Rather more tangible. It is precisely that consciousness does not continue that death is so dreadful for the living. If there really is nothing left of us how much more of a burden is it to think we knew the departed but now realize we were not there for them at all! That is, the dead are only gone insofar as they were not there at all in life. What does it mean to have someone in your life if not currently present? What is the difference? And yet, though loneliness and "missing" others when absent is distressing, it is not grief. What is the difference? If another is real in life, is that realness suddenly gone in death when not gone by mere distance? And doesn't it take the complete loss of that realness to make us recognize what we missed when alive and present?

What is tangible in what we share is the terms by which we recognize what such differences mean. Life is the language of the articulation of the worth of time. And we are perhaps the most articulate term in that language. But it is fatuous to suppose that we are endowed with that role by some external power or system. We create all the terms of that articulation. And it is impossible that we are perfectly synchronized in all its terms. But what we do do, and very much as our own creation, is to spur each other to greater rigor in presenting our own terms. This always fails, in some small nuance at the very least. But the more perfectly we achieve constancy in our terms the more overwhelming to that constancy is even the most nuanced failure of it. But if others then respond with even greater rigor of their own, and in recognition of the worth of the effort, each speech act and response in recognition of the worth of even greater rigor in thought and utterance, each act and response, together, a nuance overwhelming our commitment to constancy, then moment to moment, though we may never awaken to the changes, grows the language always overwhelmed by nuanced failures to be articulate, though just as always committed to eliminate such failures. We recognize ourselves and each other more in our own failure to be that articulation and in the response to it of greater rigor others bring in recognition to our effort to prevent it, than we do in the flat reading of the utterances we exchange we are pressured into in the academic world, or, for that matter, in the abandoned rigor of aesthetic and religious hermenuetics.

It is precisely that we are committed to reducing misstatements to the most trivial nuances, and can never quite succeed, that language is born at all. That is, long before we know what words mean there must be that recognition between us that there is rigor we are trying to bring to and spur each other in. And the terms of that recognition is the nuanced failure of that articulation. But every such nuance is overwhelming our commitment not to. Every moment in the drama of that failure in the commitment to articulate flat meaning is the completest event of language, in any language. And any recurrence of anything so complete as that moment grows more completely what language is between us than any fixed lexicon and grammar can ever be. But only in death is that completeness as recognizable as our commitment to meaning what we say and/or saying what we mean is feeble. It is not enough to cease talking or to become inaccessible for dialogue, Only the completion death is can be the most articulate term in the completion the growing moment intimated the worth of our failed articulation and response in recognition of the rigor brought to it. That is, because our constant commitment to facile and impersonal speech hides the nuances of terms overwhelmingly personal and intimate each moment of failure in that commitment is, only death can prove to us how completely that moment is what language really is. Ceasing to be altogether is the most articulate term we can bring to life. Speculation of an afterlife or conscious being of some sort after death is merely more of our fatuous commitment to constancy. And nuance by nuance of failed articulation enjoins us in the terms of that articulation in ways that no fantasy of a soul or eternal consciousness can be more than a distraction from or sop to our commitment to elude the real cost of sharing meaning. We can convince ourselves there is no need to push rigor so far that only others can spur us to the brink, or that we are so clever we can avoid even the least nuance of failed articulation, but either way the real cost of meaning is unpaid, and language dies.

People are always a bit disgusted while the sausage is made. Different story, I expect, when it comes to eating it.

