Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.754

   Such analogies “may be useful for some purposes, but it is clear that they explain nothing.” Firstly, Broad asks us to consider the successive lighting of presentness—now on one event and now on another, and so on. This is itself an event (or a series of events), “and ought therefore to be a part of the series of events, and not simply something that happens to the latter from outside” (1923, p. 60). If we suppose (as we seem compelled to) that it is not a part of the original series of events, we are launched on a vicious regress of time-dimensions. For then the successive lightning of later …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/charlie-dunbar-broad.md

2. 02 · blog0.751

   He refutes arguments purporting to show the actual sempiternity of the world, but not arguments adduced to show that such sempiternity is possible , while he characterizes traditional would-be proofs of a temporal beginning as invalid (“sophistic”). The central piece of the work is a demonstration that no branch of philosophy can prove the “newness” of the world. The natural scientist cannot, because that would require relying on an assumption that is not included in the principles of his science and would make them an inconsistent set if included. The natural scientist can explain how somethi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/boethius-of-dacia.md

3. 03 · blog0.749

   For example, one might think that the diachronic character of physical laws shows that physical objects have an innate ability to persist. If they did not, what would make the laws reliable predictors of objects’ behavior? Kvanvig and McCann find this thought lacking on the grounds that physical laws presuppose the continuing existence of the world. They are reliable because the presupposition is correct, but not because the objects they characterize are self -sustaining. Is the idea of an innate self-sustaining quality tenable? Kvanvig and McCann consider a number of possible construals and a…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/creation-and-conservation.md

4. 04 · blog0.748

   In such a world, evidently, one has to fix the state of things over the whole of the world at a time t , in order for events to be strictly determined, by the laws of nature, for any amount of time thereafter. Ismael (2016) has argued that even this is not enough to secure the desired logical entailment of the full future: in addition, one must add an “and nothing else” clause or premise, saying that in the (putatively) full description of the way things are at t , nothing has been left out that could interfere with the natural time-evolution of the world-state. In the next section we will see…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/causal-determinism.md

5. 05 · yt0.747

   You can't actually  just figure out immediately how to jump ahead.   You are forced to live time as time actually  progresses, go through the steps one by one.   I think that's a sort of important distinction  between the computational way of thinking about   things and the mathematical one, where it's just  like there's going to be a formula for the result.  That's such a vital idea, computational  irreducibility. Again, just to reiterate what   you said, when we solve a physics problem we have  the answer, maybe it's …

   yt/yAJTctpzp5w-can-space-and-time-emerge-from-simple-rules-stephen-wolfram-/transcript.txt

6. 06 · yt0.743

   So, so there there is a minimum and not only that, it has to have a certain causal structure, right? And we can we can kind of debate that and that's really in line too with surl you know in the Chinese room argument which is like look a dictionary is not doesn't have understanding because it doesn't have the right causal structure. You have to have a certain causal structure or a certain minimum complexity and then you reach this whatever it is whether it's consciousness we're talking about understanding agency all of these things right so I guess my question to you is will we be able to buil…

   yt/PNYWi996Beg-your-brain-is-a-prediction-machine-not-a-processor-karl-fris/transcript.txt

7. 07 · blog0.743

   We might adopt NASA’s definition, according to which life is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution.” However, accounts like NASA’s are implausible for a further reason: while the ability to evolve by natural selection is something that collections of organisms—species—may or may not have, it is not a feature an individual organism may have. Later members of a species come to have features earlier members lacked; some of these new features may make survival more or less likely, and the less ‘fit’ are weeded out of existence. An individual organism, such as a particul…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/death.md

8. 08 · gutenberg0.742

   Its plan is traced by the subject itself. In the first chapter, we try on the evolutionary progress the two ready-made garments that our understanding puts at our disposal, mechanism and finality;[2] we show that they do not fit, neither the one nor the other, but that one of them might be recut and resewn, and in this new form fit less badly than the other. In order to transcend the point of view of the understanding, we try, in our second chapter, to reconstruct the main lines of evolution along which life has traveled by the side of that which has led to the human intellect. The intellect i…

   gutenberg/PG-26163-creative-evolution/PG-26163.txt

9. 09 · pubmed0.741

   The known laws of nature in the physical sciences are well expressed in the language of mathematics, a fact that caused Eugene Wigner to wonder at the "unreasonable effectiveness" of mathematical concepts to explain physical phenomena. The biological sciences, in contrast, have resisted the formulation of precise mathematical laws that model the complexity of the living world. The limits of mathematics in biology are discussed as stemming from the impossibility of constructing a deterministic "Laplacian" model and the failure of set theory to capture the creative nature of evolutionary process…

   pubmed/PMID-40149204-the-reasonable-ineffectiveness-of-mathematics-in-the-biologi/info.md

10. 10 · pubmed0.740

    Despite Darwin, we remain children of Newton and dream of a grand theory that is epistemologically complete and would allow prediction of the evolution of the biosphere. The main purpose of this article is to show that this dream is false, and bears on studying patterns of evolution. To do so, I must justify the use of the word "function" in biology, when physics has only happenings. The concept of "function" lifts biology irreducibly above physics, for as we shall see, we cannot prestate the ever new biological functions that arise and constitute the very phase space of evolution. Hence, we c…

    pubmed/PMID-24704211-prolegomenon-to-patterns-in-evolution/info.md