#Cats (musical) #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #((this amusement not to be taken as expressing an opinion regarding the statement itself))
although I guess it would be funny to take the flesh-eating bacteria thing as an excuse to start slut-shaming gardeners for wearing short sleeves, the hussies.
if they just stopped living their deviant lifestyle maybe they wouldn’t keep coming down with disgusting incurable diseases, there’s nothing natural about sticking your hands in the mud
(Image: Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, saying “Am I finally getting through?”)
This is part of why it’s bad that religious modesty types tend to dominate the discourse on not wearing revealing, tight-fitting clothes*. Or worse, covering your face, which distracts from the REAL reason why you should cover your face in public, which is to wear protection from the contagion risk of promiscuously inhaling every gas, particle, and droplet that happens to waft under your air-slut nose. Alas, that still includes me, so I can’t get too mad about it.
Yet.
*Mosquitoes can bite thru many forms of tight clothing, including jeans.
Posted: 2019-05-01
This aged well.
Tags:
#illness tw #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #now that I have adopted a policy of reblogging posts that stick with me I will be tagging them #that one post with the thing #(I *would* say ”why are we calling people ‘maskholes’ when we could be calling them ‘air-sluts”’‚ but I know why) #our roads may be golden or broken or lost
Sometimes I’m looking for something online – often “how to” articles – and I want to filter for – like – a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience.
I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.
The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
This is in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they aren’t sufficiently search engine optimized.
“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.
If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.“
I don’t know what you mean by “consciousness.” The kinds of things people usually claim that there is such a thing as “consciousness” is pretty vague, and often conflates various sorts of phenomena.
I don’t think language is a precondition for consciousness. (And there aren’t any languages that lack language-like components.) I think that while language probably has an effect on consciousness, it is not the causal antecedent of consciousness, and the two may not even be in the same causal chain.
That’s a really good point actually — I think even defining what consciousness *is* is really hard, let alone trying to explain it. And definitely agree that there are different phenomena get lumped under “consciousness,” and different people may be thinking of somewhat different things.
I guess there are two phenomena I tend to think of as “consciousness” — one, having an internal subjective experience / phenomenology, and two (this one is more squishy and meta), being “aware” of oneself as an entity with subjective experience. If that makes any sense?
It is sort of “hard” to explain what it means to be a conscious person, and I think this is at least as much a fact about the nature of consciousness as it is about the nature of language. It’s difficult to explain consciousness on the basis of the words we use for it.
I guess one of my ideas here is that consciousness and language (and other language-like things, really) are not really distinct categories — they are (or can be) intertwined. It’s not that language causes consciousness, but rather that the two are linked: it’s hard to describe a conscious being without referring to language (e.g. “a human being who speaks English”), and there are things that are conscious that we can talk about only in terms of the words we use for consciousness (e.g. a single “I”). (If you know something about the nature of consciousness and not much about language, this may sound very hard to believe, but in practice a lot of things we claim about language seem to apply to consciousness, and vice versa — the things we claim about consciousness are also things we claim about language, etc.)
Another thing I’ve wondered is, can the two be separated? Consciousness may be a complex phenomenon, but if you get all the parts and recombine them (which is a standard approach to explaining stuff like consciousness), can you get a system that’s fully conscious and also entirely non-language-like? I doubt it, but it’d be really cool if there were such a thing.
It’s definitely an interesting question — but I’d have to take a page from your book and ask you what you mean by “language.” Like, what would make a system “entirely non-language like”? Is any symbolic or representational process “language-like,” as you’re thinking of it?
The answer I’m giving here is just a very vague answer. It’s also a bad answer, and I don’t think it’s a very productive one.
There’s no good way to draw a line between things that are “linguistic” and things that aren’t, because there are so many ways to draw the line, and a lot of them don’t seem very informative.
There are certainly linguistic things that are non-symbolic and non-representational. For example, if you are reading this post, it might not be “about” anything at all, it could be some purely internal process without external referents. If you were reading this post, you would not be consciously aware of the words on this page, but rather you would be conscious of something else, the internal processing of information.
In general, I think language is much more of a process of internalization and abstraction than people normally think. It’s an important source of abstraction in both our internal experience and our external environment, but it’s not the only source of abstraction. You can abstract information from the outside in a non-language-like way — this is what, e.g., “pattern recognition” does. You can also have things that are internally abstract, without even using the words “symbols” or “semantics” to describe them. In this case, the abstraction is not driven by linguistic information alone.
You ask a fair question, but I don’t have a good answer — this is what I meant by “vague.”
There are certainly linguistic things that are non-symbolic and non-representational. For example, if you are reading this post, it might not be “about” anything at all, it could be some purely internal process without external referents.
You’re more right than you can possibly know, Frank
Tags:
#Rob’s comment is exactly what I was thinking #computer generated text #philosophy #oh my god
#oh look an original post #I posted a syndication link for this and then realised I had more to say #so I took the link down while the post cooked a little more and am now putting it back up
Brinens and Things 