Where or how did you find her ? — Amity

Living in Italy has its advantages. She's all over the waves here... I posted about her as a response to your posting Zuchero. She's been in that league of major Italian pop stars for a decade or so. She's a classically trained cellist, father Moroccan (hence the Muslim name), mother Milanese. Raised in housing projects around Milan; true grit.

The first song I heard of her was this one, not the deepest song lyrics I ever heard but there's attention to the human condition, and a few haiku type verses which I liked. It's about how time affects people, again not the most original topic but an important one nevertheless.

it still retains a kind of old worlde charm. — Wayfarer

This text is a pleasure to read. Elegant, amusing and precise. Seems like the writings of a true gentleman.

Should anyone here wish to argue definitions, they're in the wrong thread. — creativesoul

Excellent rule.

Can't get enough of Malika Ayane.

Adesso e qui (nostalgico presente) (live unplugged)

Well, again, the science popularizers are the extreme minority of real actual scientists. — Dharmi

Not just talking of those writing books. I'm just describing the approachable, passionate scientist type.

Scientists don't know anything at all about the world outside of the very narrow field they've specialized in. Which is fine by me, it's just not fine to those who need science to be an infallible oracle of Delphi. They cannot accept that. — Dharmi

There are many marvelous scientists who do a great job, and often manage to share the results of their work with much passion, because they care, but also the necessary humility, because they care. And one can learn a lot from them. Gould for instance.

Then you have the type that goes around telling non-scientists that they know nothing worthwhile because they never entered a science lab, and if they did they couldn't use the instruments... It's only the latter type that I call "glorified lab technicians". They tend to be quite jealous of their exclusive access to truth, and from them, the common man can learn very little.

More Celtic?

LOL

Okay, German?

(This is my last try)

You a Scot?

:-)

The Philosopher's Zone is a great show. — T Clark

Yes, it was well made. Balanced, inquisitive but sympathetic, and with some pace and flow in providing a broad overview.

Where are you from Amity?


Now for something lighter, though still surprisingly philosophical.


A Storm

If you catch yourself laughing
Only you know why
Like an infection passes
From you to the next guy

Freedom is a simple concept
If you don’t give up on its complexities

Whether it’s forever, a day,
Or just for a moment,
Whether it seems risky,
Whether it's by joke, by mistake or by miracle
As long as it’s a storm
A storm

To take time away from I don’t know what
Isn’t so difficult
It remains unknown however
Just how much you can handle losing

Freedom seems formidable
Like a sleeping volcano

Whether it’s forever, a day
Or just a moment,
Whether it seems risky,
Whether it's by joke, by mistake or by miracle
As long as it’s a storm
A storm

Freedom is a simple concept
If you don’t know what it means

Thanks for Juliette. She passed away recently.

One last piano piece, and then I promise something more joyous.


One of Those - Benabar

Here, what are you doing here?
It's me, it's Nathalie
What, you don't you recognize me?
Why, you and I...

We were in high school together
It's true, I have changed
I've got children, a husband
What? you look surprised...

I was not destined
To a tidy life
I was lost
My husband found me

I was one of those
Who never say no
One of those easy girls
Whose name gets forgotten

I was not the pretty one
No, I was her girlfriend
The one you barely saw
Called me "Something"

I was two years older
Maybe two years too old
And I loved boys
Maybe a little too much

Of course you had had
Dozens of conquests
That no one had ever seen
Always during the holidays...

For many of you [boys]
I was your first time
Of those who matter
But not that much

I was not one of those
Who is being courted
Me, I was one of those
Who already agree

You would come to my house
But the next day
You'd refused in public
To hold my hand

When you would kiss me
Always behind closed doors
I knew why
So that no one could see us

So I closed my eyes
Hard enough to split the eyelids
While to watch out
You kept yours open

I repeated to myself:
"I must not fall in love"
You thought to yourself:
"It must not be known"

But once in my arms
Your breathless whispers
It was for me, just for me
That they were intended

Entwined into you
Breathing your hair
I know it, I affirm it
You loved me a little

Some fall in love
It's pure, it elevates them
I was falling in love
Like one falls from a chair

And proud to have done it
You were holding conference
A mouse that you dissected
My body for the science

I was feeding
Your barracks jokes
Which you thought manly
You little cavemen

To have for me
One word of tenderness
Appeared to you
Like the worst weakness

You were boasting
Speaking like experts
Forgetting that in my arms
You looked far more lost

And the other girls
Perfidious little saints
Would have shaved my hair
In another era

Those who are used
To be cajoled
Who ignore loneliness
Whom nothing can console

Thanks, it means much to me. It is a beautiful song.

