Hume, Causation and Two Arguments Concerning God

In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume (1779/1993) appeals to his account of causation (among other things) to undermine certain arguments for the existence of God. If 'anything can cause anything', as Hume claims, then the Principle of Causal Adequacy is false; and if the Principle of Causal Adequacy is false, then any argument for God's existence that relies on that principle fails. Of course, Hume's critique has been influential. But Hume's account of causation undermines the argument from evil at least as much as it undermines arguments for theism, or so I argue. I then suggest that Hume's account of causation can be used to formulate an alternative argument against classical theism

Computability and human symbolic output

This paper concerns “human symbolic output,” or strings of characters produced by humans in our various symbolic systems; e.g., sentences in a natural language, mathematical propositions, and so on. One can form a set that consists of all of the strings of characters that have been produced by at least one human up to any given moment in human history. We argue that at any particular moment in human history, even at moments in the distant future, this set is finite. But then, given fundamental results in recursion theory, the set will also be recursive, recursively enumerable, axiomatizable, and could be the output of a Turing machine. We then argue that it is impossible to produce a string of symbols that humans could possibly produce but no Turing machine could. Moreover, we show that any given string of symbols that we could produce could also be the output of a Turing machine. Our arguments have implications for Hilbert’s sixth problem and the possibility of axiomatizing particular sciences, they undermine at least two distinct arguments against the possibility of Artificial Intelligence, and they entail that expert systems that are the equals of human experts are possible, and so at least one of the goals of Artificial Intelligence can be realized, at least in principle

Cosmological Argument: A Pragmatic Defense

We formulate a sort of "generic" cosmological argument, i.e., a cosmological argument that shares premises (e.g., "contingent, concretely existing entities have a cause") with numerous versions of the argument. We then defend each of the premises by offering pragmatic arguments for them. We show that an endorsement of each premise will lead to an increase in expected utility; so in the absence of strong evidence that the premises are false, it is rational to endorse them. Therefore, it is rational to endorse the cosmological argument, and so rational to endorse theism. We then consider possible objection

Solar proton monitoring system

Solar proton monitoring system in North Americ

Equivalences, Identities, Symmetric Differences, and Congruences in Orthomodular Lattices

It is shown that operations of equivalence cannot serve for building algebras which would induce orthomodular lattices as the operations of implication can. Several properties of equivalence operations have been investigated. Distributivity of equivalence terms and several other 3 variable expressions involving equivalence terms have been proved to hold in any orthomodular lattice. Symmetric differences have been shown to reduce to complements of equivalence terms. Some congruence relations related to equivalence operations and symmetric differences have been considered.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; To be published in International Journal of Theoretical Physics, Vol. 42, No. 12 (2003); Web page: http://m3k.grad.hr/pavici