One Year Later, the Belated End

I think that when exactly one year passes without updating one's blog, it is a perfect moment to declare it officially dead. Of course, unoficially it has been dead for a long time, and probably none of my old readers is still checking this; but it is better anyway to have a proper closure, if not for anything else, at least to avoid random Google searchers thinking that the main focus of the blog was chess. So hereby I declare Reality Conditions officially defunct.

As a last bit of retrospective navel-gazing, and to ease the work of future searching and referencing, I am including here an index of my favourite posts.


Physics and Philosophy of Physics:


- Relational Quantum Mechanics (and the follow-up Taking back my words)

- Landscape chat

- On Price on the Arrow of Time (and the follow-up On Price (and Penrose) on Time Asymmetry in Quantum Mechanics)

- On not taking a stance

- Book Review: Paul Davies, Cosmic Jackpot

- Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, and Scientific Realism

- Report on the Quantum Gravity School: the discussion

- Quantum Mechanics in words of one syllable

- Loops 07: Conference report (part 3, including discussion session)

- Quantum Gravity Colloquium: the discussion. (QM vs. QG: the Grudge Match!)


Philosophy, Religion and Philosophy of Religion:


- Book Review: Thomas Nagel, The Last Word

- Are Evolution and Theism Compatible? (and the follow-up More on the compatibility of evolution and theism: Reply to Pruss)

- Chalmers, Dennett, and the Zombies

- Atheism, Religion, and Rationality; or, do you think that all those who believe in God are stupid?

- An examination of Dawkins’ “Ultimate 747” argument


Fun stuff:


- Weirdest Google Search leading someone to this blog (so far)

- What people search for here

- Mathematicians and computers

- Book review: Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle

- Upstuff

Quick Links

Aaron Bergman is guestblogging at Uncertain Principles and promises to answer all your questions about String Theory

*Peter Woit gets criticized for scientism by Richard for dismissing the "simulation argument", in what seems to me an example of people with different concerns talking past each other. Richard is right that science, in the narrow sense of empirically testable theories, does not exhaust the realm of rational discourse; Peter is right that the simulation argument is not science nor is even close to being science, as some versions of the anthropic principle may be. If philosophers want to have rational discussions of the simulation argument they may do so, and they may even come to illuminate some matters in epistemology; but this is not connected to anything scientific, and to pretend otherwise would be pseudo-science. (I also think that philosophical discussions with no scientific or practical connections will tend towards the sterile and the scholastic, but that's a separate discussion.)

*Via this discussion I found an intersting blog to add to my blogroll, Overcoming Bias. Its ultra-Bayesian-rationalistic approach to everything under the sun looks to me very limited and a distorted view of actual rational practices; but many of the posts there can be extremely thought-provoking when abstracted from this framework in which they are posed.

*Windmills of my Mind, an excellent film blog, is dedicating this month to exhaustive analysis of Steven Spielberg's films: one post per day, one per film.

*Even though he hates the books and I am a certified fan, I am enjoying Mike Smith's snarky chapter-by-chapter review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I liked the book a lot, though there were a couple of disappointments. And I was right on target with one of my main predictions -and wrong with several others. Best of the dozens of online discussions I've read are at Pandagon and In Medias Res. Also unmissble are the summary of the book in lolspeak and the roundup of naughty double entendres.

Link and Notes

I've been a Bad and Lazy blogger lately, and I am likely to remain so for some time. The reason is that I've started to write a new paper, and when I pass most of my working hours writing I don't feel like writing for fun in my free time. Writing for fun works better as a rest after a day spent calculating. (What, you say I should also consider the possibility of getting a life? What is that?)

So here a few interesting links I have collected lately, all of them on the kind of subjects you might have seen at some time discussed in this blog:

-The FQXI Community webpage for fundamental questions in physics looks very cool. I recommend especially Matt Leifer's post "Is the world made of wave-vectors?", an extremely clear and concise summary of the pros and cons of "ontological" and "epistemic" interpretations of quantum mechanics.

-I don't intend to become any sort of chronicler of the new papers appearing in the quantum gravity community (the guys at Physics Forums take care of that) but given that this new spin foam model appeared today and seems possibly important, I thought I might just as well link to it. Also there is this recent one by Ashtekar, based on his "LQG FAQ" talk at MG11, which I blogged about last year.

-At the n-Category Cafe, a fun quiz to give your probability estimates for whether a number of quasi(?)-mythological(?) figures (ranging from Gilgamesh to Robin Hood) actually existed. The discussions in the comments involve both what it means for X "to have existed" (descriptive vs. causal theories of proper names) and what it means to assign a probability to it (Bayesianism vs. others).

-Via Thoughts, Arguments and Rants I found this interesting paper, which describes a recent mathematical result which may be of unexpected relevance for the centuries-old philosophical problem of induction. Would old David Hume ever have guessed that there is a rule which, given any function on the real numbers and its values up to (but not including) a certain T, can predict its value at T correctly, for almost all values of T? I'm sure not! What I'm not sure is how relevant this is for the traditional problem -especially given that the theorem only assures the existence of a rule, without explicitly providing one.

-Talking about Hume, Brandon has been putting up some notes on reading and interpreting his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. This is one of my favourite philosophy books, so I am following this series of posts with great interest. The posts are: Part one and two, Part two and three, Part four and five.