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ELI5 What is stoicism?
Stoicism is a way of approaching living with the aim of having a positive and tranquil life. It originated in ancient Rome with a philosopher named Seneca, who started a school to teach his approach to life, called Stoicism. The basic idea in stoicism is to seek out a tranquil and positive way of living by training o...
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Why are most random number generators said to be "pseudo-random" rather than truly random? What is the difference between true randomness and pseudo-randomness?
Reading a book on programming they mentioned that the Random function for C# didn't actually produce random numbers, it produced pseudo-random numbers, but that this is acceptable for almost all situations. I'm a bit confused as to what they actually mean. My understanding is as follows: My random number generator is ...
Let's start with the definition of deterministic. A deterministic process or system has one future for each state. In phase-space, the trajectories don't cross. So you can usually predict the future state of a particle given the particles current state. Random processes/functions/systems (whatever) can have multipl...
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CMV: Saying that we are in a computer simulation is a meaningless, nonsensical statement
From time to time I come across a theory claiming that our universe is a computer simulation. [Here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis)'s a Wikipedia article about it. I think it's a completely meaningless proposition. It's similar to claiming that there is a parallel universe, completely separated fr...
Bostrom's argument that I've previously read suggests the following: Let's say we are in a computer simulation (which can be argued is actually quite likely). What is the purpose of this simulation? Is it to simulate a particular point in past history, or to determine certain particular outcomes to certain particular ...
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