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FWIW, linguists "admit" that the notion of word is one of the most controversial in linguistics. see also semiotics.
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FWIW, linguists "admit" that the notion of word is one of the most controversial in linguistics. see also semiotics. Yes sir, Buddy. Slowly, carefully, I tried to slip in some precursor concepts that could assuage the entrenched dogmas of word people. Which is to say: If you don't know the semantic nature of words, we can't discuss anything, we can only ramble.
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formerly known as etaoin...
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Thanks, Buffalo, I think. The article says almost exactly what I think about memory storage in the brain, but that which I think is fuzzy so I squinted my eyes the second time I read it and now it makes perfect sense. So Thank You, Shrdlu, but now begin I wonder: When a robot realizes that he is a robot is he still human? I think yes.
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If a tree falls in the forest and no one posts the video on Facebook did it really happen?
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If a tree falls in the forest and no one posts the video on Facebook did it really happen? Yes Ten thousand beetle eggs hatched into grubs and begin reducing the tree to sawdust that attracted secondary predator beetles who ate the succulent grubs but couldn't eat the hard acorns which sprouted cautiously but profusely in the new earth-enriched sawdust --and then -- a new baby tree entered a Brave New World. Don't believe me? Gimmie the tree's coordinates and I'll show you on GoogleEarth if they haven't already UPSed the film to Homeland Security to classify. 
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Two books dealing at least in part with the subjects broached on this thread: Non-fiction; meant to be taken seriously: The Mind's I, by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, and Science fiction, sort-of; meant to be entertaining/speculative: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson And each intriguing in its own right, I might add.
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Thanks, Wolf, I'll try to get "Mind's I" on my reader.
I started reading "Anathen" but after a few pages I found it juvenile and thought it not worth finishing. I think I burned it at the Great Book Burning Party I held last year. Maybe I can find a copy at the Library and... naw, I'm betting I won't.
I am an invariant snob about what I choose to read.
> TWELVE (12) is the number of I's I used in this post<
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Some time ago I read "The meaning of meaning" by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards (1923) - a classic in the field.
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
I strongly disagree. Just because physical objects are needed to code, store and transmit information (of which words and thoughts are elements), information is immaterial in itself. E.g. material objects are subject to conservation laws, whereas information can easily be destroyed without leaving a trace. What will remain of a word that falls on deaf ears?
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Words and thoughts are physical objects
I strongly disagree. Just because physical objects are needed to code, store and transmit information (of which words and thoughts are elements), information is immaterial in itself. E.g. material objects are subject to conservation laws, whereas information can easily be destroyed without leaving a trace. What will remain of a word that falls on deaf ears? What remains of lightning after it strikes? Could a brain think without electrical thoughts? Remember HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey? HAL was unplugged as was Dave when he was set-apart from the rest of mankind. The Conservation of Energy idea is like the Newtonian ideas of gravity. Close, but no cigar.
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Words and thoughts may be not unlike lightning bolts in our brains but they bear no relation to the physical objects or mental constructs they represent. When my brain ceases working the existence of all the things referred to by the words I know will not cease to be.
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Looking at these last several posts, I think you folks are just going to have to agree to disagree, and move on...
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I think you folks are just going to have to agree to disagree, and move on..
Sad as it is, you may have a point. There has been little evolution in the dispute.
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I think you folks are just going to have to agree to disagree, and move on..
Sad as it is, you may have a point. There has been little evolution in the dispute. Not me. Agreeing to disagree is the stuff of wimps. Understanding "being" is the essence of being, and to not discuss what we are is the stuff of trees and other living machines. An understanding of Evolution will tell us where the monkey hid the money. Nobody here seems to know but me. And I will tell if I can find the memes and words to tell the few big-eared people here who will listen. If you saw a hand reaching out and up from the muck and mire of a dark swamp would you not lend a hand and help him?
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Why do I feel like I'm back in the freshman dorm?
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Why do I feel like I'm back in the freshman dorm? Because, dear heart, you intuit that you are. But alas, the neural patterns of fifty-five years have cluttered your once good brain and now you must discharge those patterns and embrace the new order of thoughts. Try now, grasshopper, to create a worthy original thought about Evolution and try to express it without using clipped and freshmanic remarks. [kiss and good luck]
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EVOLUTION Part II: Biological Causes of Global Cooling
Public Talk:
"Global cooling by grassland soils in the geological past and near future".
Abstract:
"Major innovations in the evolution of vegetation such as the Devonian origin of forests created new weathering regimes and soils (Alfisols, Histosols), which increased carbon consumption and sequestration, and ushered in the Permian-Carboniferous Ice Age.
Similarly, global expansion of grasslands and their newly evolved, carbon-rich soils (Mollisols) over the past 30 million years may have induced global cooling and ushered in Pleistocene glaciation. Organisms in such coevolutionary trajectories adapt to each other rather than to their environment, and so can be forces for global change.
Some past farming practices have aided greenhouse gas release. However, modern grassland agroecosystems are a potential carbon sink already under intensive human management, and carbon farming techniques may be useful in curbing anthropogenic global warming".
Last edited by jenny jenny; 09/02/2013 4:30 AM.
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Here, AWADers, unfolds the beginings of the understanding of semantics.
And if you have ears that listen and a soul that hears you will soon become one of the few folks on Earth who understand our raison d'etre.
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I think you folks are just going to have to agree to disagree, and move on..
Sad as it is, you may have a point. There has been little evolution in the dispute. Which underlines the dull fact that evolution and getting somewhere is not the same thing.
