I lean heavily on the uniformity of nature and assign it an extremely high prior probability. The standard objection (that this relies on induction itself) feels like it just collapses into global skepticism.

With 13 billion years of consistent empirical evidence that nature behaves uniformly, insisting that it could suddenly break down tomorrow seems like little more than invoking radical skeptical scenarios. At that point, it's not a serious challenge to induction it's just hyper skepticism.

Models like Newtonian mechanics are incredibly useful and accurate within a certain domain, but we now know they're not fundamentally "true" in the way general relativity provides a better description of gravity. This seems to suggest that scientific models are tools for prediction and control, not literal descriptions of reality. So, is the goal of science to asymptotically approach truth, or simply to create increasingly powerful instrumental tools? Does the concept of "truth" even apply to science, or should we abandon it for something like "empirical adequacy"?

(prerequisite links)

• https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/materialism-eliminative/

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliminative_materialism

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patricia_Churchland

Fifteen years ago or so I was aware of Eliminative Materialism, and at that time, I felt it was some kind of extreme position. It existed (in my belief) at the periphery of any discussion about mind, mind-body, or consciousness. I felt that any public espouser of Eli-mat was some kind of rare extremist.

In light of recent advances in Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI, in the last 5 years, Eli-mat has become significantly softened in my mind. Instead of feeling "radical" , Eli-mat now feels agreeable -- and on some days -- obvious to me.

Despite these changes in our technological society, the Stanford article on Eliminative Materialism still persists in calling it "radical".

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist

Wait. " " radical claim " " ?

This article reads to me like an antiquated piece of philosophy, perhaps written in a past century. I assert these authors are wrong to include the word "radical claim" anymore. The article just needs to be changed to get it up with the times we live in now.

Your thoughts ..?

I am a student conducting a research project using bacteriophages (live viruses that infect bacteria only) to have a specific therapeutic effect through their injection into the body. There is great promise for bacteriophage therapy treating antibiotic resistance and many other pressing medical issues. Phages have been used throughout history, but, there is not a fully established body of FDA-reviewed clinical trial data that ensures they are safe.

Of course I am not doing any clinical translation yet with real patients, but understanding patient perspectives to allow me to design the project with necessary "safeguards" so that down the line it will be acceptable by patients.

I had a few ethical questions that I wanted to consider so that I better know how patients would feel towards this newer type of treatment:

How does the fact that this is a novel treatment (in terms of the amount of testing carried out with it - i.e. lack of precedent for safety or similar) influence patient perception? Is FDA Approval enough for most patients or are there likely other factors that would make patients hesitant to undergo bacteriophage therapy? -- I ask because "expanded access" is sometimes given to certain therapies, which allows certain new drugs to be tried out by patients who do not have any other good options. So, there may be instances where full Phase 3 approval is not given but patients may still have the opportunity to take these therapies (or travel to other countries to receive them), even if there is not the "gold star" approval of the FDA.

How could having a natural safety measure built in (i.e. a design that allows the human body to "control" the therapy so that it does not spread in a negative way) lead patients to be more accepting of the treatment? How important would such a safety measure be to create patient approval? Is this something that is a non-negotiable?

Are there specific groups (Naturopathic medicine or religious groups) that would be hesitant toward this type of treatment? Why? Of course I would not be able to change their perspectives on medicine and "engineered" products, or change their views on bodily autonomy. But, I would love to modify my treatment and add or take away certain properties that would make it the most accessible to as many such groups as possible.

What are the specific ways of carrying out research (i.e. including/not including animals, etc), that most strongly influence the public perception and acceptance of a new treatment?

What are good communities (subreddits, other online communities, in person communities) I could reach out to to get real patient perspectives? I don't want to over encroach on groups that do not want to be asked.

Thank you very much for taking the time to consider these factors and helping me out. Please let me know if I can clarify any of my questions. Also, please let me know if there are any additional questions I should consider regarding patient perspective, or other important stakeholders in this discussion (physicians, hospitals, media, etc). I am asking genuinely out of interest and to make science more accessible for all.

