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I still love Kierkegaard

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Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#111

Post by 59nadir »

mborch wrote: post #110
59nadir wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sören/Søren or Soren? They're not the same.

But they are... Unless you want to be pedantic.

They're not pronounced at all the same, no. Naming your child Soren after Sören makes about as much sense as naming a child Ålän after Alan. You do realize that the "o" and "ö" are different letters representing different sounds, right?

Edit: As a dane you should realize how stupid it sounds for you to argue that Soren and Sören are the same, both with swedish and danish pronunciation. It's not at all being pedantic. Do you also think that ч is a 4 and н is a h? The only thing that "ö" and "o" have in common is that they're vowels.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#112

Post by pron »

jabretti wrote: post #83
qntty wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask which philosophers don't annoy you?

Not the OP but to me a non-annoying philosopher would be someone like Russell, Quine or Dennett. A good philosopher takes the time to define terms, explain the problem clearly, explain other possible views on the matter in a fair and accurate way, then explain their own view as clearly as possible, and then ideally pre-emptively discuss several possible objections or misunderstandings. A good philosopher understands…

But being precise limits you to those subject that afford precision. Philosophy shouldn't accept such a limitation, and entertain discussions even on subject where absolute precision cannot be achieved.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#113

Post by barrkel »

rtpg wrote: post #92
opportune wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd agree that Python and OCaml are analytic. But personally I find Java much more "continental" than C++, in that it combines aesthetics and function in a way that is both time-tested/consistent and expressive. C++ has always felt like a programming language designed with the same philosophy in mind that Frankenstein had when creating his monster.

Comparing C++ to Frankenstein is a bit of a dis-service to the time spent developing this language. There's some bad innards from C compatibility, but that's only a small sliver of the overall language. The language overall is very big, but has a high level of consistency and.... dare I say orthogonality. The open-ness of the language at the outset, especially around the breadth of available overloading, means that f…

C++ is configurable in all the wrong ways. Its orthogonality is only with respect to a C-oriented perspective on the world; it doesn't have a philosophy, so much as "like C but let me customize most of the underlying operations". That it is usable at all is mostly down to enormous amounts of effort and careful selection of idioms. Writing C++ reminds me a bit of playing chess: if you're deep in the idiom, there are only a handful of moves to consider, but if you're out of it, there are so many mistakes you can make.

I like the "pit of success" analogy. In design (whether it's API or language, or even physical mechanisms), doing the right thing should be the easiest way to go. C++ has a narrow ridge of success, with cliffs not far from either side.

A more orthogonal, more powerful and even more controllable language, to me, would be some variant of Scheme or Lisp that let you produce fully typed ASTs or even target code for the places where you need absolute control over performance, but high level enough to focus on the business domain problems most of the time. C++ demonstrably simply can't climb very far in the abstraction stack; people don't write web apps in C++. That's the metric that matters in the end.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#114

Post by 3131s »

59nadir wrote: post #111
mborch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they are... Unless you want to be pedantic.

They're not pronounced at all the same, no. Naming your child Soren after Sören makes about as much sense as naming a child Ålän after Alan. You do realize that the "o" and "ö" are different letters representing different sounds, right? Edit: As a dane you should realize how stupid it sounds for you to argue that Soren and Sören are the same, both with swedish and danish pronunciation. It's not at all being pedantic.…

I mean, neither the letter ø nor the sounds /œ/ or /ø/ exist in English, so presuming the GP lives in an English speaking country they probably didn't want to curse their kid with a name that nobody could pronounce. So, as has been an American custom for a long time, they modified the name slightly by substituting out a visually similar character with vaguely similar phonological characteristics (the /ɔ/ in "Soren" is rounded, open-mid like /œ/). And as they say, it's the thought that counts!

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#115

Post by coldtea »

T_D_K wrote: post #73
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "more complex". That's the high school kind of "religion is absurd" reaction, and is a naive literal reading that even the people of the bible era were above. The key is that there are no "rules that he himself also put in place" etc. (as he doesn't exist and even if he did it wouldn't matter). The rules were formed by people (obviously) and codify societal practices and philosophies towards morality and r…

>But this wasn't the case in later Rome and Europe, not even in the Inquisition era I'm skeptical that throughout the history of Christianity, everyone took the "parable" interpretation of the bible (rather than taking most or all of it seriously). Are you claiming that the... inquisitors (?) weren't killing based on a literal lack of belief in god, but rather were killing because people weren't morally up to snuff?…

>Are you claiming that the... inquisitors (?) weren't killing based on a literal lack of belief in god, but rather were killing because people weren't morally up to snuff?

The inquisition were killing for many reasons (and not as much killing as its mythologized), but most of them were political. See for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_revision_of_the_Inq...

