I have never been to the US, but I wonder if this is equally safe in the EU where plastics regulations appear to have changed the density and feel of drinks containers over the past half-decade or more. They're obviously fine for carbonated drinks, and probably bottle-rocket use too, but I wonder about their structural integrity as a receptacle for alcohol combustion.
The patent says they are good to 100 psi for regular operation and people pump them up to 2x that when they shoot them up as rockets.
It's fun to make a "chemical pressure bomb" out of that kind of bottle, the classiest way to do that is to use liquid nitrogen, the second classiest way is to put in a pellet of dry ice, if you have no class at all you put in some aluminum foil and either a strong acid ("The Works" drain cleaner) or a strong base (Lye/Sodium Hydroxide) which in either case will evolve hydrogen. [1]
The dry ice version goes off in 30-45 minutes if you put in just the pellet, if you add some hot water it works like a hand grenade and will explode less than a minute, cold water is intermediate. These are dangerous at point blank range
but in my experience harmless 10 feet away. [2] [3] When I was in college my friends and I made a bunch of them and threw them into a vacant lot at night and thought 30 minutes later that we'd failed, but soon we heard a series of loud explosions which caused the neighbors to call the police. The cops drove by and shined a spotlight into the area and we were worried that the last one would go off when he was there but it exploded just after he drove off.
[1] ... and spray dangerous chemicals. Don't do it.
[2] had one blow the bottom out of a small plastic waste basket though and read a report which I couldn't find this time about a high school chemistry teacher who tried this in class and it blew up in a student's hand, blinding him
[3] usually the bottle is torn up such that most of the plastic is in one big piece with jagged edges, today people would worry about microplastic generation
See https://waterockets.com/ for commercial kits for making really fancy pressurized water rockets, even 3-stage rockets! You can get many many uses out of a bottle.
In Larry Niven's Known Space books, rockets are launched from earth using some kind of super-compressed material encased in tanks made of some unobtanium, a vastly improved version of those water rockets.
2. Carbonated drinks are at a very high pressure already.
I could, if I wasn't feeling lazy right now, do the math to compare the two pressures. Its easy stuff - two drops of alcohol combusted + assumption all the combustion products are ideal gases vs Henry's law for CO2. This last one will require looking up how much co2 is dissolved in the product, but thats not too hard.
But, like the other commentator pointed out.... there's only one way to find out.
He and Trump share an enormous amount of plainly evident narcissistic traits, which are effective in business but fatal combined with toxic, quixotic ideology. Impulsivity is among those features.
Narcissists embrace and promote tribalism, which shores their power and volatilises their circles and communities. As conflicts arise, individuals are forced to take side. It is better for the narcissist to lead a battle to disaster than to be the benign civilian in a country at peace.
My degree is philosophy and mathematics, so not really - of course I'd happily work as a front-end developer for some philosophy journal or magazine, but that's way too narrow to be feasible. I don't regret my degree - I do think it's a good one, and when I tell people what I study they often (embarassingly) exclaim that I must be really clever - I guess it's something that would pique recruiters/employers' interests. The maths I studied was about 85% pure mathematics, so I don't have any serious statistical/data experience either (but I don't think I'd like to work in data anyway).
Yes, I was under that impression as to low-level openings, especially with junior roles. Thanks for the advice.
Hardware + software would not qualify as property dualism (at least as described in your link) unless one was asserting that the behavior of the software could not be completely accounted for in terms of hardware operations. In that article, the example of vitalism is apposite.
I never understood this line of argument. It is difficult to see why something being hard to define makes it nebulous. The use of the concept of free will (which is incredibly intuitive—try asking a stranger if they have it, and they will certainly be able to answer) is only in this rather useless discussion associated with physical determinism (which is certainly not being thought of by the mentioned stranger).
Can you define a "decision" either? That is a word you use effortlessly and apparently without irony in the same breath as free will, which shows you really do understand what we are talking about when we talk about it. It is hard to pin down but that doesn't stop it from being at least linguistically related to other, more grounded and—I must emphasise—_extremely_ basic concepts of human life and behaviour, let alone psychology.
Of course, some people in a particularly zealous "scientific" mood feign ignorance about folk-psychology ideas, even basic ones like "decisions". But this is as self-defeating, really, as solipsism (at least, I have never known anyone who simply did not make decisions ever).
I can define a decision: the outcome of a process that selects between multiple options. The process can be conscious, unconscious or a computer programme.
Semantics can be tiresome but if you are unable to define a concept and must resort to “try asking a stranger” then how am I supposed to know what you are referring to? You could be referring to the legal definition of free will, the compatibilist one as espoused by Daniel Dennett, the dualistic one where consciousness exists beyond the physical universe, or one that I have not thought of. Most likely, a stranger would respond with the legal definition or a vague reference to the dualistic one.
If you cannot define it, then perhaps it has no real meaning.
Once again there is simply no physical grounding for the term "option". That word doesn't pick up a referent in the material world; its meaning is accrued from social and behavioural human intuition.
I actually am quite interested in this topic so I don't find it tiresome. I just find it important to note that defining terms very rigidly at the outset of inquiry can often mean that you are the one diverging from the general meaning of the word, which makes the result of that inquiry a lot less beneficial.
There are many theories of meaning, but there are obvious problems with the definability criterion for meaning. Does it suffice for one speaker to be able to define their terms, or must all utterers have to be able to define them? If the former, this says nothing about the use of the word free of the definition's restrictions; if the former, someone who is perhaps intelligent enough to speak but not to define their terms cannot speak with meaning (which is absurd).
My own view coincides with (later) Wittgenstein. Meaning is determined by use, and there are too many ways to use a phrase in too many contexts to provide an exhaustive definition, perhaps ever. I suspect W. would tell you to imagine a primitive language with no concept of definition at all. Do their utterances have meaning?
