My response to the title question¹ was essentially 'Somewhat, yes', at which point I felt the need to define it as best I could.

Time is a full-sized dimension for which causality, for the most part (as we typically perceive it, and as it causes our perception)² is uni-directional.

Traditionally I thought of space-time as four dimensions through which we were travelling at a constant speed, and where we would by default be travelling that speed one direction through time. But recognising the causality of perceptions made me realise that's really stupid. (My excuse is that it's from my high school days or earlier. No excuse for not moving well past it years ago. I did kind of move past it, but didn't completely abandon it.) Obviously we're not 'moving through time' (or maybe we are because, well, that's how we define movement), but because my current state is caused by my past state, the past appears to me as, well, the time.

In metaphysics, we discussed timeslices and how this stuff doesn't degrade into nominalism. (My position was that it does and that it's good that it does because nominalism is the view that actually makes sense.)

This newish line of thought lead me to determinism. It always seemed baseless and strange to me what people say that if determinism is true, that Laplace's demon can calculate not only the future, but also the past. Clearly, were determinism true then a given timeslice of the universe could lead only to one outcome, but why could there not be multiple timeslices that can cause a given timeslice? Consider Conway's Game of Life. The blank board, for example, can be caused by:
* The blank board
* The blank board with exactly one cell, located at at 0,0
* The blank board with exactly one cell, located at at 0,1
* The blank board with exactly two cells, located at at 0,0 and 47,42
* And so on.

This doesn't only apply to the blank board, of course. Any board causes by board X can also be caused by board X with one lone cell added apart from all the others.

Clearly, the universe is not governed by the rules of Conway's Game of Life, but it seems as if the principle should be similar. (I suppose my examples should have been selected to agree with the conservation of matter and energy, but that's more complicated. Still entirely doable, though.)

As I wrote this, though, something I missed earlier struck me: the verificationist would claim that 1. the claim that those vanishing cells exist/existed is meaningless and more importantly (because 1. is addressed by my comment in my previous parenthetical) 2. the claim that a given timeslice that could cause our current one existed and that another potential causing timeslice didn't is meaningless.

I have a lot of sympathy for verificationist. But they're so very annoying, don't you agree?

¹ Not that anyone asked it. It just popped into my mind.
² Initially I went with 'for normal matter', but I didn't like that at all.

'Do you agree with the statement "Everything happens for a reason"?'

Usually this question is religious in nature, and I disagree with it in terms of religious reasons, so 'no'.

But obviously things have causes, so 'yes'. I don't want sciency people interpreters taking my answer to mean I'm not sciency.

But quantum mechanics suggests things happen without causes, right? So 'no'.

Yes => I sound religious, and therefore unsciency.
No => I sound unreligious, and therefore sciency, but also unclassicalsciency. Will the sciency people interpreting my answer think to consider quantum mechanics?

By the way, 'karma' literally means 'cause and effect' (or perhaps just 'cause'), which I strongly believe in, and my friend's daughter is named Karma, whom I also am fairly certain exists. So do I believe in karma? I think there are causes, yes. I don't think there are mystical connections wherein doing bad causes bad things to happen to you, especially seeing as I am a nominalist and don't buy into wide content.

These questions seem simple to you simple-minded people, but they're not.

People at work were recently saying that they'd never donate sperm or eggs because there'd be a child with their genetics out there that they didn't know about. Upon my inquiring why that would matter, they essentially proclaimed that anyone who doesn't consider such a thing important is a bad parent. 'You came from my seed, but it doesn't matter.' == Bad parent.

This has some obvious logical consequences: I know of families where one child was born to them and one was adopted. They do not favour one child over the other. Therefore, ceteris paribus, they do not care that Child A has their genetics, and therefore these people are bad parents.

My conclusion is slightly different: I've observed that these people are good parents, and therefore, the people I work with are wrong (because, like most people, they've bought into the whole 'bloodline' idiocy we were supposed to have abandoned when we left the hereditary monarchy in favour of meritocracy). Genetics are a medical matter. It's the social aspects (IE, who raised you) that should matter to us socially.

One night after falling asleep, I dreamt about the Death Star from Star Wars. Looked just like it.

What's amazing is that I'm not alone. Dozens, nay, thousands of people have had similar dreams. They lose consciousness and then have vivid perceptions of large, spherical space stations of similar size and design, and often it's called a 'Death Star' by people in the vision.

This is an amazing coincidence, and I think we can take it as proof positive that the Death Star truly exists.

