Re: death of the mind.

From: patty (pattyNO_at_SPAMicyberspace.net)
Date: 08/02/04 

Date: Mon, 02 Aug 2004 18:36:25 GMT

Lester Zick wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Aug 2004 14:43:42 GMT, patty <pattyNO@SPAMicyberspace.net>
> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>
>
>>Lester Zick wrote:
>>
>>>On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 19:09:23 +0100, David Longley
>>><David@longley.demon.co.uk> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>In article <410bbe97.13837142@netnews.att.net>, Lester Zick
>>>><lesterDELzick@worldnet.att.net> writes
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>On Sat, 31 Jul 2004 13:19:39 +0100, David Longley
>>>>><David@longley.demon.co.uk> in comp.ai.philosophy wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>>One of the themes I've laboured here over the years is that our
>>>>>>"intelligence" is not something which is to be found "in our heads" as
>>>>>>some sort of "stuff", but in our actions and how they are differentially
>>>>>>shaped by our environments. It should go without saying that we all
>>>>>>differ somewhat in terms of how skilled we are as a function of how we
>>>>>>are physically structured, but that's just individual differences. To a
>>>>>>very large extent, our "intelligence" comes down to how effectively we
>>>>>>(collectively) manage to structure our environments and how we thereby
>>>>>>manage to participate within our cultures. Our pragmatic use of
>>>>>>computers and other electro-mechanical artefacts is merely a
>>>>>>contemporary illustration of how we use the extensional stance to better
>>>>>>manage our behaviour, and I've urged you to look into that more
>>>>>>carefully and to dispense with the "metaphysics" you currently
>>>>>>promulgate. I'm trying to encourage you to behave more "intelligently".
>>>>>>
>>>>>>To appreciate the bigger picture of what I'm talking about, you could go
>>>>>>back further than Quine, Turing, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Frege etc, back
>>>>>>past Hollerith, Babbage and Jacquard and the industrial revolution
>>>>>>(<http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1145.htm> to the origins of geometry in
>>>>>>early surveying several thousand years ago (where all that measuring
>>>>>>helped ensure that ones house didn't fall down or that one could find
>>>>>>your way back to ones house after a long excursion off in the desert).
>>>>>>You could even look back further to our earliest recorded "use of"
>>>>>>discriminative stimuli in even more primitive ways maybe 50,000 years
>>>>>>ago (cave paintings etc). Like it or not it comes down to our use of
>>>>>>language in conjunction with the rest of our public behaviour.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>"Differences" are important, as without them everything would be "the
>>>>>>same", but in itself, that's something we learned thousands of years ago
>>>>>>and it's something every child learns (it's studied as discrimination
>>>>>>learning, and one may as well do it with rats or pigeons) as it's shaped
>>>>>>by the culture it's born into. The point is that as a scientific
>>>>>>linguistic community we have moved on - but to appreciate how, you're
>>>>>>going to have to take some of that advice I've given you and do some of
>>>>>>that reading I have suggested instead of telling us what *you* don't
>>>>>>understand and failing to tell the difference between that, and what
>>>>>>*we* understand. Ironically, you don't seem to know the difference.
>>>>>
>>>>>Well, David, at least you're being responsive and making a worthwhile
>>>>>point. The difference between what you suggest we learned several
>>>>>thousand years ago and my own concept of differences and differences
>>>>>between differences is that my idea accounts for the locus of what we
>>>>>think here in our heads and the inherently ambiguous nature of what is
>>>>>thought and clears up Russell's paradox in mechanical terms.
>>>>>
>>>>>All you have to do is consider the nature of differences as isolated
>>>>>mechanisms in their own right. Antecedents of differences lie outside
>>>>>the head but results lie inside the head or at least inside some locus
>>>>>used as the basis for the difference. There really is no alternative.
>>>>>This is why our intelligence lies inside the head and not outside. You
>>>>>can make a comprehensive case that all antecedents to differences lie
>>>>>ultimately outside the head but the results of differences cannot.
>>>>>
>>>>>Failure to recognize this is the compelling disconnect in materialism.
>>>>>One can train differential mechanisms using only antecedents lying
>>>>>outside the head and the seat of intelligence but only if magnitudes
>>>>>of antecedents are such as to overwhelm the differential mechanism and
>>>>>make the external antecedents and results of differences functionally
>>>>>identical.
>>>>>
>>>>>It isn't so much that I just don't care to take the time to peruse the
>>>>>materialist-behaviorist literature. It's that there is no literature
>>>>>on the mechanical nature of differences and their consequences
>>>>>because everyone has been too busy looking for positivist foundations
>>>>>for knowledge instead of differential foundations for knowledge.
>>>>>
>>>>>Regards - Lester
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>As I said before, pointing out that what you write makes no sense
>>>>doesn't help you much because you can't tell the difference between
>>>>sense and nonsense. To begin to be able to do that, you'd have to do
>>>>some of the reading which you've never done, and which, rather
>>>>bizarrely, you assert you don't need to do. The rhetorical question
>>>>therefore remains: "how do you know?", and the instructive answer is:
>>>>"you don't".
>>>
>>>
>>>No, actually I do know. If you want to know how I know, David, it's
>>>simply because I prove differences universally for all things through
>>>the consideration of the universally self contradictory nature of
>>>alternatives to differences.
>>>
>>
>>To whom have you proved these things ?
>
>
> To all those for whom contradiction and self contradiction have
> meaning.

Would those be the same people who think that a tautology says something
about the world?

tautology: An empty or vacuous statement composed of simpler statements
in a fashion that makes it logically true whether the simpler statements
are factually true or false; for example, the statement Either it will
rain tomorrow or it will not rain tomorrow.

see <http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=tautology>

In any case a wise old bird said: "Differences are important, as
without them everything would be the same" and i think that about sums
it up :)

patty

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