From: Michael M. Butler (mmb@spies.com)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 20:46:00 MDT
Re: Aleph:
Sure, sure, but you start counting wth Cantor numbers and see how far you
get! :P
<That's at least an Aleph-One... joke, for those who ddn't get it.)
<Cool A=1 identity issues elided>
A kindred issue: I have been told that the pre-Socratics had, in whatever
variety of early Greekoid they spoke, the same sort of confusion between
the "is" of existing and the "is" of possessing-a-property that we as naive
thinkers can get into in English, which is to me a striking thing since I
can (I think) easily imagine a language that uses a "has"-analog for
properties and doesn't get into that water.
But I wonder how likely that is to develop a priori (well, early) from an
evolutionary biology standpoint. Especially if people really are using
their sensory modalities for thinking, and, to whatever extent, reasoning
(a la Lakeoff's work)...
And that makes me wonder about a weak analog to Jaynes's Bicameral Mind
stories; that the scaffolding of thinking has changed in some significant
way in the relatively recent past. Do you follow? The abstract problems one
can address when one can reason that way are very different from the ones
that don't get you killed as a HG or serf, mostly.
Final random thought related to the above: what if "AD(H)D" is just what
more and more of we monkeys do when developmentally exposed to what we
monkeys have been doing more and more of lately? Is that a possible sigmoid
shaper that will tend to slow any singularity takeoff? How bad, really, is
the battle betwen "being nibbled to death by ducks" (distraction to
overwhelm by irrelevancies) and missing a bet? Are we being told it's worse
than it really is? Are we worrying ourselves to death?
Is there any escape from noise?
MMB
-- I am not here to have an argument. I am here as part of a civilization. Sometimes I forget.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Jun 02 2003 - 21:02:33 MDT