NO, WAIT. That's stupid. The Death Star appears in a very widely-known piece of fiction. It's an established piece of culture. People think about such things, go to sleep, and then dream about them. This doesn't even begin to suggest that any such entity actually exists. That's one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.

Now try this one on for size:
'Lots of people in near-death situations, upon losing consciousness, see angels or a bright light telling them it's not their time yet, as can be found in numerous works of popular culture. Therefore, such things really exist.'.

Dreaming about something does not prove it exists, kid!

I'm a bit of a purist when it comes to paradoxes. I don't consider the most ingenious one to be one. (Autoplaying video warning)

Tem42 defines paradoxes roughly as 'when there are two reasonable ways of looking at something and they result in a contradiction'. I often find myself tempted to be exclusionary to the point of saying 'two [or more] sound arguments with contradictory conclusions' (in which case, paradoxes are logically impossible).

I'm happy to be less exclusive, of course. My main goal is to throw out the birthday 'paradox' and its ilk. (For those who don't know, the BP essentially says 'How many people do I need in a room for there to be a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday. Answer: only 23. That's so low! How very paradoxical!').

The Phantom Menace DVD special features contains a clip of some people asking Jake Lloyd (Anakin Skywalker) how much he'd estimate the film costs to make, and the ten(?)-year-old Jake replies hesitantly 'Probably over 50 000 dollars?'

Would people say that this ten-year-old underestimating the cost of film-making to be an example of a paradox? Technically, this fits the Greek root (contrary to opinion/expectation), but we don't use it that way. So whywhywhy would it be a paradox that people with bad mathematical intuition are surprised by mathematical results? Stupid people get things wrong? PARADOX! No.

Yes, I'll even throw out the Monty Hall paradox. It's bizarre at first glance, but if you look at it correctly, you'll eventually realise it was confusing because you didn't understand it or math properly. Your fault, not the fault of the world, or of logic.

The Sorites Paradox (the heap) may be a paradox, though it's really just clumsy language. The surprise execution seems to be a paradox because, well, let's see you solve it if you think it's not. Same for the 'This sentence is false' and other self-referential paradoxes. If you can solve the paradox with 'People are stupid' I prefer not to count it. If you have to solve it by saying 'Language is broken', I consider counting it. If you can't solve it without saying 'Logic is broken', then we have something I'd consider a paradox.

Philosophers came up with ID a couple thousand years ago, and it's been revisited many, many times. I first heard of it many years ago under it's traditional name 'The Watchmaker Analogy'. In short:

You're walking out in the desert and you find a golden pocket watch with lots of little gears and everything inside and it keeps perfect time. 'Amazing!' you say. 'A pocket watch has randomly formed from the sand!'

This seems absurd. A reasonable person assumes there's a watchmaker who created it, because it's a really complicated thing and it would be stupid not to assume that it was created by an intelligent being.

So too is it with the universe.

This is a really good argument. That's right, ID is good. ID is a brilliant philosophical argument that we've been teaching in philosophy courses for hundreds of years. Because it's a most excellent argument for the existence of god.

But here's the thing: ID is a brilliant philosophical argument that we've been teaching in philosophy courses for hundreds of years. Do you see the words 'science' or 'scientific' in the previous sentence? No, because ID is a brilliant philosophical argument. Not science. No one for a second considered this science until very recently when the religious fanatics needed a new way to force their philosophical views into science classes. It hasn't changed. What makes something science hasn't changed. Only one thing has changed about it recently: politicians decided they needed to declare it science to push their own agenda.

That's not cool.

Science is science (thank you, Aristotle!) while philosophy is not (though it keeps spawning sciences).

* ID is not based on empirical evidence. (That the universe is complex?)
* ID doesn't give us any predictions about future observations. (If we continue to examine the universe, we'll continue to see that it's complex? We're going to find the designer if we look over in that star system?)
* ID is not falsifiable. ('Oh, we were mistaken: the universe actually isn't complex'?)

Actually, one thing has changed other than the politicians: science has shown that ID doesn't really apply to the main things we thought it did: life. Yeah, the universe is pretty complex, but we now have proof that there is a simple working mechanism by which complex things arrive from simple ones. Higher lifeforms don't need an intelligent creator. They just need lower lifeforms. And the lowest lifeforms are simple enough that they don't need a creator.

(Potentially relevant link)

People who say the above are wrong.

• Orange is the best colour for your box of laundry detergent in order to maximise sales.
• Orange is the best colour for emulating the Luna scheme.
• Orange is the best colour for camouflaging yourself in a jungle.
• Orange is the best colour.

