Krimel said to dmb: Calling a probability distribution a "preference" makes it sound all warm and fuzzy. But it is just clinging to the Myth that something or someone is in charge. You are expanding the hyperbole of "preference" into a conceptual framework you call consciousness. It is just a fancy fuzzy security blanket. If you lose the "desire" for that warm fuzzy, you begin to appreciate the beauty of the fractal vistas that open up; supported on nothing but multidimensional probability fields.
dmb says: Oh, Krimel. You're such an egghead. Your eggly head is so hugely, eggly egg-shaped that it makes the other squares look round. And you don't have to be a philosopher to know that a sneer is not an argument. You've merely assigned an emotional motive, a warm fuzzy desire, to the actual assertion and then condemned the assertion for being badly motivated. This happens every five minutes on the Rush Limbaugh show. I'm surprized to see that you'd stoop to that. Didn't you win the Noble Prize for sweetness and fairness last year? What's the motive most reasonably applied to that assertion? Just what the assertion itself implies, namely the desire to explain unlaw-like behavior in physics, like "probability distribution" to use your example, in a way that also solves some other philosophical problems. It also extends the evolutionary theory all the way down and, as I was explaining, the false choice of "oops" or God as explanations for the present state. In other words, I think its a good idea, one that agrees with science and makes sense of a whole series of issues. Wanting that is motive enough. If there is an emotional quality, it's not about warmth or security. But I'll confess that I like the idea that the rest of the universe is NOT fundamentally different from you and me. It implies that alienation isn't quite possible and it rhymes with the mystic notion that "thou art that". These aren't badly motivated just because they're pleasant thoughts. They're just more philosophical problems addressed by this idea, problems of the existential variety. In any case, it's just no good to condemn an idea for being too attractive, too pretty. If "preferences" can be used indifferently so that it applies at every level, then we have a concept that is simple and neat. In areas of thought as complex as this, that's quite an achievement. Simple and neat is as good as it gets, as in E=Mc2. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® is up to 70% faster. Now good news travels really fast. http://windowslive.com/online/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_70faster_032009 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/
