To All Y'all MoQers, Sorry but I gotta lurk for a while. Some recent events in real life have conspired to make it difficult for me to spend as much time as I would like in these realms. I have to focus on a couple of really time consuming activities for the next couple of months. I have drifted in an out several times over the past few years so I'll be back when I can and I will chime in from time to time just not as often as usual.
I hate leaving active status right now because there are several issues I would like to pursue but that's life, huh? A couple of note in passing: In a conversation with dmb I asked what experiences radical empiricism would allow. I was not picking a fight over mysticism rather I was wondering what kind of experience one could have that did not involve activation of the nervous system. I would say emphatically, "None!" If your nerves don't light up it didn't happen. We can categorize experiences into various boxes; direct, indirect, immediate, recalled... pick your own boxes but all of our experiences a located in our nervous systems. I guess my point is that you aren't going to understand much about experience if you don't at least look at the nervous system and how it grows, how it tranduces energy, how it integrates its own multiple modalities... Welcome back Squonk! I would love to knock heads with you, literally. I have always found our exchanges to be like body slamming in a mosh pit. Not sure where you are heading with your moral raising of brains in vats but it is not, as you suggest, unknown in science fiction. Majority Report was about psychics raised in vats and used to convict "pre-criminals" of crimes they were about to commit. In "Vanilla Sky" another Cruiser, Tom figures out he is living in a virtual world. "The 13th Floor" and the ever weird Cronenberg's "eXitenZ" were different riffs on the themes of "The Matrix". Slaughterhouse Five has aliens keeping Billy Pilgrim in a kind of zoo/vat with a Playboy bunny. There are lots of stories about AIs coming to sentience, WOPR in the 1983 "War Games", "I, Robot", Skynet in Terminator or the Star Trek episode were the holodeck creature Morarity gains sentience and is given his own virtual world to live in and a virtual sweetheart to live with. Craig at last seems to have convinced Ham of the fallacy of his belief in a particular logical fallacy. You are a better man than I, my son... wanna borrow my list of fallacies Ham refuses to acknowledge? DM and I have come to some sort of truce at the moment so not much hanging there. Ron, I think a problem with your whole linguist thing is, that is what has take philosophy down the path of irrelevance. It is all just arguing about the meaning of words. There is much of life and experience that has noting at all to do with language. It can be expressed "in" language or "through" language but it is not at all lived that way. Language is how our species constructs it illusions and yes understanding language helps us see the structure of those illusions but there is more to it. I suspect much more. Anyway just this writing took an hour, which sort of makes my point for my own benefit... So I'm not bailing out just laying low for a bit. You'll be hearing from me and I will continue to hear from all of you. Good luck to you, one and all! Krimel Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
