Gary M Washburn

Rather more tangible. It is precisely that consciousness does not continue that death is so dreadful for the living. If there really is nothing left o...

People are always a bit disgusted while the sausage is made. Different story, I expect, when it comes to eating it.

Actually, I'm asking you to think smaller, not bigger. I'm not even challenging conventional wisdom about how reason works. Merely that there is a lim...

Is this meant dismissively? You seem to think language is a one-way street. It's not the content of our assertions that engenders meaning, it is the d...

It's the whole point. The addiction of facile semiosis, or natural language, is that the stranger we are to what we think we mean is kept at bay and o...

There is no escaping ambiguity. If you think you've reached the end of it you need to think again, and keep talking. We cannot outstrip the deficit of...

Didn't run the video, so if this is central to your question what I say here may be impertinence. We are born into this world complete strangers to it...

Even nonsense deserves a response that is more than a machine designed to fool us. Come to think of it, who the hell do they think they are? However s...

Socrates refutes libertarianism in book three, I think, of Republic, the passages where Thrasymachus challenges his thesis. I wonder if your libertaia...

Time is difference without limit. That is to say, it is the difference each unique thing brings to it. In itself it is nothing, a bit of noise. But wh...

Is a digital system a place? I thought it was a 'processor'. Consciousness is an interruption of a process.

Nothing formal can 'identify'. Period. Identity is personal. Leibniz is subordinating reality to formal rules he constructs from question-begging the ...

Sameness is sameness is not a tautology, it's circularity. Don't you need to establish what you mean by being this one before you can use quantifiers ...

Identity is not an attribute. There is absolutely nothing it is "like" to conscious. Uniqueness is not a myth. There is no calculus, no formulation, t...

Isn't a function by definition "computable"?

What? AI? I think you mean I am saying Turing did, as far as I have read of him.

Can't say I've ever had a dream involving a computer or "device". Maybe it's a generational thing. What AI can never get past is that every time a hum...

[reply="TheMadFool;600773" How about being on hold? A very polite bot does not recognize that a live person expects variation even when repeating the ...

Reading this list, all I can think is: Yeah!, Let's do it! What it leaves out is that once and for all America is to make itself a nation, as opposed ...

Which brings us back to the sure-fire remedy, threaten him with a primary challenge. Arm-twisting, too, is brinkmanship, and tends to go on in private...

You know, the president has the power of the veto, but even that can be overridden. For years now McConnell has exercised a veto power without the pos...

Once established, a regime of intimidation can be sustained with very little effort.

You can't fight a system of conscription with persuasion. If they think we're on the wrong side they won't listen to reason. But the history is long. ...

Is the issue how much the bill costs, or how much it will do? America can afford elevating everyone to the middle-class, even if not willing to "work ...

"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die." America is the product of the English Civil War. it is just as imponderable how the Cavaliers ma...

Biology is a constant cycle between autonomic systems and a kind of re-calibration. The heart changes constantly in rate and force. The mind, too, rel...

There was no "metaphysical world" at the time, that was an invention of Aristotle. For a man not 'for the people' he was remarkably loyal to them. Hav...

I was not relying on Plato's "authority", nor what you call his interpretation of the idea, but on his supplying ample human interactions on the idea ...

Socrates knows he doesn't know, he does not know he doesn't know. He asks in hopes his interlocutor does know, and is genuinely surprised when he find...

I beg to differ, with the world if necessary. Socrates uses divinity aspirationally, not in reference to some eternal authority. His whole career is a...

The task, then, is archeological. But underestimating English is a mugs game. Not reading Greek, I am left with translations, but I have my Loebs (wit...

I was under the impression phronesis and sophrosune were synonyms, usually (incorrectly) translated as "prudence". Sophia appears as a root in many wo...

Odd remarks, considering that most sources claim Greek was lost to Western Europe for the duration in question. More accurately it was censored, not l...

The written word was invented to depersonalize language. Monumentalism and rent tallies. Only the Greeks became literate without some imperial suppres...

Sorry, didn't read any of this, but the answer seems dead obvious, investment runs on interest and profit. Usury requires growth, Otherwise the regres...

Then what of sophia? Actually, it is fairly commonplace to associate the meaning of terms with the character of its people. The movie Tolkien has a sc...

"ek pantos noou" : with all one's heart. Just one sense cited in Liddel and Scott. But heart, ardent feeling, is hardly a repudiation of physical real...

It's easy to forget that from about 300 CE to at least the seventeenth century education was explicitly ideological. In my youth I was taught to write...

Precisely my point, if you'll review my earlier remarks. But even in the macro orbits are counter-intuitive. But in particle physics the Newtonian dis...

No, it is the energy that sets the orbit. That's first year stuff. If you study the physics of orbital docking maneuvers you'll see what I mean.

Thanks for that. Read Berkeley's "The Analyst" and it may not seem so strange. If we are convinced a value is being reached that is necessary to our p...

"Indeed Léon Rosenfeld recounts Bohr's frustration at the continued misunderstanding of his principle. When Rosenfeld off-handedly suggested to Bohr t...

Probably can't help. You see, when faced with ideologues progress is alienating. The ideology, that is, that answers must be mechanistic and dehumaniz...

The limit is the idea. But time is explicitly unreal within that limit.

How fast is the banana ripening at any one time? At any one time a drop of rain is a deluge. At any one time any occurrence is not even a phenomenon, ...

The stupidity of the law is that police, lawyers, and judges are required to apply a meaning of the law that belies its origin. When we stop at a stop...

Somebody in mind?

Merely suggesting that the most prevalent mode of stupidity in the world is obtusely misconstruing the stranger for fear of one's own alienation. It's...

Maybe add the h? It's hard to know what ignorance is these days, when even the most expert source is largely ignorant of the broader details of his ow...

I'm with Baker on this point. Platitudes are not opinions. They are lines in the sand. Or, as Gump would say, Stupid is.... The world we are born into...