Et tant pis pour vos fesses = too bad for your ass

It is tender but also cruel, or rather, real. In the end, she loves them but ils passent pour des cons. She fondly describes what others call losers or dreamers.

I hate the world today
You're so good to me
I know but I can't change
Tried to tell you
But you look at me like maybe
I'm an angel underneath
Innocent and sweet

Yesterday I cried
You must have been relieved
To see the softer side
I can understand how you'd be so confused
I don't envy you
I'm a little bit of everything
All rolled into one

I'm a bitch
I'm a lover
I'm a child
I'm a mother
I'm a sinner
I'm a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I'm your hell
I'm your dream
I'm nothing in between
You know you wouldn't want it any other way

So take me as I am
This may mean you'll have to be a stronger man
Rest assured that when I start to make you nervous
And I'm going to extremes
Tomorrow I will change
And today won't mean a thing

I'm a bitch, etc.

Just when you think you've got me figured out
The season's already changin'
I think it's cool you do what you do
And don't try to save me

I'm a bitch, etc.

Isn't science precisely that combination of empiricism and rationalism?

BTW, this ABC podcast provides an interesting overview of Collingwood's life and thought.

Just like everything else in the world, you know enough about that thing (person), you can understand how they work (think) and predict their behaviors. — Harry Hindu

Indeed, one could even say that people are easier to understand and predict by other people than, say, electrons. This being said, people can also dissimulate their thoughts. You can never be 100% certain that a given report is genuine and truthful. So there is still some privacy to human thoughts, an optional form of privacy: you chose what to publish, and you never publish (make public) every single thought you happen to have.

That's a good point: we can never know the consequences of our actions in advance, yet people have to make choices in real time. And they ask themselves these moral questions.

Pragmatically speaking, this often implies they go by either their emotions or some set of rules that simplify decision making. Science cannot provide an answer about 'oughts'.

What should be done is irrelevant and imaginary. — Harry Hindu

I suppose you've never found a baby abandoned in a trash dump. These things are rare nowadays, though they still happen. Back in the days of the Roman empire, it was a constant occurrance. And people had to make such choices. "Do I let this baby die or do I rescue him or her?" It was not an imaginary question but a real and frequent one.

The mind, like everything else is both a cause and effect. So the state of some mind is both caused by the state of the world, and the mind can be the cause of some state in the world. That is what I said. — Harry Hindu

I agree with that.

Octopuses and cuttlefish can count.
— Olivier5

Or, respond to stimuli in accordance with what we categorise as numerical. — Wayfarer

Another way of saying the same thing, no?

Ask ‘em what a prime number is. :-) — Wayfarer

Unfortunately I don't speak their language. :-) As you must be aware of, many people do not know what a prime number is, and they still know by and large what a number is or isn't. Granted that octopuses may not reach the same proficiency as humans in manipulating numbers. Granted too that one can find infinite puzzlement and wonder in the smallest thing, even in the number 2 (or even better, the number 1!) and that definitions are an endless game. ranted therefore that there is legitimately such a thing as the philosophy of mathematics.

However, I still maintain that it is irrational to consider a question about what numbers are as "pernicious". For one because the adjective "pernicious" is very emotional and judgmental, not rational. For two because all questions in philosophy could be considered "pernicious". In fact Hacker himself, in the paper quoted by , concludes that:

It has generally been assumed that the concept of the human body is unproblematic. But that is wrong.