Actually, I'm asking you to think smaller, not bigger. I'm not even challenging conventional wisdom about how reason works. Merely that there is a limit. That limit is that the infinitesimal cannot be deemed negligible without cost. That cost is the synthetic term. Everything. All that meaning is. If we must start with the familiar to find the stranger, in ourselves and each other, but require complete conservation of all terms relevant to a rational progression, then ignorance is enforce upon us. But if estrangement from that continuity of terms is the most rigorous product of that commitment to it, then we can only meet ourselves and each other as that estrangement. That is, the change in ourselves we each bring to the moment of that estrangement of the continuity if terms is met as a contrariety as much to that continuity as to each other. We make ourselves a community in contrariety to conventional terms is a character of change that itself has no term that can ever become convention, but is symmetrically opposed between us. That symmetry would, and in some ways does, become itself a kind of edifice of conventional terms, but is thwarted by the simple case that any continued exchanges are not only already modified by the moment we share, in the character of that community we make ourselves there, but, so altered from the body of terms antecedent to it, and so disparate in the character each of us is in it, that the moment of estrangement that then ensues cannot be symmetrically related to its antecedent. The stranger does not augment mechanically, but grows organically. Each moment as unprecedented as bewilderment always is, but each moment more contrary to the limit of reason than to who we are together at that limit. But if you have not a clue what this means, I don't see how you can expect me to supply all of them. And, as you might say, I am without a clue too. Yes, we do need to suppose our terms are synchronized some to begin to speak, but to limit ourselves to that throws out the project of speech wholesale.

How small a thing is it that we differ? How small a thing can we afford to make it before silence does prevail? If the smallest thing of all, the tiniest difference we can possibly hope to neglect at the end of rigor, is all the differing we are capable of articulating fully and competently, then it damn well behooves us to relish the moment of it, for the rest is babble. Only as that moment do we recognize ourselves and each other. And, of that moment, do we only recognize ourselves through each other, as the symmetry of difference each is there to the garbage we always carry with us to discourse.

Time is the characterology of change. All ideas devolve from the drama of this. But there is no language, nor any term in any language, that can bring us as near that characterology as the moment of estrangement, from the terms of enduring time language always is, that we share as we vie with each other not to differ from the terms we feel we must continually and without beginning be familiar with. And so, we diminish the stranger to a limited term, but ultimately find the stranger is always who we really are. And the least term of that estrangement is always more comprehensive, and comprehensively real, than the limiting of it. Ideas are not structural units than can be assembled into edifices of 'justified' ignorance and run through mechanistic rituals of induction. We can and do rely on an ability to do this, but ignore the wilderness as the final and least term of that ignorance at our peril. The peril not only of losing our way ahead, but of losing the meaning of our origin. But if you attribute some vague sweeping intent on my part you're not paying attention. Nothing could be more precisely delineated than that moment where bewilderment is proved our differing with each other more united us than any supposed synchrony of terms. Of that moment we each recognize the worth each brings to the differing of all terms that, structurally, enforce ignorance and neglect of that worth. If for you language is a construct you really are bereft of clues. The worth of human effort in all this is the whole story. That effort is not a term at all. There is no clue I can give you.

I get you. Wu wei! Thank you. — TheMadFool

Is this meant dismissively? You seem to think language is a one-way street. It's not the content of our assertions that engenders meaning, it is the drama that ensues that alters our terms. If that alteration is the product of a rigorous process meant to conserve our terms, then the generated change cannot be less rigorous than the attempt at conservation of terms. And if the exchange is reciprocal the change is more shared between interlocutors than the original terms of assertion are the property of each alone. That is, we cannot know what we are saying until we know each other. The meaning of terms is intimated, not explicated.

It's the whole point. The addiction of facile semiosis, or natural language, is that the stranger we are to what we think we mean is kept at bay and only emerges in the lessened terms of estrangement we encounter in every exchange. But that estrangement is the engine of all the other addictive terms of facile speech. And if the discipline of engaging in that speech entails a kind of rigor in sustaining that facile performance of it and access to it, lessening the estrangement always haunting it, then the dynamic of that rigor (emotion) and that haunting (the completeness of estrangement) is the real story of language.

There is no escaping ambiguity. If you think you've reached the end of it you need to think again, and keep talking. We cannot outstrip the deficit of understanding and clarity in anything we say.

If polar oppositions are a functional tool in reason, the most encompassing polarity is that between strangeness and familiarity. Between the overwhelming impossibility of saying anything real and the entrenched addiction to facile hearing of words and reading of signs. The stranger is the subject, the facile attribution is the predicate. That's just how it works. Forget that, or, worse, deliberately exclude it, and language is just vapor.

