Agreed! And that ‘margin of error’ plays out in the human condition as suffering. — Possibility

True, hence antinatalism. Right?

In defense of pro-lifers, I'd point out that Roe vs. Wade happened in 1973. It's now 2022. That's 49 years. To put things into perspective, fashion changes every year! In other words, the Roe vs. Wade ruling needs to be updated - the field of neonatology, obstetrics & gynecology have undergone dramatic transformations and it only seem natural that any laws/rules that depend on them should also be adapted to the new realities of these disciplines, oui?

Panta rhei. — Heraclitus

Anicca!

This may not be exactly on point, but the notion of being invalid is more applicable to a theist as god(s) have been interpreted as a psychological crutch for people (believers) who can't face/handle the truth (WYSIWYG) as it were. It's likely that this is part of a broader defect of the mind which includes denial in some shape or form.

the all-purpose problem solving abilities of humans that can come up with good solutions to almost any problem they encounter. — Gnomon

I'm afraid you overestimate our abilities, especially if you use me as benchmark! I'm terrible at problem solving! I prefer to give up unless my ass is on the line! :snicker:

Well, with that attitude how do you get anything done in your life? I'm not saying we can't do better, but for some obvious reasons - most of them to do with practicality - we can't do things to perfection. At some point you're gonna have to make a decision and act whether you have all the information to do that or not. I guess what I'm getting at is that a certain margin of error is expected and we'd better to learn to live with it, oui?

It depends what exactly you mean but yes in a general sense I think most things are not clear cut and discrete but rather a more flexible spectrum of transition in which a certain level of bias or interpretation must be made.

For example using the previous example we could say a shoe is a piece of footwear you wear to walk or make a fashion statement. However when one considers repurposing and lateral thinking a shoe can indeed function in many ways - it can be a container for plants, a missile to throw at someone when you’re annoyed, something symbolic like the shoes that hang on telephone wires where drugs are sold, it could be part of a sculpture or art installation in a gallery, or could be worn comically by different animals - cats dogs etc. The list is endless. Yet we can’t afford to spend time defining every possible way a shoe can exist or function even though the possibilities are vast. This applies to most objects and thus yes the world is “fuzzy” indeed — Benj96

With regard to your example of a shoe, couldn't we make a distinction between primary use(s) (integral to its definition) and secondary use(s) (go hogwild). Wittgenstein should've realized this before shooting his mouth off (meaning is use). :chin:

As you rightly pointed out, no definition is perfect except maybe mathematical and scientific ones
— Agent Smith — Hillary

There's no ambiguity or vagueness in (say) what a triangle is. Nobody ever gets confused as to what a triangle is, once s/he is edified as to what they (triangles) are, oui? :chin:

Maybe so, but those fulfilling sufferings need to be taken by a person´s own free will, not after someone is forcing her/him to the "game" of life.
— Antinatalist

You're on target, sir/ma'am! However, who's coercing anyone to save the world? Do you think Alexander Fleming was bullied into discovering antibiotics? Are all the folks engaged in cancer research under some kind of duress? :chin:
— Agent Smith

Maybe we are speaking about different things. By ´forcing´ in this particular point I mean reproduction. I thought it was quite clear. — Antinatalist

I'm not sure, but your concern seems to be consent, the lack thereof, in birthing children. While it's true that there are many of us who'd have wished to remain unborn, the catch is would-be parents are in the dark about that - they didn't know if the child they're now busy bringing up would've preferred nonexistence over life. Plus those people who manage to do well in life are likely to say "yes" to life.

As you might've already realized, starting a family then requires you to accurately predict the future (of your children), something notoriously difficult to do! Some of us then resort to what is essentially a gamble - we have children, hoping they'll have a good life and we do our best (grooming, educating, assisting, etc. them) to give them a decent chance at success, knowing all the while that life may throw them a curve ball with catastrophic consequences. The sentiment is noble (a person could enjoy life) but also ignoble (we're basically gambling with someone's life).

