Galileo didn't conduct any experiments besides thought experiments — Xtrix

This is a ludicrous assertion. He conducted many thought experiments, yes, and he even got stuff wrong, but he was also a champion of observation and the application of maths to those observations. From wiki:

His work marked another step towards the eventual separation of science from both philosophy and religion; a major development in human thought. He was often willing to change his views in accordance with observation. In order to perform his experiments, Galileo had to set up standards of length and time, so that measurements made on different days and in different laboratories could be compared in a reproducible fashion. This provided a reliable foundation on which to confirm mathematical laws using inductive reasoning.

No, we don't. It's just not so simple, otherwise there wouldn't be work in the philosophy of science. — Xtrix

There's no work in the philosophy of science. It's already a matured school, and scientists at large hardly even use it. There's need for the application of philosophical thought within many of the theoretical fields, especially where exploring new ideas to test is needed, but ultimately those hypotheses must be fed through the bull-shit chipping bottle-neck of experimentation and reliable prediction.

To say that it's just a matter of empirical observation and experimentation does little good -- that's natural philosophy, too. The Greeks were doing that as well. Is archeology not a science because it doesn't have "sufficient experimental predictive power"? What about genetics or evolutionary biology? — Xtrix

Why didn't the Greeks get anywhere interesting beyond apriori mathematics and some masonry skills? They had some bright people, but the limited information they had - the limited observations they could make - resulted in a worldview that was perforated with bull shit.

Archeology is an interesting field, and archeologists readily accept that the inductions they make are more precariously hinged on available evidence (like the ancient Greeks they have much more limitations, but unlike the Greeks they understand this fact and refrain from bullshitting before the evidence arrives. If you're interested to know how archeology can yield predictive power, one facet is the ability to anticipate the presence and content of human artifacts. By having a model of human movement and evolution overtime, we may become able to make inferences about where ancient human groups are likely to have localized. We can also anticipate how one group may have changed over time by understanding how another group migrated into or through their lands. Projecting backwards is more difficult in terms of confirmation (because when we project forward, the future itself becomes confirmation).

And when was that, exactly? When did this notion take hold? The 17th century? 18th? 19th? Are you really so certain it was this notion that drove progress? So what was happening in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance? Or the Islamic Golden Age? Or Ancient Greece? Or even in Mayan astronomy, Babylonian mathematics, and Egyptian engineering? Was all this activity non-science? — Xtrix

Some of it may have been downright scientific, but if we're talking about the modern body of scientific knowledge, then it all needs to be checked by modern standards.

I don't have the answer to exactly when modern science was developed; it's still under development, and those developments come in the form of discoveries which open up new models, tools, and methods of observation and prediction.

Not really -- because we don't know what "it" really is. What's evolving, exactly? If you believe something, some discrete "enterprise" or "activity" has evolved which we label "science," then that's one way to look at it -- but again we're left with "What is science?" Well, if we take a look at the beginning of modern "science," in Copernicus and Galileo, and even in Newton, you'll find lessons that don't fit your current conceptions very well at all. Take Liebniz, even -- was he not a scientist? Was he a philosopher?

Remember, these categories didn't exist to Liebniz, Newton, or even Kant. They certainly didn't matter to Democritus, Archimedes, Aristarchus, or Euclid. — Xtrix

It's like you're objecting to the existence of a discrete contemporary organism by pointing to an evolutionary lineage of predecessors.Yes, science evolved, no, modern science is not constrained by its prototypical origins.

Speculation" about things -- thinking about them, trying to understand them, formulating hypotheses, making guesses, conducting creative thought experiments, etc. -- are simply what human beings have been doing for millennia. They go down many blind alleys, they're often wrong, theories get overturned and adapted, etc. This is true today as well -- we're no doubt wrong about many, many things. The Standard Model, quantum mechanics, mathematics, atomic theory, the Big Bang, not to mention neurology, psychology, and sociology, will go through many changes in the centuries to come. To look back on the Greeks and dismiss them as primitive, along with their "error-prone ontology" (whatever this means), is simply a common mistake. It's one you can make only if you truly believe there's a discernible and clearly-defined boundary between OUR "science" and superstitious speculations of the past.

Again, it's simply not that easy -- and completely unsupported by historical evidence. — Xtrix

When a good empiricist speculates, they do it for practical reasons, and they do not go on to accept the speculation without adequate experimental validation. This practice is what helps to ensure that scientifically accepted "facts" are very robust and consistent. This makes them fundamentally usable as building blocks for more complex models (and so on). Yes we get things wrong, but you're fundamentally misunderstanding (or just not perceiving) that the modern science is an observation/experiment/prediction demanding crucible compared to the science of old.

Eh, this is nonsense I'm afraid, and you know it. Just think about it for a minute. Take an example I gave: Aristarchus. Was he wrong? Was that not science? Was that superstition? Or maybe just "luck"? Was that not "getting anywhere"? What about Democritus's theory of atoms? Was Euclid a superstitious man? Did the Phoenician sailors, using the stars as navigation, get lucky in their calculations? Ditto the Egyptians, with their elaborate constructions of the pyramids, or the Sumerians and their ziggurats?

All these primitive, superstitious people -- without our modern sensibilities and "method" of science -- seemed to "get somewhere," I'd say. In fact they laid the foundations for much of what we currently know. — Xtrix

Democritus didn't lay the foundation for atomic science so much as he happened to guess more aptly than his peers. Until we actually get to modernity, atom's might as well have been Horton's Who's.

What are your intentions in trying to compare modern scientific standards to ancient ones? They're vastly different.

Science has no starting assumptions? That's just nonsense. See below. — Xtrix

Yes, the problem of induction is a thing. "How do we know that just because something has given us predictive power in the past that it will give us predictive power in the future"?... This is not a question that concerns me...

What "science of old" are you referring to, exactly? — Xtrix

Specifically, pertaining to the method itself, where rigid testability and reproducibility standards do not exist (i.e: where speculation reigns)...

What do you mean by "speculating about nature"? — Xtrix

Imagining the way the world could be, could work, has been, or will be, without conducting a single experiment to validate those imaginations.

Says who? — Xtrix

It's not an absolute rule, but things which have no consistent empirical validation tend to get systematically expelled from the body of scientific knowledge.

