The 9/11 Forum

OneWhiteEye wrote:I don't want to discuss any more philosophy here. Lectures about how to put one foot in front of the other before taking a walk in the forest are not welcome, neither is the insistence that no walk can be taken until the petulant complaints are addressed.

I can see markings here on the screen, but until you describe to me in detail the assumptions built into your use of written language, I’m afraid that I cannot form a specific critique. As you may or may not know, philosophers from Saussure to Wittgenstein, Derrida to Chomsky, have proposed that the structure of language shapes not only how you may participate in a given discourse but forms the very basis of thinking.

Until you account for and rigorously detail your unacknowledged engagements with grammar—nouns from normative to ablative (properly, in Latin declensions), verbs in tense, person, and mood-- punctuation, and the range of possible meanings contained in a single word (btw, please provide full etymology ), I might possibly not understand you completely.

For instance, you write: “complaints are addressed.”

Now, what if I understand the word “complaints” to signify definition 6 of the Oxford English Dictionary: A bodily ailment, indisposition, disorder (esp. of chronic nature)? And what if I understand “are addressed” to mean that you are writing an address on such “complaints” as you would a letter? Then what the hell do you mean by writing an address on a bodily ailment?
See, it just doesn’t make sense without a rigorous and exhaustive explanation of your presumably “obvious” assumptions.

Secondly, please prove to me that you are a person and not a computer—because it would be pretty boring to be talking to a computer--and while you are at it, please help me to understand that the world actually exists and is not simply a set of perceptions resembling the world controlled by demon. You see, this problem plagued Descartes, etc. , etc…

And riddle me this: how can you even type a single character on your keyboard? For, you see, to press a key with your finger, your finger must travel half the way there. And for it to get half the way there, well, it first must travel half that distance. And to get half that distance, naturally, it must complete half the journey. Now for that half, there is, of course, a waypoint (roughly half). But to get there...
--
You see, OWE, nothing useful can ever be done!

Major_Tom wrote:I have little doubt govt agents read the posts here from time to time.

DHS, today.

OneWhiteEye wrote:Perhaps we can start a separate thread called The Philosophy of a Rubble-Driven Collapse, or Kant's Granular Revenge or some such. I've no aversion to discussing this, but pretty soon I'll be cluttering up the discussion with equations and graphs.

I threatened to do it, and made good on my threat. There is some nice discussion here, and some maybe not so, it just tended to be far afield from the specifics of actually modeling rubble. More like a "what's it good for?" and "how does it fit in to the overall picture?" and "can I tie my shoes without Popper's help?" kind of thing.

Nice, but I'm not really all that interested, except maybe for this one social experiment: The last time I mentioned the word 'entropy', it was like rubbing a genie's bottle.

Entropy.

Melville wrote:

OneWhiteEye wrote:I don't want to discuss any more philosophy here. Lectures about how to put one foot in front of the other before taking a walk in the forest are not welcome, neither is the insistence that no walk can be taken until the petulant complaints are addressed.

I can see markings here on the screen, but until you describe to me in detail the assumptions built into your use of written language, I’m afraid that I cannot form a specific critique. As you may or may not know, philosophers from Saussure to Wittgenstein, Derrida to Chomsky, have proposed that the structure of language shapes not only how you may participate in a given discourse but forms the very basis of thinking.

Until you account for and rigorously detail your unacknowledged engagements with grammar—nouns from normative to ablative (properly, in Latin declensions), verbs in tense, person, and mood-- punctuation, and the range of possible meanings contained in a single word (btw, please provide full etymology ), I might possibly not understand you completely.

For instance, you write: “complaints are addressed.”

Now, what if I understand the word “complaints” to signify definition 6 of the Oxford English Dictionary: A bodily ailment, indisposition, disorder (esp. of chronic nature)? And what if I understand “are addressed” to mean that you are writing an address on such “complaints” as you would a letter? Then what the hell do you mean by writing an address on a bodily ailment?
See, it just doesn’t make sense without a rigorous and exhaustive explanation of your presumably “obvious” assumptions.

Secondly, please prove to me that you are a person and not a computer—because it would be pretty boring to be talking to a computer--and while you are at it, please help me to understand that the world actually exists and is not simply a set of perceptions resembling the world controlled by demon. You see, this problem plagued Descartes, etc. , etc…

And riddle me this: how can you even type a single character on your keyboard? For, you see, to press a key with your finger, your finger must travel half the way there. And for it to get half the way there, well, it first must travel half that distance. And to get half that distance, naturally, it must complete half the journey. Now for that half, there is, of course, a waypoint (roughly half). But to get there...
--
You see, OWE, nothing useful can ever be done!

I can't believe I didn't acknowledge at the time that this may be the most brilliant post on the forum.