Frankly, I have a feeling that people hardly think so deeply about bringing other peeps into existence! They should, right?

Metaphorically, death, discomfort, and boredom are the gun to the head. That is part of my OP about dissatisfaction. That is part of complying with the game. — schopenhauer1

I sometimes feel that given the givens, only a fool would opt for life!

Also, what do you make of how spirituality, some strains, recommend, as a practice, denial of life as most people recognize it. There's something unclean/impure/unsatisfactory about physical existence seems to be the message!

'Objective' means pertaining to the object"
— Nickolasgaspar

'Objective' means pertaining to the object
— Tobias

Gracias! I didn't know that!
— Agent Smith

:lol: — Hillary

:smile:

Metaphysical means that a claim lies beyond our current knowledge.
So the truth value of it is unknown. So no its not wrong.
In my comment I explain that , in order to avoid all metaphysical assumptions we will have to accept Objectivity as an observer dependent term based on the regular nature of reality that our methods and senses detect , register and verify.
Do you agree with that statement? — Nickolasgaspar

I envy your clarity of mind! I'm in a bit of a fog you see, as regards metaphysics. The Wikipedia article says metaphysics is about first principles, about what is fundamental, but for the life of me I can't detect a common thread that runs through the various topics that come under metaphysics. As far as I'm concerned metaphysics is just an assortment of unrelated ideas and a faithful translation of "metaphysics" should be "miscellaneous".

What sayest thou?

But the computer does! It computes big X times as fast as we do. On big Y times as many data we do. Simulating intelligence. The brain is a universe in small. Everything there is in the world, we can resonate with. While walking the streets you constantly resonate with the world and your inside world, and yourself (body) on their turn, shape the world. From conception to last breath, no from big bang to last breath, one ongoing process. No on or off button. Well, a final off button maybe... — Hillary

:up: Much obliged!

Actually, the first so-called "computers" were women mathematicians. And their primary advantage over their male competitors was that they were able to sit still and focus on numbers for hours on end. Meanwhile, the men would get restless, their minds would wander, and they were made to look like fools by the very females. who were not supposed to be "good with numbers". Unfortunately, for those number-crunching gals, the digital computer is even more focused & relentless. But dumb! If they divided by zero, they would keep-on crunching until kingdom come, or the machine burst into flames, whichever came first. — Gnomon

An interesting tidbit of history! In all likelihood number crunching was considered a menial task (mechanical rule following). Would I be correct if I said technology has affected women more than men in re our biggest worry - machines replacing humans women?

"Sit, and focus!"
"I tell you something, stick tha numbers on your p$n$s! Oh no, to big a number!" — Hillary

:rofl:

Memories of the future he traveled to, like us, and then returning to the past? Just travel to the past? That's difficult, AS. But out of curiosity, did he say anything about WW3? I know he rightly predicted the Iranian revolution too. — Hillary

For starters visit Nostradamus.

Yes. That's how AI chess players beat humans : they have instant access to thousands of historical games and situational plays. The only thing that keeps humans in the game today is creativity : to do what hasn't been done before, hence is not yet in memory. — Gnomon

Thanks for reminder Gnomon. This generates a kinda sorta paradox where a fool (computer) beats a sage (a person, relatively speaking that is). :chin:

The brain doesn't compute. It simulates. The mind computes. — Hillary

DOES NOT COMPUTE!

lol......that is a metaphysical assumption. — Nickolasgaspar

You mean it's wrong? :groan:

'Objective' means pertaining to the object" — Nickolasgaspar

'Objective' means pertaining to the object — Tobias

Gracias! I didn't know that!

Maybe so, but those fulfilling sufferings need to be taken by a person´s own free will, not after someone is forcing her/him to the "game" of life. — Antinatalist

You're on target, sir/ma'am! However, who's coercing anyone to save the world? Do you think Alexander Fleming was bullied into discovering antibiotics? Are all the folks engaged in cancer research under some kind of duress? :chin:

I'm inclined to agree. Just got my new glasses - the optometrist told me I'll need to adapt to it. Could it be that the world is fuzzy and because of that our definitions fall short of the mark. No fault of ours if this is the case, oui?

