Palo Alto Networks and Cisco regularly voice warnings of the dangers of advancing AI applications that might invade and corrupt corporate networks. This is not surprising since it is their business to avoid cyber attacks. I don't recall the specific story I've read but you can look for yourself in business news.

My own information is very recent, based merely on curiosity following Astorre's thread.
For introduction, I watched the Amazon documentary The Thinking Game on the development of DeepMind. However you might rate this AI as it is currently used, The way Hassabis and company employed it was actually an AGI by my lights. For current developments, I glanced through
https://grjnst.net/index.php/view/article/download/202/159 (2026)
and
https://s-rsa.com/index.php/agi/article/download/15119/11065 (2025)
Because these are recent and come from professional researchers.
Wikipedia on AGI is very informative for a newcomer like myself, but it is not quite up-to-date and might always suffer from biases due to lack of competent peer review.

But you missed my poorly expressed point, whether that be right or wrong.
The journey of artificial intelligence went from highly controlled code for precisely defined applications to to an open-minded thinking machine that is only taught to think for itself, to remember and build upon its successes to reach some form of achievement. This vagueness is built in.

What that means in practical terms is that an AGI does not compute or deduce its direction but that it makes probabilistic guesses then tests its hypotheses against its own objective or subjective criteria. That is how humans and animals think as well. We are not calculators, we intuit.

meta-rules that already exist in a system like the one I describe could lead to something like Dissonance and therefore there would be no guaranteed causal chain of reasoning leading us to the inference of intervention because one cannot infer that that second iteration of an action taken and its mismatched outcome are due to a meta-rule implemented with the goal of intervention on the part of an AI; for all we know it could be due to a pre-existing meta-rule — ToothyMaw

Cyber security companies are in the news being quite concerned with the growing capabilities of AGI's that can potentially infiltrate and corrupt corporate or private systems operations. This could either be human directed or creatively discovered by AI's spread throughout the internet.

The question is where should dissonance be sought, at the source, policed by internet, or at the sight of attack. At the source, AGI's are not logic bound in the expected ordinary sense, rather they evolve their entire knowledge base through probabilistic trial and error thought experimentation. Humans do not have the intelligence or speed to follow this process. Suddenly, on human time scales, a possibly unanticipated solution pops up. Because this is a creative process, twin AGI's would not be expected to come up with identical solutions.

Over the internet, policing bottlenecks could be upgraded as needed, but always one step behind the innovator AI.

I doubt morality has a logical basis, otherwise we could teach morality to AI. — Astorre

Since personal morality as such is inapplicable to an automaton, laws of etiquette and conduct could and probably are taught. That's why we have chatbots that pleasingly lie to us at various levels of discourse rather than admitting that they just don't have a reasonable response. An AGI, rather than telling untruths should tell us that it doesn't know yet, and perhaps we should come back and try again at a later date.

if we persist in imposing our own criteria while ignoring the evolutionary trends of the Earth system, which has—fortunately—endowed us with consciousness: the ability to understand ourselves, our place in the world, and the needs of others. From this point onward, it is up to us, exercising our freedom, to decide what attitude we choose to adopt. — Seeker25

Natural unplanned evolution is not necessarily our ally if we are dreaming of survival as a species. Naturally, the only foreseeable trend is extinction now or later due to some environmental upheaval that makes human life impossible, or over-population and disease, or unbridled global technological abuse. To defeat the pessimistic projections of the concerned scientists we could appeal to unnatural selection by introducing beneficial genes into all humans to create the long imagined superhuman to be our descendants. This is a frightening but not an impossible project given where current scientific research is headed.

This thesis can't be taken out of context with the rest of the message. One of the key ideas in the entire message is speed. The world is accelerating — Astorre

Those are two of the ideas that you claim to be related. That is your thesis.

To do that you, not I, need to understand both your key words and the ideas they supposedly stand for.

The world is changing. Fine and well. But you mention different aspects of that world that change or evolve at various rates. Speed is not quite the right way to think about it. The rate of change and the acceleration of that rate of change are the other distinct measures for each aspect of interest.

