Picking this great thread up again, hope that's okay;
I have a feeling that logical consistency didn't bother the ancients quite so much Bryan. My guess is that's more of a rational, Enlightenment hangup.
If Socrates played language games with "truth" it was a playful poking mankind with sharp sticks, not an anxiety about nature itself. All those pre-Socratics (Anaximander, Thales etc) were on a very confident footing about the world, basically; as for Wittgenstein much nearer our own time, "the world is whatever is the case" (where the case may vary from time to time). The concern back then was more about human values and representations, after such terrible wars the basis of everything fell into question.
What Plato tried to address in thought, like Godel in logic was that we are "incomplete", if there is universality, a one, a good, and there is an I to observe it, but still be of the one, it must invoke a third concept, an existential relation. And that's where the tear begins. Here in the 21st Century the wound still bleeds. Extending Korzybski's map and territory, the system is not the society, the sample is not the sound... etc
a.
mystical ways, qualities of the one.. axes or poles, like light and dark, but
On Fri, 27 May 2011 10:09:02 +0200 Bryan Jurish jurish@uni-potsdam.de wrote:
On 2011-05-26 14:58, Andy Farnell wrote:
Alan Watts, and to some extent Pierre Grimes analysing Plato, gave me some good thoughts on this.
If we weren't neural networks, prone to classification, the question might be, are there different kinds of intelligence? Or is what we do, (throwing boundaries around things and concepts), intelligence by definition only?
I'm not at all sure what `intelligence' is, but I don't think that matters too much. The really tricky terms (at least for me) are things like "logical consistency", and of course the ubiquitous "truth" and "reference" (I suppose intelligence plays into it if you think that only intelligent beings can appreciate such things). Since we're trading snappy quotes, here's one:
"... there is the question which is hardest of all and most perplexing, whether unity and being, as the Pythagoreans and Plato said, are not attributes of something else but the substance of existing things, or this is not the case, but the substratum is something else"
- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book III
marmosets, Bryan
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Bryan Jurish Deutsches Textarchiv Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften
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