You present this as if you've stumbled on the true definition of science. But in reality, it's not at all clear what drives scientific knowledge -- especially if we don't know what science really is. — Xtrix

But we *do* know what science is (it's a body of concepts and models with sufficient experimental predictive power). We even know what it really is (induction via empiricism). You're free to suppose science as continuous and emergent thing, tracing roots through ancient times (and ancient fallacies), but its evolution is much more discretized than that. Before the notion experimental validation is how we should test scientific models really took hold, "science" had a hard time advancing. Shaking off the dead weight of superstitiously derived ontic assumptions has often made the difference.

You seem to be responding to my initial post -- but the rest of what you've written has almost nothing to do with it. I'm interested in the ontology of what's called "science," which seems to me to be bound up with a conception of nature. Thus I track the idea through history, to the Greeks and the word phusis (translated into Latin as natura and the root of "physics") -- which is in my title: φθσισ. The point is to explore this ancient Greek sense of phusis, as this was their word for being, and to see how it differs from our modern conception of being in science ("nature," the "cosmos," etc).

Talking about the inductive method isn't relevant here. — Xtrix

I have given you a compressed definition of what "nature" means in terms of modern science. Nature is the way things are as revealed by controlled and repeated experimentation and testing (consistent observations and predictions); nature is the destination and/or the cargo the cart is seeking, not the force driving its advancement. "Nature is my god" is not a serious or guiding attitude, other than to say the success of science relies on the universe actually containing consistent behavior that can be modeled, and all claims must be confirmed or disconfirmed with physical evidence/repeatable experimentation. If you want to contrast this with ancient opinion, rather than supposing gods may have whimsical or changing designs that need fancy and snow-flaked interpretations, we suppose that god doesn't roll dice.

Importantly, nature is the thing science is attempting to model; it cannot reason from nature or appeal to nature (the naturalistic fallacy). Speculating about the nature of things (meaning to say, making untested or unstable assumptions) is one of the cardinal differences between a primitive and error prone ontology like Aristotelian teleology (haphazardly assigning qualities, functions, purposes, etc...) and the modern scientific method. Aside from that, modern science eschews "meaning" and "why" in-favor for "observable cause", so on some level the comparison between ancient (and rather superstitious) ontologies and the ontology of modern science is apples to oranges. Ancient systems tend to include meaning or ethical components which are completely invisible to the lens of modern science.

The move from philosophical speculation to more strict empiricism is why modern science actually got somewhere.

Re-responding to the final paragraph of your post with this in mind

The analysis of this concept is very important indeed to understand our current scientific conception of the world, and therefore the predominant world ontology (at least non-religious, or perhaps simply the de facto ontology ). Does anyone here have an analysis to share, original or otherwise? Full disclosure: I am particularly struck by Heidegger's take, especially in his Introduction to Metaphysics. But other analyses are certainly welcome. — Xtrix

It's not necessary to understand Aristotle's teleology or Descartes doubt to understand modern science; science is necessary to understand science. I don't say this facetiously, it's the very crux of science itself: make no starting assumptions about what something is or the way things are, and instead use observation, experience,and systematic modeling/experimentation to gain predictive and therefore descriptive power. It's less about having a world-view colored by historical conceptions so much as it is testing presumptive worldviews.

Predictive power is ultimately the only signal of truth that we have. Comparing this to the sciences of old, much of it is comforting self-delusion and window-dressing derived to fit metaphysical prior assumptions.

Reasoning speculating about nature in the field of science and physics is done only to look for insight and clues that can lead to deeper discovery, otherwise they're putting the horse before the cart.

Science is entirely based on the empirical validity of induction. That is to say, experimental consistency with respect to prediction is the actual driver of scientific knowledge. The cart itself being hauled can be thought of as a static heuristic or set of useful models, and the horse that's actually doing the pulling can be thought of as the act of scientific exploration (conducting research, testing hypothesis, etc...).

Its all built around induction. If we keep getting the same accurate results when we actually test the predictions that scientific models imply, we increase our surety that the model is accurate. Another way of saying this is that we increase our confidence that applying the theory/model correctly will yield the expected results.

It’s not an accusation, I’m just contrasting it to my own ethics, which are more deontological. I’m suggesting this is where we might differ. — NOS4A2

I think that a retreat to framework appeal is a red herring in this case (though I did initiate meta-commentary by contrasting your willingness to accept increased death in the name of punitive justice, so don't take this as hypocrisy; I was actually making a rhetorical emotional appeal of my own). At one point we were debating withholding funding in terms of pragmatism... To cede the point that withholding funding will negatively affect the WHO, and that a negatively affected WHO can be reasonably expected to negatively affect health and safety (in the context of the current pandemic), is ostensibly to say that doling out punishment is more important than mitigating the present disaster.

Surely there is room in your deontological stack for a rule or principle that says "don't hamstring an emergency support service to conduct investigations and dole out punishments during the middle of an emergency"...

But in the end what difference would it make? If our moral frameworks can be haphazardly thrusted at others as sufficient argument and justification for our beliefs or actions, what's the point? Deontological frameworks and virtue ethics set out to achieve consistency and rational grounding, but ironically they just wind up creating a zoo of poorly and diversely justified cherries that can be randomly and hypocritically picked at any time. I mean... You didn't even bother to cite a rule, reason, or even rhyme that rationalizes your position, you basically just alleged that your convictions are different from my own.

The China response is well reported and recorded, filled with the typical communist censorship of its own people, the disappearing of critics, and the suppression evidence. The WHO, on the other hand, helped to spread this misinformation. It was late in declaring a public health emergency—after the virus had already spread to 18 countries—and spoke in glowing, servile terms about China’s response while doing so. It is so far up China’s ass that it embarrassingly dodged questions from Hong Kong reporters about excluding Taiwan.

It might not be the WHO itself that is to blame. It could very well be just the leadership. But one thing is for certain, our taxpayer dollars are funding this and this is not what we pay for. A holding on funds and an investigation is warranted. None of this would be necessary if the WHO didn’t launder China’s image at the expense of its own credibility. — NOS4A2

The WHO is an internationally funded organization that does not directly serve the USA's political interests. It is not the propaganda mouthpiece of either China or the USA. If the Chinese government officially reports the "results" of their investigation, then it is arguably the duty of the WHO to report them rather than to play political guessing games about state liars. The tweet you quoted merely reported relevant information, which included clearly stating the source.The WHO had no way of confirming or disconfirming the results of the investigation in any reasonable amount of time, so they just relayed the information.

But again, all of this is merely to say "WHO BAD, WHO BAD!". They're not perfect, and I'm sure they've made countless mistakes since the start of this pandemic, but we're not debating the WHO's performance, we're debating whether withholding funding is a sane thing to do in the middle of a pandemic.