Didn't run the video, so if this is central to your question what I say here may be impertinence.

We are born into this world complete strangers to it. But, usually, find ourselves in the care of those so completely inured to its terms that they cannot imagine strangeness so complete. Between the complete stranger to and the complete and facile denizen of the world a drama ensues. But it is a drama in which the only possible terms of expression, or sharing anything at all of it, is to diminish that strangeness to lesser differences we call ideas, terms, words. This is, of course, contradictory. Our only idea of difference so complete we have no term of it is a lessened difference we feel empowered to treat as the same. Even as sameness as such. Leibniz's "indiscernibles" is an attempt to secure this nonsensical sleight of mind as the foundation of analysis. It makes no sense to navigate reality by simply denying the stranger, the engine of it all, any place in it. Words are the bathwater of the real, but those who valorize analysis enshrine the bathwater and throw out the stranger the engine of the real is.

No, we do not learn who we are by becoming strangers. But we do engage in a drama lessening that strangeness but failing of the real. That failure of being real moves amongst us as a dynamic to our terms of which each of us is critically participant and, in an important sense, the most completing term. The character of the stranger come to the world through each of us is the most articulate term the engine of meaning is. But this articulation of the worth of time is too compete, too completely the stranger to the lessened differences supposed to name it, to be an enduring term of it. That is, what is too worthy, too much what worth is, cannot be endured. Cannot be an enduring term. And so, we lessen the difference to a term more enduring. But in so doing we valorize the unchanging and pretend language is made up of determinate samenesses. But, if this seems to suggest all we can say is distortion and lie, if the drama we engage in does indeed alter the terms of that distortion and lie, and does so in the very throes of a competent commitment to its terms, then the articulation of the stranger each of us is to that commitment is the reality of that commitment, its real meaning. Silence is no answer to the riddle. Failing, failing to establish enduring terms of being real, as the rigorous prerequisite to the articulate changes that come to those terms, is the only articulate, and most articulate, term of being real.

Children may babble or even spout individual words, but when they really begin to speak it is sudden and surprisingly articulate. And we don't teach them. Chomsky uses this fact as proof of his thesis that analysis is "wired-in". But what it really means is that the child only really talks when it has become fully naturalized and committed to the lessening of differences as a way of enduring our failure to articulate the stranger the worth of time is. Sociologists have scoured the world for examples of primitive or 'evolving' speech (a sort of "missing link" of language) and though they have found curiosities (like odd color schemes or language without tense) they have not found anything that could fairly be called a primitive language. But this only means that language is always born full-grown, as the naturalization of the stranger to the world and the complete banishing of anything so complete as the stranger come into this world we are at birth.

Even nonsense deserves a response that is more than a machine designed to fool us.

Come to think of it, who the hell do they think they are? However sophisticated the system, isn't there a culpability involved? To my mind, wherever there is an injury to a person involving a machine. there is no assumption of innocence on the side of the machine. The machine is always culpable unless there is malicious intent on the part of the person. Any shortcoming in the capacity of AI to avoid hurting or offending a human must be regarded as the intention of the maker. That, written in law, might dampen the enthusiasm of the whole AI crowd. I mean, if they can't navigate a human world how can they be permitted in it at all, except in the most circumscribed, safeguarded settings?

Socrates refutes libertarianism in book three, I think, of Republic, the passages where Thrasymachus challenges his thesis.

I wonder if your libertaianism doesn't extend to wanting the government to interfere with the interference by others in your life, like your boss, your bank, your neighbor's dog?