For example, education takes years for anyone. But job possibilities also change in each field at their own rate. Philosophy hasn't changed in fifty years. Doctors and lawyers are good for about a decade before they become obsolete. Ditch diggers only need to use a shovel or drive a backhoe. Proletarians, If they're not already on full-time well-fare can learn whichever job in an hour.

Are people obsoleted by AI? Their technological jobs are certainly obsoleted regularly, but new jobs also open up which have to be learned by the displaced workers. The balance of job and employment subtractions and additions can be traced through following numbers published by the bureau of labor statistics.

5. Education. It's already clear that the classic school and university format of education doesn't meet modern needs. First, it's too long, second, too traditional, and third, it produces far more specialists than is needed. A large supply of specialists, combined with their rapid replacement by robots and AI, lowers the cost of their labor. — Astorre

By classic education do you mean a classical curriculum that teaches ancient and modern languages, philosophy, literature and history, or one of the many other pure and applied curricula? Normally, people learn their to do their jobs after college, in practice.

I am not seeing the cost to having an AI buddy who always knows what to say and what to do. — Athena

Then how would you make that a balanced reciprocal relationship?

the AIs that exist today are incapable of transcending paradigms or knowledge. They are incapable of radically shifting their perspective on a problem, or even seeing the problem for themselves. — Astorre

Your perspective on AI has been obsolete for years now. The type of AI I dreamed of long ago was hand programmed to do specific tasks for just the right agents in preordained sequences depending on each query.

The newest artificial *general* intelligent programs come as open minded as possible unfettered by a human knowledge base, like babes opening their eyes for the first time seeing the flash of light off the robe of an obstetric nurse walking by.

I asked my health insurance website a question and their AGI agent replied that it was just learning the insurance system!

You don't understand what a person is telling you if they say they're cold? Odd — frank

It is odd from an everyday ordinary language (an other 'orthogonal') perspective to say that I don't know what you mean by cold. Actually I do understand from recalled personal experience of sitting on the peak of bald mountain mid-January night star gazing trying to avoid frost bite. That was cold.

But that content of the sensation of cold remains forever private. You can repeat what I said, but you cannot know how cold I felt.

Ordinary language is as broad and vague and ambiguous as is necessary to adopt it to a specific situational common context of discourse at that time and place. That context might or might not be reproducible for ostensible purposes. All red apples are red enough, but words for sheep clouds or a gorgeous sunrise do not convey the picture.

No, we don't understand either one. There are two distinct notions 'orthogonal' to each other plus a scale measure to create a rough translation from one language-less feeling to a public technical language that can be charted for other doctors to see.

What else is needed? — frank

A doctor will attempt to relate "I'm cold" to their Wittgensteinian meaning by asking "on a scale of 1 to 10 how cold do you feel?" That number is only on a relational scale, but it is still meaningful assuming the patient was sincere (which is not a given).

The content of experience isn't private in the Wittgenstein sense. — frank

It isn't? Can anyone other say how cold the feverish person is?

How AI is going to figure into this discussion is a bit unclear, to me anyway. — BC

This challenging discussion gave me impetus to check the progress of AI on whatever to me available documentaries. They are now talking AGI, self-teaching General Intelligence machines that are dropped into deep environments without support. At first they nearly drown but eventually learn to far outshine even the best professionals.

Their accomplishments are frighteningly effective, especially when they surpass even the remotest possibilities of human creativity, something we used to hold untouchably sacred by any future bots. A fairly recent example was the solving of the very complex 3D protein folding problem by AlphaFold. The best biochem researchers have been making slow creatively initiated progress for decades to predict proteins that have 100.000 to millions of atoms that bind themselves into complex shapes. The self-taught AGI running powerful hardware solved all the possible configurations.

Obviously, wealthy entrepreneurs corporations and governments will have future access to such technology and will also control the direction of future developments. For good or ill. Consequently, the rich will get richer at an ever increasing rate and all of us bourgeois (that's pretty much everyone any of us know) will become quickly distanced from our trillionaire masters.

Trump reinstated an already existing programme because it was the opposite of what Obama did — Punshhh

Could well be. The Dems cut the program because it was expensive and pointless. The prestige value is still there if one is willing to foot the bill.

