Posts by Pole

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

For epistemology, it's a matter of how we know what we know: the words (especially of whatever language with which we were raised...our "natural" tongue), and the cultural and social influences that are incorporated in that language (the "collective consciousness" mentioned above). We can't escape it: our very thoughts themselves, as formulated in the privacy of our midnight musings, are always represented in our brains as words...words which came from someone else, which we blithely accept, and about which we often have very little knowledge of where they came from and what they really mean. Then, of course, as others have mentioned, there's the issue of genetic patterning.
So, if a Yugoslavian came up to me and expressed himself very forcefully, what would I think? I'd think "Gosh, I don't have a clue what this guy is saying!" because 1) I can't understand the words he is saying, and 2) even if I learned the words (dictionary-style), I still wouldn't have a clue about the nuances and entedre of his meaning. And so also for a higher-dimensional being trying to communicate with me, except much worse: the higher-dimensional being would be trying, using "my" language," (and such a being could only communicate to me using "my" language) to describe something to me that was utterly beyond my ability to comprehend; all "my" words in the world couldn't take me beyond the limits of my own being.

Onacruse,

1) Check out "the linguistic relativism hypothesis". Also known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis hypothesis.

2) How the heck do you know that "we can't escape it: our very thoughts themselves, as formulated in the privacy of our midnight musings, are always represented in our brains as words...words which came from someone else"??? How do you know we think in terms of natural language words and phrases only? Is it because every time you try to communicate your thoughts you use language?

Would you then say that people deaf and mute from birth don't think at all? Read the example of the deaf Nicaraguan children. I posted it above.

25

Why Does God Permit Wickedness?

by undercover in

how many times did we, as jws, see that question?

how many times did we read or recite the same ole bs about allowing wicked people to try to rule themselves and failing?

god's soverienty was brought into question and now he'll give satan and man so many thousand years to give it a try.

Pole

If I had been Adam - the first man and if God had shown me somehow all the human suffering that would follow as a result of my eating the forbidden fruit, then guess what I would have done?

I'd have killed Eve and then committed suicide.

And what if God hadn't let me do it? Then he would've been to blame for all that mess that followed not me.

And what if I'd committed suicide and he'd resurrected me to help him "fulfill his will"? Then he'd be double guilty!

Or, I'd have tried killing the serpent first???

What would you have done? You don't need to answer...

Pole

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

Terry,

First of all:

:: We do not use our langauge to gain knowledge or data about language. A child who speaks does not come ready wired with the data of nouns, verbs, direct objects, predicate nominatives, etc. That is my dichotomy between innante functional propensity by way of physical development and the "data" per se of concepts, definitions, axioms.

::This probably isn't even worth fighting about, is it? I certainly am no expert. I am not fit to untie the shoe laces of an expert. I'm just one of those annoying people who reads too much and then opens his mouth like he actually knows what he is talking about.

If by "knowledge" you mean conscious, reflective knowledge as opposed to subconscious competence , then I can possibly understand your position.

However, I'm still unwilling to accept the assertion that "unconscious knowledge" is no knowledge at all. Probably because of my background - I'm a computational linguist (not a very good one anyway) who's trying to feed lingustic "knowledge" in a computer. The machine is totally unaware of this fact, but I still call the general rules of interpretation that I provide to it "a knowledge base" . Maybe I just need this presupposition.

As for your little anegdote:

:: I am reminded of a tale that Herodotus (Ancient Greek Historian,5th Century BC) tells about an ancient ruler who wanted to know what the "original" language was. He proposed an experiment. An infant, when born, would not be allowed to received spoken language cues from anyone until it spoke. Then, whatever language the child spoke would be the "innate" language.

I have a possible ending (true story), which I'm pasting below.

Peace be with you.

Pole

---------------------
"An interesting example of this is the case of Genie, otherwise known as "The Wild Child". A thirteen-year-old victim of lifelong child abuse, Genie was discovered in her home on November 4th, 1970, strapped to a potty chair and wearing diapers. She appeared to be entirely without language. Her father had judged her retarded at birth and had chosen to isolate her, and so she had remained up until her discovery. It was an ideal (albeit horrifying) opportunity to test the theory that a nurturing environment could somehow make up for a total lack of language past the age of 12. Sadly, she was unable to acquire language completely. Due to this and other complications, she eventually ended up in an adult foster care home.

"Detractors of the "Critical Age Hypothesis" point out that in this example and others like it (see Feral children), the child is hardly growing up in a nurturing environment, and that the lack of language accquisition in later life may be due to the results of a generally abusive environment rather than being specifically due to a lack of exposure to language."

"However, there exists emerging evidence of both innateness of language and the "Critical Age Hypothesis" from the deaf population of Nicaragua. Until approximately 1986, Nicaragua had neither education nor a formalized sign language for the deaf. As Nicaraguans attempted to rectify the situation, they discovered that children past a certain age had difficulty learning any language. Additionally, the adults observed that the younger children were using gestures unknown to them to communicate with each other. They invited Judy Kegl, an American linguist from MIT, to help unravel this mystery. Kegl discovered that these children had developed their own, distinct, Nicaraguan Sign Language with its own rules of "sign-phonology" and syntax. She also discovered some 300 adults who, despite being raised in otherwise healthy environments, had never acquired language, and turned out to be incapable of learning language in any meaningful sense. While it was possible to teach vocabulary, these individuals seem to be unable to learn syntax."