Time is difference without limit. That is to say, it is the difference each unique thing brings to it. In itself it is nothing, a bit of noise. But where it offers the rest an opportunity to recognize how empty the universe is without it there is a response implicit to that recognition asserting the worth of that bit of noise or anomaly, because it offers the rest of time the term it needs to be itself recognized of its worth. When a kid sighs in class wondering how the clock could be moving so slowly this offers all of us a kind of language, complete in every way, of being there and knowing what time is. A computer may be devised to pick up the outward forms of that language, but not the dramatic participation in it we all bring to it. The question, then, is over how long a period is AI to be tested? An hour, a day, a lifetime? Can a computer remember what it meant to be bored twenty years ago? Or know how to use the response of others at that time to anticipate the meaning they will take from our words and gestures now? And even continually revised and augmented by the interim experiences even though not directly interacting in those events during that interim? "Do you remember where you were.....?" Yes, the computer will 'remember' where it was, but will it know what that memory means to others, and what they will know it means to it? Isn't meaning personal? And, if so, isn't a computer completely and utterly detached from it? Just not a player in the drama that is what language really is? And, if so, why do philosophers distort this? AI technicians I get, but philosophers?

Is a digital system a place? I thought it was a 'processor'. Consciousness is an interruption of a process.

Nothing formal can 'identify'. Period. Identity is personal. Leibniz is subordinating reality to formal rules he constructs from question-begging the meaning of equivalence. Can the meaning of 'equal' or 'same' or 'indistinguishable' derive itself? If everything real is unique the equivalence of attributes is simply irrelevant to identity. From what I've read, and it's been a while, Turing only expected his 'test' to even be meaningful, let alone definitive, limited to very narrow technical statements. Of course, these days, AI technicians know no end of ambition, and arrogance, and others let paranoia get to them.

Sameness is sameness is not a tautology, it's circularity.



Don't you need to establish what you mean by being this one before you can use quantifiers like any and all to demonstrate it? And why is it we feel justified in using quantifiers to nail down what a quality is? Gibberish is gibberish even if encoded in arcane symbols. Qualities are not ways of being the same, they are similarities in ways of being different. The fact of the matter is that 'identical' is an artificial concept that can only be real through the manipulation of materials as well as a bogus idea of what qualities are. You can make two ball-bearings impossible for an unaided eye to distinguish, but try to find such similarities in nature! Living cells can even distinguish one atom from another, of the same element! Distinguishing one thing from anther is only problematic by intervention to hide the difference or in the fantasies of rationalists. But what really gets hidden is what an idea really is, and I would think a philosopher would not wish to be party to such deception.

Identity is not an attribute. There is absolutely nothing it is "like" to conscious. Uniqueness is not a myth. There is no calculus, no formulation, that can infer it. You can't use analysis to achieve synthesis until you are capable of recognizing its limit. Its limit, that is, that there is nothing there at all. You might as well determine who you are by the accumulation of scars and scabs on you. They may mark you out, but do not tell you who you are. What they ("attributes") tell you is who you aren't. Analysis is nihilism.

Isn't a function by definition "computable"?

What? AI? I think you mean I am saying Turing did, as far as I have read of him.

Can't say I've ever had a dream involving a computer or "device". Maybe it's a generational thing.

What AI can never get past is that every time a human uses a word it conveys a difference. Maybe just a unique inflection or tempo, a micro-pause or elision. Something in every word that situates its meaning uniquely.

[reply="TheMadFool;600773"

How about being on hold? A very polite bot does not recognize that a live person expects variation even when repeating the same statement. Leibniz was an ass. The identity of indiscernibles is inane, would make us real suckers for Raven, or is it Mystique?

Turing didn't think a human could be fooled. He also set conditions on the test that would make it very hard not to be. Language is not what philosophers want us to think it is. It is a living growing drama. It is intimacy. Something a machine can never bring to it. A young man of my acquaintance, when annoyed at you, would call you a tino-nino. If very annoyed, a tino-nino-nuckinuck! No machine could ever get the meaning, but even a simpleton human would instantly grasp it. If we are forced to stick to defined terms the sophisticated systems available today certainly could give us a run for the money, but if forced to throw away the lexicon, the human will win hands-down every time. The fact is, all linguistic terms are the result of a synthesis that is still perfectly enigmatic to science and to philosophy, and AI can only win the Turin-Test by locking us into fixed terms and ignoring the mystery of synthesis. It's a drama intimated amongst us, not explicated and recorded in some unchanging format. And if AI really wants to fool us, I suggest it teach its systems how to avoid mindlessly repeating the same assertions without at least altering its inflection to recognize the uniqueness of a real human listener.