What’s it got to do with Trump? — Punshhh

Everything. I doubt that there is any scientific or technological priority of any sort that can be addressed by actually sending live people into orbit, space, the Moon, or Mars. It's 100% publicity stunt to prove to the ignoranti how great we are. Besides, the clock is ticking, possibly nearer to 15 seconds by now.

Beautiful and challenging post.

If I let it be general lack of progress in philosophy and in the arts then I am not obliged to demonstrate the missing progress. Leaving the burden of demonstrating just one recognizable sign of progress in each area to the reader. Then I can define progress to exclude challenges.

The problem is that, as a pluralist, I need to decide on what progress might be in each case, according to the accepted circumstances and still within my own preferences.

For example, according to me Plato gets the award for the most advanced philosopher for the 2400'th straight year for being the broadest, deepest, sharpest, most imaginative, and best writer. Presocratic and Socratic philosophy reached it pinnacle with Plato and it has been downhill with some notable swells of ideas ever since. Progress defined in any way that happens then quickly disappears under the ocean of social, religious, and academic dogmatism.

The 20th Century had some wonderfully hopeful movements that provided logic, language and clarity to philosophy. After that, to this day Plato scholarship had a revolutionary revival. But that understanding is already sinking under the waves of academia. Which students or publishers really want to know what Plato actually said? And never mind any of those useless presocratics.

I'm not sure 'the arts' can 'progress'. A poem by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Keates, or Billy Collins, or you or me, is successful if it resonates with its contemporary audience, for whom it was written. Whether it resonates 500 years later is the responsibility of successive generations, not the original poet. — BC

Each of us has preferences. Perhaps Baudelaire, Proust, and Tolstoy are not my cup of tea but I cannot deny their greatness in conveying ideas and feelings beyond the limits of language. Can I say that represents progress over Sophocles or Shakespeare? Or that Michelangelo's Slaves are progress past his Pieta?

I could venture that they are broader in scope and deeper in expression. Or perhaps it still boils down to personal preferences that change over time. Can we call streamed emotionally jarring multimedia progress?

Ah, music is somewhat mathematical and it paints in tones framed in time. Showing what progress ought to have been here should be easier. It seems that great music comes and goes with innovating geniuses throughout the ages. But who do we have now? Glass? Arvo Part? Good but not as great as the French Impressionists or Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninoff. 20th Century music was technically and expressionally deeply innovating to a degree that now seems insurpassable.

one geologist on the moon can do a hell of a lot more than our best rovers — ssu

He was invaluable because back then next to nothing was known of the Moon's geology. The one and only scientist ever to be sent?

most inventions people use today have come out of large scientific projects as the engineering required spawned much of the technology we use today. — Christoffer

That's the difference between technological and scientific projects. Technology makes constant advances on top of existent technology in an ever faster cycle. Technological progress is driven by moneys coming from governmental and industrial sources because for the most part capital is required for man power to create the machinery of inventions. This is easy to confuse with progress in other areas including the sciences. (Obviously, we have not seen any progress in philosophy or in the arts for the past 50 years) The sciences are driven by technology. Technology opens up new vistas for hypotheses and technical avenues for research. For the most part, this is 'small' experimental science. Big science more often comes from big ideas that come from people, the theoreticians.

Edit:

We spend more money on mindless consumption of AI slop and influencer nonsense than we spend on science, education and engineering. — Christoffer

Those are two different We's. Most of all science comes from university research labs sponsored by government and industry. AI is driven by consumerism now, but it has enormous potential for space exploration.

The amount of money spent on anything scientific globally today is so small it's embarrassing. If we took just a fraction of the funding that the global military gets each year we could have solved so many scientific problems today. — Christoffer

This has been an effective rationale for public funds and to raise individual contributions toward the 'sciences'. The argument makes a great deal of sense when that research directly effects people's lives, as in genetic or cancer research done at small, focused laboratories and less sense when talking about mega science like the CERN Large Hadron Collider or manned space flight. The scientific return on these projects decays with time. Initially, startling advances might be possible after that not so much.

Money can be the answer only if trained talent and technology are already in place to make progress. For the most part, scientific advance happens in response to outstanding novel technical and individual achievement made possible by funds. Funds alone get us nowhere.

I am interested in hearing any objections to this 'proper' form of direct realism - perhaps it is not coherent or perhaps it has unacceptable implications. — Clarendon

My take of some relevant ancient history.

