Scaling Arguments
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The argument that evolution speaks to being the most "intelligent design".
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The lecture focuses on arguments that might be offered as proof for the existence of the soul. The first series of arguments discussed is those known as "inferences to the best explanation." That is, we posit the existence of things we cannot see so as to explain something else that is generally agreed to take place.
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Professor Kagan discusses in detail the argument of free will as proof for the existence of an immaterial soul. The argument consists of three premises: 1) We have free will. 2) Nothing subject to determinism has free will. 3) All purely physical systems are subject to determinism. The conclusion drawn from this is that humans are not a purely physical system; but Professor Kagan explains why this argument is not truly compelling. In...more
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The lecture begins with a continued discussion of the Cartesian argument and its weaknesses. The lecture then turns to Plato's metaphysical views in the context of his work, Phaedo. The key point in the discussion is the idea that in addition to the ordinary empirical world that we are familiar with, we posit the existence of a second realm in which the Platonic forms exist. These forms are the abstract properties that we attribute to...more
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Car-Cdr Recursion Problem that Returns the Sum of Every Element in a List of Integers, How Scheme Checks Type During Run-Time Rather than Compilation, Recursive Implementation of the Fibonacci Function in Scheme, Example that Illustrates Runtime Error/Type Checking Vs. Compile-Time Error/Type Checking, Writing a Recursive Flatten Function that Removes All the Intervening Parentheses from a List, Using a Cond Structure to Branch Over the...more
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The debate between contagionists and anticontagionists over the transmission of infectious diseases played a major role in nineteenth-century medical discourse. On the one side were those who believed that diseases could be spread by infected material, perhaps including people and inanimate objects, and on the other those who subscribed to the more venerable miasmatic theory. Although the contagionist view would be substantially...more
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Derivative Of A Distribution, Example: Derivative Of A Unit Step, Example: Derivative Of Sgn(X), Applications To The Fourier Transform (Using The Derivative Theorem), Caveat To Distributions: Multiplying Distributions, Distributions*Functions, Special Case: The Delta Function And Sampling, Convolution In Distributions, Special Case: Convolution When T = Delta, The Scaling Property Of Delta
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Professor Kagan puts forward the claim that Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilych is quite the typical man in terms of his views on mortality. All of his life he has known that death is imminent but has never really believed it. When he suddenly falls ill and is about to die, the fact of his mortality shocks him. In trying to further access how people think about death, Professor Kagan explores the claim that "we all die alone," presents a...more
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Effect On Fourier Transform Of Shifting A Signal, Resulting Delay Formula (Shift Theorem), Effect Of Scaling The Time Signal, Stretch Theorem Formula/ Interpretation, Convolution In Context Of Fourier Transforms; Multiplying Two Signals In Frequency, Resulting Convolution Formula
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Over time, economists' justifications for why free markets are a good thing have changed. In the first few classes, we saw how under some conditions, the competitive allocation maximizes the sum of agents' utilities. When it was found that this property didn't hold generally, the idea of Pareto efficiency was developed. This class reviews two proofs that equilibrium is Pareto efficient, looking at the arguments of economists Edgeworth and...more
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This lecture introduces students to the study of psychology from an evolutionary perspective, the idea that like the body, natural selection has shaped the development of the human mind. Prominent arguments for and against the theory of natural selection and its relationship to human psychology are reviewed. Students will hear several examples of how studying mental phenomenon from an evolutionary perspective can help constrain theories...more
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This lecture reviews selected topics previously covered in lectures 1 through 5. This includes: scaling arguments, dot products, cross products, one-dimensional kinematics, trajectories, and uniform circular motion. Professor Lewin concludes by presenting a brain teaser to the audience. Sliding his fingers underneath a yardstick, towards the center, something strange happens: the fingers seem to make turns moving, they alternating...more
