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It's difficult to verify an individual probabilistic statement about a real-world event, especially if the estimate is as vague as 50%, but we can check large sets of probabilistic statements against observations. We can ask, when this person says the chances are 50%, what proportion of times does the event he predicted actually happen? If the event ...
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There are many interpretations of probability, as other answers have pointed out (though those answers are filled with errors and inaccuracies, so beware).
The most basic issue to point out, I think, is that your question assumes that utterances like "There is a 50% chance of it raining tomorrow" have a truth value. That is, you assume that it ...
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I think you make an excellent point. We have an internal experience of semantics, but judging other humans from outside, aren't they 'Chinese rooms'? That is exactly the Philosophical Zombies issue. So it's absurd to deny it can be dismissed as an issue, you 'just can't' compare the human body from outside, because we know somehow that we don't follow rules. ...
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Zero doesn't depend on the "presence of absence"; it is just the cardinal number of the empty set. Even in ancient times, people were well aware of emptiness, or empty sets, or classes that had no members:
That jug is half full of beer, and that other jug is empty.
Abraham has 1000 sheep and Lot has no sheep.
Cyrus has 10,000 horses and Xenophon ...
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Greek and Roman number systems did not have zero. Roman numerals were still preferred in accounting in some places until the 1800s. Zeno's paradox depends in large part on uncertainty on interpreting zero.
The crucial function of zero is as a placeholder in a place-value system, in our case normally base ten.
Egyptians have the earliest recorded use of zero, ...
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This sort of thing (claiming 1-1 does not equal zero) happens all the time in elementary algebra classes, where it is referred to as an arithmetic error or "mistake".
Regarding whether or not zero qualifies as a "real" number, it occupies a "real" position on the number line and in decimal notation indicates the absence of ...
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A weather prediction is a conclusion from evidence. For a complete description of the problem, you need to include the evidence, which is basically all of the data that the weather bureau uses to make the prediction.
From the frequentist point of view, this evidence can be seen as the experiment; the rain or lack of rain the next day is the outcome. So ...
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I do not know of such a theory. But I offer some related thoughts that impinge on what it might look like:
Some dedicated meditators claim there is only one qualia. Practitioners of Advaita Vedanta claim all of experience is made of sat-chit-ananda, which is one substance (the triune term is just capturing the one thing to describe it better), which ...
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Note: From the Latin, singular "quale" (kwah-lay), plural "qualia" (kwah-lee-ar)
The brain processes vastly complex information. Yet it operates on a small number of design principles, such as neuronal firing patterns and synapse strengths between neurons. The same basic circuit elements are repeated billions of times but each is ...
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