Alexander Pruss's Blog

Imagine two worlds, in both of which I am presently in excruciating pain. In world w 1 , this pain began a nanosecond ago and will end in a ...

One version of the quantum Zeno effect is that if you collapse a system’s wavefunction with respect to a measurement often enough, the meas...

Goedelian ontological arguments (e.g., mine ) depend on axioms of positivity. Crucially to the argument, these axioms entail that any two po...

The following claims are incompatible: Beliefs are never under our direct voluntary control. Beliefs are high credences. Credences are d...

In two recent posts ( here and here ), I made arguments based on the idea that wobbliness in priors translates to wobbliness in posteriors....

The existence of non-standard models of arithmetic makes defining finitude problematic. A finite set is normally defined as one that can be ...

Here’s a problem for Bayesianism and/or our rationality that I am not sure what exactly to do about. Take a proposition that we are now pre...

Bayesian reasoning starts with prior probabilities and gathers evidence that leads to posterior probabilities. It is occasionally said that ...

Here’s yet another variant on a life-based argument against machine consciousness. All of these arguments depend on related intuitions about...

Mere criticism is a statement that something—an action, a thought, an object, etc.—falls short of an applicable standard. But sometimes inst...

I just came across a quote from Leibniz that I must have read before but it never impressed itself on my mind: “no reason can be given for t...

I have an empirical hypothesis that one of the main reasons why a lot of ordinary people think a machine can’t be conscious is that they thi...

I find the following line of thought to have a lot of intuitive pull: Some mental states have great non-instrumental ethical significance....

Weak supplementation says that if x is a proper part of y , then y has a proper part that doesn’t overlap x . Suppose that we are impress...

I’ve just realized that one can motivate belief in bare particulars as follows: Constituent ontology of attribution: A thing has a quality...