Computer scientists often make unfounded bold statements in an effort to elevate their profession to the status of physics and maybe share some of the glory of that field. This is understandable but it becomes ludicrous when they equate their ability to model complex problems and arrive at a solution to that of physical reality in arriving at the same solution. It is troublesome that the educational establishment not only tolerates this type of behavior but also promotes it and rewards it.
I am not talking about straw man arguments in this case because the subject of the paper by Karakostas is not his invention. Specifically, the concept of reality in philosophy is as old as Parmenides. However, deductions based on hidden premises can be problematic, especially when they deal with the nature of reality.
While I am agnostic about of the bold intelligent design hypothesis, I believe that using straw man arguments and being fanatical is not just a non-scientific way of opposing it but instead reinforces it in the minds of laymen because such efforts often demonstrate insecurity about the fate of evolution theory.
A substantial part of philosophy of science has devoted itself to the production of straw man arguments in the absence of any real breakthrough and substantial contribution. Especially troublesome are attempts to question the validity of empirically confirmed physical laws, such as the law of conservation of energy in mechanics, by applying them arbitrarily and without any reality check to absurd thought experiments involving the concept of infinity and point masses. The latest paper disposed in the junk archive is a clear indication of the state of decadence in contemporary philosophy of science.
Another epistemological shock from a paper in the junk archive that confuses symbols with their values and that knowing if the limit of a sequence exists does not imply knowing its value.
We get many of these name callings lately. Realism of such and such individual. Anti-realism of such and such individual. The latest is by a paper titled “Can van Fraassen’s anti-realism give an account of novel predictions of unexpected phenomena?”. Obviously, another name calling for whatever reason.
Being able to convey complex ideas in plain language is a sign of intelligence. Yet, in modern science, doing that is not considered a good way of advancing a career. This is because nowadays giving an incomprehensible speech or writing an incomprehensible paper is considered a sign of intelligence, especially when it is accompanied by standard titles we all know how easy they are to get in certain cases.
Precognition, in my opinion, my be due to the probabilistic nature of the human quantum brain. The human brain calculates probabilities about future events constantly, based on available information.
Another epistemological shock today from another paper in PhilSci-Archive , the archive that has refused to publish my papers. Epistemology nowadays seems to thrive on straw man arguments. In the paper Judgment Aggregation and the Problem of Tracking the Truth, the authors give the following example:
It was reported in a paper signed by 117 authors that neutrinos went faster than the speed of light. As expected this has generated a lot of speculation and talk about a violation of Relativity Theory. I’m not surprised. You should not be either.