Reading this list, all I can think is: Yeah!, Let's do it!

What it leaves out is that once and for all America is to make itself a nation, as opposed to a federation of local warlords (which is what the Roman Republic was, and which the founders of the Republic so shamefully used as its model). The idea of states rights was always meant to make the federal government shill to the subordination of local populations to the authority if its prominent men. But in a democracy there are, properly speaking, no state's rights. States don't have rights, they have responsibilities and authority pursuant to and limited by those responsibilities. Anything more is not only undemocratic, it constitutes an attack on the reality, as well as the idea, of democracy

Which brings us back to the sure-fire remedy, threaten him with a primary challenge. Arm-twisting, too, is brinkmanship, and tends to go on in private, and only end at the last. So the result is a nail-biter either way, for the rest of us.

You know, the president has the power of the veto, but even that can be overridden. For years now McConnell has exercised a veto power without the possibility of an override. Power never asserted in the Constitution. But I doubt even Manchin expects to exert that kind of power. He'll settle for less than all he's "demanding". If he ever says what the hell it is he does really want. Sounds like what he really wants is attention. So it's really a question of how much notoriety will satisfy him. Maybe someone can make him notorious. Once he asserts explicit demands he'll draw fire. I'm sure he knows this, but he's playing a game that has limits.

Once established, a regime of intimidation can be sustained with very little effort.

You can't fight a system of conscription with persuasion. If they think we're on the wrong side they won't listen to reason. But the history is long. Have we forgotten all the assaults on reasoned persuasion, from America First, not Trump, Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh, through the red scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee. And on and on and on....



I fear you're right there.

Is the issue how much the bill costs, or how much it will do?

America can afford elevating everyone to the middle-class, even if not willing to "work for a living". And it can't afford not to. Impoverishing America so some of us can have cheap servants and compliant labor will be our undoing. Maybe it's arguable there is an inalienable right to feather your own nest and invest in your children's future, but the public sector has at least as fundamental a responsibility to see to it that this does not aggregate into an insurmountable system of exclusion and suppression. Of course all Americans should realize the same outcome for the same investment of talent initiative and effort. How many times do we hear that the key to success in America is (aside from education) "networking". Just another word for corruption and nepotism. An excuse for rationing opportunities.

Maybe it's time to bite the bullet and tell Manchin he'll face a primary challenger. He might still win, but not the general. Democrats will lose the Senate anyway if they don't get that damn vote.

"Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die."

America is the product of the English Civil War. it is just as imponderable how the Cavaliers managed to keep the loyalty of the yeomen under their authority. It's a matter of conscription, not reasoning. Taking orders. Perhaps there is a collective parallel to a bipolar syndrome. The theme that runs though them is a mandated enthusiasm (think how the founders of the Republic regarded that concept) and its correlate antagonism against reasoned opposition to it. What as a personal syndrome oscillates between mania and depression, as a public malady ranges from crazed obsession to violent resentment against sanity.

