26 ideas
6259 | Why can't a wise man doubt everything? [Montaigne] |
6263 | No wisdom could make us comfortably walk a wide beam if it was high in the air [Montaigne] |
23122 | Montaigne was the founding father of liberalism [Montaigne, by Gopnik] |
6258 | Virtue is the distinctive mark of truth, and its greatest product [Montaigne] |
2572 | Logical truth seems much less likely to 'correspond to the facts' than factual truth does [Haack] |
2570 | The same sentence could be true in one language and meaningless in another, so truth is language-relative [Haack] |
7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
6262 | We lack some sense or other, and hence objects may have hidden features [Montaigne] |
7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
6260 | Sceptics say there is truth, but no means of making or testing lasting judgements [Montaigne] |
6261 | The soul is in the brain, as shown by head injuries [Montaigne] |
7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
7496 | Rules and duties are based on the will, as that is all we control [Montaigne] |
7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
7495 | Apart from the fear, dying is an easy duty [Montaigne] |
22269 | We must fight fiercely to hang on to the few pleasures which survive into old age [Montaigne] |
20482 | Virtue inspires Stoics, but I want a good temperament [Montaigne] |
20480 | There is not much point in only becoming good near the end of your life [Montaigne] |
20481 | Nothing we say can be worse than unsaying it in the face of authority [Montaigne] |
20479 | People at home care far more than soldiers risking death about the outcome of wars [Montaigne] |
7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |