Before AI

    Socrates: Platohagel, I think you have identified something important in the relationship between those two pieces of your archive. The 2004 “No Royal Road to Geometry?” post is not merely an early discussion of geometry. It documents a method of inquiry already operating before anything resembling today’s AI dialogue. You were tracing how a question…

  • Reason Against Unjust Beliefs

    Platohagel: Does Socrates and Platonism advance totalitarianism states? Socrates: Ah, my dear interlocutor, the pursuit of wisdom and virtue is the essence of my philosophy. Totalitarianism, with its emphasis on control and power, goes against the ideals of justice and individual autonomy that I advocate for. The true path lies in the examined life and…

  • The Eternally Existing, Self-Reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe

    The Eternally Existing, Self-Reproducing, Frequently Puzzling Inflationary Universe Since I cannot comment at Sean’s Blog either,  I might as well comment here too:) 27.   Moshe Says: October 23rd, 2011 at 5:00 am Igor, I am not sure I understand. We have an initial value problem, so today’s observations are determined once you specify an initial…

  • How Time Ages the Pyramids

    Chanticleer – A Pleasure Garden Believing that something must be true about the world because you can’t imagine otherwise is, five hundred years into the Age of Science, not a recommended strategy for acquiring reliable knowledge. It goes back to the classic conflict of rationalism vs. empiricism. “Rationalism” sounds good — who doesn’t want to…

  • David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation

    When you are told that carrots have human rights because they share half our genes — but not how gene percentages confer rights — wizard. When someone announces that the nature-nurture debate has been settled because there is evidence that a given percentage of our political opinions are genetically inherited, but they don’t explain how…

  • TED Talk-Leonard Susskind: My friend Richard Feynman

    I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend Richard Feynman. I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. And I’m going to tell you the Richard Feynman that I knew. I’m sure there…

  • Intelligent Life in the Universe?

    While Drake’s equation is a good basis for systematic investigations of signals from extraterrestrial intelligences, I care little about the admittedly scarce possibility that we ever receive positive news from our SETI searches. I care more about the fact that, if we consider the whole universe instead than restricting to our small galaxy, and if…

  • A Yearning for Truth

    Beauty, Plato wrote, is not easy to define, but something that “slips through and evades us”. For this reason, many logic-oriented philosophical approaches tend to divorce and even oppose truth and beauty. “The question of truth”, wrote logician Gottlob Frege in one of his most influential works, “would cause us to abandon aesthetic delight for…

  • A Correlation in Perception

    James Cameron’s AVATAR This post will indeed seem quite odd. But as I told Phil I wanted to explain a principal behind all the language I used here as if it would appear to another if we assume another perspective. James Cameron’s AVATAR Now we know how some of us who go the the extreme…

  • Brief Glimpses of the Sun

    Mathematics and Science: Last Essays 8 Last Essays But it is exactly because all things tend toward death that life is an exception which it is necessary to explain. Let rolling pebbles be left subject to chance on the side of a mountain, and they will all end by falling into the valley. If we…

  • William Thurston

    Xianfeng David Gu and Shing-Tung YauTo a topologist, a rabbit is the same as a sphere. Neither has a hole. Longitude and latitude lines on the rabbit allow mathematicians to map it onto different forms while preserving information. William Thurston of Cornell, the author of a deeper conjecture that includes Poincaré’s and that is now…