colonel@sunybcs.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman) (10/21/86)
> I. What is "understanding", or "ducking" the issue... > > If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and > quacks like a duck, then it is *called* a duck. If you cut it open and > find that the organs are something other than a duck's, *then* > maybe it shouldn't be called a duck. What it should be called becomes > open to discussion (maybe dinner). > > The same principle applies to "understanding". No, this principle applies only to "facts"--things that anybody can observe, in more or less the same way. If you say, "Look! A duck!" and everybody else says "I don't see anything," what are you to believe? If it feels like a bellyache, don't conclude that it's a bellyache. There may be an inner meaning to deal with! Appendicitis, gallstones, trichinosis, you've been poisoned, Cthulhu is due any minute ... This kind of argument always arises when technology develops new capabilities. Bell: "Listen! My machine can talk!" Epiktistes: "No, it can only reproduce the speech of somebody else." It's something new--we must argue over what to call it. Any name we give it will be metaphorical, invoking an analogy with human behavior, or something else. The bottom line is that the thing is not a man; no amount of simulation and dissimulation will change that. When people talk of Ghosts I don't mention the Apparition by which I am haunted, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, which lurks in the plate- glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors to waylay me. --L. P. Smith -- Col. G. L. Sicherman UU: ...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel CS: colonel@buffalo-cs BI: colonel@sunybcs, csdsiche@sunyabvc