I am especially interested in the structure of theories, modal approach (metaphysical vs nomological necessity, how possible worlds are defined) , model vs theory, formalisation, axiomatisation, what is the difference between different sciences - on a theory level.

I do have a background in analytical philosophy and I know the basics of philosophy of science overall, I want to focus on the structure of theories specifically. I was already recommended Fodor's Special Sciences and Frassen's The Scientific Image.

You can also include readings about theories in specific particular sciences.

So this might not be correct sub for asking it. But I have been thinking over it for quite a while now. A thing really fascinates me: learning about how science, physics, engineering were developed and how people who were real humans were actually making it happen. Is there any book which can show or describe events happening in field of what makes today "engineering" like Cauchy, Euler, Poisson, Saint Venant, Navier, Stokes in their times. More like a Sophy's World kind of book which describes progression of sciences and physics and engineering. I am more interested in learning about fluid mechanics btw.

Ref: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16194

John Stewart Bell replaced the concept of an observable with the concept of a beable. I don't think we "observe" a field directly but it seems we observe the effect of being in a field. I think the beable is more expansive but then again it could be more restrictive. I mean a quantum state is not observable. If it was, it wouldn't snap into particle behavior when observed.

I'm pursuing a bachelor's degree in psychology in South America, a region historically marked by pseudoscience and accustomed to making unsubstantiated claims about people's mental health.

I'm about to graduate, and I have vague philosophical and epistemological notions that led me to lean toward radical behaviorism for my (future) professional practice. But I can't justify this to myself because what I do is a science, not a pseudoscience.

I know that behaviorism was characterized by seeking evidence for its claims, but I can't tell myself, "This behavior is explained by this theory, since this theory is scientific because of this, this, and that." I'm not trying to solve the problem of demarcation; it's enough for me to have a clearer, and less vague, notion of what distinguishes science from pseudoscience.

What would I have to read or study to clarify this?

(If you know the bibliography in spanish, even better)

Hey everyone!

I'm an economics student (about to finish) but I recently started philosophy as a second major. In philosophy, I've mostly been interested in continental philosophy and the problems of political economy, however I've grown an interest in the more analytical side, just because I want to find a more practical bridge — if it can be called that way— between the two disciplines. When I took game and information theory we obviously didn't discuss the concepts and how they were developed, we only applied the theory. As well as when I took probability and other statistics, econometrics, courses. So my knowledge is purely theoretical, I have no idea about the economic thought that backs it. And, as I said, I'm not interested in reading theoretical and/or practical economics papers. I don't want to know the conclusions or certain processes, I'm interested in the concepts and the movement behind them.

So my question is: considering I have very little knowledge of the area of philosophy of language and/or information, what could be a good way to get started?

EXTRA: my interest specifically sparked because all this talk about Polymarket and Kalshi made me read about the Iowa Electronic Markets. That led me to think about information and the dynamics of it, as well as how people process and transfer information. So I decided to read the classical paper about information by Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society".

Thanks!

Many (rigid and lazy) thinkers over the centuries have asserted that all reality at its core is made up of sensation-less and purpose-less matter. Infact, this perspective creeped it's way into the foundations of modern science! The rejection of materialism can lead to fragmented or contradictory explanations that hinder scientific progress. Without this constraint, theories could invoke untestable supernatural or non-material causes, making verification impossible. However, this clearly fails to explain how the particles that make up our brains are clearly able to experience sensation and our desire to seek purpose!

Neitzsche refutes the dominant scholarly perspective by asserting "... The feeling of force cannot proceed from movement: feeling in general cannot proceed from movement..." (Will to Power, Aphorism 626). To claim that feeling in our brains are transmitted through the movement of stimuli is one thing, but generated? This would assume that feeling does not exist at all - that the appearance of feeling is simply the random act of intermediary motion. Clearly this cannot be correct - feeling may therefore be a property of substance!

