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Showing posts from December, 2020

Big Faith Big Prayers

When I was a Protestant, our college ministry would have these really early morning prayers where all the guys would go on top of Signal Hill and pray. We would gather in a circle and go around and do a little prayer. And by itself a 2 or three minute prayer isn't bad, but, when you have a couple of guys who are just trying to flex, a 3 minute prayers in a circle of about 15 guys can mean just standing in a circle for a solid 45 minutes, and I wasn't having it. So when it was my turn to pray, all I said was, "Dear God, please bless me with millions and millions of dollars. Amen." I was kinda making a point, and I was being a butthead about it. Afterwards, my friend Max came up to me, and he told me, "Dude, I looked up and Steve just gave you the maddest look. It was hilarious." Indeed, it was.  So, what exactly is wrong here? Maybe the execution of the prayer, in that context, but I want to look at the content. The content of the prayer did, at the time, see

Russell on Sense-Data and Physics

The following is a draft of a final paper I had to turn in for my Analytic Philosophy paper. Enjoy.  Russell’s Structural Collapse In this paper, I critically examine Bertrand Russell’s theory on the relationship between our sense-data and physics. Russell aims to show that we construct about the world from our sense-data, we do not infer the world from our sense-data. He does this by arguing from analogy. Since we do away with hypothetical entities in math, then we should do it in physics. The relative property between math and physics in Russell’s view is that physics really is just reducible to math. However, I show that there are problems with the mathematical content of the analogy itself and Russell’s understanding between the relationship of math and physics which absurdly tells little to nothing than what we commonly understand physics tells us, thus making his argument by analogy a weak one.  Russell is out to set out a theory concerning the relationship between sense-data and