Do you know what sortition means? Public offices were drawn by lot - not a bunch of people to argue about an issue on film. Very different concepts. I...
So decisions on major public issues now hinge on a video of people - 200 people! - arguing? I'm trying to imagine the sound level and clarity. This id...
Please list in order of triviality. Government by focus group... How is that an improvement over the current system, wherein every adult has at least ...
And who would set the question for this Friday? Do the voters get advance warning to inform themselves on the subject? It's not a lot of time to prepa...
Ecclesiastes 3:1 To everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under Heaven. Nations grow rich, then powerful and their rulers grow am...
That would mean children born deaf can think well enough to function, communicate and learn sign language. In fact, they begin to invent their own sig...
When you don't have access to the other entity's mind, I'm not sure you're justified in assuming they have no symbolic communication. You're probably ...
Maybe we don't all have the same definition of 'advance'. Maybe some territories were too remote and poor for conquest, and therefore the inhabitants ...
Individual freedom; individual choice. Not wanting children for yourself doesn't mean you disapprove of other people's desire to have them. I like bot...
You seem to consider symbols important. I don't think it makes any difference to the concept whether there is a call, a word or a pictogram signifying...
Then what do the sentries outside meerkat burrows, groundhog colonies, wild goose nesting grounds and rookeries shout when a hawk or kestrel or coyote...
I recently saw a documentary about Australian natives constructing mental maps in that way. The person who doesn't know the way is escorted along the ...
What if you're all alone on a desert island, building a shelter, foraging for food, making tool and working on an effective SOS signal, and there is n...
How is danger a linguistically generated concept? Dangers have been around as long as living organisms have been around, but human language is only ab...
Invariably expressing my view and paraphrasing nobody - except occasionally in jest or irony and that's more likely to be poets or scriptwriters than ...
I believe we think on several levels and several ways at the same time. The multi-chambered mind allows us to process input, store it in short-term me...
And I agree. I don't imagine that other species view anything as 'evil' in the way that humans do. But they do appear to have a strong notion of thing...
Why should they? They already have concepts and strategies that work for them. The lost point there was that the sophistication of language, narrative...
A couple of other people have just recently told me that llamas can't generalize something that threatens them as being evil or even bad. I didn't say...
Okay. Humans have hyperbole that other species probably don't. I don't know the language of alpacas or zebras. I can't even picture the symbology in t...
Even when the river has cement banks... Yes. There have always been movements in civilized societies, of a small number of people who lived, or attemp...
To herbivores, predators are the greatest threat. Many herbivores simply accept that they will be chased and possibly killed by wolves or other predat...
They make excellent guards for sheep, I've heard and will spit and kick at predators. But they can become accustomed to dogs in a domestic setting. De...
What sort of generalities? Like : "All wolves are evil." or "If the angles of one triangle add up to 360 degrees, the angles of all triangles must als...
Human history does not indicate - at least to this observer - that all that science and culture have contributed significantly to our collective abili...
Oh, you mean because some species can't be assumed to have thoughts? The ones that have no brains, I admit to not having allowed for them. The ones wh...
I assume every species has thoughts that no other species share, since the equipment with which we perceive, experience and interact with the world, a...
Does it matter whether you can tell stories about your thinking? I mean, it obviously matters to the storyteller. I happen to be a teller of fictional...
Biology is still beyond our ken. Neuroscience is well behind. Physics and cosmology are ranging off into neverlands of speculation. But we know all ab...
Yep. It's hard to imagine an organism that does not interact with the world - if only to anchor on something and feed itself. With blythe disregard to...
It doesn't. The preponderance of evidence does. The teeny-tiny, microscopic point I attempted to make in this context was in support of the previous a...
by what means? would rather presuppose the existence of Pythagoras, who also wasn't the first or else blowing itself up that way and turning into the ...
The same way you are. The biological clock that came with our brain, plus changes in the environment, plus experience, plus memory. People and other a...
Only if you have some external source of information that contradicts your defective senses. without that contradiction, you would ask no questions. N...
But the subject matter one thinks about has to be collected through sensory data processing before one can formulate any concepts. (Hence the poverty ...
Only, I really do. It started forming last month, on Friday the 13th. Haven't written it down yet, because there isn't a plot in which to ground the i...
Me, I like saffron. Better yet, the bead-work and fringes of North American native shamans. Their work may have a dark side, but they don't have a Cri...
Then why are witches dressed in black? Why are ravens and crows associated with foretelling death, or doom, rather than something spiritual about soul...
Yes, I get the light/dark thing (including its spurious association with skin colour). It's the religious garb I find anomalous. Does any other belief...
What can you be yourself without? Lose your possessions, relationships, status, occupation - you're still yourself, though a less effective self. Lose...
There is a great danger in infantilizing our young, and in idealizing ignorance as a state of bliss. Children are capable of understanding, learning a...
They, as well as crows, also teach their young life skills and how to get by in the human world. The 'murder' is a gathering of crows. They're just fa...
Yeah. It's largely uncontrolled, so that no authorities know which parents are beating their kids, or making them kneel on cement floors as penance. I...
In that instance, 'innocence' simply means that the accused has not committed the particular crime of which he stands accused. It does not mean a gene...
I was humouring you. But, okay: a first entity existed. If we take 'entity' to mean any solid identifiable object, that would theoretically have been ...
That, like so many formerly pleasant activities, has lately become perilous to one's mental health. I look at the Gulf of Mexico in the lower right co...
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