----- "Chris McCormick" chris@mccormick.cx a écrit :
On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 01:37:19PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Thu, 19 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 12:38:37PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 11 May 2011, Chris McCormick wrote:
At the very least they exist physically encoded in the brain
chemistry
of somebody who is thinking about those concepts. Brains are part
of
physical reality, right?
Yeah, but the map is not the territory.
I am not convinced they are different in the case of things that
"we
can't perceive ... from the physical world."
All this to be able to cleverly claim « Santa Claus really
exists » with
a big satisfied grin on your face ? ;)
I'm not being smug. I think it's a mistake that very intelligent people make in dismissing things that are "just ideas". For some reason people think that ideas are something independent of the physical world, but they are not. Ideas physically occupy people's brains and make people change the world.
Brain thinking could be stimulated by indices that would relate something similar with the idea whenever it exists or not.
People that claimed they have discovered licorns used to cut narval's horn to get a proof of their discovery, they were playing with ignorance, it was certainly easier to do that during antic greece, before they used to get rhinoceros horn when african, asian, and indonesian wildlife weren't very popular in europe.
They also weren't used to scientific method which is nowadays very famous for determining if something is part of reality.
We can imagine many different kinds of new animals, some also have been modelized since a long time through sculptures, we know that almost all those weird animals are not and have never been real.
moin Patrice,
On 2011-05-23 05:09, Patrice Colet wrote:
We can imagine many different kinds of new animals, some also have been modelized since a long time through sculptures, we know that almost all those weird animals are not and have never been real.
To pick a much-overused example, is the sentence "Pegasus is a flying horse" true or false? Or do we need to ditch the principle of bivalence? What the heck does "Pegasus" refer to anyways? Clearly, we can all parse the sentence and assign it some kind of semantic interpretation, and no one here is claiming to have actually perceived any airborne equines recently, but I think there's more going on here than can be adequately described by "so-and-so-many synapses in these-and-those brains dumped so-and-so-many neurotransmitters of such-and-such a chemical composition into their respective synaptic gaps in response to an influx of such-and-such a mean volume of sodium ions"... to put it bluntly, how `real' is fiction? Maybe that's what you were getting at in the first place; apologies if I'm beating a dead horse, airborne or otherwise ;-)
marmosets, Bryan
-
Bryan Jurish -
Patrice Colet