I think we're talking past each other. The short explanation is that we have different ideas about the goal of rational thinking. Let me put it this w...
Thanks for the Wittgenstein quotation. I had forgotten it. Your greys are a bit different from ours. I've never heard of black or white ones. It would...
Thanks. Obvious once you know. I can see the rationale for both projects. Beyond that, I'm not competent. I had the impression that Einstein pursued t...
I can't really talk about the Dems, but I have the impression that the Dems, back in the day, were an alliance of (mainly social) liberals and politic...
Saying "you can't know things outside of being conscious" is like saying "you can't see things without your eyes/walk without legs." "Insuperable" imp...
Thanks for the Wittgenstein quotations. I had forgotten it. There's a philosophical angle to this, of course. Perhaps more relevant is that if we are ...
I guess I was wrong about in thinking there might be more insects in the suburban area I live in. I see so much about how the countryside is losing al...
I think it's much more complicated than that. One has to distinguish the proffered reason for the fight and what's actually going on. The interplay be...
They don't talk much either and petting them is a bit of a problem. But I knew a goldfish once that blew a bubble at you when you gave it a crumb of f...
That makes two of us. Exchanging views sounds a bit pointless to some people, but it is a very good way of learning and passing things on. Yes. With c...
I knew that rewards came into it. I just wondered whether they also did it for fun. Doing it for fun is intrinsically rewarding, but then the handler ...
I think my reply to you before was a bit hasty. Whether mimicry and imitation are rational or not depends on why it is being done, surely? If it is be...
That's big if. I think the real point is that if we are not absolutely sure that they do and which preferences are moral and which are not, we should ...
Well, maybe you are better balanced than me. I'm thinking, though, that good motives do not excuse everything. You probably know about the Tuskegee Sy...
Well, change usually brings disaster and misery to the most vulnerable people, and the rich are mostly not the most vulnerable, so you're not wrong. S...
Yes. That's sadly common, isn't it? But we do have a choice, if we can set aside the question who is right and who is wrong. There is some risk, if on...
It's more accurate to say that we thought we needed a standard, quantifiable set of responses and decided to develop whatever we had to hand. "We need...
Do we really need us to tell them what they think about daily survival? Your definition of rationality is no more than a stipulation. Anyone who is ra...
I think that's right. But the links are complicated. Language is our clue (in philosophy), but it is our only clue and it itself tells us when somethi...
I think that you and they badly need a deeper understanding of the concepts of identity and the self. Then they wouldn't waste their time on obviously...
I think I agree with you. Yes. I would value them more if they weren't called "intelligence tests". The very idea of intelligence makes not sense to m...
I don't understand that. Sometimes cats and dogs sit and stare into space, quite still. One wonders what they are thinking about and whether they are ...
No, I don't buy that. We know that consciousness evolved long after the inanimate formed. We know that causation was working perfectly well during all...
OK. I'll accept that you are right about that. But you are OK with the relationship between part and whole, I think. So do you say that relationship i...
The Arts vs The Humanities. That explains it. I'm taking you to mean by "focal range" because there is always an object of understanding - the "what" ...
Yes. There's been a lot about it in the media in advance. H'm. The author says that's his view, that's true. But if only it was just complacency. Ther...
I realize that you are asking those questions to get me puzzled, not because you think they don't have answers. But perhaps we should start from the f...
Yes, and one can see why. There's reason to think that planning ahead pays off. But the model always suffered from not recognizing that planning isn't...
I know there's a lot going on around causality, because there are so many anomalous phenomena that seem to escape it. Just as the pre-scientific (Aris...
I dunno. There's evidence around that being smart and linguistic may turn out not to be entirely beneficial. In this context "better together" means t...
Yes, it's fascinating to watch people wrestling with it. BTW, I don't think the brain thinks. I'm the one who does the thinking. In other words, think...
So you should also have a better understanding of what empiricism was/is all about. The debate between empiricists and rationalists (the orthodox back...
I guess you'll have better things to do that hang around here! I want to add that I do not at all deny that animals (including humans) do have purely ...
That's a different case. Our recognition is revealed when we recognize it. These powers, as Hume keeps emphasizing, are "secret", "hidden". I recommen...
quote]He (sc. Hume) presents an argument in the form of a dilemma which appears to rule out the possibility of any reasoning from the premises to the ...
Yes, it could. But that's what links the different scales together, as different representations of the same thing. We can also extend the format from...
That's true, but doesn't answer my question. What if a (natural) master is isolated from slaves and vice versa? But he does think that slaves are vici...
Thank you very much. I can get my teeth into this. I won't complain that you've sent me too much. I just hope that my reply isn't too much and that we...
I do like the lens metaphor - it seems to me to be very useful and I shall use it at every opportunity. There are clearly hidden depths to the definit...
Well, yes. It is redundancy in one sense, but it has a point, which makes it not entirely redundant. There has to be something that the picture/map ha...
Yes, but the coarser grain mapping enables you to supply what the fine grain mapping leaves out - the whole that the fine grain mapping can't present....
Not intentionally. If I've upset you, I apologize. Yes, that would be good. But maybe other people prefer something noisier - more exciting. That's wh...
Why does that concern you? Everybody who has power has an opposition. The opposition always thinks that those with power should be "reined in" or crus...
Why do you assume that a natural leader with no people to lead and a slave without a master to serve will inevitably live in isolation. Why cannot the...
So a map of a single grain of sand cannot signal distinctions between grains, and a map of the inside of a grain cannot signal the whole grain, and a ...
You really hate an example, don't you? Nothing but large-scale generalizations. So you miss the detail. Yes, they certainly do. But then you don't get...
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