Footnote Physicist

          “For Descartes, the mind or soul inhabited the body rather like a “ghost in the machine,” as one             twentieth-century philosopher memorably put it.  Critics of this idea, which is often known as           'dualism,' tend nowadays to be sceptical of the ghost, but in Descartes's time they were more           puzzled by the machine.”           – Anthony Gottlieb I           "And you'll do the dance           that was choreographed           at the very dawn of time"           – Conor Oberst (Bright Eyes) II           Mechanical philosophy is the most important and undervalued innovation from the enlightenment (or the scientific revolution)....

          “An intelligence that, at a given instance, could comprehend all the forces by which nature is            animated and the respective situation of the beings that make it up, if moreover it were vast            enough to submit these data to analysis, would encompass in the same formula the movements of            the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atoms.  For such an intelligence           nothing would be uncertain, and the future, like the past, would be open to its eyes.”           – Pierre-Simon de Laplace I           “God does not play dice.”           – Albert Einstein II           Determinism  is a facet of  mechanical philosophy  all too oft...