All PostsAll Posts: I’m Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid and Charlie Kaufman September 17, 2020 E.B. White on the Essayist, Political Rectitude, Liberty September 12, 2020 The Curious Essayist (with Loren Eiseley, Edward Said, Phillip Lopate) September 2, 2020 Beware Complexity July 26, 2020 Happy Birthday, Xu Lizhi July 18, 2020 Thinking About Thinking About Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems (and Consciousness) July 17, 2020 Denotation Switch 02: Semantic Vagueness; Conditions for Blame/Praise July 14, 2020 Free Will: Impossibility Paradox July 13, 2020 Coupon Collector’s Problem with Stirling Numbers of the Second Kind Part 2: ‘Within’ vs ‘Exactly in’ a Given Number of Die Rolls July 4, 2020 Agustín Rayo Argues for Zero (mathematical platonism vs. nominalism) June 19, 2020 Yes-or-No Questions Are Dangerous June 18, 2020 What Is Race?: Four Philosophical Views by Glasgow, Haslanger, Jeffers, Spencer June 14, 2020 Lost Boarding Pass Probability: Seven Dwarfs & 100 Airplane Passengers May 31, 2020 Fibonacci (and Tribonacci) Numbers Derived from Coin Flips May 21, 2020 Artificial Intelligence as Artist (intuitions and requirements) May 13, 2020 Willful Ignorance (A Thought Experiment) May 6, 2020 Free Will & Randomness? No Problem. May 4, 2020 Simulation Hypothesis + Pascal’s Wager = Belief Behavior? April 30, 2020 Dice Probability: Median Rolls to 6 Sides (Coupon Collector’s) with Stirling Numbers of the Second Kind April 28, 2020 David Chalmers Would Like to Be Immortal (And so Would I) April 26, 2020 Immortality Is Impossible April 25, 2020 Dice Probability: Median Rolls to See All 6 Sides (Coupon Collector’s Problem) April 22, 2020 Virginia Woolf’s “On Being Ill” (Under COVID-19 Lockdown) April 17, 2020 Entitled Opinions and the Private Intellectual April 15, 2020 New Yorker Fiction Podcast: Lorrie Moore on Julie Hayden; Deborah Treisman on David Foster Wallace April 10, 2020 Infinite Divisibility of Frequencies, Notes, Pitches April 8, 2020 Denotation Switch 01: Ordinary Speakers, Hard-Earned Confusion, Philosopher’s Hat March 23, 2020 Plagiarism Yay(?) and Pay Me to Daydream (Part 1 of 3) March 21, 2020 Placebos Don’t Require Deception? March 9, 2020 Confusion, in Praise Of February 27, 2020 The Portal: Eric Weinstein, Agnes Callard, Philosophy February 24, 2020 Dice Probability: Expected Rolls to See All Six Sides (Coupon Collector’s Problem) February 14, 2020 Replace ‘Husbandry’ with ‘Élevage’ February 10, 2020 Dice Probability & Expectation: Expected Rolls to See a 6 February 5, 2020 WordPress Jetpack’s Beautiful Math with LaTeX February 1, 2020 100 Prisoners and 100 Boxes (probability challenge) January 31, 2020 (Not) The Most Powerful Word January 28, 2020 “Nights That Won’t Happen” by David Bermen January 27, 2020 Frequentists Use Bayes’ Theorem Too January 17, 2020 We Should Worry About Cars November 24, 2019 The Lighthouse: Wake’s Curse (of Winslow) November 19, 2019 Thought Experiments: I’m a Fan, But… November 19, 2019 Why Older People Should NOT Be Allowed to Change Their Legal Age October 24, 2019 Another Argument That 100 Heads in a Row Is Impossible September 27, 2019 Betteridge’s Law: Is ‘No’ the Answer to Any Blog Post Title That Ends in a Question Mark? September 27, 2019 Is Lightning Sexist Against Men? September 27, 2019 The