Can you show that the WHO is causing more harm than good? If not, why should we trust Trump's gut instinct that the WHO should be fired?

You should try and moderate the information (especially from social media) that you are consuming. Many threads on this site are filled with exchanges of ridicule, and I'm sure facebook and twitter users are presently brimming with mutual and righteous indignation as well.

Sit around digesting this stuff all day and you're going to become stressed. If it is calm interaction you're after, find or create an intentionally quiet corner, and ask for reciprocity when and where necessary.(the tone of your own posts can easily determine the nature of responses).

This is one of the most stressful periods in human history in terms of absolute numbers. Never before have so many molecules of cortisol flowed through the veins of this many great apes. Obviously this is going to go to our heads; before deciding one's self rational, it's perhaps relevant to consider how experimental and fragile our rationality is in the first place.

I'm sorry to hear about your present state of depression though. I wish you a nice day as well...

I think the difference in my “ideology” is that I’m not into applying utilitarian principles. — NOS4A2

Utilitarianism is more palatable than virtue ethics run amok though, wouldn't you say? Why must the slaves be buried alongside the failed lords?

You could accuse any argument that appeals to saving lives as being utilitarian, but it's not a very persuasive counter-appeal (you might as well accuse the WHO of being too socialist). When we're dealing with broad, general, and hard to answer issues, utilitarianism often wins out even our legal system. No matter, after-all, holding people accountable and all that is much more important than putting our existing fires, right? (they're the arsonists who keep intentionally setting the fires, right?).

BUT WAIT! Wait just one stock-pickin' minute...

How do you know the WHO is corrupt, ineffectual, or derrelicted their duty before an investigation has been carried out?

Wouldn't we be rather stupid to compromise one of our defenses to an existing attack, even if it is not perfectly effectual?

If we withhold funding from the WHO, conduct the investigation, and then find that the WHO was actually acting responsibly and effectually, and that the funding cuts resulted in decreased performance, would we then be allowed to hold Trump accountable?

Arsonist?

China is an arsonist in this analogy?

Yes, withholding funds would affect its ability to function in the short term. — NOS4A2

Can't we have an investigation while also continuing to fund them? If you want the leadership to be held accountable, then hold them accountable; withholding funding from the organization does not hold leadership accountable.

In keeping with the fire analogy, you would shut down a component of the fire department, mid-blaze, on principle, figuring that accountability is more important than putting out the fire.

This seems to speak volumes about your ideology. Saving Trump's face is worth more than human lives?

Perhaps it's boredom, but there's something oddly satisfying about the contorted responses that must follow...

Like watching raw pasta extruded through a narrow and misshapen orifice...

Mostly I just want clear responses though, so that I have something solid to throw back when Donald inexorably flip-flops.

How does continuing to fund it resolve any of those issues? — NOS4A2

It doesn't resolve any of those issues, but you're not answering my question.

I am insinuating that withholding funding may comprise their ability to function in the short term.

Do you think that withholding funding from the WHO will not affect its ability to function in the short term?

Would you withhold funding from a fire-department during a period of extreme fire hazard in order incentivize them to work harder?

Here are some tangents for you to bounce off instead of answering the above:

What do structural and political failures have to do with anything? Are you advocating for a random fishing expedition? What's with the timing here? I thought witch hunts were bad? Why are investigations good when Republicans suggest them and bad when Democrats suggest them? Why can't we let COVID wash over the nation?

How does withholding its funding pending an investigation during a pandemic make it function more properly in the short term?

Yes. It’s in our best interest to have a properly functioning health authority, especially during a pandemic. — NOS4A2

How is de-funding them going to make them function any more properly in the short term? You're advocating market solutions to a non-market problem.

I voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces party because that's what the founders would have wanted. The current leopard is a highly successful face-eater. People are just jealous of his spots.

Several weeks later:

I never thought that leopards would eat MY face!!!!

For some laughs

Is the middle of a pandemic really the best time to withhold funds from the world health organization?

There is no important difference in the terms, broadly they're about what is "right and wrong", and how we should behave based on those facts. You're free to assume that normative ethics is just a fancy term for morality. Because meta-ethics can go any number of different ways, under some frameworks there is zero difference.

That said, you will find some people making formal distinctions in some cases. Usually they use ethics to refer to what we should or should not do (it's like a set of rules governing social interaction),and morality to refer to the individual process of figuring out what we should or should not do, or the capacity for ethical behavior in and of itself.

You can't do oversight with classified intelligence...

At least, you can't do it well...

The speed,complexity, scope, and sensitivity of most of the goings-on at various intelligence agencies renders comprehensive oversight implausible at best. The compartmentalization that is required in this kind of work basically creates a situation where intelligence agencies cannot even coherently oversee themselves.

One of the main reasons that it has to be this way is that these agencies are locked in existential conflict with every other intelligence agency (they all constantly try to hack, spy, and harm one another, even allies, because they operate as state enforcers/thugs). Deep down they really are trying to benefit their countries, and therein lies their endless and problematic moral justification. The down-shot of this is that they need to operate in vast shrouds of secrecy, lest they be exposed as targets for other state actors.

If you're interested in the subject though, I recommend looking into cyber-security and cyber threat intelligence. There's a really scary but neat-o world that consists of public security firms vs threat actors, where information about known hacking groups is gathered, newly discovered exploits are discussed and addressed, etc, and it bleeds heavily into the world of state intelligence.

It's exceedingly difficult to get someone to change a deeply rooted belief in real time, but sometimes it does occur.

More realistically, persuasive arguments tend to act over time by slowly wearing down confidence and giving rise to reflection and examination, until finally intellectual furniture gets spontaneously rearranged in the hush and dead of night.

If you ask people for their opinion, they might haphazardly form one right on the spot, and then argue to the death that this was their true and well reasoned perspective. People don't like to feel wrong, so we tend to just rationalize when necessary, but at some point, perhaps even without being consciously aware, our opinions change. Once there's sufficient emotional distance between our old beliefs/ our historical wrongness, we feel comfortable talking about how we graciously and intellectually evolved toward nuance....

If you really want to see someone transform in real time, then your argument needs to utterly encompass their own (your argument must be more persuasive in every possible way), and you've got to offer it to them as an alternative to their own position. It's more of a sales game than it is a matter of reason, logic, or philosophy. Most importantly, your position must come with all the same irrational or emotional cushions of your interlocutor's position, else it will be more comfortable for them to stay at rest. Focusing on the wrongness of their position almost never works because people would rather be wrong than be confused and uncomfortable; without an attractive alternative position or understanding which is robust enough to fully replace their own (and simple enough for them to learn it in a single sitting), it never happens in earnest.

