Number 95 : February 1999 |
John Stubbings - C94/13: (i) The range of ability: You have what I had in mind, sort of. Add taking bodging down through the "do nothing" and grades of demolition worker. Bring highly artistic demolition (pyrotechnics ?) around and up to the best of finely demolished art (neoexpressionism ?), getting a sort of colour circle (disc ?). And keep in mind that most people seem to find looking at anything other than green (high craft and low art) rapidly becomes a strain. (ii) How quickly artists become artists: We rarely see any of the initial rubbish from their youth.
John Neary - Your Comments C94/15: (i) You ask what use are mosquitoes. They irritate us, and in WWII the RAF found mosquitoes extremely useful for precision work. (ii) With the non-awake state. Psychosomatic interaction is bi-directional and does not switch off when a creature goes to sleep. I was only suggesting what affects the sleeping mind must be compatible with what affects the sleeping body. That the dreams of all creatures must be compatible with their beds. The body can be in a "somatic" dream. The [mind ? Ed] can be in a "psycho" dream. (iii) But we must not overlook that it is essential to support an examination based education system so that those who qualify will know which parts of the syllabus to rewrite.
Stef Gula - C94/16: But can you depend upon the trees to tell you what it is doing. No matter, that is only an aside. Buried in the small print I think you will find I did indicate no "commander" at any node anywhere in any type of real command structure can have unlimited choice, there are always constraints of some kind on everybody. Which example might help resolve what seems a misunderstanding, I didn't mean complete freedom of choice was something we should strive for, only that the ability to choose comes in degrees of freedom between the extremes of no choice at all and the liberty to make any choice at all. Literal "free will" would be the latter, an abstract point terminating the inaccessible far end of the degrees of freedom scale. From that I would not agree "free will" is a means of achieving any objective, because "free will" is not something a human can have. But I would be happy to accept that an ability to choose, insofar as the degree of freedom permits for any actually possible case, is certainly a means towards achieving some objectives. However, the degree of freedom issue is the thing. To be quite honest I am not sure all that many people actually want completely free will. Many seek or need restriction in their ability to choose on some objectives so other objectives can be achieved. Those affected often lose much liberty; priests, fire-fighters, etc., and lose almost all liberty under conscription. Some even volunteering to terminate their genetic line. What price the free will they deny their potential descendants. Either way, many still come to say they are happiest from having done their duty, the desire for immediate liberty seeming the lesser need. I would ask what objective would you seek if you actually had "free will".
David Taylor - C94/17: There are 3,000 funny people spread between the poles, most were born in damp and smoky bars and cafes. The females usually present more vulgar material than the males, but the males generally cover a wider subject range. Both males and females can follow the smell of money for hundreds of kilometres at night to find a dozing audience. No one is sure what purpose they really serve. They will live for as long as the rest of us take ourselves seriously. Looks like they will probably live for ever.
Vijai Parhar - C94/19: (i) Socrates: A psychiatrist's opinion on Socrates would be interesting. (ii) Eggs and questions: Only that as the first chicken came from an egg not laid by a chicken I was wondering if you might agree the first question to a human was not put by a human. (iii) Bees: I read it somewhere in a book on religious art. Hexagons look better. (iv) Chess: Checkmating is not the goal of chess. The goal of chess was to produce leaders trained in political and military strategy. Subsequently it became the goal of chess to produce people who think logically. These days it has become the goal of chess to prove computers can not play the game better than people who think well. When the computers triumph over the last three people who think well enough to still beat them, chess, as we know it, will disappear in favour of the new virtual reality games already evolving from it in response to the desire of the people to train themselves in political and military strategy. What then is the position of checkmating. If chess rules do not actually require one to play so as to checkmate one's opponent then it would seem they allow one to try to play very carefully planned genocide instead. Which means the optional requirement to checkmate is only a carrot, a device to encourage selective slaughter but discourage genocide, a device superior to law but still a perversion of morality. Unless one declares an exception. But what exception can one declare without implicitly reducing the device to a technicality beneath revised law, so that the intent of chess then fell entirely within its rules, and checkmating and its associated slaughter become just trivialities of the game. Curiously, the trials at Nuremberg offer an example of exactly that. By creating the exception, excluding morality, and declaring some slaughter illegal, other slaughter became seen as legal and moral. But we can see that is wrong. Hence, whether in the rules or not, even declaring a requirement to checkmate is immoral because of what it must bring about. The proper way to play chess is for both players to wait to be attacked.
Albert Dean