The strongest logical statement in philosophy comes from Parmenides. To paraphrase, Everything is, period. There is no else to this existential logic because Everything comprises all possible conceptions whether logical, verbal, psychological or physical.

The next strongest logical statement comes from the mouth of an unlikely source, "Après moi, le déluge". This represents the other, Protagorian existential absolute. Taken within their premises, these two absolutes are not debatable.

Unfortunately neither absolute gives any insight into their only object, nor do they suggest any relation or transition to the world we or I live in.

Plato replaced the One with the plurality of the Forms and also of objects, a multitude of sensible objects represented by Forms. But visible sensation of the material objects is indirect through circumstances, visual rays of sorts, and mental perception. Plato noted that this necessarily indirect sensation-perception cannot possibly yield personal certainty or knowledge because it is contingent on worldly intermediaries.

To perceive [see] something is to be in unmediated contact with it. I take that to be a [presupposed] conceptual truth that all involved in this debate will agree on.
...
With that in mind, a 'direct realist' is someone who holds that ... when I look at the ship I am directly aware of the ship itself. — Clarendon

So be it. Doing so eliminates the Platonic Formal and perceptual complexities and in the process makes Truth, Certainty, and personal Knowledge possible! Reasonably well defined philosophical objects can be logically acted upon. But only for the direct realist. The majority who insist on either naively obvious indirect or publicly derived Scientistic dogmas will point to their greater more popular world but can never have anything more than the probability of their opinion in that greater world.

I think that direct realism 'proper' would have to be the view that perceptual relations have 2 and only 2 relata: the perceiver and the perceived. That is, no mental experience features as a relata within it (for then you automatically get indirect realism) — Clarendon

In the strict sense (ignoring quotes of whatever outlier opinions) perception is a foreign word to direct realism that introduces a Trojan horse fallacy if admitted.

In the case of the sparrows I find their behavior abhorrent, nature doesn't.
Because of that and other practical reasons I will not allow them on my bird feeder. But, you see, that is my judgment not nature's.
The hidden natural agent that might have spurred the sparrows on is random and probabilistic. Their randomly altered genes favoring murder of chicks of their peers probabilistically survives, although I can't even speculate how that might help their species. Bigger is not necessarily better in the city. It sure doesn't help them in my backyard.

To use the umbrella term of Natural (describing each and every thing that occurs in Nature, including 6 inch hailstones), while accurate, adds little beyond the label. — LuckyR

The idea of distinguishing artificial man-made from what is natural is useful in many ways.

As example, many large spherical rocks seen in a valley could be either monuments from a prehistoric civilization or sedimentary accidental rocks that rolled downward at the bottom of an ancient ocean that used to cover that land.

For the sake of this discussion, human acts that create artificial things can be phrased as human agency with or without intent. People are considered materially, socially, even morally responsible for their acts. Nature is an 'act of God' and animals are not held or should not be held responsible for any act or consequence. If a mountain slide buries my Swiss village who do we sue?

using the term natural to describe a particular behavior of a wild animal in it's natural habitat, identifies it's common behavior, unaffected by human intervention. — LuckyR

Who is to say what is common behavior for wild animals? Common behavior is everything each animal of a species does? Or is it what we happen to see them doing?

In the first example, an Unnatural thing would mean artificial or man-made, in the latter case unnatural would mean unusual or aberrant. — LuckyR

Unusual or aberrant according to who? If sparrows kill other sparrows what do we make of that?

Natural, in my understanding, is normal for nature. Normal, almost identical to common, can apply to nature as well as manmade systems. — LuckyR

Natural is just anything that happens without human, artificial intervention. Man-made systems are unnatural.

What is common is only what we as people come to expect in our circumstances within our life and time scale. 6-inch hale stones are natural but uncommon. So is snow in the Sahara.

Normal is a bullseye no dart ever hits — frank

That is a very powerful way of stating the crux of normalcy.
A dart is a material object with size that pokes out a disk shaped hole in a material plate.
But we or they pick the target each time by our or their latest standard of normalcy, and if that conventional dimensionless point or one-dimensional extent always shifts around anyway by its own nature, then if it was there, where is it now and how could I ever know?