Biology is a constant cycle between autonomic systems and a kind of re-calibration. The heart changes constantly in rate and force. The mind, too, relies largely on semi-mechanistic processes, but makes adjustments and recalculations, maybe even nanosecond by nanosecond. The adjustments may be calculations according to abstract formulae, or merely hunches, but between the passive play of predetermined processes and the proactive readjustment and recalculation, there must be a moment of recognition that the system is veering awry. It is all too easy to get caught up in the difference between mechanism and intervention, but the crucial meaning is neither, but is instead that moment of recognition. Whatever standards apply, when things begin to go awry something must intervene or disaster looms. The adjustment is no fix, there is no certain and permanent obviation of the moment of recognition. But there is literally no measurable duration between, and therefore no process or presence to identify the agency of that differentiation. Mind operates on divisions either/or, but that recognition of a system going awry is pure and wholesale differentiation. Neither prefabricated system nor re-engineering, It is neither/nor. Our minds are trained, autonomic and calculative, to see nothing there at all, until it's time to change. Which is constant, but infinitesimal, activity. Science is fixed upon the calculation, living is fixed upon the bio-mechanism. But mind is as much neither as it is nor, as much neither as not either. It's a cul-de-sac that takes a philosopher to clarify. Consider, for instance, how many times the steering-wheel of your car moves under your hand as you drive. You are not trying to set a fixed system of steering, but keeping you car in your lane. You may think about how to stabilize the steering, but it's not possible to anticipate the next flaw in your steering. Consciousness and agency is a constant intervention that cannot anticipate its being there at all. Science and habit are equally at a loss to avoid that moment of intervention. It's a tightrope. Get too habitual, or too calculative, and we fall. It's not a matter of finding the time, it's a matter of recognizing there is no time there at all, just moment neither one time nor the other. Being elusive is what it is.

There was no "metaphysical world" at the time, that was an invention of Aristotle. For a man not 'for the people' he was remarkably loyal to them. Have you read Crito?

I was not relying on Plato's "authority", nor what you call his interpretation of the idea, but on his supplying ample human interactions on the idea to situate all its nuances, as understood by the participants.

Foucault would find plenty to dig around in, even if you think not. I meant archeology in that sense. I've confessed I am no scholar, but to my mind Plato is about people, not ideas at all. I think I read people better than words. And that Plato sets ideas before people as a stimulus for exhibiting their character, and potential for growth.



The question is meant as a joke, by Socrates. He's pulling the wool over on Protagoras, because he doesn't grasp what ideas really are at all. It's neither subjective nor objective, but dramatic. Not what we conceive, but how we respond to our differing conceptions. The ideas don't have a life of their own, they just serve as a measure of our character.

Socrates knows he doesn't know, he does not know he doesn't know. He asks in hopes his interlocutor does know, and is genuinely surprised when he finds it necessary to prove to them they do not, and distressed when they show irritation or rancor. If you know you do not know, this is not a state of ignorance. It is emancipation from bad habits of thought, like expecting to establish opinions that need no explanation or defense. Like, for instance, that words can be written down without loss of the immediacy of meaning only dialectic affords.

I beg to differ, with the world if necessary. Socrates uses divinity aspirationally, not in reference to some eternal authority. His whole career is an effort to spur his interlocutors to higher abilities to interrogate their own prejudices, not so much to higher states of being. Is it hard to be, or merely to become, good? (Protagoras)

The task, then, is archeological. But underestimating English is a mugs game.

Not reading Greek, I am left with translations, but I have my Loebs (with the original text on the facing page) and multiple other translations to compare. One thing about Plato, as opposed to other Greek authors, he knew how to develop a context in which terms are given extensive contextual keys to help us avoid these sorts of discussions, which some seem to think obviate reading him.

I was under the impression phronesis and sophrosune were synonyms, usually (incorrectly) translated as "prudence". Sophia appears as a root in many words, bringing it a bit more down to earth than divine wisdom. I've gotten the impression, from reading Plato specifically (I am not a Greek scholar and read other Greek authors sparingly and with not a lot of interest, and I still need a list of the Greek alphabet to navigate my Liddell and Scott) that his sense of sophrosune is 'wisdom of moment'. or catching the situation perfectly, always setting just the right tone.

Odd remarks, considering that most sources claim Greek was lost to Western Europe for the duration in question. More accurately it was censored, not lost. But some Greek scholars still persisted, and Constantinople lasted until the fifteenth century, when it finally fell to the Turks, with a little help from crusaders. In other words, for a thousand years the terms in question were discussed in Latin as Latin terms, not Greek at all.

The written word was invented to depersonalize language. Monumentalism and rent tallies. Only the Greeks became literate without some imperial suppression of popular will. The first appearance of Greek (linear B) are ribald wisecracks on a bit of pottery. Other writing lays down the law, Greek is born in flippancy.

