[jhedwards]

I highly recommend the book Causality and Modern Science by Mario Bunge for a thorough and scientifically grounded treatment of the philosophical problems of causality and determinism. This article seems to be going in an interesting direction with respect to those ideas but I can't quite follow it.

[swatcoder]

Seconded.

As for the article, it's just a shower thought. I don't fault the author for choosing to sketch down little sparks of personal insight on a blog instead of in a private journal, but I don't know why someone submitted something so undeveloped to HN or how it kept some footing on the front page.

It makes me wonder if people might just enjoy seeing clusters of meaty philosophy and systems buzzwords placed near each other in valid sentences.

[kyleperik]

People don't generally read hacker news because of its polish, but because of its novelty. There's plenty of polished backwash to read elsewhere.

For me, undeveloped personal insight is just the kind of content I find most interesting here.

[ShamelessC]

> People don't generally read hacker news

Twisting your words a bit, but it’s been my experience that “indeed”, people don’t read the articles here. Lots of upvoting from just the headline or a quick skim. “I don’t get it but I’m curious what the discussion will reveal for me if I upvote”.

The guidelines here don’t really have a problem with this attitude either. You can make an uninformed upvote, just not an uninformed comment. In practice, both are somewhat common.

[esafak]

His other posts are like that too. He could avoid writing these superficial posts if he read a few books first.