It's abnormal to be normal

our times are still one of the cooler ones geologically speaking: there have been periods of time on earth that had flourishing life and much hotter temperatures. — ProtagoranSocratist

Geologically we are speaking in million-year or even billion-year time frames. Civilization only goes back thousands of years which on this time scale is hardly noticeable. Geologically we are and we are not, no matter. Global warming is only an issue to us because humanity, in a broad sense, is endangering its very frail short-lived outlier existence on a temporarily hospitable planet.

Recently I've tried a new approach to crack the Parmenides. If the Parmenides character is made to expand his world into Plato's Formal pluralism, what would he say? We have his original words from his Poem.

Parmenides's Proem concludes with lines that might be aimed at the relationship between Parmenides' realms of Reality and Opinion.

But nevertheless, you shall also learn “these things,” how the “accepted/seeming things” should/would have had (to be) to be acceptably, passing through [just being] all things, altogether/in every way.(C 1.31-32) (IEP/Jeremy DeLong trans.}

This seems to be confounding the three major alternatives in ancient philosophy. Protagorean subjectivity in the plural (accepted) or singular (seeming), Heraclitean flux and relativity (altogether or in every way), and fixed static Forms (things).

However, to the point, Plato's Parmenides appears to attempt a logical demonstration of this profound synthesis of Opinion in the second part of Plato's dialogue.

Does this make any sense? If so, How does this project to Platonic Forms?

that's enough to keep the markets really on the edge. — ssu

That pretty much characterizes the US markets. There is a high level of fear that flips the market trend almost daily. Smart people are gradually withdrawing from investing in individual stocks not knowing which tariffs will whack their industry next. There is definitely money to be made by the bears.

The free speech claim is just a smoke screen by his supporters. It's his other activities that got him notice. He will have his day in court, and then he will get his ass kicked out.

Found an info page on Chora (Khora) in Wiki, which looks good. — Corvus

I like the two well-chosen Plato quotes there from the Timaeus.

“Moreover, a third kind is that of the Khôra (χώρας), everlasting, not admitting destruction, granting an abode to all things having generation, itself to be apprehended with nonsensation, by a sort of bastard reckoning, hardly trustworthy; and looking toward which we dream and affirm that it is necessary that all that is be somewhere in some place and occupy some khôra; and that that which is neither on earth nor anywhere in the heaven is nothing." — Plato, Timaeus, 52a-b
"So likewise it is right that the substance which is to be fitted to receive frequently over its whole extent the copies of all things intelligible and eternal should itself, of its own nature, be void of all the forms. Wherefore, let us not speak of her that is the Mother and Receptacle of this generated world, which is perceptible by sight and all the senses, by the name of earth or air or fire or water, or any aggregates or constituents thereof: rather, if we describe her as a Kind invisible and unshaped, all-receptive, and in some most perplexing and most baffling partaking of the intelligible, we shall describe her truly."[4] — Plato, Timaeus, 51a

I complained before about the necessity of bringing a point of view to reading Plato. Even in the original, one can't tell whether a speech or argument is actually Plato's belief or just that of the dramatic speaker in the dialogue. Is the receptacle part of Plato's overall scheme or is it a tall tale from the Pythagorean sophist Timaeus? When it is emphasized as likely, is likely to be taken positively or negatively?

This sort of judgment needs to have its own justification on some basis, be it dramatic, psychological, political, historical, religious, or whatever might seem relevant to the reader. I try to base my reading on coherence to other things Plato said elsewhere in other dialogues hoping that his philosophy was logically founded.

My preference is for something like the SEP article Timaeus written by two experts who have a definite approach to Plato. Their view however is still only their view.

In its own right it is (part of) a totally characterless subject that temporarily in its various parts gets characterized in various ways. This is the receptacle—an enduring substratum, neutral in itself but temporarily taking on the various characterizations through traces of the four elements in it. The observed particulars just are parts of that receptacle so characterized (51b4–6). — D.Zeyl & B.Sattler

Could the quantum universe be in a possible world? Or would it be a legitimate existence in the universe? — Corvus

The quantum universe is just another description of the physical universe but at the smallest quantum level. Consequent observable that change at human scales are the cumulative effect of countless quantum events. Just as the river is the sum of all the waters flowing by another name. It isn't any existence but the entire makeup of the whole of what can be.