Sorry, didn't read any of this, but the answer seems dead obvious, investment runs on interest and profit. Usury requires growth, Otherwise the regressive transfer of wealth becomes too obvious to sustain politically or socially. I wonder if any economists are thinking about how to sustain an economy with a shrinking population? Robots? Marx asserts that machine manufacture cannot justify profit. It requires, he claims, "surplus labor". Adam Smith covers all the bases for profit and loss in his famous book, be relegates labor to no better than subsistence. You see, if you are not an investor, and you are not dead, you must have enough. An investor, of course, can never have enough. That is, there is no natural limit to wealth, but there is a natural limit to subsistence.

The Greeks thought interest was immoral, but under Roman law the head of the household, the "Patris Familias" alone had "potestas", or standing in law. And debt entailed becoming dependent upon that patriarchy. Effectively enslaving the debtor. Rome prohibited usury as much to protect that power over debtors as anything else. It was a status eerily akin to "The Godfather" or Mafia Don.

Then what of sophia? Actually, it is fairly commonplace to associate the meaning of terms with the character of its people. The movie Tolkien has a scene where a philology professor waxes rapturously about the derivation of the word "oak". The life of a people, he extols. I beg to differ, and I think Plato, ultimately, does too. Words just mean what we discipline each other to bring to them. Conventional wisdom inhibits our ability to inspire that discipline in each other, and amounts to an evasion. That's why Socrates keeps his dialectic so personal and refuses to permit second hand views. All the world offers us is a venue within which to prove to each other it is not who we really are, and that proof is the genius of language, and the origin of terms by which we know ourselves and each other.

"ek pantos noou" : with all one's heart.

Just one sense cited in Liddel and Scott. But heart, ardent feeling, is hardly a repudiation of physical reality. "Mens", however, is a repudiation of Greek richness relative to Latin sterility.

It's easy to forget that from about 300 CE to at least the seventeenth century education was explicitly ideological. In my youth I was taught to write in Latin syntax, or else. the idea of intelligence is very much a hangover of that tradition. It's tempting to cherry-pick Plato, but I think a more expansive reading will reveal that he frequently changes his terms, explicitly to prevent the kind of sclerotic view some express here. Please, never rely on a simplistic reading. Multiple contexts of a term need to be considered. And always keep in mind the more encompassing drama of the personalities involved.

Perhaps, too, he may have wished to identify the goddess with wisdom of character (ἐν ἤθει νόησις）by calling her Ethonoe (Crat. 407a-c).

Perhaps he is saying "wisdom of character' = ethos.

Precisely my point, if you'll review my earlier remarks. But even in the macro orbits are counter-intuitive. But in particle physics the Newtonian distinction between potential and kinetic energy is meaningless, as the distinction matter and energy is unresolvable. Little pyramids don't solve anything any more than they collect "energy". Calls to mind a scene in "Red Dwarf" between Einstein and Euclid. "Always with you it is triangles!" The stark truth of the matter is that electrons seem to vanish, matter and energy, for most of what otherwise should be their orbital path around the nuclei, and nobody's asking what the hell that's all about. My thought is that, energy and matter, they go "dark", i.e. outside calculation and observation. We can't assume it is nothing any more than it is something we can't know of. What we must assume is that it is an issue for thought and a a potential area for speculation to resolve aporia in the model. But are we doing philosophy or physics? Science can never outstrip its premise. The enigma is that where the premise to analysis fails, synthesis begins. Where something "seem real" we can start to think analytically. But the end of analysis is not proof, it is the erosion of the premise. The end of science is where the enigma of synthesis intrudes upon its premise. Physics has spent the past century devising ever-more elaborate strategies for putting off the moment where chaos reigns. But ultimately its only argument for this strategy is that it "seems real".

No, it is the energy that sets the orbit. That's first year stuff. If you study the physics of orbital docking maneuvers you'll see what I mean.