Counter-intuitively, the more you focus on the wrongness of someone's position (as opposed to the superiority of an alternative position), they more stubbornly they tend to defend and cling to it. (As if they are committed to their own brand)...

Look me over, if you like what you see help out, if not, vote for the other Biden.

Are Americans really this stupid?

Something tells me that moneyed interests being afraid of Bernie had their hands in this...

P.S. Elizabeth Warren should go back to the republican party as their fucking season MVP....

P.P.S: Vote for the other Biden...

Bernie bowed out of the race today...

Congratulations everyone! Four more years of Trump!

We may not be getting the candidate we wanted, but we are getting the candidate we deserve!

it's a heuristic or a model that has predictive power over a range of content and circumstance.

What's with the logarithmic scale? (technically that scale would flatten any curve i think).

I've been wondering about when infections will peak in Canada and the U.S...New cases in New York started to plateau last I checked, which is a good sign that the peak is close.

Perhaps humanity will willingly work together to end the pointless repetition and suffering for future generations. — schopenhauer1

I don't have much to disagree with other than to say it's all a matter of opinion, but I thought I would point out that it is these kinds of crises that cause baby booms.

If your position holds, then it's almost an irony that as our mistakes and circumstances clarify and worsen -as the hole deepens- we inevitably start digging with greater fervor.

Of course, it's a necessary jerk from an evolutionary-survival perspective...

I wonder if COVID-19 will result in a baby boom...

People are trapped inside, some of them are in that particular the future is uncertain state.

Thoughts?

Oops, meant to type "Hillary" ;)

Fuck it, why not?

#Reptile2020

QM effects are already non-reversible...

I suspect that this is a precision related problem that manifests between quantum granularity and the continuous spectra Newtonian mechanics (and relativity) approximates the system as...

Perhaps one way to state this is that the magnitudes of forces (and the differences in them which are caused by smaller and smaller deviations in the evolving positions of the black holes) become extreme enough in this case that quantum states of underlying particles can have lasting effects, where otherwise they seem to cohere or converge toward linear behavior at great time and scale.

That depends on what knowledge is. We possess knowledge that we don't know we have. Have you ever forgotten something, only later to be reminded?

As usual with this topic (mind-matter) we throw about these terms without really understanding what we are saying, or missing in our explanation. — Harry Hindu

Granted the high level stuff is still up for interpretation as to how it works, but what I have laid out is the fundamental ground work upon which basic learning occurs. The specific neural circuitry that causes fixed action responses are known to reside in the spine, and we even seem them driving "fictive actions" in utero (before they are even born) that conform to standard gaits.

Forgetting and remembering is a function of memory, and how memory operates and meshes with the rest of our learning and intelligent systems + body is complicated and poorly understood. But unless you believe that infants are born with per-existing ideas and knowledge that they can forget and remember, we can very safely say that people are not born with preexisting ideas and beliefs (we may not be full blown tabula rasi, but we aren't fully formed rembrants either); only the lowest level functions can be loosely hard-coded (like the default gait, or the coupling of eye muscles, or the good/bad taste of nutritious/poisonous substances).

Larger brains with higher order thinking evolved to fine-tune it's behavior "on the fly" rather than waiting for natural selection to come up with a solution. You're talking evolutionary psychology here. In essence, natural selection not only filters our genes, but it filters our interpretations of our sensory data (and is this really saying that it is still filtering our genes - epigenetics?). More accurate interpretations of sensory data lead to better survival and more offspring. In essence, natural selection doesn't seem to care about "physical" or "mental" boundaries. It applies to both. — Harry Hindu

Evolutionary endowed predispositions have these complex effects because they bleed into and up through the complex system we inhabit as organisms (e.g: environment affects hormones, hormones affect genes, genes create different hormone, different hormone acts as neurotransmitter, non-linear effects emerge in the products of affected neural networks), but they are also constrained by instability. When you change low level functionality in tiered complex systems you run the risk of having catastrophic feedback domino effects that destabilize the entire system.

So then, why are we making this dualistic distinction, and using those terms? Why is it when I look at you, I see a brain, not your experiences. — Harry Hindu

Because we have to distinguish between the underlying structure and the emergent product. Appealing to certain concepts without giving a sound basis for their mechanical function is where the random speculation comes in to play. I minimize my own speculation by focusing on the low level structures and learning methodology that approximates more primitive intelligent systems. Ancient arthropods that learned to solve problems like swimming or catching fish (*catching a ball*) did so through very primitive and generic central pattern generator circuits and a low level central decision makers to orchestrate them. In term of what we can know through evidence and modeling, this is an accepted fact of neurobiology. I try to refrain from making hard statements about how high level stuff actually works, because as yet there are too many options and open questions in both the worlds of machine learning and neuroscience.

Also, you don't see my brain; you don't even see my experiences; you experience my actions as they express, which emerge from my experiences, as orchestrated by my brain, within the dynamics and constraints of the external world, and then re-filtered back up through your own sensory apparatus.

What about direct vs. indirect realism? Is how I see the world how it really is - You are a brain and not a mind with experiences (but then how do I explain the existence of my mind?), or is it the case that the brain I see is merely a mentally objectified model of your experiences, and your experiences are real and brains are merely mental models of what is "out there", kind of like how bent sticks in water are really mental representations of bent light, not bent straws. — Harry Hindu

We cannot address the hard problem of consciousness, so why try? We're at worst self-deluded into thinking we have free will, and we bumble about a physically consistent (enough) world, perceiving it through secondary apparatus which turn measurements into signals, from which models and features are derived, and used to anticipate future measurements in ways that are beneficial to the objectives that drive the learning. Objectives that drive learning are where things start to become hokey, but we can at least make crude assertions like: "pain sensing neurons" (measuring devices that check for physical stress and temperature) are a part of our low level reward system that gives our learning neural networks direction (e.g: learn to walk without hurting yourself).

There are a few obvious implications that come from understanding the 'low level" workings of biological intelligence (and how it expresses through various systems). I would say that i have addressed and answered the main subject of the thread, and beyond. A homunculus can learn to catch a ball if it is wired correctly with a sufficiently complex neural network, sufficient and quick enough senses, and the correct reward signal (and of course the body must be capable of doing so).