What is the World Soul? Do humans have souls? — Corvus

Here, my only interest in Plato's World Soul is as a rational intelligent agent that after the original divine origin, continues to create natural observable things by mixing definite finite forms with indefinite primal substantial elements. Of course, human agency, people with intelligent souls can do the same as craftsmen. This is part of the metaphysical mechanism the passes formal identity and properties to objects, and in turn recognizes things in this or that form as objects.

The quantum universe is proposed to be whole, and an intelligent agent in a Platonic sense. It is supposed to be acting instantaneously beyond our 3-D spacetime. Tempting sci-fi speculation but it hasn't been shown to be impossible partly because of real physics theories of extra space and time dimensions.

It sounds like Chora does things, moves, changes, generates imbued with souls and lives on, like God creates and time flows, but it may not exist in the material world for us to be able to perceive or sense. — Corvus

Yes. Quite different from an empty infinite space or a container of sorts.
Interestingly there is a modern quantum version of the World Soul. The idea is that the universe is quantum computer busy calculating its and our future

Cornford's framing of a Theory of the Forms assumes a level of explanation that may not be on offer. — Paine

Do you mean his explanation for the exclusion of Forms from the Theaetetus? Cornford was a unitarian with respect to Plato's underlying metaphysics and believed that beyond the many things said there was deeper coherence. He also consciously excluded later Aristotelian interpretative influence. There is a review (here).

Plato seems to have deliberately hidden his metaphysics by sparingly spreading it throughout the dialogues, I have the strange impression that since Plato was his own editor and publisher, he periodically revised earlier dialogues stashing key pieces here and there. Consequently early readers like Aristotle could genuinely be obsoleted without their awareness. Furthermore the Academics might have had a later more complete copy of the works than the Lyceum.

Cornford's 'Platonist' sought out the metaphysical fragments then reread the entirety with an unerring guidance from that knowledge. Unfortunately only advanced scholars have the mental capacity to follow that plan. Certainly not me.

One feature that does not appear in the pure substrate model is the "wet nurse" role of the "receptacle". — Paine

That opens up Pandora's box.
The demiurge creates natural things by informing the chaotic substrate. I say things that are images, copies of their forms, that become, move, change, and perish like the substrate, yet retain formal identity. Things interact by kind, and have identity and temporal properties that can potentially be sensed. Things are less real than their perfect Forms and cannot be known because they move and change constantly.

The receptacle must contain and nourish objective things.

What pops out is the puzzle of subjective sensation and the objects of perception as contrasted to the things of the chora.

A Platonic reading recognizes this distinction, an Aristotelian reading does not. Aristotle sees substantial objects where Plato sees dynamic things and perceived objects.

What is your definition, or rather, understanding of chora? — Corvus

A definition might be too strict for something that mostly does not exist to be defined, it is an extended boundless dynamic field of inter-penetrating proto-substances constantly moving and changing into each other. According to ancient physics, if substances are self-generating and self-moving then they are necessarily imbued with soul and must be alive in some sense.

Analytic philosophy cannot cross over the dictionary meanings of words, suppose — Corvus

If they did they would lose an objective common ground of communication. The lexicon has its own biases as well but where would we be without it? Plato resorted to dramatics, personalities, irony, and metaphors to paint over large gaps with a broad brush where the fine strokes of reason lacked.

I bought a few old books on Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Lucretius and Heraclitus recently, so will do some reading on them. — Corvus

I need to do the same. Boundless apeiron and fundamental material substances as arche originated with those early physicists and I often wonder what that lost book by Heraclitus would read like.

You make many cogent points in those posts that I have to think about as I write.

I take Gerson's point that a "likely account" does not refer to its "probabilistic" sense. — Paine

Describing chora as a place or as an extension is un-Platonic primarily because these are plainer ideas that stray too far from the complexities of text. Aristotle and Gerson attempt to assimilate what is taken to be Plato's word into their own simplified Aristotelian philosophical mindset. Plato is hard to read because the dialogues should force us to step outside of our practical self-serving schemas. If we don't take that step then we are left behind.