Missing Dollar Riddle September 12, 2019 Interpretations of Probability at SEP (and Elsewhere) August 28, 2019 Gambler’s Ruin & Random Walk: Probability, Expectation, Steal the Chips August 24, 2019 Free Will Skepticism Doesn’t Need Science May 20, 2019 I Think, Therefore I Am: What We Can’t Infer from the Cogito May 7, 2019 What Do You Mean by “God”?: Denotation Switch, Three Forms of Disbelief, and Zealous Agnosticism May 6, 2019 Reliable Lie Detectors Are Impossible April 18, 2019 Appeal to Fate: A Free Will Fallacy April 11, 2019 How to Tell If You’re a Zombie April 5, 2019 Some Naive Questions About Many-Worlds Quantum Mechanics March 14, 2019 Probability (or Randomness): Ontic, Epistemic, Aleatory, Subjective, Personalist, Bayesian, Egocentric, Quantum, Objective, Rational, Inductive, Existential… ? March 1, 2019 Why 92 Heads in a Row Is Not Not Surprising February 16, 2019 Defense Attorney’s Fallacy: A Conditional Probability Problem December 28, 2018 (Counterintuitive?) Dice Probability: Sue vs Bob December 18, 2018 Anthropic Bias (Ch 2, Part 2): Fine-Tuning in Cosmology & 100 Heads in a Row December 17, 2018 Monty Hall Problem and Variations: Intuitive Solutions November 21, 2018 (Strange?) Probability with Playing Cards November 10, 2018 Bertrand’s Box Paradox (with and Without Bayes’ Theorem) November 9, 2018 Why Deliberate? November 2, 2018 Two-Child Problem: A Brief Explanation September 26, 2018 Attention: Mind the Mind Gap September 9, 2018 Causation and Free Will: Compatibilist vs. Incompatibilist Intuitions September 3, 2018 Anthropic Bias: Fine-Tuning in Cosmology (Chapter 2), Part 1 August 5, 2018 Fun with Statistics on Planet żMi August 4, 2018 Lost in Math, Beautiful Theories, and a Racehorse Analogy July 8, 2018 Frankfurt Cases & Moral v. Legal Responsibility July 8, 2018 Anthropic Bias: Introduction (Chapter 1) June 27, 2018 (Quantum) Computing: A Recursive Problem in Universe Modeling? April 21, 2018 The Incredibly Small Probability of Having a Beard April 9, 2018 Omega Hungers: Skeptics about Heads-Tails and Tails-Heads in the Sample Space March 26, 2018 A Secret Intention’s Strange Effects on Probability March 10, 2018 Newcomb’s Problem: Of (At Least) Two Minds March 5, 2018 So his brain’s just squished (rather than only 10% there): A Bonsai Brain February 16, 2018 Laplace’s Demon Defeated by Human Consciousness January 6, 2018 Uploading Minds to a Computer Need Not Imply Substance Dualism January 6, 2018 Cancer Screening: An Easier Counterintuitive Conditional Probability Problem (with and Without Bayes’ Theorem) January 1, 2018 Three Strange Results in Probability: Cognitive States and the Principle of Indifference (Monty Hall, Flipping Coins, and Factory Boxes) January 1, 2018 Two-Child Problem (when one is a girl named Florida born on a Tuesday) December 31, 2017 Counterintuitive Dice Probability: How many rolls expected to get a 6, given only even outcomes? December 1, 2017 Aesthetic Experience as Response to Stimuli (and Meaning) Rather Than to Mental Representations October 21, 2017 Utilitarianism and Conscious Computers: An Unsettling Utopia? October 12, 2017 The Magic of Meaning – (Words, Mental Causation, Experience, Mind-Brain, Behavior) August 1, 2017 Nassim Taleb’s Fat Tony Example / And: Is it possible to flip 100 Heads in a row? July 8, 2017 Free Will Is (Mostly) Irrelevant July 5, 2017 Amnesiac’s Dilemma (Aka: Sleeping Beauty Problem) June 24, 2017 Memory and Consciousness (via Audition) June 24, 2017 Why We Get the Monty Hall Problem Wrong(?) March 16, 2017 Free Will Paradox? March 16, 2017 Consciousness Explained in Three Billion Pages February 17, 2017 Four Dimensions of X-ism (and ‘Seminal’ Is Sexist) February 10, 2017 Sine-Wave Speech January 17, 2017 Do Groups Believe? August 26, 2015 Rachel Dolezal: Race, Gender, Sex, and Social Group Membership June 16, 2015 Pulse: You Are a Series of Non-Repeating Events October 11, 2014 In Favor of Compositional Nihilism: A Response to the Organicism of van Inwagen August 11, 2014 Exploding the Metaphor July 31, 2014 In Defense of Sensitivity: Nozick, Kripke, and Predicate Exclusivity July 29, 2014 Is Suicide Possible? July 25, 2014 Time Travel and the Soul, Or How to Disprove God July 23, 2014 Democracy Doesn’t Exist July 16, 2014 Deaf by Design: Designer Babies, Reproduction Rights, and (So-Called) Disability July 13, 2014 You Are (Probably Not) a Computer Simulation June 4, 2014 Against James Rachels’ Punishment and Desert September 7, 2013 The Failure of Philosophy: A Success Story August 5, 2013 The Genetically Modified Guitarist: Genetic Enhancement, Musical Experience, and the Good Art Gene August 2, 2013 Discursive Formations in Foucault’s Archaeological Historical Analysis July 31, 2013 Musical Innovation and Progress; Or: On the Meaning and Implications of Musical Change February 7, 2012 Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, Part II: Bachelardian Neoteny January 4, 2012 Update: Lanier, Jodorowsky, de Beauvoir, Airbender, et al. December 27, 2011 The Question Intelligent Design Can’t Answer August 9, 2011 Marnie Stern Shreds February 20, 2011 Dear Hecklers and Haters: Your Folly’s Not Funny February 18, 2011 Group Agency, Voting, Same-Sex Marriage January 6, 2011 Radiolab, Stravinsky, Perfect Pitch, Dissonance December 9, 2010 Edgard Varèse: The Liberation of Sound June 23, 2010 Who Cares if You Listen? (Milton Babbitt’s Famous Article) June 23, 2010 Music and Emotion; Or: I’m Not Crying, My Eyes Are Just Very Sensitive to the Air, the Molecules of Which Have Been Even Further Stimulated by That Cello June 23, 2010 American Irony January 20, 2010 Advice for Aspiring and First-Time Authors (a.k.a. The Book Business) January 14, 2010 Gloria Coates: A Composer You’ll Love January 10, 2010 Music Theory: It Won’t Kill Your Music January 8, 2010 Peeling the Jazz Onion January 5, 2010 Should Patterns Shape Our Conception of Reality? January 4, 2010 Is Music Filtering a Good Thing? December 31, 2009 Philosophy Bites Podcast December 25, 2009 What is Art? December 24, 2009 Professor Werner Herzog’s New Film School October 5, 2009 CD vs MP3; Is the Album Dead? March 11, 2009 Interview with Seth Godin about the Music Industry March 11, 2009 Slow Listening Movement March 10, 2009 Timbre vs Melody, part ii: Timbral Listening March 10, 2009 Culture (Individuals Are Cooler) March 10, 2009 Sonny Sharrock: On Improvisation (“Fool + Noise = Bullshit”) December 13, 2008 Timbre vs. Melody December 3, 2008 Attn Film Fans: Battleship Pretension December 2, 2008 Cet Air-La December 2, 2008 Chnickeman Manickchen November 25, 2008 Soft-synths, Samples, Tangent on Texture… November 25, 2008