Wouldn't it be nice if we were vastly over-estimating the occurrence? If the tests give a false positive 3% of the time, and we rapidly increase the number of people we're testing, it would look like a rapid increase in infections during that time..

If only...

My province is declaring a pre-emptive state of emergency tomorrow. We have about 21 cases in the province, and the local government wants some legal standing to issue a curfew...

God I hope this cluster-fuck ends soon..

HUZZAH! My kindred!!!

Everything you said is bang on the nose!

The dimensionality reduction and integration of our sensory observations is definitely a critical component of prediction (otherwise there is information overload and quick impacts on upward efficiency and scalability).

My own project began simply as an attempt to make an AI spider (since then it has exploded to encompass all forms of animal life)... As it happened, spiders turned out to be one big walking super-sensitive sensory organ (all the sights, all the sounds, all the vibrations, etc...), which is to say they have incredibly dense and "multi-modal" sensory inputs (they have sight, hearing, vibrational sensing, noses on two or more of their legs, and sensory neurons throughout their body that informs them about things like temperature, injury, body position, and acceleration, and more). And to integrate these many senses, spiders have a relatively puny brain with which they get up to an uncountable number of interesting behaviors with an ultra complicated body (if their flavor of intelligence can be scaled up, it would amount to a powerful general intelligence). It's not just the sensory density and body-complexity, but also the fact that they actually exhibit a very wide range of behaviors. Not only can they extract and learn to encode high level features from individual senses, they can make associations and corroborate those features in and between many different complimentary sensory modalities (if it looks like a fly, sounds like a fly, and feels like a fly: fly 100%).

I could expound the virtues of spider's all day, but the point that is worth exploring is the fact that spider's have a huge two-ended dimensionality problem (too much in, too much out), and yet their small and primitive-looking nervous systems make magic happen. When I set out to make a spider AI, I didn't have any conception of the dimensionality curse, but I very quickly discovered it... At first, my spider just writhed epileptically on the ground; worse than epileptically (without coherence at all).



I had taken the time to build a fully fleshed out spider body (a challenge unto itself) with many senses, under the assumption that agents need ample clay to make truly intelligent bricks. And when I set a reinforcement learning algorithm to learn to stand or to walk (another challenge unto itself), it failed endlessly. A month of research into spiders and machine-learning later, I managed to train the spider to ambulate...

And it wasn't pretty... All it would ever learn is a bunch of idiosyncratic nonsense. Yes, spider, only ever flicking one leg is a possible ambulation strategy, but it's not a good one dammit! Another month of effort, and now I can successfully train the spider to run... Like a horse?



Imagine my mid-stroke grin; I finally got the spider running (running? I wanted it to be hunting by now!). It took so much fine-tuning to make sure the body and mind/senses has no bugs or inconsistencies, and in the end it still fucking sucked :rofl: ... A spider that gallops like a horse is no spider at all. I almost gave up...

I decided that there must be more to it... Thinking about spiders and centipedes (and endlessly observing them) convinced me that there has to be some underlying mechanism of leg coordination. After creating a crude oscillator and hooking up the spider muscles with some default settings I got instant interesting results:



It's still not too pretty, but compared to seizure spider and Hi Ho Silver, this was endlessly satisfying.

Over the next half a year or so, I have been continuing to research and develop the underlying neural circuitry of locomotion (while developing the asset and accompanying architecture). I branched out to other body-types beyond spiders, and in doing so I forced myself to create a somewhat generalized approach to setting up what amount to *controller systems* for learning agents. I'm still working toward finalizing the spider controller system (spider's are the Ferrari of control systems), but I have already made wildly good achievements with things like centipedes, fish, and even human hands!

(note: the centipede and the hand have no "brain"; they're headless)





These fish actually have a central nervous system, whereas the centipede and the hand are "headless" (im essentially sending signals down their control channels manually). They can smell and see the food balls, and they likey!



The schooling behavior is emergent here. In theory they could get more reward by spreading out, but since they have poor vision and since smell is noisy and sometimes ambiguous, they actually are grouping together because combined they form a much more powerful nose (influencing eachother's direction with small adjustments acts like a voting mechanic for group direction changes). (I can't be sure of this, but im in a fairly good position to make that guess).

They have two eyeballs (quite low resolution though, 32x32xRGB) each, and these images are passed through a convolutional neural network that performs spatially relevant feature extraction. it basically turns things into an encoded and shortened representation that is then passed as inputs to the PPO RL training network that is acting as the CNS of the fish (the PPO back-propagation passes into the CNN, making it the "head" classifier, if you will).

This observational density aspect of the system has absorbed almost as much of my focus as the output side (where my cpg system is like a dynamic decoder for high level commands for the CNS, i need a hierarchical system that can act as encoder to give high level and relevant reports to the CNS. Only that way can I lighten the computational load on the CNS to make room for interesting super-behaviors that are composed of more basic things like actually walking elegantly). I have flirted with auto encoding, and some of the people interested in the project are helping me flirt with representation encoding (there's actually a whole zoo of approaches to exhaust).

The most alluring approach for me is the hierarchical RL approach. Real brains, after-all, are composed of somewhat discrete ganglia (they compartmentalize problem spaces), and they do have some extant hierarchy thanks to evolution (we have lower and higher parts of the brain. Lower tending to be basic and older, evolutionary speaking, with higher areas tending to be more complexly integrated, and more recent acquisitions of nature). Sensory data comes in at the bottom, goes up through the low levels, shit happens at the top and everywhere in-between, shit flows back down (from all levels), and behavior is emerged. One evolutionary caveat of this is that before the higher parts could have evolved, the lower parts had to actually confer some kind of benefit (and be optimized). Each layer needs to both add overall utility, AND not ruin the stability and benefits of the lower ganglia (each layer must graduate the system as a whole). The intuitive take-away from this that we can start with basic low level systems, make them good and stable, and then add layers on-top to achieve the kind of elegant complex intelligence we're truly after. For most roboticists and researchers, the progress-stalling rub has been finding an elegant and generalized low level input and output approach.

Like with pecking, it's likely to be the case that features that distinguish good to peck targets (like seeds' shapes and sizes or bugs' motion and leg movements) from bad to peck targets become heavily impactful in the learning process, as once an agent has cottoned onto a task relevant feature, they can respond quicker, with less effort, and just as accurately, as features efficiently summarise task relevant environmental differences.

