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Of course simplicity is not the same thing as fitting the evidence. You only even start comparing simplicity after you have multiple hypotheses that actually fit the evidence. Then, and only then, can you properly apply Occam's Razor. The hypotheses "Always comes up heads" and "always comes up tails" and "always lands on the edge" are all already on the reject pile when you're trying to figure out the best theory for the existence of the "HTTHHT" sequence, and thus none of them get any points at all for being simple.

Indeed, if you've only got one hypothesis that fits, it's still too soon to apply Occam's Razor, except informally as a heuristic to encourage you to invent another hypothesis because your existing one looks excessively complicated. Only after you've got more than one hypothesis that fits the "HTTHHT" sequence can you actually use any formalization of Occam's Razor to judge between those hypotheses.

The interactions of three people is more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. But the theory that my house contains three different residents still explains observations of my house much more simply than if you start with the assumption there's only one resident. You accordingly cannot actually use Occam's Razor to disfavor the theory that my house has three residents simply because the interactions of three people with each other are more complex than the interactions of one person with himself. Similarly, adding a cat to the three persons hypothesis actually improves the explanatory power of the model, even though you now have three sets of human-cat interactions added to the model; rejecting the cat on the basis of Occam's Razor is also a failure.

Is a trinity more complex than a unitary godhead? In itself, sure. But if you're trying to do something as notoriously convoluted as, say, theodicy, the question is, does the trinity provide extra explanatory power that reduces the overall complications?

And I strongly doubt anyone is both knowledgeable enough about theodicy and sufficiently rational and unbiased on the unity/trinity question to give a trustworthy answer on the question of which is the actual lesser hypothesis there. Especially since the obvious least hypothesis in theodicy is that there is no God at all and thus nothing to explain.

If you're going to claim that a unitary godhead is favored by Occam's Razor over a trinity, you actually need, among other things, a whole unitary-godhead theodicy. But if you actually worked one out, in order to have a rational opinion on the relative viability of the unitary and trinity theories, I'm going to wonder about your underlying rationality, given you wasted so much time on theodicy.

Why do you attach any value whatsoever to a "consciousness" that cannot think, feel, remember, or respond? Your "consciousness", so defined, is as inanimate as a grain of sand. I don't care about grains of sand as ends-in-themselves, why would you?

Be clear that when you say you are conscious, it cannot be this "consciousness" that motivates the statement, because this "consciousness" cannot respond, so the non-conscious parts of your mind cannot query it for a status check. A simple neural spike would be a response, we could watch it on an fMRI.

Well, I expect you're failing, yes. It is going to be futile to try to understand the Islamic State without understanding the philosophy of Al-Ghazali, the most influential Muslim scholar since Mohamed, the man accorded the honorific Hujjat al-Islam (Proof of Islam), and his doctrine of occasionalism.

This is going to be particularly hard on this site because the local "rationality" is rooted in the Aristotle-Averroes-Aquinas tradition, where we believe in things like natural laws that can be deduced by observation. And Averroes (Ibn Rushd) was a critic of Al-Ghazali who was exiled to live among Jews for heresy.

Al-Ghazali, in his The Incoherence of the Philosophers, says that there is no such thing a a material efficient cause; the efficient cause of all things is the will of God. When you apply an open flame to cotton, the cotton is burned by God, not by the fire. If God decided in a particular instance to instead have to cotton metamorphose into a VW minibus on the application of flame, that would be no more and no less a miracle than the occasions on which God had the cotton burn. "Allah's hand is not chained"; God might usually work in ways humans can understand, but He is transcendent, and is not required to obey reason.

Internalize this principle of causation, and it becomes clear that one must align one's will with God as best you can and try to please God. All other tactics are futile, because God decides the results of all things. So first and foremost, you align your actions with those of Muhammad and his closest followers, as recorded in the Koran and Hadiths. Since God is usually logical, you then try to be logical in how you do things after aligning yourself with God's will, but never let logic override faith and fidelity to the example of Mohamed.

Sure they are - given that the placental clade contains most of the extant mammal diversity.

The very issue is that "mammal diversity" is vastly insufficient to make any conclusions about general independent evolutionary trends. The number of potential explanations of the advantages of intelligence derived from features from the recent common evolutionary origin completely overwhelms any evidence for general factors.

For one example, if someone were to demonstrate that intelligence is usually useful for a species of animals where the adults, by a quirk of evolution, have to take active care of their young for an extended time — BOOM. A huge quantity of the "independence" is blown up in favor of a single ancestral cause, the existence of nursing of the young in mammals. And the same happens every other time you can show intelligence specifically helps given an ancestrally-derived feature or is promoted by an ancestrally-derived feature in the whole group. The placental mammals are far, far too alike in life cycle, biochemistry, et cetera for parallel evolution within the group to be good evidence of real evolutionary independence of a trait on a scale of completely separate planetary biome evolutions.

The entire period from the cambrian explosion to now is what - 15% of the history of life?

That's not disingenuity, that's driving home the point. The octopus, separated by that whole stretch of 15%, is a far better case for evolutionary independence of intelligence than puttering around with various branches of the placental mammals — but still not nearly as good as if we had a non-animal example (or even better, a non-eukaryote). Unless and until we have good evidence of the probability of the evolution of animal-analogues, near-ape-level intelligence being (in general) weakly useful for animals (with Cephalopoda, Aves, and Mammalia being the only three classes we know have it or even strongly suspect from the fossil record have ever had it) is hardly strong evidence that near-ape-or-better intelligence is a highly probable feature of life-in-general.

Er, a few species of placental mammal are hardly "widely separated lineages". Trying to draw conclusions for completely alien biologies by looking at convergent evolution inside a clade with a single common ancestor in the last 2-or-3% of the history of life on Earth is absurd. And the fact that the Placentalia start with an unusually high EQ among vertebrates-as-a-whole make it a particularly unsuitable lineage for estimating the possibilities of independent evolution of high animal intelligence.

His explanation on Reddit is that his style is too distinctive to go undetected.

She got a Dreadful for dying . . . then Professor Quirrell revived her and re-graded her Troll.

Sshall ssacrifice my fallback weapon, and girl-child sshall gain troll'ss power of regeneration.

Quantities and locations matter. Atomic-diameter filaments linking nanogram-level concentrations in the brains of Voldemort and the Death Eaters could discorporate them without killing Harry (at least, not killing him before he could reach the Stone of Transfiguration).

The available dates were Monday, March 2nd, or Tuesday, March 3rd; the "12:01 am" did not distinguish which of those dates was meant by "Tuesday, March 2nd" in the slightest, since both possible dates had their own 12:01 am.

This has been subsequently corrected by EY to "Tuesday, March 3rd" (which was the correct day for the 60 hours promised).

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