The ship was designed by just putting a model upside down. — Hillary

W (Double-U) $\to$ M (Emm)...New letter!

:snicker: Creativity at its best, si señor/señorita?

As far as I know, a definition should list ALL SUFFICIENT & NECESSARY conditions for a word to apply to an object, and once this criteria is fulfilled, that object becomes the word's referent.

A shoe is (my own definition), one of a pair of objects one wears on one's foot for protection mostly, but also as a fashion statement (are those shoes that women wear these days? :chin: ).

As you rightly pointed out, no definition is perfect except maybe mathematical and scientific ones and hence the OP I suspect. The issue is in all likelihood more complex than I've presented it in this post; it usually is with philosophical tyros like me!

Furthermore, I've always maintained that Wittgenstein made a mountain out of a molehill by declaring incorrect word usage (breaking the rules of a good definition) as correct ones, but now that you've made clear in the post, is a good definition possible at all? Mathematics & science are quite well-known for the quality of their definitions.

Ouioui! — Hillary

Tennyson, quite possibly, had never lost in love or suffered in life.

:smile: With this clarification, yup, it's better.

During the suffering though, this feels differently... What if the suffering continues? — Hillary

Yep!

'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

So yeah, aligning myself with Tennyson's mindset,

'Tis better to have lived and suffered than never to have lived at all. — Agent Smith

Most interesting! :chin: — Ms. Marple

Don’t complain, just kill yourself — schopenhauer1

Watch your words. You could be charged with aiding & abetting suicide! Weren't there highly publicized cases of such happenings? I'd better edit that post before something untoward occurs.

Count me among those who think it’s a mistake to treat the mind as a computational device and neurons as 1’s and 0’s. I hew with enactivist cognitive psychology which rejects computationalism and representationalism when it comes to modelling human perception.
Relating this back to your distinction between memory and pattern recognition, I would argue that the neural activity of the brain is constantly changing in response both to external stimuli and its own activity. This means that memory is not stored patterns that remain unchanged until accessed. Meanwhile, what is perceived comes already pre-interpreted based on prior expectations. So memory , in the form
of expectations , co-determines what counts as data in the first place. All perception is recognition because of this contribution of anticipatory neural activity to perception at even the lowest levels. — Joshs

In my humble opinion, any noncomputational model of mind reads like gobbledygook. Maybe that's just me, I'm not smart you see.

Memory is just data storage. Pattern recognition is the beginning of cognition : knowing, consciousness. Pattern recognition sees the invisible (meaningful) links between isolated bits of information. Human intelligence is far ahead of AI in its ability to do more than just mimic. Plus the human mind uses a variety of cognitive processes -- beyond pure Logic (e.g. emotional & visceral & muscle memory) -- to add nuance to sensation. :brow:

Ie ie! Yokoso!
You're welcome. — Gnomon

The patterns have to be remembered, that's what I believe learning is.

However, pure memory seems adequate to appear intelligent. You could, for instance, memorize every question and their answers and pass yourself off as a genius, but are you?

Sure, but a trend is very different from a widely-held opinion, wouldn’t you say? — Possibility

In the vernacular "trend" is near synonymous with "widely-held opinion". Loose usage I'd say, but nothing to be concerned about.

Pareto’s principle is about the distribution of quantitative value, which is only part of the picture. I find it interesting that so many people experience quite an affected relation to the graph. The basic feeling is that it should at least be more of a normal distribution - a bell curve - and that it should be someone else making the change. — Possibility

Sorry, I don't follow. My point was one doesn't need to aim for universality, a majority will/should suffice. We need someone to conduct a poll, pronto! You know, to settle the matter once and for all!

How do art aficionados/experts identify the provenance of a painting?
— Agent Smith

First, document search. Sales records.
Second, paint used. Many forgers get caught using paint that was not available at the time. — Jackson

Danke!

