Pantagruel

Thanks javi! However it turns out that England's stance on cannabis reform is somewhat archaic and, until that changes, moving there poses us a seriou...

I've been pondering it a lot myself for the last week and I'd agree with this.

Sure as long as we understand that learning reflects the ability of a pattern-recognizer to adapt to novel instances. I don't conceive of "machine-lea...

Here's something that might interest you @"Bob Ross". A mathematically perfect solar system. "According to new research, all six planets orbit the sam...

It isn't dismissive, it's objective. The fundamental mechanism of information processing via artificial neural networks has not changed. It is simply ...

Do we really even understand what consciousness "is" ? How it emerged from inert matter? What its actual role is in the evolving universe? Or do we on...

Exceedingly unlikely since we know the exact mechanism whereby they generate responses. And they did not "evolve" in the same way and have none of the...

Durkheim looks closely at how this communal-instrumental mind (which he consistently refers to as a real and essentially living thing, the cultural mi...

:100: No one is more cynical than the believer who failed to find what they wanted. I stopped clinging to jobs like that was all that there was and st...

As a member of the Commonwealth my pensions and benefits are more straightforward than some other places, for one. My grandfather was born in England....

Yes, and I had a feeling that some of that was coming, and a few different degrees of it already have. But here's a suggestion in return. Do you think...

:chin:

I'm not so sure about that. Normally it's about -5 here this time of year. Last couple of days it got up around 15 and all the snow melted. Now, the t...

True. Geologic time-scale events become less foreboding as one's lifespan dwindles however. I wouldn't want to be 30.

Hadn't considered New Zealand. Quite a hike! BC is so expensive and seems like climate change might be more of a problem there. My wife lived and taug...

:up: We are going to take some short trips to England soon, possibly one later this year, to get a feel for things and check out different regions.

Which is high on our requirements list. It seems like everywhere has its major flaws. I suspect that happiness is mostly about the motivation and ener...

We are also considering the Wye Valley.....

My wife has German citizenship so we have talked about Germany also. Cold is something we are trying to avoid though!

Wow. Thanks for all the information guys. This is why we ask. I'm not sure that the critical reviews aren't just a symptom of global decline though. I...

It's absolutely impossible in Canada. Home prices here are sky-high. Home prices in England are at least 10-15% lower. Plus we would be moving to a mo...

Are you from Banos de la Encina?

Thanks for replying Javi! We are mainly going by climate, a little drier and sunnier, so the southwest, or northeast, like Suffolk. We are pretty flex...

Exactly. Only the most trivial and mundane of things can be known without doubt. The volume of water in that glass is 300 ml. As soon as you begin to ...

:100: If anything, I'm more inclined to view thought as fundamentally social-collective than to view language as fundamentally idiomatic.

This hypothesis doesn't seem valid to me even on its face, due to the fact that the individual has no existence independent of the collective (species...

Well your theory is about conduciveness to harmony as a kind of ideal. Kant's theory about the inherent morality of duty is expressed eloquently throu...

Indeed it is not, it is the essence of morality to be prescriptive. However, as a final note, I will say that, if your theory is accurate, it ought to...

Yes, that's not the least bit abstract.... Natural systems do not exist in a state of "peaceful congruence." Natural systems if anything exist in a st...

You cannot weld the objective quality of fitness for a purpose onto morality through the mere fact that we refer to both using the term goodness. They...

I literally just gave you the virtue of duty, including the sense in which actions can be considered deontologically virtuous meaning they are intrins...

Not at all. However I believe the more literal interpretation is "to excel", which certainly aligns with the fact that moral value aligns with actions...

Yes, we aspire to live in a human world of hopes and fears and joys and sorrows. You can't simplify that. People do good because they are or aspire to...

Your entire OP is based upon a false definition followed by an unending stream of equivocation between goodness and perfection, which are manifestly n...

And also, this whole notion that there is some kind of behaviour-transcending "perfection" can be utilized to justify any action that the believer bel...

New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson

So you are assuming that rationality has a universal value. Ok. What about aesthetics? What about sentimentality? What about the inherent value of fre...

As I put it, however, it is not clear that this is anti-thetical to universal harmony. The human race is arguably more anti-thetical to universal harm...

I think some people feel they can avoid such pitfalls if their logic is stringent enough (without being aware that extreme-logicism can itself constit...

Yes, I kind of figured. It was only a matter of time.

Moral Education by Émile Durkheim

Ontology is the heart of metaphysics. And this is its traditional accepted definition, the nature of being, contrary to your assertion.

Ok Bob. How does the perfect nuclear weapon fit into your schema? Since human beings are arguably impairing the perfect balance of our eco-sphere, uti...

What is Pattern Recognition? Pattern recognition is a process of finding regularities and similarities in data using machine learning data. Now, these...

Which bias originally derived from the biased input data, as is in the article. Like I said, it's a fact. Do some reading. "Training up" a neural net....

Indeed. And there are limits both to the extent that it is actually "shared" (different degrees of understanding of the same thing (ability and specia...

The Dawn of Everything evaluates this position, and also explores the unique power of the indigenous world view through some historical analysis infor...

I'm sorry, perhaps you just do not understand the way neural networks function. Do you think that the data categorizes itself? This isn't a subject of...

This is how I feel.

Like stoicism. You can read all the stoicism you want. But there is a difference between reading it, and believing it to the extent that you actively,...