glen m. sizemore

You are badly in need of Wittgenstein therapy.

gms2004

Just Playing

I am looking at your advice and I am trying to understand it.
I tried to rephrase it as:
You are in badly in need of something.
From here I added the following:
In order to be in balance you badly need something.
And I tried to turn into an equation where:
X is "need";
n is "badly", where n is a large positive number;
Y is "something";
and I obtained:
nX=Y or nX-Y=0
And here is where I got stuck.
The concepts of "need" and "badly" seemed to be more or less clear for
me but the concept of "something" i.e. "Wittgenstein therapy" is
unclear.
Based on this misunderstanding I may decide that you either made fun
of me, and I will retaliate and start calling you names, or I will
take your advice seriously and spend the rest of my life trying the
therapy or pursue other alternatives.
Coming back to my previous post it seems that while I got your logic
right, the amount of information that you packed in your concepts was
extremely different from the one received by me and the final result
may be not the one intended, at least by one of us.

Just Playing

john jones

Wittgenstein said that there are categories such as 'games' that have no
common features, but have groups of features that overlap between particular
cases. So the fact that you presented 'dogs' as being constituted of fixed
categories only shows that you have adopted a classificatory system to
something that you already defined as 'fixed' - dogs. You then bundled
categories into that fixed notion.

I am Wittgenstein. I think now as I did then. But I can change my mind.
JJ

feedbackdroids

JP --> GMS --> JP. Beginning to behave like george now, are we.

gms2004

Just Playing

I have used the "dog" example only because it was mentioned repeatedly
thru the replies but I guess you are expecting too much, too soon from
a short post.
If I am correct "games" as in playing are present in most animal
species.
But if you look at "games" as activities that do not have a practical
result, it is not difficult to get to this concept.
Actually games as a concept seem much simpler than "God" or "freedom"
because they have a physical representation.
And I mentioned that once you start creating abstract categories the
sky is the limit, see quote:
"The same way I can create a lot of conceptual categories and use them
for creating new ones and neither the initial ones nor the resulting
ones will have any physical representation. And the process can go on
and on, the only limitation being our imagination."

Just Playing

stéphane coël

Luc Steels is a cog scientist and made some experiments to answer the
following question: "in physics there is an infinity of colors; why do
people
use only a limited number of names to define colors, and why are there
different names in different cultures for the same color?"
In the lab, he put some intelligent robots who can see objects with
different
colors and who communicate a name for the colors they discriminate.The
number
of names for the colors increases between 10 and 15, until the robots agree
on
the names, until the communication is satisfactory.

If the robots do not communicate, every robot invent names until the
discrimination
is satisfactory for him.

If you are interested in definitions, you may find some interest in the
ideas of Whorf,
just type "Whorf" on Google. Our western language is based on nouns; native
american
language is based on verbs.

There is a nice tool on the web to find the meaning of a word
http://dico.isc.cnrs.fr/.

--
Stéphane Coël


"Just Playing" <gms2004@lycos.com> a écrit dans le message de news:
543191fc.0406290948.410573d5@posting.google.com...

feedbackdroids

Is there any thruth to the concept of the trinity - that it takes 3
parts to make a whole?

paul bramscher

Categories are generalized heuristic groupings that we use to reduce the
complexity of the world into actionable & understandable terms. We
categorize databases, libraries, and exhibits in a museum in order to
make sense of things which would otherwise be jumbled or unordered,
unrelated. The label, bibliographical record, or database tuple is a
reference pointer to a real object. An imperfect and sometimes biased
subset of information -- pre-selected to answer certain kinds of questions.

The problem in Western philosophy is when the categories are enamored as
things among themselves, elevated to a status greater than that which
they reference. And whether or not things can exist without categories
(a totally egotistical question to even phrase).

Categories are expediencies. A "thing" is a mate in the same species, a
potential mate in the same species, food, potential food, a known
threat, a potential threat, unknown, a known competitor, potential
competitior, a different species but inconsequential and not dangerous,
etc. But when the day is over, the mating, eating, fight, or flight
takes place. If it remains a mere category, what was the point in
creating it? For its own sake?

And that's where the Western empirical/experimental tradition breaks
with its rational/armchair tradition.

wolf kirchmeir

We categorise as we do because that's the way our CNS has evolved.
Experiments with other creatures have shown that they categorise
differently: a frog will not respond to a dead unmoving fly, but will
try to eat any small dark moving object, such as a raisin suspended on a
fine thread. Clearly, a frog categorises "small dark moving objhects" as
"food". If it could smell the fly, it wouldn't try to eat the mobile
raising, but would try to eat the dead fly. Sp it alcks categories
involving "smell" and "food."

The fact that we can talk about the categories we form is neither here
nor there. The fact that our ability to talk as often results in
nonsense as in sense is of some interest, especially since we also use
language to sort out the sense from the nonsense. Just how we do that
is, IMO, a more interesting question than waffle about why we create
categories.

PS: NB that a person use many categories of which he is unaware, and may
even deny if one draws attention to them. "By his behaviour shall ye
know his categories."

john jones

They don't feel like they have a practical result. But what else can be
practical?

jJ


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