There is a breed of philosophers who think that their job is to deconstruct concepts, show how they cannot possibly mean anything, and leave every body confused. That's one way of taking the "linguistic turn", I guess. Another is to use the tools we have, including concepts, to try and make sense with them.

It ends our hopes of actually determining the future, but it doesn’t end the idea that it is determined. — khaled

If we cannot determine the future, the future remains indertermined, at least by us. Whether somebody else, like God, can determine it is immaterial to anything.

With strong emergence, you can’t do that. Which is why I think it’s magical bullshit. — khaled

For me, it is just the accumulation of many weakly emergent events, and nothing more complicated than that.

Sure, keep fantasizing that you too could have written Critique of Pure Reason. I could have painted like Picasso too but I went into accounting instead.

You think scientists are the only ones entitled to facile comtemp of other folks?

Way I see it is it is the only way out for a dualist who wants to respect the science — khaled

Been chewing on this. True that epiphenomena are conceived as fundamentally different from phenomena, like two different substances. So I agree with you that epiphenomenalism is a dualist theory.

they're just as likely to have got there themselves — Isaac

That's speculative. Most scientists don't try and think too hard, in my experience. Glorified lab technicians. A lot of them have no clue why they do what they do. They just go along with the motion and get the paycheck.

I don't think determinism/indeterminism matters much. — khaled

Note that it is a metaphysical question. And yet there are generations of scientists who fetishized determinism, and still today, more than a hundred years after the double slit experiment... So scientists too do metaphysics.

The distinction between strong and weak emergence makes no logical sense. There is no qualitative difference here. Strong emergence is just the cumulative effect of much weak emergence.

Numbers are simple stuff? I disagree. — norm

Octopuses and cuttlefish can count. I guess they would agree with me that numbers aren't that complicated. To each his capacity for abstraction. I suppose any annal analytic philosopher could spend three hundred pages trying to clarify the number 2, but that is philosophy for computers, and only fools care for that.

Modern scientific observations don't discard determinism. — khaled

Actually they do, but believers still believe!

Reductionist? Just curious. — khaled

Gods forbid! Emergentist, if that's a word

Your "egg of consciousness" is different from most people's because you don't say "the mind is non physical" or anything like that. — khaled

That is correct.

There is no evidence we should care for babies though, that much is true. We do it for other reasons than strictly material. And therefore, not all social construct can be evidence-based. Some are a priori stated.
— Olivier5

And when an a priori assumption clashes with modern findings which should we favor? — khaled

No scientist is going to prove to you in a lab whether or not you should dump a baby in the trash. It's not a scientific question but a social and moral question.

As for old assumptions that do clash with modern scientific observations, well, they should be discarded I suppose. Like materialism and determinism.

You seem to be arguing against your own point here as you clearly consider our modern ideas of the sanctity of life better, that the Roman idea should be discarded. — Isaac

There is no evidence we should care for babies though, that much is true. We do it for other reasons than strictly material. And therefore, not all social construct can be evidence-based. Some are a priori stated.

Some models are rubbish. — Isaac

Of course they are. You're beating around the bush.

Some say nothing.

...you missed the option that some might not be even improvable (ie be irredeemable nonsense). I suppose you could stretch the meaning of 'improvable' to include changing almost every single aspect but... — Isaac

Some social constructs may be based on insufficient empirical evidence but it does not make them total nonsense. They mean something to people. For instance, modern people tend to believe that the life of a baby is worthy of care and protection. It means something to them when a baby dies. Good old Romans disagreed, and routinely abandoned their unwanted newborns on trash dumps, as not yet human anyway. I suppose one could argue the case either way. There is no empirical evidence that one should care for babies. It's a social construct. At best a feeling, right?...

So I don't think you can make the omelette of this particular improvement without breaking some eggs. — Isaac

I wouldn't break the egg of my own consciousness for any omelette, that you very much. You do what you want with yours.

Start here, you get epiphenomenalism; start there, you don’t. — Mww

I get to the same conclusion wherever I start: epiphenomenalism is for the epiphenomenal among us, those of us who have no impact on anything whatsoever and are quite happy about their own irrelevance. The theory may logically be true for them, as a self-fulfilling prophecy is: they don't matter because they don't want to. But otherwise, it is logically self-contradictory.