Edit: in some, extremely abstract, respect, feature learning and central pattern generators address the same problem; Imagine succeeding at a task as a long journey, central pattern generators direct an agent's behavioural development down fruitful paths from the very beginning, they give an initial direction of travel, feature learning lets an agent decide how to best get closer to their destination along the way; to walk the road rather than climb the mountain — fdrake

One of the more impressive things i have been able to create is a cpg system that can be very easily and intuitively wired with reflexes and fixed action responses (whether they are completely unconscious like the patellar knee reflex, or whether they are dynamically modulated by the CNS as excitatory or inhibitory condition control). But one of the trickier things (and something that I'm uncertain about) is creating autonomic visual triggers (humans have queer fears like tryptophobia; possibly we're pre-wired for recognizing those patterns). I could actually train a single encoder network to just get really good at recognizing stuff that is relevant to the critter, and pass that learning down through generations, but something tells me this could be a mistake, especially if novel behavior in competition needs to be recognized as a feature).

I'm still in the thick of things (currently fleshing out metabolic effects like energy expenditure, fatigue, and a crude endocrine system that can either be usefully hard-coded or learned (e.g: stress chemicals that alter the base tension and contraction speed of muscles)).

In the name of post-sanity I'll end it here, but I've only scratched the surface!

What does it mean for the chick to not know what it is doing at first? — Harry Hindu

It means that it has no prior experience of the thing it is doing, and also that the proximal cause of the thing is not its high level thoughts. After it gets experience of the thing it is doing, and figures out how to do it on demand, and how to refine the action to actually get food, then we might say "it knows what it is doing".

It seem to me that the chick is showing intent to feed, or else it wouldn't peck the ground. How do you know that what it does instinctively, is what it intends to do in it's mind? — Harry Hindu

The science of behavior calls them "fixed action responses/patterns". They're still somewhat mysterious (because neural circuitry is complex), but they're extensively studied.

When a female elk hears the mating call of a male, she automatically beings to ovulate. Does the female deer "intend" to ovulate? Does she "intend" to mate? i know you'll answer 'yes' to that last one, so what about in the case of a recently matured female deer who has never met an adult male, and never mated before. How does that female elk "intend" to do something that she has never experienced, does not understand, and doesn't even know exists?

The chick has never eaten before. It has no underlying concepts about things. In the same way that a baby doesn't know what a nipple is when it begins the nursing action pattern. We know because there is no such thing as being born with existing experience and knowledge; if we put chicks in environments without grains or bugs to eat, they start pecking things anyway (and hurt themselves).

Again, it's an action they do automatically, and overtime they actually learn to optimize and utilize it.

For an instinctive behavior - one in which it is not routed through the filtering of consciousness - what it does is always what it wants to do. It is in consciousness that we re-think our behavior. I'm famished. Should I grab John's sandwich and eat it? For the chick, it doesn't think about whether it ought, or should do something. It just does it and there is no voice in their mind telling what is right or wrong (their conscious). What is "right" is instinctive behavior. Consciousness evolved in highly intelligent and highly social organisms as a means of fine-tuning (instinctive) behavioral responses in social environments. — Harry Hindu

Why are you now making claims about "consciousness"? Are you trying to exclude chickens from the realm of consciousness?

Are chickens not highly intelligent and social animals?

Based on your theory, there is no reason to have a reward system, or intent. What would intent be, and what would it be useful for? — Harry Hindu

How come you have to look out for obstacles when you are driving or walking down the street?

Why do fishermen need to come up with novel long term strategies to catch fish when the weather changes?

How come we all aren't exactly the same, in a static and unchanging environment that requires no adaptation for survival?

"Brains" first emerged as a real-time response-tool to help dna reproduce more. DNA is a plan, and it can encode many things, but it has a very hard time changing very quickly; it can only redesign things generation to generation; genetically. Brains on the other hand can react to "real time" events via sensory apparatus and response triggers. If you're a plant that filters nutrients from the surrounding water, maybe you can use a basic hard coded reflex to start flailing your leaves more rapidly when there is lots of nutrients floating by.

But what if your food is harder to get? What if it moves around very quickly, and you need to actually adjust these actions in real time in order to more reliably get food?

That's where the crudest form of central decision making comes into play. Evolution cannot hard code a reliable strategy once things start to get too complicated (once the task requires real-time adaptation), so brains step in and do the work. Even in the most primitive animals, there's more going on than hard-wired instinct. There is real time strategy exploration; cognition. the strategies are ultimately boot-strapped by low level rewards, like pain, pleasure, hunger,and other intrinsic signals that give our learning a direction to go in.

What was the stimuli? If the stimuli was a visual or smell of the bug or grain that started the instinctive behavior of pecking, then what purpose if the reward? If it already knows there is a bug or grain via it's senses, and that causes the instinctive behavior, then what is the reward for if they already knew there was a bug or grain on the ground? — Harry Hindu

It can actually happen without any stimulus (sometimes it's a trigger mechanic with a stimulus threshold, a release mechanic, a gradient response to a stimulus, or even something that happens in the absence of a stimulus). Chicks will start pecking things regardless, but certain body positions or visual patterns might trigger it more often. But that said, randomly pecking is not good in and of itself; the action needs to be actively refined before chicks can do it well.

The reward is the taste of the bug itself. It gives the bird a reason to keep doing the action, and to do it better.

For anyone else who missed it, here's the short version:

The 'pecking' motion that some birds (but especially baby chickens) do is actually an automatic hard-wired reflex that gets triggered by certain stimulus. However the chick doesn't know what its doing at first, or why; it just thrusts its beak randomly toward the ground. Once it manages to snatch something tasty (like a bug or grain), it can start to optimize the pecking motion to get more "reward" (a hard wired pleasure signal that plays an essential role in the emergence of intelligence and intention).

If you didn't define "intent" or show how it has a causal influence on the brain, — Harry Hindu

This is an oxymoronic statement. Intention is generated by brains. Brains cause intention...

you didn't come close to addressing my earlier points that both you and TMF have diverted the thread from by bringing up one chicken who could walk after a botched decapitation. — Harry Hindu

It's clear you haven't read my posts...

You wasted your time. None of this addresses the questions I asked TMF. — Harry Hindu

Oh... I thought you asked if a decerebrated infant can walk before learning to walk. The answer is no, unless little or no learning is required for walking in the first place (this may actually be the case for some insects to get going). I also have explained why; the loose neural circuitry we come hard wired with only solves the problem part way, and conscious learning is very often required to refine a given action or action sequence (refined via the central nervous system responding to intrinsic rewards).

If you take my answer to your sarcastic question seriously, then it also answers some questions about "intent", which I won't hazard to define. If you're not interested that's alright, but I'm sure many others are, so please forgive my use of your post as a springboard for my own.

I wonder, if a child lost it's head before learning how to walk, if the child would be able to walk after losing it's head? Why or why not? — Harry Hindu

For humans the answer is almost definitely no, simply because we're super complicated. When children first learn to stand up, balance, and walk, they're doing it with conscious effort, and overtime they get better and better at doing this. We have more fine-control requirements than something like a chicken (it has a much lower center of gravity (and therefore more balance-plausible positions), including bigger feet and fewer muscles). I know that in adults balance can be handled subconsciously by central pattern generators (look at a time lapse video of someone standing "still", they actually sway back and forth constantly, which is caused by pattern generators correcting the skeletal muscles (like those in the hips and back) which directly affect balance (e.g: if your actual balance perception or your force/position sensing afferent neurons indicates a problem happening in a given direction, then a reflex can issue a correcting force until the problem is marginalized)).

For chickens, there is still early learning that must take place. The 'pecking' motion that some birds (but especially baby chickens) do is actually an automatic hard-wired reflex that gets triggered by certain stimulus (like looking down with the right body position, and seeing something shiny). However the chick doesn't know what its doing at first, or why; it just thrusts its beak randomly toward the ground. And once it manages to snatch something tasty (like a bug or grain), it can start to optimize the pecking motion to get more rewards.

The nursing/suckling motion performed by the the jaw muscles of human babies is another example. This is definitely a central pattern generator circuit being activated automatically (just by the touch receptors near the lips), but initially the baby has no clue what it is doing and cannot nurse effectively. It learns to adapt and modify the movements quite quickly (breast milk must be the bee's knees for a newborn), and this is what enables it to quickly learn the somewhat complicated and refined motor control for nursing. The same pattern generators probably get us babbling later on, and then are used for speaking more distantly.

Likewise with baby deer, they can stand up almost instantaneously,but not actually instantaneously. They still have to get the hang of it with some brief practice.

The hard wired starting patterns we have from birth are like very crude ball-park/approximate initial settings that basically get us started in useful directions.

CONTENT WARNING: Disturbing

This is video of a decerebrated cat (its cerebrum has been disconnected from its body, or damaged to the point of non-activity).



It is being suspended over a treadmill so that its legs are touching the substrate. As can be seen in the video, without any central nervous modulation whatsoever, the still-living peripheral nervous system can still trigger and modulate the central pattern generators in the spine to display a range of gaits.

Whether or not this would work with a kitten is the experiment needed to start estimating how much learning takes place in the spine and brain-stem itself throughout the lifespan of the animal (is it the higher brain that improves it control over the body, or do the peripheral body systems adapt overtime to better suit the on-going needs of the CNS (or, what combination of both?). Increasing the default coupling strength or activation thresholds of different neurons in these central pattern generator circuits can effectively do this). How much motor control refinement takes place, and where it takes place, certainly differs between very different species of animal. (insects, fish, quadrupeds, bipeds, etc...)

In summary, different bodies have different demands and constraints when it comes to motion control strategies. Centipedes don't need to worry to much about balance, but the timing between their legs must remain somewhat constant for most of their actions. Spider's worry a lot about balance, and they have even more rigid timing constraints between their leg movements (if they want to move elegantly). These kinds of systems may benefit from more rigidly wired central pattern generator (lacking spines, they still do have cpgs). Evolution could happily hard wire these to a greater extent, thereby making it easier for tiny insect brains to actually do elegant high level control. At a certain point of complexity, like with humans, evolution can't really risk hard-wiring everything, and so the cpg's (and the central nervous system controlling them) may take much longer to be optimized, but as a result are more adaptive (humans can learn and perfect a huge diversity of motor control feats). Four legged animals have a much easier time balancing, and their basic quadrupedal gaits are somewhat common to all four legged critters, meaning it's less risky to give them a more rigid cpg system.

Excellent post. But I've seen some of those spooky Boston Dynamics robot videos, and they're pretty darn good at freestyle running! — Wayfarer

Thanks!

Boston Dynamics has some quadruped robots that aren't too bad, but it's a much more stable and simplified body, and they're still quite fail-prone.

The humanoid robot simply cannot do freestyle running. All we ever get to see are the very best results on specific setups that they try over and over again. And to boot, they won't even talk about their underlying methods (cause it's embarrassing hard coded rules systems that is over-complicated, hard to generalize with, and they don't want a decade + of mind numbing effort to be stolen by competition)

You know that you can also do this? — BitconnectCarlos

What necessities should I sacrifice in order to roll dice on wall-street?

What are the least essential vitamins I wonder...

This is questionable. Traditional financial wisdom advises against timing the market, and instead riding out the storm. Of course in this case we may just need to make an exception (personally, I have sold most of my holdings). In any case, over the past few decades fund managers have not generally speaking outperformed the S&P. — BitconnectCarlos

If there wasn't gain to be had on average, nobody would be investing whatsoever. Outperforming the S&P isn't required. If performance is in the black then wealth will concentrate merely because most people have no position to begin with.

Am I missing something? One kind of concentration I'm worried about in this case is the bargaining power that businesses (and therefore workers) themselves lose during the recession (those that become more dependent on investment capital to adapt and outlast competition). Meanwhile, private owned (small) businesses either find private investors (same issue happens there) or they run the risk of bankruptcy. As bankruptcy occurs, market-vacuums open which can only be quickly filled by global corporations with the infrastructure required to do so.

I'm looking at a broad recession/depression like a series of industry shakeouts. There is risk and opportunity, but there is more opportunity for those who are already well positioned, and much more risk for those who are not.

Paycheck to Paycheck with no health insurance in America is not well positioned...

I feel like we need to define "affected" here a little better. On one hand, the wealthy have lost more than the poor in dollar terms this past week by far. Generally speaking, it seems like people are getting knocked down a peg - so everyone becomes less wealthy. On the very bottom of the social ladder you have the homeless who probably aren't affected by this very much at all. But above them are the poor who are now in a serious situation and threatened with homelessness. The middle class now risk becoming poor in a recession and the wealthy may risk becoming middle class or less wealthy.

If the rich are trying to time the market then they have more to gain and also more to lose if they mistime it. I think if everything were to crash we'd all be more equal, relatively speaking. You would just have a ton of wealth destroyed and everyone would be poor. Even if a rich person did time the market well who would buy his products? — BitconnectCarlos

This is a good point. I think relativism holds true in this case.

Stealing a billion dollars from Jeff Bezos or mayor-what's-his-face is actually less of a crime than stealing 1000$ from a family that has less than 50k savings (which is the vast majority of them).

The closer someone is pushed toward the bottom, the exponentially worse their living conditions seem to get. Since basic nutrition is already on the concern-table for many American families, I'm confident that the breaking point isn't actually that far off. Maybe we'll just get away with some thousand dollar Trump checks; stretch-marks that remind us of a really shitty time. Or maybe global problems are about to stack themselves against us. What if there's another disastrous hurricane event this September? Or several? What if there's a problem with the flow of that sweet sweet black stuff (many states would love to pull some shit against the petro-dollar, and global crisis of any kind is an opportunity to do so).

...

The world really needs to start reassessing its "in this together-ness", because the rapidly changing future and future prospects of our society promises to filter us out of existence if we don't.

Wealth de-concentrates during depressions. We haven't had one in a while, so I'd easily believe we're at a peak. — frank

Does it manifest as symptom or as a cure?

And what happens when the depression ends?

I'm willing to be educated here, but it's not easy to draw analogies to historical events (things can go both ways...).

It seems like you're saying wealth aggregates until shit hits the fan and the distribution becomes untenable (maybe its called a depression).

Are you with me on the subject of wealth redistribution then? I've been arguing for UBI for years...

I'm working on a fairly advanced AI project. It has quite a lot to say about the notions in this thread...

@StreetlightX

You're right to say that these kinds of problems are not necessarily solved via computation. The very structure of our bodies and the environment (directional gaze/perspective + 3D motion) make it so that we can just line up a few "values" (the horizontal displacement of the ball with respect to one's own change in velocity in this example) to intercept the ball...

However...

Much more trivial than learning how to catch a ball is learning to control one's limbs in the first place. Running involves coordination and sequence timing of hundreds of individual muscles, and running smoothly requires high-speed feedback reflexes and modulatory signals both from the external environment (like when your foot touches the substrate) and from different parts of the CNS.

Running is actually a much more complicated problem than just catching a ball (catching is a brief episode with very specific goals and requirements) because running requires very fine coordination of the entire body. Staying balanced, applying the rightforce ratios, timing our contractions, and responding to perturbations is the complexity that prevents us from creating good humanoid robots. Yes, Boston Dynamics spent ten years making a hard coded algorithm that can run on a very specific course that it has been optimized for, but it cannot *run in general* (meaning if you change the course slightly or introduce anomalies, it will fail).

A common way to describe this problem is to call it "the curse of dimensionality". Imagine that our muscles are controlled by a series of dials that determine contraction strength. There are about 640 knobs that each control individual muscles in the human body. Almost any random combination of settings on these knobs will result in seizure like behavior. The person would fall over and begin writhing randomly (and probably injure itself in the process). Because there are so many individual values, and because changing one of these dials can drastically change what happens to the body (example:walking would be a specific sequence of dial settings, but if you suddenly activate a random muscle while walking, it might cause the body/agent to fall over or fail), figuring out how to correctly manipulate these dials for good motion patterns is extraordinarily difficult. (the problem space is too large to search with regular machine learning algos, and it's also too complex to have the motion rules hard-coded by hand).

This brings me to the spine and "central pattern generators". These are neural circuits that hard-code primitive and basic motion patterns (from utero), and this essentially biases out a large portion of the problem space referred to earlier. Exmaple: most walking patterns are very similar, even across different species of animals.The fundamental base of the pattern can be more or less hard coded in a primitive way with these pattern generators, and this gives the new-born agent an obvious starting point when it is learning to walk. Ontop of this, these central pattern generators can be hooked up with autonomic reflexes that essentially solve part of the walking problem automatically (example: they can apply greater force when they receive a signal that one of the legs or feet are stuck,which can be based on rudimentary proprioception signals).

Chickens can run with their heads cut off (because the pattern generators in their spine are already wired and optimized for running) and baby deer can stand up almost instantly for the same reason. This is why when we ourselves want to walk or run, we don't have to think about each and every muscle, or each and every foot fall; we just think a high level thought "run", and our lower brain and spine basically sorts the rest out for us.

In other words, the non-intelligent body (the structure of the body, the way the reflexes are wired up, and the default spinal systems that simplify control for the CNS) is actually a fundamental part of higher intelligence. Relating this back to the ball-catching problem, the only reason that we're physically dexterous enough to even contemplate catching a ball is because the unconscious parts of our brain and body do most of the work for us.

Another ramification of this realization is that it's unreasonable to expect current neural network architecture to be able to express itself with broad/general intelligence when it is given a complex set of outputs to control.

How can an agent learn to speak if controlling the voice box is too complicated? How can it paint or play soccer if the problem of ambulating an arm and a leg is beyond the ability of our best networks?

How can an agent learn to communicate using language if it cannot learn and relate language-encoded concepts using the myriad of other senses that may be required for experiencing the concept or thing being described? For example, how will a language transformer ever understand what a cup actually is if it has no experience of 3d space? If it has never explored or touched a cup? Can it truly understand cups if it is too far away from a thing that could actually use one?

We see all kinds of wonderfully good results coming out of machine learning, but they're all stupendously narrow functions. We can train an agent to identify animals within images, or we can train it to balance a ball, but not both. We cannot yet integrate these different intelligence into a single AI with any degree of elegance whatsoever. We're still behind in this respect because we have yet failed to comprehend how animal intelligence is built from the bottom up in the first place. Philosophically inclined ML devs (especially) only seem to concern themselves with high level cognition where concepts and ideas are already there to be played with, having no sweet clue where they really come from beyond "it's the magic of end to end learning", and hence they get nowhere but to produce lofty theories about how it all might work (they're in for decades of speculation).

Nope. Let dead dogs rest in peace...

Aristotle's primitive "teleology" approach to ontology is also inherently bound up in his approach to ethics. It haphazardly assigns purpose from form or function, and hails itself as the fullest and most true understanding there is to be had. It's quite popular among theologians wishing to argue ethical points on the basis of intelligent design.

Logic itself is wonderful, but we've progressed immensely since Aristotle; keep the cave allegory, bin the rest.(oops that's Plato). Keep.... his memorable quotes?

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
― Aristotle, Metaphysics

Huzzah!

Thread fulfilled!