Robin Faichney wrote:
> Eric writes
> >Marie Foster <mfos@ieway.com> wrote:
> >> Excellent points. But the truth is that we are at a pinnacle
> >> as a species. Each day we are at a new one.
> >
> >I guess I've been to highly trained in calculus to appreciate the "truth"
> >of that one. A pinacle is like a local max -- a local max only occurs at a
> >critical point, and at a critical point, the derivative is ZERO -- meaning
> >that, at the very least, our upward progress has been haulted! I prefer to
> >see our progress as an ever increasing function, myself. I honesly hope we
> >never acheive a "local max"; lets keep learning more!
>
> Marie can say that each day we are at a new pinnacle
> because she is comparing the present with the past --
> there's no problem with breaking a record every day,
> or even every instant, in principle. Eric has a
> problem with that because he's not looking only at
> the past, but also the future. How can you say
> something is an all-time great, when the future is
> by definition unknowable? Marie and Eric are both
> right.
>
> This misunderstanding is very, very typical of those
> that occur over and over again, around here, and lots
> of other places too. Marie is trying with honesty
> to say how things look from where she is, while Eric
> is trying to understand, and then communicate, how
> things really are. Thus the more objectivist (note
> the case of the initial!) stance of taking the future
> into account. Marie, I think, is less interested in
> how things *really* are, and more interested in how
> people see things -- where people seeing things the
> same way is a bonus, of course!
>
> Ultimately, how things really are, and how people see
> things, are both important -- I'd go so far as to say,
> they're equally important. We need to look at both,
> and we'll avoid a lot of unnecessary hassle if we're
> clear about which we're focussing on at any given time,
> because though they're equally important, they're not
> entirely interchangable.
>
> I hope not to become a boring proselytiser, but I'll
> take the risk of mentioning that I go into stuff like
> this, to some extent, if anyone's interested, on
> http://www.faichney.org/synthesis/ (and I'll be going
> into it to a much greater extent in the coming months).
>
> (Work on the website is one of the reasons I haven't
> found the time to keep up with all the discussion
> going on here just now.)
> --
> Robin
-- MarieWho in real life exists as
The Great Lady Casey, Citizen of Oasis, Sonoma Shard, Britannia