The above are all predicates, and predicates are true, false, or nonsense, but never more than one of these. (In this case, probably true, true, false, and false or nonsense).

Now, many fools such as Foo will protest that orange is indeed his favourite colour and therefore the best colour. If I favour blue, though, Foo will contend that we're both right, but he's denying one of the fundamental principles of logic (and despite what silly people will claim, logic applies perfectly to every aspect of the world).

Now, if I say 'blue is my favourite colour' and Foo says 'Orange is my favourite colour', then we can both be right about those respective claims, because they're different claims. And perhaps if you claimed 'Orange is the best colour to show Foo when he asks to see the best colour', you'd be right because Foo is an idiot who doesn't yet buy my claim and no one wants an angry Foo yelling at her for showing the 'wrong' colour. But 'Orange is the best colour' isn't relativised to the person. It's stated in absolutes, just like 'Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system'. True. Not just True-for-Wesc, but True.

Due to our inability to distinguish between 'best' and favourite, we don't like that answer--and by 'we' I mean Foo. I like the answer. I wrote the bloody answer. People mostly do redefining of terms this with normatives like 'best', 'better', 'worse', etc. But why do they object to my labelling it false/nonsense on the grounds of best not applying to colours¹? If I claim 'Jealousy is the heaviest emotion'--with 'heaviest' not being any silly metaphor, but something along the lines of 'having the most physical mass'--they'll not say 'Oh, you're right, because weight/mass doesn't apply to emotions²'. Instead they'll claim it's false/nonsense. The same response I give to the colour evaluation.

Opinions are about predicates and are right or wrong. Preferences are neither right nor wrong, predicates about preferences are. I've had to defend this claim countless times (including to Dr. Hettche, one of my philosophy professor).

¹ I confess that 'best' may apply to colours, but if so, you probably determine the best by enumerating how much people like each one how much.

² Anyone who wishes to butt in with a comment cashing out emotions in terms of chemicals and electronic impulses is welcome to do so only after they've come up with a better analogy for me to use.

(Potentially relevant link)

People are always having such trouble thinking about space, so during a debate once I wrote this introduction (very slightly edited). It's not super!well written, but it's something. Enjoy:

Intro to the meaning of 'Universe'

There are two ways of thinking about the universe .One is that it's everything, as the good Toilet¹ said. The other is the big blob of space expanding outwards from the point of the Big Bang.

People usually don't distinguish between the two, because usually we say they are the same thing.

Getting a grasp on the concept of 'space'

Imagine two things as close together as possible. There is no room between them at all. They are touching--at the subatomic level if you need think of it that way.
Now imagine: There's a large solar system in between the two things.
That's right, a large solar system between two things that have no space in between them. So the solar system isn't in space. Does that make sense? For the moment, let's say no. After all, 'in' or 'next to' or 'between' are all in spacial terms: if something is between two other things, it is in the space between the two things.

Now think about the 'edge' of space. Beyond that is just like between the two touching things: there is no space past it, because it's the edge. Now, does it make sense to say there's another thing past the edge? No, there's nowhere for it to be. It's just like being between the two things. And we said that makes no sense. (But maybe we lied.)

Metaspace

The problem most people have is that they can't think except in terms of space. They can't imagine something (like the universe) not being somewhere. So they tacitly and unconsciously make up a 'metaspace' that contains normal space. If you do that, the normal big bang space is at some metalocation and there could be another big bang space at another metalocation. This makes it all very easy to talk about such things. Unfortunately, it makes it easy to talk about them incorrectly, because people don't notice that they've gone from normal space to metaspace.

Suppose you have a nice big metaspace*, and inside it there are two big bangs. One of these big bangs is fortunate enough to have us in it, and the other is a bizarre place filled with tree frogs (but no trees, sadly). Suppose we wanted to rescue these unfortunate tree frogs by flying our infinitely-fast spaceship to their space and supplying them with lots of trees. Where do we fly to?
This ship is just like your car. Sure, it's faster and can fly, but it's the same in that it only travels through normal space. It can't take you to the solar system between to touching objects, because that's somewhere in metaspace, not in our normal space. And it's the same with the frogspace: you can't fly off the edge of normal space, because then you're flying in metaspace, which is an entirely different thing.

Turtles

Our happy big bang space is in metaspace, riding on two strange creatures, known as metaspace turtles. We know they're turtles because they have shells on their backs and go really slowly, but don't look at all snailish.