I recommend reading about Artificial Neural Networks:

Neural networks learn (or are trained) by processing examples, each of which contains a known "input" and "result," forming probability-weighted associations between the two, which are stored within the data structure of the net itself. The training of a neural network from a given example is usually conducted by determining the difference between the processed output of the network (often a prediction) and a target output. This difference is the error. The network then adjusts its weighted associations according to a learning rule and using this error value. Successive adjustments will cause the neural network to produce output which is increasingly similar to the target output. After a sufficient number of these adjustments the training can be terminated based upon certain criteria. This is known as supervised learning.

Such systems "learn" to perform tasks by considering examples, generally without being programmed with task-specific rules. For example, in image recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain cats by analyzing example images that have been manually labeled as "cat" or "no cat" and using the results to identify cats in other images. They do this without any prior knowledge of cats, for example, that they have fur, tails, whiskers, and cat-like faces. Instead, they automatically generate identifying characteristics from the examples that they process. — Relativist

Much appreciated! Gracias!

@Banno Vide supra, Relativist's post! Ostensive definitions in re Wittgenstein? How does an AI know from pictures labeled "cat" and "no cat" that "cat means cat and not whiskers, legs, tails, etc. (all these features should appear in pictures of cats).

Interesting subject, AS! Let me give one shot for the goal. The human memory function very differently from the computer memory. If an image is projected on our retina, a corresponding neural structure is activated. The world is full of patterns and forms of which the parts have no causal connection to the whole. Diametrically opposed parts of the circle don't influence one another directly, but still the circle ( or spherical form of the sun) stays a circle. All parts have a common cause and form the circle. — Hillary

I'm not sure if I follow. There possibly is a difference betwixt brains and computer CPUs; however, the language of ons/offs (1s/0s) seems to be be a common factor [action potentials in neurons are all (1) or none (0)]. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the brain has a computerish architecture.

Even so, there's the real possibility that brain function is radically unlike that of computers. We'll have to wait for (neuro)science to tell us how as I have a feeling this matter is still not as cut-and-dried as we would've liked.

If at some future point, it becomes possible to artificially gestate a zygote, then abortions will be obsolete if the pro-lifers are willing to pay for the gestation service (can't be cheap), and to divide up the resulting children among themselves to be raised.

I'm alluding to a general problem I have with many pro-lifers: it's easy express moral outrage at abortion, while shrugging off the fact that the alternative has life-altering consequences for the mother who gives birth ("that's their problem, but I'll pray for them"). — Relativist

True that! That's been one of the sticking points in the issue. If you're going to be pro-life then you gotta go the whole nine yards - from conception to adulthood. In its current form, the anti-abortion camp's position boils down to caring for babies but not giving a rat's ass about their future well-being (happiness). I suggest the pro-choice movement look for teens/adults who lead miserable lives and give 'em a platform to voice their outrage - they would've preferred not to have been born and yet here they are, living in poverty, homeless, no future, etc.

Pro-lifers are also pro-voter suppression (and pro-death penalty). Why? It's all about demographic control. Reproductive freedom is more deliberately exercised in the US more by White working / middle class women than non-white women and contributes to accelerating America's looming so-called "demographic crisis" The "evangelical" pro-life movement, IMHO, always has been about "the good lord's" work of Making Apartheid Great Again. :shade:

Four pro-life SC Justices, appointed by 2 GOP Presidents who both lost the popular vote in their respective elections (one starting two unpaid-for, fraudelent, failed wars of opportunity and the other Impeached twice while in the pocket of Russia & Saudi Arabia), form the basis for a judicial cabal (on the verge of) stripping citizens of established Constitutional Rights (i.e. protections) for the first time in US history, aided and abetted by a fifth pro-insurrectionist joke-of-a-Justice. — 180 Proof

Crumbs! It's that bad, eh? :up:

I don't think so, pregnancy will then be obsolete. The only babies being produced will then be designer (GM) babies. Human abortion will be enforced by the newly derived species, resulting in the extinction of the human species — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah, I was thinking about that. Why would a woman want to carry the fetus in her uterus when it can do just as well in some kind of artificial womb? One reason for abortion accepted by even pro-lifers is danger to the mother and with artificial wombs, this goes out the window.

