6 Matching Annotations
  1. Mar 2022
    1. Hands can be a prompt, a window, a way station—butwhat they ought never have to be is still.

      Missing reference in this chapter on encouraging gestures as a tool for thought: "idle hands are the devil's workshop".

      Could the Bible have been encouraging the use of one's hands for communication??

    1. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/idle_hands_are_the_devil%27s_workshop

      Proverbs 16:27 "Scoundrels concoct evil, and their speech is like a scorching fire." (Oxford, NSRV, 5th Edition) is translated in the King James version as "An ungodly man diggeth up evil: and in his lips there is as a burning fire." The Living Bible (1971) translates this section as "Idle hands are the devil’s workshop; idle lips are his mouthpiece."

      The verse may have inspired St. Jerome to write "fac et aliquid operis, ut semper te diabolus inveniat occupatum" (translation: "engage in some occupation, so that the devil may always find you busy.”) This was repeated in The Canterbury Tales which may have increased its popularity.

  2. Apr 2017
  3. Nov 2016
    1. This guy raises the stupid Liar Paradox multiple times, in different contexts, while making his explanations, and every time he states that "philosophers have worried about this for thousands of years".

      Well, I've never seen a true philosopher dedicate a long time to this question, or even to consider it a question or a problem or an inconsistency in the world we must solve -- I can only see this guy and his fellow mathematicians do that.

      Nor it is true that Gödel's theorem is a form of Liar Paradox, it is not. The fact that these mathematicians keep bringing the Liar Paradox to explain Gödel's theorem to the public makes it seem like they are terrified by it, and actually attribute an enormous value to it.

    1. The obvious followup question|and what if a programdiddo all those things?|is often leftunasked, or else answered by listing more things that a computer program could self-evidentlynever do. Because of this, I suspect that many people whosaythey consider AI a metaphysicalimpossibility, really consider it only a practical impossibility: they simply have not carried therequisite thought experiment far enough to see the di erence between the two.

      This man cannot understand that if something is a metaphysical impossibility, then a sane person must not try to imagine it, or what should happen if that thing is true. That's idleness and represents a real danger to one's intelligence.

      For example; imagine if you were not only you, but all other people; imagine that you had no other choice, but only to kill your father or your mother; imagine that you had no sense of self-responsibility.

      Of course if it happens that this thing is not a metaphysical impossibility, then all these people he is considering would be wrong, but at least they were consistent.

    2. If you accept this, thenit seems fair to say that untilPversusNPis solved, the story of Hilbert's Entscheidungsproblem|itsrise, its fall, and the consequences for philosophy|is not yet over.

      If you accept this bizarre interpretation, then you can suspend the belief in the fact, known to everybody, that \(P \ne NP\), because it hasn't been mathematically proved, and say the question isn't solved yet. Wow, how interesting!