Justifying our existence

Justifying our existence.

The title of this editorial may have existential and philosophical implications but for our purposes is designed to reflect a more everyday requirement. That is to demonstrate to the public that the treatments we purvey are effective in managing their complaints. The need to demonstrate effectiveness is a rational one both in terms of spending healthcare budgets wisely and avoiding unnecessary ...

Can Science Change our Notion of Existence?

I explore the question of whether scientific changes can induce mutations in our ordinary notion of existence. I conclude that they can’t, partially on the grounds that some of the proposed alternative-notions of existence are only terminologically-distinct from our ordinary notion, and so don’t provide genuine metaphysical alternatives, and partially on the grounds that the ordinary notion of ...

Justifying Equality

We consider the problem of finding irredundant bases for inconsistent sets of equalities and disequalities. These are subsets of inconsistent sets which do not contain any literals which do not contribute to the unsatisfiability in an essential way, and can therefore be discarded. The approach we are pursuing here is to decorate derivations with proofs and to extract irredundant sets of assumpt...

Justifying Decision Support Systems

The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of Our Existence

Our laws of nature and our cosmos appear to be delicately fine-tuned for life to emerge, in a way that seems hard to attribute to chance. In view of this, some have taken the opportunity to revive the scholastic Argument from Design, whereas others have felt the need to explain this apparent fine-tuning of the clockwork of the Universe by proposing the existence of a ‘Multiverse’. We analyze th...