Rabbit Killer
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Thoughts within thoughts make us human. Liz Else, associate editor (Image: Ivo Berg (Crazy-Ivory)/Flickr/Getty) Cogito ergo sum - I think, therefore I am - was coined by René Descartes in 1637. He was struggling to find a solid philosophical basis for how we know about reality and truth. This is also turns out to be of the most famous examples of recursion, the process of embedding ideas within ideas that humans seem to do so effortlessly.
So effortlessly and so skilfully, in fact, that it's beginning to look like the one true dividing line between animals and humans that may hold up to close scrutiny. That's the hope of Michael Corballis, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His new book, The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization, is a fascinating and well-grounded exposition of the nature and power of recursion. In its ultra-reasonable way, this is quite a revolutionary book because it attacks key notions about language and thought. UNetbootin - Homepage and Downloads. René Guénon. René Guénon (November 15, 1886 – January 7, 1951), also known as Shaykh 'Abd al-Wahid Yahya, was a French author and intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from metaphysics, "sacred science"[1] and traditional studies[2] to symbolism and initiation.
In his writings, he proposes either "to expose directly some aspects of Eastern metaphysical doctrines",[3] these doctrines being defined by him as of "universal character",[4] or "to adapt these same doctrines for Western readers [5] while keeping strictly faithful to their spirit";[3] he only endorsed the act of "handing down" these Eastern doctrines, while reiterating their "non-individual character".[6] He wrote and published in French and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
Biography[edit] René Guénon was born in Blois, a city in central France approximately 100 miles (~ 160 km) from Paris. Writings[edit] Some key terms and ideas[edit] [edit] Leonard Cohen - Everybody Knows. Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. A sequence on how to see through the disguises of answers or beliefs or statements, that don't answer or say or mean anything.
Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions is probably the most important core sequence in Less Wrong. Posts in the sequence are distributed from 28 Jul 07 to 11 Sep 07. Main sequence Making Beliefs Pay Rent (in Anticipated Experiences) Not every belief that we have is directly about sensory experience, but beliefs should pay rent in anticipations of experience. Belief in Belief Suppose someone claims to have a dragon in their garage, but as soon as you go to look, they say, "It's an invisible dragon! " Bayesian Judo You can have some fun with people whose anticipations get out of sync with what they believe they believe. Professing and Cheering A woman on a panel enthusiastically declared her belief in a pagan creation myth, flaunting its most outrageously improbable elements. Belief as Attire Focus Your Uncertainty The Virtue of Narrowness Your Strength As A Rationalist. Uncleftish Beholding. Uncleftish Beholding (1989) is a short text written by Poul Anderson.
It is written using almost exclusively words of Germanic origin, and was intended to illustrate what the English language might look like if it had not received its considerable number of loanwords from other languages, particularly Latin, Greek and French. The text is about basic atomic theory and relies on a number of word coinings, many of which have analogues in modern German, an important scientific language in its own right.
The title "uncleftish beholding" calques "atomic theory". The text begins: For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life. The vocabulary does not completely derive from the Anglo-Saxon word-hoard. See also[edit] Anglish References[edit] External links[edit] Linguistic relativity. Hypothesis of language influencing thought Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition.
One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world.[1] Various colloquialisms refer to linguistic relativism: the Whorf hypothesis; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis ( sə-PEER WHORF); the Whorf–Sapir hypothesis; and Whorfianism. The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history.[3] The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. Although common, the term Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is sometimes considered a misnomer for several reasons. Ancient philosophy to the Enlightenment [edit] Following Plato, St. German Romantic philosophers Johann Georg Hamann Wilhelm von Humboldt Boas:
E-Prime. Some scholars advocate using E-Prime as a device to clarify thinking and strengthen writing.[1] For example, the sentence "the film was good" could not be expressed under the rules of E-Prime, and the speaker might instead say "I liked the film" or "the film made me laugh". The E-Prime versions communicate the speaker's experience rather than judgment, making it harder for the writer or reader to confuse opinion with fact. History[edit] D. David Bourland, Jr., who had studied under Alfred Korzybski, came to the idea of E-Prime as an addition to Korzybski's general semantics in late 1940s.[2] Bourland published the concept in a 1965 essay entitled A Linguistic Note: Writing in E-Prime (originally published in the General Semantics Bulletin). The essay quickly generated controversy within the general semantics field, partly because practitioners of general semantics sometimes saw Bourland as attacking the verb 'to be' as such, and not just certain usages.
Rationale[edit] Allowed words[edit]
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