Your post exemplifies why it is hard to define and discuss. You implicitly take on one particular definition of free will (though you leave it unstated) and then discuss it as if it is the only obvious thing one could consider when they say the words "free will". While this is a perfectly useful notion that you are targeting, it simply omits some other important aspects which people care to discuss.
A more nuanced discussion with strangers which actually asks them questions about e.g. physical determinism will reveal that such strangers often do, in fact, hold some rather suspicious and unlikely beliefs about the role physical determinism plays in their lives.
Maybe this was unclear, but the point wasn't that there is a good singular notion of free will, and that that is a commonsense one.
Even if I leaned towards this view (I wouldn't say that I do) my point was moreso to point out that while the average person (if not everybody) can't define free will, they certainly will be able to use the term and understand its meaning. In fact, they will understand it in virtue of a plurality of definitions (or senses).
The claim that if you can't define a term you do not understand it is defeatist because it simply does not reflect the role of language. Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term? Do names (pointing to objects) have definitions or just abstract objects and types; if so what do these definitions consist in besides their names, if not why this dualism? And so on.
> Maybe this was unclear, but the point wasn't that there is a good singular notion of free will, and that that is a commonsense one.
How could this be when we can be demonstrably discussing different objects when we say "free will"? Just because people will generally, kind of, vaguely think they agree when they say "free will" does not mean they are truly in sync.
And yes, the objects they mean will mostly overlap in a significant way so if you do not look too hard, it could seem to them they are discussing the same thing. I find this to be a common type of situation in everyday life.
But when you want to discuss something more deeply and in greater detail, there arises a need to wrestle out a more precise meaning and then you can notice discrepancies arise between the subtly different things that could all be reasonably given the name "free will".
> Does a child who asks for chocolate not understand what she is saying if she cannot define that term?
A child has an understanding of what it is saying, not the one and only understanding. Another child asking for chocolate might have a different object in mind. The objects they are referring to will most likely significantly overlap and they might never notice the differences.
This is where definitions help. Definitions are a way of banging and cross-referencing a lot of different, mostly-shared objects together in the hope of arriving to a more precisely shared version of another mostly-shared object. Reaching towards better understanding via definitions is like applying the Whitworth Three Plates Method (https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...), but to concepts instead of physical objects.
I agree with you on this issue, and I suspect education is at least partly responsible for the 'definitions first' approach.
When teaching a topic in math, it is usual to start with definitions, and this is often also the case with science, but that is not how progress is made: more typically, the definitions follow from learning more about what starts as a vague or speculative concept, or was not even imagined before the studying was done (entropy, for example).
Philosophy is not immune to the problem; it is not that uncommon for me to find an author basing an argument on an ontology or a metaphysical claim that I suspect could be, at some future time, empirically refuted, or where some thing is "in a sense" like something else, without establishing that the sense in which they are similar is relevant (for example, there is a sense in which learning how to ride a bicycle is like learning how to perform addition, but it would take more than this sense to conclude that riding a bicycle is, to any useful degree, just a matter of learning a set of propositions.)
As you say, definitions can be used to avoid an issue, and while I agree with Dennett on many things, I feel that he and his fellow compatibilists are doing this with free will, which I consider to be the true 'hard problem' of consciousness.
I guess that depends on how you define "understand." There are many things I understand that I would have a hard time explaining to someone else, much less defining them. Most people who have spent enough time to master something would agree there are certain (possibly asthetic) aspects that they recognize but couldn't define.
Even when you get formal, there are limitations to how expressive any language can be.
Kind of, yes. You don't have to learn very much about law to realize that trying to codify/define everything to the extreme is a fool's errand, so we just punt and leave it up to "a jury of your peers".
I'll take "will" to be a given. There is something that is capable of thinking, and the thoughts it has are will. A decision, then, is when that entity has a thought that has intention.
I think it becomes nebulous by adding "free" to the equation, because it's not defined in relation to something specifically. Free from what? How would you differentiate it from a decision that's not "free" in this sense?
Free from thoughts? Free from gods? Free from memory? Free from circumstances? To differentiate it from "non-free will", we have to define what we actually care about, and then use it only with that scope.
If someone else can predict what decisions you will make with 100% accuracy can it still be free will? Some argue it can't, they like to believe that their mind is a unique snowflake that can never be reproduced, anything else means they don't have free will.
The commenter's point isn't that philosophers generally endorse dualism, it's that even those who claim to be monist materialists, etc. tend to possess latently dualist assumptions or conceptions of what consciousness is. Chalmers in particular pokes at this issues and challenges physicalists to either totally reimagine their understanding of the mind (cf. Dennett among others), which is mired in semantic and other difficulties, or perish.
Moreover, dualism is certainly no longer dying (or dead)—this is confirmed both by reading the literature and surveying departments. It's certainly not as unusual as it once was.
Restricting brain activity to computation it becomes more difficult to find exceptions to the argument. I think this is because computation is fundamentally quite alien to human minds, insofar as it is not an elementary, inescapable mental state. Many philosophers of mind (though not all, particularly not those who adhere to reductive physicalism and eliminative materialism) would characterise phenomenal consciousness and intentionality as these unavoidable mental properties.
It is worth mentioning that there are at least good reasons to reject nearly all of these theories (including physicalist and material thesis). Many aspects of each theories turn out to imply highly unintuitive effects. But I would recommend you read for yourself, since the mind-body problem is immense and very interesting at every step. The SEP articles on both of these[1][2] are quite good.
Elsewhere in this thread some have pointed out that the ontological assumptions of philosophers fade away as we approach the mind in our inquiry. This is at least partly because the mind stretches our understanding of knowledge and matter themselves, and to an even greater degree, our intuitions thereof.