More importantly from my perspective, the metaphysical requirements of the chora as a theoretical entity override mere geometric (place) or dimensional (extent) considerations. The chora needs to be an indefinitely active maelstrom, a background that cannot be sensed in any way that randomly moves and changes itself and everything in it. Otherwise Plato's philosophy doesn't work for him.

The difficulty described by Timaeus is that the language of correspondence does not serve us as readily as it did in the other two models. — Paine

I agree with that take as it applies to chora and even to Plato's atomism. For one, the chora is too big and the atoms are too small to correspond to anything that we care to name given their ancient setting. OK, modern physics has caught up with language like universe, energy, forces, atoms and molecules but that cannot count except as conceptual crutches for us moderns.

The other difficulty is that third entity is prior to the other entities as a fundamental ground of natural being. — Paine

Yes, the chora must predate the gods and the entire creation story, just as the Forms must. Otherwise the demiurge has nothing to work with in creating the physical world, such as it seems. I'm not sure how that relates the heavens of the gods to the world though.

Wow an old thread — Corvus

A few years back I had to invade the library of a local seminary in search of an expensive Plato commentary. When I asked for help the young librarians instantly assumed that I was searching for God infusing Forms into Chora. So I figure this thread might be worth reviving.

Is it possible for philosophical interpretations on the original texts totally objective? — Corvus

The analytic philosophers of the last century tried to do that and they made amazing progress. But it left many readers wondering whether Plato was somehow lost in the process.

Would it not be inevitable that all interpretations are somewhat subjective? — Corvus

I don't see how that can ever be avoided if even the most solid translations mislead their readers in key passages of the text. Following up on previous comments,

I call upon God and beg him to be our savior out of a strange and unwonted inquiry, and to bring us to the haven of probability. — Plato, Timaeus, 48d, translated by Jowett

we must call upon God the Saviour to bring us safe through a novel and unwonted exposition [48e] to a conclusion based on likelihood — Plato, Timaeus, 48d, translated by Lamb

So now once again at the outset of our discourse let us call upon a protecting deity to grant us safe passage through a strange and unfamiliar exposition to the conclusion that probability dictates. — Plato, Timaeus, 48d, translated by Cornford

Let us ... call upon the god to be our savior this time, too, to give safe passage through a strange and unusual exposition, and lead us to a view of what is likely. — Plato, Timaeus, 48d, translated by Zeyl

Clearly we should now begin again, once we have called upon the god, our saviour, at the very outset of our deliberations to see us safely out of an unusual and unaccustomed exposition, to the doctrine of things probable. — Plato, Timaeus, 48d, translated by Horan

What's the difference and does it matter?
The sentence before this one belabored the perils of probabilistic guessing about the heavenly order imposed by a perfectly good god of reason. ("Remembering what I said at first about probability, I will do my best to give as probable an explanation as any other--or rather, more probable")
Therefore it is the Pythagorean theoretician who is in need of saving through divine inspiration and not us. God is not our savior but the savior of the true philosopher.

So, which translation should I start with?

I wonder if one could transcend the present time, when one is reading the past original texts. One will always read them from the stand point at he / she is in the time. One cannot be the original writers who lived 2500 years ago. — Corvus

Which is why it is only possible to misread Plato in one direction or another to a lesser or greater extent. Scholars' translations and readings are slanted as ethicist, moralist, mathematical, humanist, historical, literary, or holist. Each gives a picture yet none of them feel quite right for the others. Plato actively encouraged this diversity by exploring aspects of philosophy from the perspective of other philosophers (deliberately interpreted with a slant). I imagine his Academians were also vociferously divided.

only seven million deaths in the world and one million in the US — ssu

You're giving my calculator a headache

disabling agencies like the IRS, which is laying off 6000 more recent hires (made largely under Biden, I would guess) — BC

It would make sense for the DOGE to use AI to sift through administrative records of government contracts for suspected waste and corruption. Younger people with marketable skills and near retirees took the bonus and bailed out. They're eliminating social services as 'Marxist' and 'woke' agencies as promised to Trump supporters. But I can't tell how they so quickly single out individuals to be fired. If it is other than competence, is it by tweets? I imagine they're keeping all Trump supporters.