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

:: If I understand you correctly (not at all sure I do) you are making an appeal to Authority.

You asked for examples of "data that we are born with". I thought that you meant any examples of such data, and - being a naturally helpful person - I gave you the example from the field of human language acquisition. I paid some lip service to Chomsky - that's true, but I'm not sure at what point it became "an appeal to authority".

Then you came up with your exclammation:

:: Innate language and Noam Chomsky?

:: He, (Chomsky) is not saying that language itself is born into us (babies don't speak French or Polish from birth) but the sense of grammar is born into us. That is, the ability to create useful rules to organize expression.

The answer to your surprisal and the contradiction that followed is this again:

Chomsky didn't just mean "the ability to create useful rules to organize expressions". I don't think Chomsky would have ever become known if this had been his main point, Terry :)

Mystical as it may sound, what Chomsky in fact claimed was that there is a set of ready-made rules on which all natural languages are based, and that all children must have access to those rules in order to develop language-specific communication skils. THese rules can be represented as logical expressions of the form: A --> B + C

In other words, French, Chinese and English have all a common denominator in the form of an abstract Universal Grammar. With time Chomsky even began to claim that there is a "language acquisition device" - a neurological entity (ie: piece of brain) which encompasses this inborn knowledge.

This is not an appeal to authority. I'm just commenting on what you said Chomsky's view on language acquisition was.

Now what is the evidence that you asked about? Agan my disclaimer comes here: I'm not totally convinced by this evidence - but I find it hard to ignore altogether.

1) Language universals
2) The poverty of stimulus argument
3) Language acquisition studies (the critical age hypothesis)

There's no point in trying to elaborate on all of that now, I'm just giving you some pointers:

1) Let's skip it for now.

2) The poverty of stimulus argument means that there are "principles of grammar that cannot be learned on the basis of positive input alone, however complete and grammatical that evidence is".

In other words, there's not much evidence to the effect that all language can really be acquired in this paradigm:

stimulus - response - feedback -
stimulus - better_response - more feedback -
stimulus - even better response - even more feedback etc...

unless you assume that some set of of universal rules are "encoded" in our brains prenatally.

3) Acquiring language is different from learning it. The fact that language can only be "fully" acquired before the critical age of 12-14 is sometimes explained with the claim that it is the only time in your neurological development when "the language acquisition device" gets activated. After this period you can only learn the language by understading the rules of grammar and consciously learning from your mistakes and so forth.

---------------

So what? So although Chomsky is not my greatest linguistic authority, I find some of his observations abuot language acquisition irrefutable. It's reasoning by negation, but it makes me think twice before I say that there are no examples of innate knowledge. In other words:

I do believe that some aspectc of linguistic knowledge are inborn!!!!

Hope it does it for you, Terry. If I'm still not clear enough, forget it, as it is probably due to the fact that my language acquisition device was only exposed to Polish and not English when before I reached the critical period.

Confusing Pole

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

Innate language and Noam Chomsky?

He, (Chomsky) is not saying that language itself is born into us (babies don't speak French or Polish from birth) but the sense of grammar is born into us. That is, the ability to create useful rules to organize expression.

Hello? Did you even read my post? I'm very specific about linguistics. I wrote: "Universal, innate grammar", not a specific language. That babies don't speak French from birth goes without saying - that wasn't my argument at all and I made it clear. It doesn't take a linguist to state that, so don't put these words in my mouth.

And you're wrong when you say "the sense of grammar".

Edited: or when you say "the ability to create useful rules to organize expression".

It's much more than just "an ability". Chomsky was a MIT mathematician he spent half of his life trying to come up with a body of specific context-free transformational rules (= a body of knowledge) which would correspond to the innate Universal grammar. So it was much more than merely "the sense of grammar". What do you mean by that anyway?

As far as being born with an angel inside of us or as a part of our consciousness and then being our consultant------all I can say is---wow! Is that just an assertion hanging in space like a cloud or do you have some fact, data, or experiment that would test it? I'm open. How do we test that?

I didn't say that, it's not my argument. But now I see why you wanted this example...

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

Terry,

Are you asserting that we are born with actual data inside our head? Could you give me an example of that? I'd love to know.

It wasn't me who was asserting this and I don't know why this person was asserting it (I got lost half-way through the thread), but I'm giving you an example of inborn knowledge:

Example:

Human language - at least in the generative linguistics paradigm is believed to be PARTLY "innate" in humans.

The "innateness theory of language aquisition" developed by Noam Chomsky was a major breakthrough in 20th century linguistics and cognitive sciences, and it is in opposition to purely behaviourist theories (you learn by repetition and imitation only). It has now lost much of its appeal and Chomsky has become more of a leftist activist than a liguist, but the premises of the theory have remained unchallenged.

