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Pope Francis has died

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611–620 of 875 posts

Re: Pope Francis has died

#611

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> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have. To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what…

I feel a little blue. Does your code understand that? Can the code function properly in civilization without that understanding?

Re: Pope Francis has died

#612
post #468

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Who should surrender, though? At this point in time, if Hamas were to surrender, the Israeli occupation of Gaza would just get worse. That wouldn't be peace, or justice, for people of Gaza. I certainly don't support what Hamas has done, but Israeli rule will probably be pretty brutal for Palestinians.

Israel hasn't occupied Gaza for 20 years.

They literally control the air, water, electricity, food, internet, everything. They are literally mass starving the Gazans as we speak.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#613
post #45

I genuinely liked him, even as an atheist. He seemed to be trying his best to make the world a better place and I can't fault him for that.

Same here. Although I grew up a Catholic and am now an atheist, my father counselled me that there were few institutions in the world that look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church has often not done that, but under Francis moved more towards that goal than any other time in recent history.

> look after the downtrodden. The Catholic church

gifted all women indissoluble marriage, which was practiced by the Roman aristocracy as "confarreatio".

This was trashed as soon as possible, and the trashing was billed as great progress.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#614

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Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the…

I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that…

Pope St. Pius X put it in Pascendi: "It is one of the cleverest devices of the Modernists (as they are commonly and rightly called) to present their doctrines without order and systematic arrangement, in a scattered and disjointed manner, so as to make it appear as if their minds were in doubt or hesitation, whereas in reality they are quite fixed and steadfast."

Francis, like other Modernists, had the knack of saying heretical things in a way that the intended effect was obvious, but his defenders could say, "He never said that! And here's how you could interpret him in a completely consistent with Catholic teaching." Or they'd argue that he was speaking off-the-cuff and shouldn't be taken literally, or that he was misquoted by an atheist interviewer (to whom he kept giving interviews and never corrected the record). But everyone who wasn't in denial knew what he was doing.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#615

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It is probably exactly because he spent a career considering the cognition behind language that he is not as impressed by LLMs as many others are. I'll readily admit to being expert in neither language and linguistics nor AI, but I am skeptical that anything going on inside an LLM is properly described as "cognition."

does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not? to me these models are useful for how effective they are, and that's literally it. the processes going on within them are extremely complex and at times very impressive, and whether some arbitrarily undefined word applies or not does not really matter. I think sometimes people forget that words are not maths or logic. when words come into language, no…

Re: "does it really matter if it can be described as cognition or not?"

To Chomsky? He'd have to speak for himself, but I suspect the answer is "yes, obviously, at least to be of interest to me."

Note that I'm not saying LLMs are useless or even that what they do is usefully described as "plagiarism."

But it seems entirely unsurprising to me that Chomsky would be unimpressed and uninterested -- even to the point of dismissiveness, he's pretty much like that -- precisely because they are unrelated to "cognition."

Re: Pope Francis has died

#616

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Did you really have to make this comment here on this post? I think you intentionally wrote it to spark a fire as well. "systematically massacring tens of thousands with the declared intent of ethnic cleansing" You know yourself that so many people disagree with you about this and sees this as an outrageous claim.

It's not an interpretation. It's what Netanyahu said himself:

“We will implement the Trump Plan, the voluntary migration plan. This is our strategy, and we are ready to discuss it at any time," he added.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#617
post #543

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I rarely feel this way about someone of Pope Francis' age and social position, but I've genuinely admired Francis as a thinker. He was a bona fide Jesuit, through and through. The next pope has big shoes to fill.

Note that Antiqua et Nova was authored by the Church. With its profound philosophical tradition, the Church offers insights in this text that surpass anything ever written by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Indeed.

I’ll also add that many of his admirers as well as his detractors exaggerated his virtues, his merits, and his flaws. He was both the victim of a media and film industry all too eager to spin him into the “progressive pope” — never shying away from quoting him out of context to push an agenda — and the issuer of problematic and ambiguous documents and off-the-cuff remarks that only served to generate confusion.

Intellectually, Benedict XVI and John Paul II were in a different league. As far as the Jesuits are concerned, I know that in the popular imagination, the Jesuits are imagined to be some kind of “progressive”, intellectually superior order, but historically, they were sort of the shock troops of the Church. They certainly have merits to their name. While they did become involved in education, they drew from the traditions of education in the Church. Education and scholarship, however, are not their charism. Compare that with the Dominicans, for example, who have teaching and education as their mission (Thomas Aquinas is probably their most famous member).

Re: Pope Francis has died

#618

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> If 99% of people in the street can agree on the meaning of a word without much ambiguity then that's a good starting point This turns out to never be true once you get into actual details. Try to buy blue house paint for a basic example.

I do not understand your comment as buying blue paint is an extremely trivial thing to do unless you're in the middle of the Sahara desert.

I think they mean there many hues that some people will cal blue and other will disagree. And definitely if you try to buy paint and just say you want "blue" there's a huge spectrum of things you might get

This website was doing the rounds not long ago: https://ismy.blue/

Re: Pope Francis has died

#619

Pope Francis caused quite a bit of controversy among Catholics. From his crackdown on the TLM (Traditional Latin Mass) to his often unscripted, pastoral tone on issues like sexuality, economics, and interfaith dialogue, he unsettled many and yet drew others closer to the Church. With his passing, we’re left to process a papacy that disrupted in the deepest sense of the word. As a Catholic, I often found myself both i…

People who aren't familiar with mainstream Catholicism might not understand that TLM is a pretty powerful cultural signifier; it's something close to a separatist movement within the church (in fact, it's the launch pad for an actual separatist movement, SSPX) and it's quite conservative. When you hear the pejorative "tradcath", these are the people they're talking about.

Naturally, the tiny but vocal minority of people who attended the TLM found Francis very activating. But it's important to know that those people are not broadly representative of the church as a whole. Most Catholics I know would barely offer a shrug if you told them (they certainly wouldn't already know) that Francis had restricted the TLM.

Re: Pope Francis has died

#620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At some point you will understand that you will never have absolute and complete axioms from which to build everything on [1], and you have to work with what you have. To have hardware that displays blue, and code that manipulates blue, you must have a very clear and unambiguous definition of what blue means. Notice I did not say correct, only clear and unambiguous. Your whole point seems to be that words mean what…

I feel a little blue. Does your code understand that? Can the code function properly in civilization without that understanding?

The code will function, in the sense of executing, whether the underlying concepts are sufficiently well-understood or not. Considering the ramifications of that statement might lead you to seeing why people want to understand what they're building before they build it.

I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were asking questions in good faith, but I'm not sure that's true anymore, so good luck.

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