Darwinian algorithm

Intentionality doesn’t come from up high; it percolates up from below, from the initially mindless and pointless algorithmic processes that gradually acquire meaning and intelligence as they develop.

Dubito

'Alan Turing was the first to foresee this possibility in 1950, when he published the seminal essay on artificial intelligence, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which proposed a typewritten test to answer the question "Can machines think?" According to Jaron Lanier, the right way to understand the famous "Turing Test" is to understand that it "began in the mind of somebody who was very close to suicide." In other words, Alan Turing, who was born 100 years ago today, is the very embodiment of the philosophical issue we face as we integrate technology into every aspect of our lives, and the distinction

Misnomer

'Even if you look at values only one standard variation away from the mean, you are generally looking at some fairly diverse values.'

Individual worthiness

...'it is very difficult to ascertain the Faustian character of the explorers, extract its essential nature, and apprehend it for itself. I want to suggest, even so, that the history of exploration during and after the Enlightenment era offers us an opportunity to apprehend clearly this soul. For it is the case that, from about the 1700s onward, explorers come to be increasingly driven by a will to discover irrespective of the pursuit of trade, religious conversion, or even scientific curiosity. My point is not that the unadulterated desire to explore exhibits the Faustian soul as such. The urge to accumulate wealth and advance knowledge may exhibit this Faustian will just as intensively.

Utopian thinking

Lives in a fluid, not on solid rock.
The solid was an age, a period
With appropriate, largely English Furniture
Policed by a hope of Christmas.

Unethical category

'...happiness is a conformist category. And moreover, none of us really want it. Which is a good thing, since the pursuit of happiness is an Enlightenment value that gets at only one aspect of what it means to live a good life. "Let’s be serious: when you are in a creative endeavor, in that wonderful fever

-'My God, I’m onto something!' and so on  -happiness doesn't enter it..'

Faux gothique de Bahlui

imagery

'But in fact what was being metaphorized were two dissimilar phenomena, since the planetary system’s motions work in terms of gravity, whereas inside the atom it is electrical forces that obtain. And so the metaphor started growing ragged and incoherent very quickly; it went from positive analogy to negative analogy. If the model was a planetary one, then how come the electrons were not continually losing energy in their orbits, as one would expect? If the inside of an atom were really functioning according to its metaphoric other half then the electron would soon lose its necessary energy and spin counter-clockwise into the nucleus.'

Dissimilitude

Some philosophers maintain that if determinism holds in our world, then there are no objective chances in our world. And often the word ‘chance’ here is taken to be synonymous with 'probability', so these philosophers maintain that there are no non-trivial objective probabilities for events in our world. (The caveat “non-trivial” is added here because on some accounts all future events that actually happen have probability, conditional on past history, equal to 1, and future events that do not happen have probability equal to zero. Non-trivial probabilities are

interwoven

   'Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,
      Now are visions ne'er to vanish;
      From thy spirit shall they pass
      No more, like dew-drop from the grass.'

The one red leaf

'....100 years ago when Rodin sculpted his great figure of The Thinker, The Thinker was, you know, in a contemplative pose and was concentrating deeply, and wasn’t you know, multi-tasking. And because that is something that, until recently anyway, people always thought was the deepest and most distinctly human way of thinking. And that doesn’t meant that I believe that all of us should sit in you know, darkened rooms and think big thoughts without any stimuli coming at us all day. I think it’s important to have a balance of those ways of thinking.'

Monetized values

‘The mind becomes narrower, men grow hot after gain, work too much, acquire too many needs….Everybody becomes plebeian, proletarian or shop-keeperish, sharp, hard, anxious and unhappy. To make money – such, nowadays is the daily concern, the all-absorbing idea– and in this country more than any other. Poverty, he writes, is generally degrading. ‘It is to some extent to avoid falling into such degradation that the English strive so fiercely after riches. They prize wealth so highly because it is, in their eyes, the accompaniment to, sustenance for and condition of morality, education and all the attributes which make a gentleman. It is under this unremitting lash that every man goes forward, drawing his load after him. And use turns into a need: even when he has reached his goal, he still goes on pulling and, in default of a load of his own, harnesses himself to that of his parish, his association, or the State.

Oxymoron

Metaphor is not simply a detection of patterns of meaning, nor is it a mere figurative distortion of meaning: it is productive of meaning in its own right. When we employ metaphoric language, we are engaging in metaphoric thought, whether consciously or not. And this is highly significant in terms of metaphor in scientific discourse.