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Search found 72 matches
April 1st, 2012, 10:11 pm
(quote not shown) Sorry, I should have been clearer. (quote not shown) I think, because of our differing conceptions of language we are being lead to different conceptions of what is to be classed as a language. Which will explain why I am skeptical that the "animals follow rules of grammar,&qu...
March 29th, 2012, 9:38 am
(quote not shown) Dictionary's are notoriously bad for conceptual discussions. If they weren't, then there would be no problems in philosophy—all we would have to do is consult a dictionary. What is justice? Look at a dictionary. What is the physical ontological category? Look at a dictionary. What ...
March 29th, 2012, 8:01 am
(quote not shown) But look, this is what you are saying: We can use a word W as a rigid designator to denote x and y . Assume x ≠ y . But then, W≠W. To quote a rather confused Persian: "This is madness!" Because ultimately we are talking about nouns such as "water" and "Pete...
March 28th, 2012, 10:49 pm
(quote not shown) You have to remember though, that we cannot predict what knowledge we will have in the future. Today's science fiction could be tomorrow's fact. But anyway, it wouldn't need to be a simulation of the entire universe, just a simulation of our experience, something far smaller than t...
March 28th, 2012, 7:48 pm
(quote not shown) Let me quote from The Psychology of Language (Trevor Harley): Competence is "our knowledge of our language," which "is about the judgments we would make about language if we had sufficient time and memory capacity." Performance is "our actual language abili...
March 28th, 2012, 6:43 pm
(quote not shown) My point here was that we use names for different things. So, we might use the name A to talk about a thing x, and a thing y. I think that makes it pretty clear that names are not rigid designators. For instance, with "water," if I was a chemist then I might use "wat...
March 28th, 2012, 4:22 pm
(quote not shown) Even when, by your own admission, you do define "anarchism" you still characterise it wrongly. Anarchism is not the "theory that all forms of government interfere unjustly with individual liberty." For a start, anarchism can barely be called a "theory."...
March 27th, 2012, 11:17 am
(quote not shown) Okay. If you are wealthy, then you could argue that capitalism gives you "the freedom to live out" your life. But for the majority of the population, this is just not true. For as long as humans are cogs in a machine, or tools to be used for profit creation, they will nev...
March 27th, 2012, 1:50 am
(quote not shown) I don't think you've correctly characterized anarchism. Anarchism is not "complete mob rule," taken in that pejorative sense. In fact, anarchism isn't really a political doctrine. Anarchism encompasses many views, unified by the assumption that authority is not self-justi...
March 27th, 2012, 1:29 am
(quote not shown) I disagree here. Although, you're partly right when you say that "Capitalism allows freedom." That is, if you take freedom to apply to a small section of society. But I don't understand how you can say that capitalism allows freedom when people are forced to sell themselv...
March 27th, 2012, 1:08 am
(quote not shown) If you take names to be rigid designators, then identity does seem to be necessary. But, I think, this view of names is false. In talking about water, Richard Feynman considers a case in which "air dissolves in the water; oxygen and nitrogen molecules will work their way into ...
March 27th, 2012, 1:03 am
Jackwhitlocke_005 wrote:Thanks for the replies so soon guys! Metaman- This is, in fact, Bostrom. This argument has been troubling me all day! It's kind of depressing when you're worried that life could be a simulation! lol
I wouldn't let it trouble you. How consciousness arises from a biological entity needs to be explained before the idea of consciousness arising from a computer simulation can be coherently formulated.
March 27th, 2012, 12:59 am
(quote not shown) When does a member of this community learn this mE-Language? I suspect they don't, because the idea does not make any sense. (quote not shown) You're completely missing the point. We are not talking about language use, or performance, but rather about language competence. If you ar...
March 26th, 2012, 11:43 pm
Jackwhitlocke_005 wrote:I do not know much about physics, but I have heard an argument along these lines: There exists an infinite number of universes and beings. Therefore, one of the following must be true:
1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
This comes from Nick Bostrom, right?
I haven't read his article on it, yet. But from what I have heard of it I am not convinced. My main concern with it is that I don't see how consciousness could arise in a computer simulation. Although, I could be missing his point.
March 26th, 2012, 9:31 pm
(quote not shown) Babies don't utilize learning strategies in learning language. The learning (growth) of language in a child cannot be down to any learning strategies, because there is a poverty of stimulus. There is not enough social (environmental) data for the child to use to learn the language....
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