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#116

Post by baldfat »

jdale27 wrote: post #90
baldfat wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I loved Kierkegaard for his prayers and parables. As for me being a Theological student in grad school his "Practice in Christianity" was read in one sitting at the library, I just picked it off the shelf to see. I ended up buying the same exact library edition on EBay for my birthday. He isn't an easy read but the journey is worth it to understand what he was trying to get across. I always try to get people to read…

Thanks for your comments. Does Kierkegaard by any chance suggest a way out of this “Demonic Despair”? A path to follow to find “an identity in our experiences and to something higher than us”?

It leads to the most famous of his ideas and the worst translation of his works. His "Leap of Faith" which really is the "Leap onto Faith." Deciding that what you currently have isn't what you can stand to be the rest of your life and to leap out away from despair and into faith when you don't have faith.

As a cancer dad who has lost a child I am in fairly large network of families that have also lost their child. There has been many times when the grief for friends have gotten so great that they ran into a life crisis. (Usually happens years after the death of their child)They think they are crazy and that they should have gotten to a place of acceptance (That doesn't really happen, at least in my case). There comes a place when you can't just accept your lot without just losing one's self. This leap onto faith seems to have happened with a few families and it really changed people's lives.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#117

Post by baldfat »

3131s wrote: post #114
59nadir wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not pronounced at all the same, no. Naming your child Soren after Sören makes about as much sense as naming a child Ålän after Alan. You do realize that the "o" and "ö" are different letters representing different sounds, right? Edit: As a dane you should realize how stupid it sounds for you to argue that Soren and Sören are the same, both with swedish and danish pronunciation. It's not at all being pedantic.…

I mean, neither the letter ø nor the sounds /œ/ or /ø/ exist in English, so presuming the GP lives in an English speaking country they probably didn't want to curse their kid with a name that nobody could pronounce. So, as has been an American custom for a long time, they modified the name slightly by substituting out a visually similar character with vaguely similar phonological characteristics (the /ɔ/ in "Soren" i…

Also it is common in English and most other countries to have different spellings for the same name. In English it is called Anglicisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation

Jesus was never called Jesus (probably). His name was Yehoshua (Joshua but Hebrew has no J) but when translated to Greek we get Jesus. In French Jacob is pronounced James due to some name meaning of James being having a limp. The New Testament Book called James in English is Jakob in Greek. These things happen for a thousand times.

Also I went to college in Minneapolis and Swedish is used as frequently as Spanish is in most Northeast cities. I met dozens of Sorens and none of them pronounced it differently.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#118

Post by zmonx »

miloshadzic wrote: post #59
throwawayjava wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I'm feeling contemplative, I really want to read something continental for the evening. But when I have shit to do, I snap into an analytic frame of mind. I feel the same way about programming languages; the Kierkegaardian crowd (C++, Perl) are great for evening enjoyment, but I'd prefer something from the more analytic tradition to language design when there's work to be done.

so you program in prolog or coq when you really need to get stuff done?

Whether or not you intended this as a joke: As a matter of fact, I actually do!

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#119

Post by goatlover »

mmyyyy wrote: post #77
T_D_K wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But this wasn't the case in later Rome and Europe, not even in the Inquisition era I'm skeptical that throughout the history of Christianity, everyone took the "parable" interpretation of the bible (rather than taking most or all of it seriously). Are you claiming that the... inquisitors (?) weren't killing based on a literal lack of belief in god, but rather were killing because people weren't morally up to snuff?…

There is no such thing as "the parable interpretation" of the bible and "the literal interpretation" of the bible. Here is a passage from a truly fascinating Christian author from the 2nd century. He starts by saying "we shall be told that these are fictions, no better than fables, like the rest of the strange stories about Jesus." (funny how arguments against Christianity haven't changed for 2000 years) Origen's rep…

Interesting, sounds a lot different than how literalists understand the bible.

Re: I still love Kierkegaard

#120

Post by goatlover »

visarga wrote: post #97
interfixus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the OP, and you just about summed it up. If I wish to ascertain the current status of the universe and the human ways of interacting with it, then any day, give me physics, math, brainscans, and controlled experimentation rather than longwinded twaddle from some dude believing his random personal ramplings to be somehow normative.

I prefer reinforcement learning to mind-body philosophy. I think RL has more clear and concise concepts that can be tested and has the potential to create intelligence, something philosophy can't do. I replace the word "consciousness" with "agent" and the word "emotion" with "value function", "sensing" with "neural network based representation" then suddenly so many mind-body debates become easier to grasp. "Reasonin…

Replacing terms doesn't make the problem go away, nor does providing a possible evolutionary reason. You're advocating a behaviorist approach, which Chalmers and everyone else has been aware of for half a century or more.

And you misunderstand the p-zombie argument. It's functionally and behaviorally equivalent, because it's physically identical. Of course it would seek to avoid death as all life forms do.

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