Reality

So we can't leave our normal big bang space, and things outside our normal big bang space can't come in.
So what is it that makes the other things real?

Footnotes

* Of course, if we really truly need a metaspace, then we also need a metametaspace, and a metametametaspace, and so on. How irksome!

Credits

General Wesc: better than Hawking and twice as pompous.²

Blogspace Footnotes

¹ The user Toilet of Doom posted earlier on the topic.

² I originally posted this on eCritters using my 'Isaac Asimov' account rather than my Wescian account.

If you said 'no', you're probably one of those annoying pseudo-intellectuals trying to sound smart (and failing). Please stop.

When I say 'yes'--the correct answer--people assume I'm being all naive and not understanding the point they're trying to make. The truth is their point is stupid. Lemme asplain:

Sound is not in your head. I know, you think you're super-clever for pointlessly redefining this common English word (and scientific term) in terms of qualia¹ instead of the physical phenomenon it really is, but you're really not. Crack open a dictionary, or an encyclopaedia, or a physics textbook. It will tell you that sound is vibrations. Physical. Not mental. Stop redefining this word. You're not Locke².

Some of you more clever people may object, 'Oh, no! you misunderstand: I'm an idealist³'. Tell me, then, Mr. Idealist, if no one is around, how is there a tree to fall? You could, of course, explain that God is always in the Quad, but now you seem to be arguing that God is deaf. I don't buy that.

¹ Being an annoying pseudo-intellectual, you probably don't know what 'qualia' means. Well, it's what you're redefining 'sound' to refer to. The 'what it's like' in your head.

² Locke annoys me so I take cheap shots at him whenever possible. (Anyway, I'm sure he did something immoral at some point in his life so it's okay to treat him like a rabbit wolf and off him^2b.)

^2b Doubleshot!

³ The less clever of you probably think I mean I-think-things-should-be-perfect idealist. I don't. I mean Barkley. Imagine The Matrix without the computers. The entire world is nothing but ideas or perceptions in our minds. Yeah, you think it's a stupid idea (or maybe you've decided to believe it because it'll make you sound clever). Please go read something by Barkley before doing either of those. It's a lot more sophisticated than you or Sam Johnson take it to be.

At Philosophy Club last night, Adam pointed out that he could make a machine that says 'Ow, that hurts!' when you punch it. So I threw this thing together. Dr. Murphy an d Dr. Vebber seemed to think it was amusing.

Anyhoo, this is similar to a basic computer program I bring up whenever idiots start talking about plants and vegetarianism. 'Oh, eating meat isn't worse than eating plants, 'cause plants an feel pain too!' Bullshit. Animals have a centre of subjectivity. Plants don't. Plants feel pain in the same sense that this button feels pain: it reacts negatively to certain stimuli. Most philosophies and certainly common sense insist that there's a morally relevant difference between animals and Javascript programs. Yet there's no basis for the claim that there's a relevant difference between a plant and the button. You can bullshit all you'd like about plants sensing whether you're a murderer or not, but _plants_ _have_ _no_ _mentation_. Animals do.

Once again, science defeats bad philosophy. The good philosophers know this.

I went to the ECU 'Mardi Gras' celebration last night. At one point, the DJ commented 'We're celebrating Mardi Gras ECU-style!' Yeah: on Thursday. They do this every year. Always on Thursday.

Totally ECU. In addition to this bit of silliness, every semester they'll officially designate a Monday to be a Wednesday or a Tuesday to be a Monday or something like that so that all the classes will have the same number of meetings.

Anyhoo, before that, I went to the Philosophy Club, which was surprisingly interesting. Dr. Wall presented on State v. Guido and one other case. He'd done the case I can't name before, but it was better this time. Bigger crowd, for one.
In the nameless case, some guy killed his grandfather in order to get his inheritance. (Being only fifteen, he was merely sent to juvie.) Later, his sisters sued to prevent him from getting the inheritance. However, at the time the statue specified the certain conditions under which a will is invalid, and murder was not among them. Should he get the money?
(The correct answer, of course, is yes.)
The majority opinion says 'no' and provided several reasons:
* Original intent of the law: surely the legislators would've listed murder if it'd occurred to them.
* Undue influence. (this 'argument' may be strengthened by the fact that the kid murdered his grandfather partly because he thought he was going to be written out of the will soon.)
* Intent of the testator: the grandfather wouldn't have wanted the kid to get the money if he'd known the kid was going to murder him.