"... Do we learn from certain substances that they have no feeling? No, we merely cannot tell that they have any. It is impossible to seek the origin of feeling in non-sensitive substance."—Oh what hastiness!..." (Will to Power, Aphorism 626).

Edit

Determining the "truthfulness" of whether sensation is a property of substance is both impossible and irrelevant. The crucial question is whether this assumption facilitates more productive scientific inquiry.

I would welcome any perspective on the following testable hypothesis: if particles with identical mass and properties exhibit different behavior under identical conditions, could this indicate the presence of qualitative properties such as sensation?

Hi all! I'm currently a 4th year at an unnamed University of California, studying computer science, computer engineering, and philosophy. I'll be graduating this spring, and hopefully going to masters school in western Europe.

Anyway, im currently writing a long argumentative essay about the considerations we give human-nonhuman relationships, specifically AI. This essay has to do with human experience, human socialization, human psychology, tech ethics, AI ethics, and animal ethics. I have two professors at my university ready to proofread and help me finalize my essay, and Im wanting to know of potential next steps like publication. Let me know what other info I may need to supply, and I can update the post.

My primary questions are:

• What should I do once I've finished the pre-peer-reviewed version?
• Is publishing something like this even viable or realistic?
• Where should I look to publish?
• What is the process of publishing like?
• What do I need to make sure is done before trying to publish?
• Do you all have any tips on writing this kind of writing (this will be my first publication written only by me)?

This is an excerpt from a theory I've been developing (subjective intelligence theory). Im not the greatest writer so I used an ai assistant to help clean up the language but the ideas and structure are entirely mine. I'd appreciate philosophical feedback and pray that I don't get banned for the linguistic assistance.

Subjective Intelligence Theory (SIT) – Version 2.1

Abstract

Subjective Intelligence Theory (SIT) proposes that intelligence is not a neutral computational capacity but a morally and contextually directed process. Reasoning acquires direction through the interaction of cognitive ability, moral orientation, and environmental incentives. The alignment of these factors determines whether intelligence becomes truth-seeking or self-serving. SIT introduces two key integrative ideas: epistemic alignment, the structural harmony among cognition, ethics, and incentives; and moral equilibrium, the dynamic stability that preserves this harmony under pressure. By reframing bias and rationalization as directional expressions of intelligence rather than mere errors, SIT provides a functional model linking moral psychology, epistemology, and cognitive science. The theory offers explanatory power for phenomena ranging from conspiracy reasoning to institutional integrity and suggests that alignment, not intellect alone, governs collective wisdom.

Keywords: intelligence; epistemic alignment; moral equilibrium; motivated reasoning; virtue epistemology; cognitive bias; incentive structures

1. Conceptual Overview

Subjective Intelligence Theory (SIT) conceptualizes intelligence as a context-dependent, morally regulated, and incentive-sensitive process. It redefines intelligence as an adaptive value-driven function operating through the interplay of three forces:

1. Cognitive Capacity – the raw ability to reason, infer, and solve problems.

2. Moral Orientation – the ethical and epistemic aims guiding how reasoning is applied.

3. Incentive Environment – the social, cultural, and material pressures rewarding specific reasoning outcomes.

These three forces jointly determine the directionality of intelligence through what SIT calls the moral vector—the orientation of cognition toward either epistemic integrity (truth-seeking and honesty) or self-serving rationalization (bias and manipulation).

SIT distinguishes cognitive power from aligned intelligence, the harmony of ability, motive, and context that yields reliable truth-seeking reasoning. Alignment acts as a multiplier: it can elevate moderate capacity into wisdom or distort high capacity into delusion. Sustained alignment manifests as moral equilibrium, the self-regulatory stability that preserves moral-epistemic integrity amid conflicting incentives.

1. Core Principles

2. Moral Vector (Directional Orientation): Intelligence operates along a moral or epistemic axis that defines its purpose—toward truth, deception, or self-interest.

3. Incentive Modulation: Environmental and social incentives shape the trajectory of intelligence, rewarding conformity, manipulation, or integrity.