If you consider the amount of linguistic input we are exposed to as children, it seems to be very scarce and totally incommensurate with the speed with which children acquire language. Hence it has been claimed that humans have an innate "Universal Grammar" which gets activated when exposed to naturally occuring language. This ability starts fading at the age of 6 and disappears completely by the age of 12-14 in some 95% of humans. There is some solid evidence for it from the fields of developmental psychology and neurology.

Of course nobody claims the Universal Grammar is equivalent to any specific language. Rather, what generative linguists say is that it's like a general software framework that any child comes "bundled with" so the child can master any human language that it happens to be exposed to.

Despite numerous attempts, so far nobody has managed to show a working example of such a universal grammar framework, but again the premises are pretty convincing anyway.

Just a possible example of some "actual data inside our head".

Pole

15

The 144,000-A club for Men Only???

by ohiocowboy in

i was just reading some passages out of the new world translation, and stumbled upon something very interesting.

we all know rev 14:1, which numbers the 144,000, but reading the scriptures after that i noticed verse 4 which states that "these are the ones that did not defile themselves with women; in fact, they are virgins".

this seems to show that the 144,000 would be comprised of virgin men.

Pole

The 144,000-A club for Men Only???

1. There are some 8600 members of the FDS class at the moment.

2. Theologically, they are still the only humans authorized to provide spiritual food in proper time and direct the worldwide preaching work - at least at the top level.

3. These guys need to be replaced by newly annointed ones on a regular basis, as most of them are growing really old.

Here is my question:

Which newly-annointed JWs would be more desired as members of the FDS?

Men or women?

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

If we are going to talk sciene we SIMPLY CANNOT do it accurately with words. It is MATH that is the language of science. There is no in-between. We are fooling ourselves that meaninful interchange is taking place.

Terry,

I would go even further than that. Take Euclidean geometry. Its fifth axiom was denied without mathematical inconsistency in the 19th century. I mean one guy (Riemann) managed to mathematically prove that two parallel lines may actually meet at some "point" on a spherical surface.

A

B

Can you even "imagine" that A and B meet at one point? And there's a mathematically consistent way of proving it.

So you have to careful when you say that "Math is the language of science". Math is no more an absolute language. Since the beginning of the 20th century there are very few if any axioms. Just postulates. Even in mathematics. Not to mention physics or mechanics. Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics require different mathematical models.

As to your linguistic remarks about the use of the metaphor to convey abstract meanings - I agree almost entirely. It's consistent with the current cognitive linguistics theories.

You can challenge a person to try to express any abstract meaning without resorting to metaphor. It's almost impossible. Well, I think I've found one or two examples, but they're irrelevant to this discussion.

Pole

133

String theory, Relativity, and angels

by onacruse in

current mathematical models of the universe involve what is termed 'hyper-dimension.".

ever read the book flatland?

it describes how a 2-dimensional being would perceive the intersection of a 3-dimensional object in "their" universe.. a flatlander would never be able to comprehend a sphere.

Pole

How God's omnipresence could be in a multiple dimension, so he could be in more than one place or is it three places ? At a time.[Ref;John 1:1, Matt. 10:29,30 ]

Computationally speaking, God could possibly be implemented as a muti-threaded time-warping server farm capable of processing billions of concurrent requests per millisecond.

In terms of object-oriented languages: God can potentially "be" in a biilion of places simultaneously. All it takes to appear in another place at the same time is creating just another instance of the abstract class "God". So it all boils down to how much RAM the Almighty one has at his disposal to handle all of those instances. If you have some faith, it becomes a quantitive problem not a qualitative one.

But that's a private joke for programmers. Sorry if it made you yawn...

Pole

39

WT RESOLUTIONS what becomes of them??

by JT in

jw
friends

i got an email the other day from an long time jw, in fact he was 13 at the 1958 convention in ny and polo grounds .

we were talking about the org and he posed the question to me as well- i thought about it and i could not think of anything-.

i have never heard -other than the name adoption resolution- any mention of any resolutions that we as jw adopted like in 1979, 1983 , etc.

Pole

Imagine the consequences if you, as a dub voted against a WTS "resolution." Do you, as a dub, have any freedom of speech in voting in those resolutions?

Its no wonder they are all passed without dissent. FEAR prevents dubs from voting otherwise.

FARKEL,

The state of WTS is a totalitarian one, so you can't expect the citizens to vote against the official doctrine. Of course all JWs are equal, but the annointed ones are more equal, and the GB + their buddies are the most equal of all.

Kind of reminds me of our Eastern-European "referendums" under the Communist rule... But it's worse. We had the offical 99% support for government proposals, but at least in reality people opposed, and finally got rid of them.

On the other hand, in the land of WTS most people are genuinely supportive, so I don't think they actually fear anything. I mean they just don't mind or don't really understand those resolutions. There's not so much to oppose in them, or is there? Stuff like: "We are witnesses of Jehovah, and we shall stand firm as the New World replaces this Old Corrupted System of Things...".

Pole