Let's consider these arguments:

The original intent of the law

(Specifically either a) they wouldn't have wanted the kid to get the money or b) they wanted it interpreted against a background of justice, to handle any screwups they made.

These both seem semi-reasonable, but if you interpret enough 'original intent' into the law, no one but the judges after the fact can know what is and isn't illegal. It's somewhat post ex facto. That's uncool. Still, a decent view, perhaps.

Undue influence

If I force your hand as you write the will, that invalidates it. But I contend that killing you is different. Consider a will that says (being freely written) 'Luca gets my estate, even if he murders me'. It seems obvious to me that this is a valid will and should be followed (even if they've updated the statute to say murder makes it invalid). Yet if I force you to write in your will 'Luca gets my estate even if he forced me to write this', that clearly isn't a valid will. These things are quite distinct, and it's not clear that they should both fall under the 'undue influence' basis for invalidating the will.

Intent of the testator

Suppose you leave me 100 000USD and I blow it all in Vegas. Maybe you wouldn't have left me the money if you'd known I'd do that, but that doesn't warrant the courts denying me the money. If you don't include the clause '...but you can't blow it all in Vegas', then sure. Same if you say '...unless he murders me'.

But that case isn't my point with this post. I wanted to comment on State v. Guido.
Some guy had the habit of abusing his wife. She ran away, but he caught her and told her he'd kill her if she tries running away again.
One day, she gets his run, and is going to kill herself, but opts not to. Then on the way to put the gun away, she sees her husband sleeping on the couch, and decides to shoot him. She does and he dies.
Because he was asleep, she was unable to get by on a self-defense claim, so she went for neurosis, or something similar. Extreme anxiety, basically.
Anyway, it's obvious to me (not being put in the actual situation) that the optimal solution would be to keep the gun and run away again (theft?), and if he catches her, then shoot him (preferably in the leg or somewhere most likely non-fatal). This brought up the suggestion of poking the sleeping husband and then when he jumps up to beat her, shoot him, arising to a very nice term: Premeditated self-defense.
Should premeditated self-defense be a crime?

(Lack of posts followed by a pathetic ramble. Oh well.)

(Potentially relevant link)

Due to the lack of one-to-one correspondence of words in natural language, translating a word such as 'hot' (spicy? high temperature? sexy?) into German (which has a word that covers high temperature and sexy, but uses a different word to mean spicy), one must consider the context of the word. In doing so, one must consider the context of the surrounding words.
It sounds analogous Google's PageRank, and seems like what you need is a recursive analysis that slowly approaches a correct translation. But there's a difference: PageRank gives you numbers for each item, but words aren't numbers. You can't really say the German word 'scharf' (sharp/spicy/sexy) is somehow closer to the meaning of 'hot' (when used to mean high temperature) than the word 'Gürteltiere' (armadillo). They're just both 100% wrong.
Now, perhaps you can say 'ganz gut' (literally 'entirely good', actually just 'alright') is closer to 'fabulous' than 'Gürteltiere' (armadillo), but further than 'sehr gut' (very good, and quite high praise indeed). But if we could get it to the point where we were only worrying about such minor things such as that, we'd be mostly done. The tough part is taking 'hot' and knowing whether it's 'scharf' (sharp/spicy/sexy) or 'heiß' (high temperature/sexy). Recursion only helps if you get closer to the correct answer as the number of iterations increases. This problem, is perhaps more attuned to a backtracking solution as you might use in Chess: if one branch doesn't make sense, go up your line of reasoning a level and try the next option. (Prolog may be the language of the future. :-)
But then you have the difficulty of determining whether a particular branch 'makes sense'. How is the software to know when to give up on that line of substitution and backtrack?

In modern philosophy (a depressingly low-level course) today, we were discussing Descartes' Meditation IV (having spent the past month+ doing the previous Meditations). Descartes is concerned with the Problem of Evil with regard to false beliefs: how could the JCI God allow us to have false beliefs?
Stop right there!
What's that? You say God allows us to have false beliefs? You mean he allows crazy people to be systematically wrong while believing their selves to be sane and correct?
Okay then. Suppose God does exist. I'll grant you that in the context of your opposition of the universal doubt. But you just admitted that God's existence will not solve the problem of us being stuck with this doubt. You premise that he's a solution on the grounds that if God exists he wouldn't let us be fooled, yet you argue against an objection to his existence by saying that he can allow us to be fooled (limitless will).

(Yes, I'm over-simplifying, but it kept me amused for a portion of the class.)