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Of course, the real question is "Why is evolution so hard to understand?"
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Of course, the real question is "Why is evolution so hard to understand?" Evolution is hard to understand because the tyranny of words is such that the more exacting words we use become in their differentiation even more restricting when we attempt to integrate them into the orderings of an objective reality. Why do you ask?
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Aha. I thought so. A basic misunderstanding of the nature of Reality (an almost foregone conclusion, given our imperfect perception of it and our replacement of it by that crude approximation we call reality) leads us to misinterpret all around us. For example, in Reality there is no such thing as species. It is as though we had taken a two dimensional slice of a tree and decided that all the separate and apparently discrete things we call twigs and branches were independent entities. Thank you, jenny jenny, for opening my eyes.
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 Ahso, Faldo, It is strange that you have known these fine things for so long and have not yet become a better person. But no matter, today is the first day of your life. Come, let us reconstruct the world together. 3,500,000,000 BC: Self-replicating lieforms first appear on Earth. Mindless, dumb things (cynobacteria) they non-the-less were able to build reef-like structures to keep the oceanic tides from washing themselves out to sea. Unmolested for three billion years they built the oxygenated atmosphere which we so much enjoy today. [Thanks for not waiting, I'm back.] 550,000,000 BC: O'happy day! After some three billion years of off-and-on frozen seas, mobile, sexual, and happy pre-vertebrate animals, sat, swam, and crawled about in the warm waters. And then... 380,000,000 BC: the animals followed the plants onto the dry lands and crawled about. But not fast enough. Plants and pre-trees flourshed in the heat and high CO2 atmosphere. But when they died there were too few bugs to eat them. The stupid trees could then not return their carbon to the atmosphere. Their remains instead were buried as coal, or, as we like to say today, sequestered as carbon. Atmospheric CO2 levels dropped sharply as the Earth cooled initiating an early cycle of Ice ages. To this let all of us give thanks,(), all we free-thinking people. 28,000,000 BC: continued on a page below
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The ones that couldn't keep the ocean tides from washing them out to sea didn't have any kids. I'd check on some of the details in your little tale.
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The ones that couldn't keep the ocean tides from washing them out to sea didn't have any kids. I'd check on some of the details in your little tale. Like today, Faldom, their "kids" were but extentions of themselves, any single-sex microbe who got washed out to sea was an aspiring Columbus eager to conquer new lands. And Faldome; do you do your checking to prove someone wrong, or to learn something new? Just asking.
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I did check after spouting my mouth off and you were right. I'm still not sure if you were somehow trying to refute my comment about the two-dimensional slice of the tree,
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Not at all, Fabo. As I understand your analogy of the tree slice and our inference of branches, it is (as the Brits quaintly say) "on spot". Besides, speculation is the mother of invention. Don't you think? 
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That occurred to me after I got done reacting to your previous post. Now that we're singing from the same dictionary, how's your friend, Roger,
doing with his production?
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I haven't talked to Roger since they returned from Oregon. If I see him at a meeting tonight I'll report back.
28,000,000 BC : Continued...
A lot happened in the 35 million years after a great bolide slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and extinquished almost half of the world's living species.
Floating on plates the continents continued spreading into a configuration approaching their relative positions of today.
Moving at about six feet a century these dancing plates interrupted the ocean's set currents of heat (from the equator to the poles) so the balmy world slowly became cooler.
Then, three million years ago, the isthmus of Panama moved into its current position and stopped the exchage of waters between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. This event cooled the Earth and thereby established a cycle of Ice Ages which literally gave birth to all mankind.
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1,000,000 BC: The best of worlds.
Hallelujah! The great day is here. After 3,000,000,000 years mankind is born to rule the world. A series of hundred thousand years of bitter cold with 10,000 year intervals of warming in between. Caught within these changing extremes some apes evolved into mankind. And then mankind stopped evolving.
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Terrific! So glad to be here. Yet I think some more
evolving is necessary here and there.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Terrific! So glad to be here. Yet I think some more
evolving is necessary here and there. No, Mister Luke, the last sentence was just a dramatic literary pause designed to empathize the salient point in the concluding paragraph below.
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You mean there's more? he says breath abated.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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1,000,000 BC: The best of worlds.
Hallelujah! The great day is here. After 3,000,000,000 years mankind is born to rule the world. A series of hundred thousand years of bitter cold with 10,000 year intervals of warming in between. Caught within these changing extremes some apes evolved into mankind. And then mankind stopped evolving. In the words of the guy in the back of the room, "Yeah. Right."
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Yes, the apes that became us stopped evolving about 500,000 years ago, if they hadn't we would likely be extinct. Drastic enviormental changes are quite a hill to climb if you are a naked ape walking around trying to feed hungry kids who only become fully functional after a score of years. As well, the apes that became us were too few in tribal numbers to continue in time aided only by the processes of physical natural selection.
I lied. Our biological evolution did stop.
But a new improved form of Evolution kicked in, this time with a capital E.
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I think you're wrong about biological evolution having stopped; the forces have just changed a little bit.
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Yes, Flage, you are ever so right.
But our purpose here is larger than being right. Our purpose is to transfer paradigmatic ideas and not to clutter our narrative with exacting facts.
What I say is clutter enough.
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Late Apes to Early Man:
Rest assured that both pre-man apes and early peoples walked upright, had big brains, and could vocalize a variety of sounds with pertinent meanings. Demarcation between the two types of intelligent animals was in their relative ability to communicate information back and forth within the ingroup via language, the beginings of a Culture.
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