Termination of pregnancy would still be permissible in the eyes of pro-choicers if the baby's quality of life is compromised (severe birth defects, poverty, and so on).

My point was that the yardstick used for abortion is the ex-utero viability of the fetus is going to come back and bite women (in the ass) for the reasons I outlined in my last post.

Here's food for thought!

The justices solidly reaffirmed that core right in 1992, reinforcing the principle that states could not interfere with a woman's ability to obtain an abortion before a fetus could survive out the womb, at about 23 weeks. Even justices who had criticized Roe said it was important to adhere to the precedent, for institutional reasons and because, quite simply, Americans had come to rely on it. — CNN

Our findings show that more babies now survive being born too soon than ever before, which is testament to the highly-skilled and dedicated staff in our neonatal services. — Professor Neil Marlow, an MRC-funded academic at University College Londons Institute for Womens Health and a co-author of both papers

:chin:

Most interesting. — Ms. Marple

I can sense a trend here: The gestational age at which fetuses can survive outside the womb has decreased over the past century or so and is decreasing in step with advances in (bio)technology. It appears that a time will come when even a zygote will be viable ex-utero. What then? Abortion would immediately have to be made illegal, oui?

Science seems to be sleeping with the enemy, religion, at least in the eyes of a section of their fanbase, pro-choicers! Pro-choice is going to become obsolete in (say) another century (conservative estimate), but only if they don't reinvent themselves in a big way. :joke:

I am in your debt, sir/ma'am!

That means that those possible future children will be treated as a means, not as an end itself. That is wrong. — Antinatalist

I completely forgot about Kant! Thanks for the reminder. As you would've already realized Kant's people as ends in themselves is at odds with another very pressing need that seems to bother us at a very deep level viz. meaning of life, which, if one really thinks about it, is simply the desire to be of some use, a synonym for means or something like that.

Moreover, people seem to find a life as but a means to such lofty ends as abolishing suffering quite fulfilling and well worth ignoring/overriding Kant's maxim, noble thought it may be.

Back in the sixties, we had to make one of those for a physics project.
— unenlightened

Yeah, I think I read about that school that exploded... — Hillary

:rofl:

An electric motor and a spring, basically. The difficulty is in getting the forces balanced so that the motor operates the finger with the strength to flick the switch while also tensioning the spring enough to pull it back afterwards. If i remember I had a very small toy motor geared down with a worm thread, and a coil spring from god knows where. But you could use a spiral spring too. The finger is just mounted on an axle that makes a 1/4 turn each time, and the lid works by gravity. Wooden box -easy to fit the bits to; an old cigar box in my case with the top cut in half and hinged. — unenlightened

Muchas gracias!

Back in the sixties, we had to make one of those for a physics project. The joy of liberal education! — unenlightened

Can you teach me how to make one? How good is yer memory? Just some tips & pointers will suffice.

What would be the reason for a meme to autodestruct? — Hillary

"It simply can't bear to exist", from a psychological POV. It must be suffering in extremum.

I've committed memetic suicide a 1000 times at least. — Hillary

Join the club mon ami! But I have a feeling I've died more times than you! I'm a pro at commiting suicide, political, philosophical, romantic, it's my schtick! :sad:

American bullshit — Streetlight

Every country, people, person, group, tribe, everyone has their own bullshit. The task, it seems, is to sort, categorize, file and, finally...pick one that stinks the least. Not créme de la créme, but poop de la poop! Sorry, if I interrupted you.

I know that I know nothing"

- Socrates

:death: :flower: — javi2541997

We're left with mere opinion! Coherence theory of truth!?

he himself is the older man — javi2541997

The (sad) clown Pagliacci! Visit Wikipedia for details.

:ok: