Hi Russell, I see the Metadiscussion has metastasized somewhat, but thanks for that bit of background on the list.
On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 10:54 PM, Russell Standish <li...@hpcoders.com.au>wrote: > On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 11:30:39AM -0500, Roger Clough wrote: > > Hi Platonist Guitar Cowboy > > > > Nothing human is off-topic to me. > > Which suggests that materialism and brain science are off-topic. > > By contrast, discussion of materialism and neuroscience is definitely > on-topic, and has often been discussed in this forum. One cannot avoid > the elephant in the room that any TOE needs to address consciousness > in some form or other. > > But it does not need to address social policy issues, fo example. > > "Need" is well put here imho. Because consciousness is linked to TOE, TOE is inextricably, albeit at some distance (too much for some; for me more case by case), entangled with social policies of consciousness. Musk is testing a platonic ideal, specifically computational idea that space and time are an illusion of mind, which when hacked, lands us occasional 3 pointers, taking us from SF to LA in under 30 minutes on solar. Or, if he doesn't go broke investing in supercharger stations, free solar "fuel" for electric cars. We're in this bizarre transition phase, and I hope we reach the point, where some of us will be charging their modes of transport with sunlight for free, while the gas guzzlers types keep paying their dues to oil overlords. But economies of scale efficiencies are hard to come by, and old technological habits die senselessly hard. But if you want to read social policy, politics and so forth into it you can, sure. And then it would stray from consciousness in classical frames and be off-topic. But this is simply out of my control; I have stated repeatedly that I don't think liberal, conservative, green, etc. reductive political stances make sense, except for the media charade and its cash flow. The dream to minimize, eliminate time and distance, to fly with little or no cost to oneself and context, ridding ourselves increasingly of physical dependencies and constraints, is in essence a platonic, computational move; that has deeper roots than all the ecological, political implications it naturally heralds. Ideas such as hyperloop are just part of keeping score between idealist and materialist positions. I still sense people pushing for self-imposed relevance filters (fat chance if we're honest...) and constraint, and while I can certainly understand that (who likes to have to take the trash out often?), any scientifically oriented list not open to "surprise", and picking up the implications of possibilities in this biased, prefabricated relevance sense, is what it is. Same goes for attention seeking spam and the overheated discussions. And thank goodness for the chaos, as TOE can't be just about solving technical problems in reasoning hindsight, as there happen to be the things in life that inspire us to pose and solve these kinds of things in the first place: "Surprise and holy crap" type things. I for one am not closing the door on that, no matter the tempting explanatory force of any TOE, religion, or mysticism. So I guess I agree in gross terms on some level with everybody on topic of off-topic: even if partial at times. PGC ---- ----- > -- > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) > Principal, High Performance Coders > Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au > University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
