Ape in the coat

When mathematicians talk about probability, they do it in terms of a triplet ( Ω , F , P ) - sample space, event space and probability measure function, with specific properties, defined by probability axioms. For a layman it may not be clear what all these things mean. Mathematical...

Introduction For a long time, I was planning to write a comprehensive post patiently exploring all the problems with conventional “anthropic reasoning”. How, for historical reasons, the whole discipline went sideways at some point and just can’t recover, continuing to apply confused frameworks, choosing between several ridiculous options and accumulating...

Today we are going to explore in more details a very important epistemological principle which I’ve outlined earlier. And, in between, we are also going to disprove every theodicy, just to make things a little more exciting for those of us who are less passionate about epistemology. Theodicy is a...

It may seem that there are to separate drives in the pursuit of truth. The first one is observation - our theories are supposed to correspond to reality and, therefore, fit the observable evidence. The theory that fit the evidence is in some sense better than a theory that doesn’t....

Philosophy has a weird relationships with skepticism. On one hand, skepticism is a legitimate philosophical view with no good arguments against. On the other hand, it’s usually treated as an obviously wrong view. An absurdity which, nevertheless has to be entertained. Skeptic arguments and conclusions are almost never directly engaged...

There is a standard pattern in philosophical conversations. People stumble upon their epistemological limitations and then assume that God’s existence somehow would’ve solved the problem. For instance, suppose we are talking about Münchhausen trilemma, demonstrating the inability to have completely certain foundation for knowledge. We inspect different horns of the...

There is a joke format which I find quite fascinating. Let’s call it Philosopher vs Engineer. It goes like this: the Philosopher raises some complicated philosophical question, while the Engineer gives a very straightforward applied answer. Some back and forth between the two ensues, but they fail to cross the...