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@amiloradovsky @tfb
Language is not a building, it's a bunch of improv games. Seriously, read up on some late Wittgenstein.
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@machado Marvin Minsky spoke of "Luggage Words" when I last saw him before he passed on... words that we chuck everything in that we don't understand.
I have a similar notion --"Mirage Concepts" -- concepts that seem to mean something at the surface or "from afar", but upon closer examination, the entire notion falls apart.
"Life" fits both.
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@machado You probably spent a lot of time in the Natural History museum in your area when you were a kid.
For me, I had developed a general and intense interest in all things Science, and I spent a lot of time at the Franklin Institute Museum in Philadelphia. It was a place of wonder for me at the time.
They even had a Moog synthesizer there at the time, which piqued my interests in electronic music.
Did you watch "Land of the Lost" when you were a kid? Hopefully that was not before your time! :D
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@lordalveric Land of the Lost wasn't available in my country. And natural history museums weren't available in my part of the country. My first contact with dinosaurs might have been The Land Before Time.
Sometimes I wish I was pulled into science like that, through interesting experiences, and with mentoring from knowledgeable people.
Instead, I was pushed into science as a matter of course, and ended up running away to the humanities.
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@machado
I see. Fortunately for me, the draw of mathematics and science was so strong that the school system had no hope of a snowball's chance in hell to destroy my enthusiasm or turn me off from it!!!!
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@lordalveric I like those notions.
What gave me a sense of "life" as a plastic category was really just sci-fi treating life and machines as isomorphic.
But what gave me the sense of categories as plastic was dinosaurs. I was dinonerd as a kid, but felt paleontology was a solved field. And then one day birds where dinosaurs. Boom, mind blown.