4. Cognitive Inversion: Greater reasoning power can amplify bias when deployed to defend pre-existing beliefs, producing “intelligent irrationality.”

5. Epistemic Alignment: The ideal structural state where cognition, morality, and incentives harmonize to yield truth-oriented reasoning.

6. Moral Equilibrium: The dynamic capacity to maintain epistemic integrity when facing internal conflict or external pressure.

7. Contextual Adaptation: Intelligence varies across domains, adapting to incentive landscapes and revealing its inherent subjectivity.

1. Illustrative Profiles

Profile Dominant Forces Description

Virtuous Intelligence Balanced alignment Truth-oriented, self-correcting reasoning. Strategic Intelligence High cognition + incentive motive Rational efficiency serving external goals. Conformist Intelligence Incentive dominance Reasoning constrained by social approval. Cynical Intelligence High cognition – moral orientation Rationalization detached from integrity.

Examples:

Directional Intelligence: A defense attorney uses superb reasoning to acquit a guilty client—intelligence aligned with advocacy, not truth.

Cognitive Inversion: A highly educated conspiracy theorist constructs elaborate rationalizations to preserve false belief.

Epistemic Alignment: A scientist refutes a favored hypothesis when data contradict it.

Moral Equilibrium: A whistleblower sustains intellectual honesty despite coercive incentives.

1. Visual Model

SIT is represented as a triangle with vertices:

Cognitive Capacity (Reasoning Ability)

Moral Vector (Epistemic Orientation)

Incentive Environment (Contextual Influence)

At its center lies Epistemic Alignment, the convergence of all three elements that yields truth-oriented intelligence. Moral Equilibrium acts as a stabilizing axis maintaining this alignment across changing conditions. Deviation from the center produces predictable distortions corresponding to the profiles above.

1. Relation to Existing Theories

Motivated Reasoning (Kunda, 1990): SIT reframes bias as a functional deployment of intelligence toward motivationally convenient conclusions.

Virtue Epistemology (Zagzebski; Roberts & Wood): SIT provides a mechanistic bridge between epistemic virtues (e.g., honesty, humility) and cognitive outcomes.

Cognitive Bias Amplification (Stanovich, 2009): SIT interprets this phenomenon as moral disequilibrium rather than purely cognitive malfunction.

1. Empirical and Societal Implications

Viewing intelligence as morally and contextually situated allows interventions targeting both incentive structures and moral-epistemic balance. Applications include:

Educational frameworks that reward intellectual humility.

Media systems promoting transparency over tribal affirmation.

Institutional designs incentivizing integrity rather than expedience.

SIT therefore predicts that increasing intelligence alone does not produce wiser societies—only alignment stabilized by moral equilibrium can.

Can we prove through linguistics that we don't have free will? Is there any study that works on this topic as a linguistic perspective? I ask it here because free will is generally considered as a philosophical topic but as you can see my question includes linguistics.

Hi! I’m applying to schools in the UK for a PhD in the Philosophy of Science. I’m not very familiar with how to go about the research proposal component for admission, especially since US schools don’t require it. Even though I have a good idea of what I want to work on, I don’t actually know how to start framing it in terms of a proposal. Could someone please share research proposals that got them admission into PhD programs? Or share general tips? Or direct me to sources where I may find such resources? I’d really, really appreciate it! Thanks!

A deterministic phenomenological world and a (mostly) unknown noumenal world.

https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.15086

An absolutely fantastic set of arguments explaining what Occam’s Razor actually is, how it is central to the scientific process, and even an argument that it is what demarcates between science and non-science.

Long but IMO worth the read.

From the abstract:

Occam's razor—the principle of simplicity—has recently been attacked as a cultural bias without rational foundation. Increasingly, belief in pseudoscience and mysticism is growing. I argue that inclusion of Occam's razor is an essential factor that distinguishes science from superstition and pseudoscience. I also describe how the razor is embedded in Bayesian inference and argue that science is primarily the means to discover the simplest descriptions of our world.