That's linking one controversial word to an even more controversial word, — norm

If you want to do philosophy, you have to use concepts. A philosopher who thinks that "concept" is a controversial concept is like a plumber who is not quite sure about the advantages of tap water.

There's no question that we can use both words in practical life with no problem ... — norm

Thanks for saying that; I was afraid something awful would happen to me for daring to mention the concept of "concept" publicly on a philosophy board...

... but when we play the game of metaphysics and try to make some concept (whatever those are exactly supposed to be) absolute, [fizzle, endless confusion].

Who spoke of anything absolute, or of any game? I repeat: To ask what sort of entity is a number is not any more pernicious than to ask what sort of entity is a chair. Let's not get confused by numbers. Or by chairs. These are the simple stuff.

With respect to epiphenomenalism, science may eventually falsify the premise, empirically, but it is currently viable as an explanatory thesis, metaphysically, merely because we don’t possess knowledge sufficient to negate it, and while it violates the principle of cause and effect physically, it stands as non-contradictory from a purely logical domain. — Mww

If epiphenomenalism is true, then epiphenomenalism is an epiphenomenon.

Why must those be the only two options? By far the majority of work is in deciding which models are useful, coherent and which aren't. — Isaac

That is the first option: the attempt to makes sense of social constructs (or mental processes) is potentially useful because social constructs (or mental processes) are sometimes reasonable, useful and improvable. In other words, we are talking of a non-eliminative theory of social constructs (or non-eliminative neurology).

You've just repeated more historical facts, none of which have any bearing on the matter of whether science is necessarily dependant on philosophy. The question is not whether it just so happened to have emerged from it. — Isaac

That was never the question, to my knowledge. The question was: do philosophers influence scientists. The response is yes, they do. A lot.

Interested in a reading group, or another thread? — creativesoul

Sure, I'm interested. Grateful for being introduced to Collingwood, had never heard of him but I like what I read so far. He is very readable.

Either there is a causal relationship of your mind with the world or there isn't. If there is then the relationship between cause and effect is information and effects (the state of your mind) carry information about their causes (the state of the world just prior to some mental state like the state of some internet philosophy forum post as you begin to read it). — Harry Hindu

I agree, but it goes both ways: the state of my mind also determines what I will physically do, like when one decides to do or write something.

Hence my accusation of historicism. That science did develop from philosophy tells us nothing at all about the necessary relationship between the two.

That a sequence of events happened to take place is not evidence that they are causally connected even, let alone necessarily so. — Isaac

There is a difference between historicism (the idea that history follows determinist laws à la Marx) and recognizing established historical facts.

That science as we know it grew historically out of a branch of philosophy (natural philosophy as it was called) is simply a fact, just like it's a fact that Homo sapiens evolved from earlier primates. We share a lot of DNA with our ancestors, and science still shares a lot of concepts with philosophy. And this should encourage you to respect your predecessors a little more, simian or not.

They can do it again, too. In fact they have. There are two broad types of sciences: the natural sciences and the social (or human) sciences, and they were not born at the same time. As is well known, the first to assert their independence from philosophy were natural sciences. This process was complete by the 18th century roughly. Social sciences came later, end 19th-early 20th century. In both cases they carved out a domain that was previously dealt with by philosophers, a set of empirical questions that science could answer. Sociology, psychology, history etc. emerged as sciences historically, and in doing so they tried to take a distance with philosophy (metaphysics) by stressing empiricism and the "laws of history". This led to exciting new theories such as social darwinism and scientific racism... :-\

That is where Popper disagreed and demonstrated (in the Poverty of Historicism) that social sciences ought not to ape natural sciences, and in particular ought not to try and discern immutable laws as historicists wrongly do. Social sciences are not determinist, not anymore -- far less in fact -- than QM. Man makes history, not vice versa.

This provides an example that the divorce was never complete. Philosophers can still tell us useful things about how scientists should go about their business.