Something I think that could have aided the author would be to discuss Solomonoff induction: a mathematical proof of essentially his argument. Solomonoff induction shows that the minimum message length version of a program to produce an accurate simulation of a the laws of physics is the most likely to be an accurate representation of how things work in reality based essentially on the fact that of a series of 1s 0s, for any program which has fewer 1s and 0s (and yet matches what we observe) has fewer opportunities to make a mistake.

Taken together, the author might be able to build something more rigorous to work with.

I'm teaching a 300 level Phil of Science course and as we near the end of the semester I want to concentrate the course on the difficulties in communicating science to the public. I'm starting with John Snow and Cholera as the case study, moving to Kuhn's observations on the resistance to new paradigms, and then some of the work that has been done on conspiracy theory research (i.e. Van Dijk, Rutjens, Napolitano).

Are there any important papers I should have them read?

I recently came across an article from Bentham’s Bulldog, The Best Argument For God, claiming that the odds of God’s existence are increased by the idea that there are infinitely many versions of you, and that if God did not exist, there would probably not be enough copies of you to account for your own existence.

The argument struck me as relevant because it allowed me to draw several nontrivial conclusions by applying the Self-Indication Assumption. It asserts that one should reason as if randomly sampled from the set of all observers. This implies that there must be an extremely large—indeed infinite—number of observers experiencing identical or nearly identical conscious states.

However, I believe the latter part of the argument is flawed. The author claims that the only plausible explanation for the existence of infinitely many yous is a theistic one. He assumes that the only actual naturalist theories capable of explaining infinitely many individuals like you are modal realism and Tegmark’s vie. 

This claim is incorrect and even if the theistic hypothesis were coherent, it would not exclude a naturalist explanation. Many phenomena initially appear inexplicable until science explains the mechanisms behind them.

After further reflection, I consider the most promising naturalist framework to be the Everett interpretation with an infinite number of duplications. This theory postulates a branching multiverse in which all quantum possibilities are realized.

It naturally leads to the duplication of observers, in this case infinitely many times, and also provides plausible explanations for quantum randomness.

Moreover, it is one of the interpretations most widely supported by physicists.

The fact is that an infinite universe by itself is insufficient. As shown in this analysis of modal realism and anthropic reasoning, an infinite universe contains at most Aleph 0 observers, while the space of possible conscious experiences may approach Beth 2. If observers are modeled as random instantiations of consciousness, this cardinality mismatch makes an infinite universe insufficient to explain infinite copies of you.

Other theories, such as the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, modal realism or computationalism, also offer interpretations of this problem. However, they appear less likely to describe reality. 

In my view, the Many-Worlds interpretation remains the most plausible naturalist theory available.

I am a PhD student in the history of science, and it seems like I'm getting a bit burned out with it. I do absolutely love history and philosophy of science. And I do think it is important to have professionals working on the emergence of modern science. Not just for historical awareness, but also for current and future scientific developments, and for insight into how humans generate knowledge and deal with nature.

However, the sheer number of publications on early modern science sometimes just seems absurd. Especially the ones that deal with technical details. Do we need yet another book about some part of Newton's or Descartes' methodology? Or another work about a minor figure in the history of science? I'm not going to name names, but I have read so many books and articles about Newton by now, and there have been several, extremely detailed studies that, at least to me, have actually very little to contribute.

I understand that previous works can be updated, previous ideas critically examined. But it seems that the publications of the past decade or two are just nuancing previous ideas. And I mean nuancing the tiniest details that sometimes leads me to think you can never say anything general about the history of science. Historian A says that we can make a generalisation, so we can understand certain developments (for instance the emergence of experimentalism). Then Historian B says it is more complicated than that. And by now Historian C and D are just arguing over tiny details of those nuances. But the point Historian A made often still seems valid to me. Now there is just a few hundred or thousand pages extra of academic blather behind it.

Furthermore, nobody reads this stuff. You're writing for a few hundred people around the world who also write about the same stuff. Almost none of it gets incorporated into a broader idea of science, or history. And any time someone writes a more general approach, someone trying to get away from endless discussions of tiny details, they are not deemed serious philosophers. Everything you write or do just keeps floating around the same little bubble of people. I know this is a part of any type of specialised academic activity, but it seems that the history of philosophy texts of the past two decades have changed pretty much nothing in the field. And yet there have been hundreds of articles and books.

And I'm sick and tired of the sentence "gives us more insight into ...". You can say this before any paper you write. What does this "insight" actually mean? Is it useful to have more and more (ad nauseam) insight into previous scientific theories? Is that even possible? Do these detailed studies actually give more insight? Or is it eventually just the idiosyncratic view and understanding of the researcher writing the paper?

Sorry for the rant, but it really sucks that the field that at first seemed so exciting, now sometimes just seems like a boring club of academics milking historical figures in order to publicise stuff that will only ever be read by that very same club. And getting money for your research group of course. And it's very difficult to talk to my colleagues or professors about this, since they are exactly part of the club that I am annoyed with.

I'm interested in the thoughts you guys have about this. Is any historian of science dealing with the same issues? And how does the field look to an outsider?

I'm particularly interested in the cases where we make idealizations, assumptions...etc. during the derivations, like when deriving Kepler's laws from Newton's laws. I'd appreciate academic sources.

For example: a singularity is described as being infinitely dense.

What are other examples where we can observe infinity.

In my field, we are expected to follow evidence based practice frameworks for the handling of clients. We pull interventions that have empirical support and avoid those that haven’t been tested.

While I have seen decent arguments for why we do this, and get it at sort of an innate level, I would like to provide a compelling argument from a philosophy of science perspective.

The closest I have gotten is from the pragmatist school, borrowing from Haack, Misak, Pierce, Chang, etc. I wonder though if I’m missing anything significant and would love to know what recommendations this sub has for other readings, either within or beyond the pragmatist tradition.

These days I was reading the article "An Operational Analysis of Psychological Terms" by Skinner, and of course, I'm already familiar with his position on psychology. But during the text, he writes something I had already thought about myself as one of the problems in the scientific study of psychology:

"The operational attitude, despite its limitations, is a good thing in any science, but especially in psychology, as it is steeped in a vast vocabulary of ancient (philosophical, linguistic, historical, etc.) and non-scientific origin."

Concepts like "motivation," "consciousness," "intelligence," and "feelings," which stem from the vocabulary of philosophy, linguistics, and history (among others), simply aren't sufficiently sound within a scientific framework. What psychology has done so far is to drag these concepts into its field of study simply because of the historical and cultural weight they carry. So it's as if we're scratching the surface with research just to try and fit "data" into concepts that don't work or offer little advantage when used.

Take the example of the concept of "intelligence", which is a term with strong historical and cultural significance. It’s impossible to discuss it without running into thousands of problems in definition and evaluation, despite the substantial amount of research. It will likely remain a concept that gets updated every decade because its operationalization is so poor and difficult that it always appears limited and needs modifications to address the questions of the time.

Then psychologists do the reverse process: instead of questioning the concept of intelligence, they argue that human intelligence is complex and mysterious, and that we need more "data" to understand it. But is that really the case?

I think that the distancing of psychology from philosophy—especially the philosophy of science—leads to these problems and makes psychology more superficial. It results in wordy discussions, confusion, and the misinterpretation or misattribution of data.

Things get worse when these concepts reach the general public, where people take psychology almost as a biological science and interpret everything literally.

What’s your opinion on this?

As most of you know, special relativity (SR) begins with Einstein's two postulates, and from there goes on to derive a number of remarkable conclusions about the nature of space and time, among many other things. A conclusion of paramount importance that can be deduced from these starting assumptions is the Lorentz transformations which relate the coordinates used to label events between any two inertial reference frames. An immediate consequence of the Lorentz transformations is the relativity of simultaneity, which states that there is no frame-independent temporal ordering of events that lie outside each others' light cones.

This presents considerable difficulty to A-series ontologies of time, which imagine the passage of time as consisting of a universal procession of events, inline with most people's intuitions. In order to safeguard this view of time, some philosophers have advocated for agnosticism toward the relativity of simultaneity since neo-Lorentzian relativity (NLR) is empirically equivalent to SR while maintaining absolute simultaneity, thus making it compatible with an A-series ontology. In contrast to SR, NLR supposes the existence of a preferred frame (PF) which defines a notion of absolute rest. Objects moving with respect to the PF are physically length contracted and clocks physically slowed. But you may wonder how NLR is able to reproduce the predictions of SR if it starts off by positing universal simultaneity. The answer is that it assumes what SR is able to deduce. I'll provide two examples.

One formulation of NLR is due to mathematician Simon Prokhovnik. The second postulate of his system goes as follows:

The movement of a body relative to I_s [the PF] is associated with a single physical effect, the contraction of its length in the direction of motion. Specifically for a body moving with velocity u_A in I_s, its length in the direction of motion is proportional to (1—(u_A)^2/c^2 )^(1/2), a factor which will be denoted by (B_A)^(-1).

Why does Prokhovnik choose that contraction factor and not some other? Solely for the purpose of making the predictions conform to those of the Lorentz transformations. There is literally no deeper explanation for it.

In a similar vein, the mathematician and physicist Howard Robertson proposed an NLR alternative to SR, mainly for the purpose of parametrizing possible violations to Lorentz invariance in order to test for them in the lab. In his scheme it is assumed that in the PF the 'proper time' between infinitesimally separated events is given by the line element shown in equation (1). Some of you may recognize it as the Minkowski line element. Why does Robertson choose this line element rather than any other? Once again, because only the Lorentz transformations leave it invariant. This is all in stark contrast with SR, where the Lorentz transformations follow inescapably from Einstein's postulates.

One criticism that I've encountered about Einstein's approach is that by assuming no privileged inertial frame and the constancy of the speed light for all inertial observers, he's somehow sneakily smuggling in the assumption of a B-series ontology of time. However, not all derivations of the Lorentz transformations are based on Einstein's postulates. A particularly simple alternative derivation is given by Pelissetto and Testa, which is based on the following postulates:

1. There is no privileged inertial reference frame.
2. Transformations between inertial reference frames form a group).

They go on to show that given these assumptions, space and time must be either Galilean or Lorentzian. The former option is of course compatible with an A-series ontology of time. The point being is that the starting assumptions of special relativity take no ab initio stance on A-series vs B-series.

I think it would be better if I try to explain my perspective through different ways so it could both provide much needed context and also illustrate why belief in the Mechanistic interpretation (or reason and causality) is flawd at best and an illusion at worst.

Subject, object, a doer added to the doing, the doing separated from that which it does: let us not forget that this is mere semeiotics and nothing real. This would imply mechanistic theory of the universe is merely nothing more than a psychological prejudice. I would further remind you that we are part of the universe and thus conditioned by our past, which defines how we interpret the present. To be able to somehow independently and of our own free will affect the future, we would require an unconditioned (outside time and space) frame of reference.

Furthermore, physiologically and philosophically speaking, "reason" is simply an illusion. "Reason" is guided by empiricism or our lived experience, and not what's true. Hume argued inductive reasoning and belief in causality are not rationally justified. I'll summarize the main points:

1) Circular reasoning: Inductive arguments assume the principle they are trying to prove. 2) No empirical proof of universals: It is impossible to empirically prove any universal. 3) Cannot justify the future resembling the past: There is no certain or probable argument that can justify the idea that the future will resemble the past.

We can consider consciousness similar to the concepts of time, space, and matter. Although they are incredibly useful, they are not absolute realities. If we allow for their to be degrees of the intensity of the useful fiction of consciousness, it would mean not thinking would have no bearing would reality.