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@Mopac
I would point out that heterosexual sex is also almost always flesh driven. Married straight couples do sex for fun, not only when they actually want to make baby.
Anti-homosexuality has two roots; the first is that a proportion of people do seem to find it repulsive. The other is that in the ancient world rulers wanted as many children born as possible so they discouraged non--reproductive sex in all forms. The reason was that a large population was the key to strength - it allowed for more soldiers to defend the homeland and to attack neighbours.
If you screw someone wearing a condom then you are doing lust-drive sex for fun, not reproduction. In such a case, why would it matter if your partner is male or female?
The Catholics are at least consistent in condemning contraception if sex is indeed for reproduction not satisfying lust.
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Mopac is quoting Romans, chapter 1. Paul's revision of Chrisitianty relieved gentile Christian converts from many of the strictures of Judaism such as dietary laws and circumcision - no doubt that was crucial in allowing Christianity to grow in popularity.
But while Paul dropped many Judaic features from Christianity, the quoted passage shows he retained its condemnation of homosexuallty, which is not so surprising given Paul appears only grudgingly accepting of marrage and sex in general.
AFAIK there isn't a definitive list in the bible of what aspects of Judaism are binding on Christians; hence differences of theological opinion and interpretation do lead to 'cherry picking'.
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@Outplayz
someone willing to shot you would be just as willing to beat or stab you to death.
Howeveer plausible that sounds, that is precisely what the statistic mentioned in the OP says is not the case.
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I think 'safe' has to be taken in context. LSD is not a poison and it does not cause systemic or permament damage, so its 'safe' in that sense, but it is far from 'safe' in in the way it distorts perception of distances and shapes etc. I used to trip, but I dread to think what might have happed if I'd tried driving! It is also extremely dangerous if taken unawares, such as when someone 'spikes' a drink.
I believe in 'caution tripping' - ie doing it with friends in a safe environment. Then it can be fun, but at the wrong time or the wrong place it can be very bad news indeed.
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Unless you are the sort of person who thinks that brothels can be made to un-exist, it is hard to come up with a strong case for them being unregulated. It is very hard to imagine that properly regulated and monitored brothels would employ trafficked workers.
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@Castin
I suspect it has a lot to do with the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Imperial Rome finalised by Theodosius in the 4th century. That was implemented almost cosmetically, leaving all the panoply and grandeur of a religion suited to a great empire in place - just the names of the objects of worship were changed.
Anyone who watches the grand ceremony of an installation of a new pope will bestruck how it resembles the enthronement of an emperor.
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Drafterman wrote:Keith is saying that it is disingenuous to suggest that Anal's attitude towards blacks is different from Hitler's anti-semetism.
I want to make it clear that is indeed my view.
Very nice post above, btw, drafterman!
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@drafterman
If you said that the question has no answer because the answer depends on the frame of reference... then I'm sure there is a secret check mark on the ticket that adds $50 for such inane responses.
Being nicked by a copper for speeding is no time for philosophical sophistry! But the possible answers to the policeman's question are 'Yes, I do know my speed' or 'No, I don't know my speed'.
The answer 'It depends on the frame of reference' is an answer to the related - but different - question 'What speed were you going, Sir?'. A question close to 'Do you think LB is pretty' would be 'Do you think you were traveling at a safe speed?'; a question close to was 'Was LB female?' is 'Were you exceeding the speed limit?'.
I'm all for keeping the distinction between opinion and fact clear (it isn't always in conversational English), but I don't think your way of doing it is right.
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@DebateArt.com
I think a relatively simple step would be to disallow startig theads until a certain number of posts or a probabtionary period is over.
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Is SEO useful? In my experience 90% of posts and debate on sites like this involve a less than a dozen people. In reality such sites have small dedicate cliques with only a slow turn over of active membership.
I'm not sure that the format would even work if there were, say, a hundred or even 50 active posters.
We are a clique a bit like a family - we may not all like each other, but we look forward to crossing swords with our favourite enemies! Having lots of strangers around isn't part of the deal, especially if they turn out to be 'one hit wonders' who don't invest in making DA (and DDO)was what it is, whatever that is!
I'm not advocating 'cliqueyness'; I am suggesting a degree of cliqueyness is inevitable and - I think - probably something we secretly like.
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@drafterman
For example: is a given picture pretty?
I resolve the 'tree in the forest' puzzle by suggesting we try to translate it into Zog, which is a language exacty like English except it doesn't have the word 'sound', so you have to either say 'vibrations in the air' or say 'aural sensation'. You will soon realise why there are no philosophers in Zogland.
Rather than a picture, let's think about Lauren Bacall.
Is/was Lauren Bacall pretty?
Is/was Lauren Bacall female?
There's no getting around that there are two sorts of property - subjective (pretty) and objective (female). The conseqeuence is that question 2 has a right answer and a wrong answer, but question 1 has no answer at all. If you are tempted to answer it, you would be answering a different question such as 'Do you think/judge Lauren Bacall was pretty'? 'Pretty' is not something you are - it is something you are judged to be.
Quite often perception matches reality (otherwise there would be no point evolving consciousness), but the two are not identical - many things are perceived but not facts (Prettiness, halucinations etc) and many facts are not perceived (the professors holding a pen by a blind person). I am not sure where to take things further.
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Valid for what purpose? Does it tell us how good someome is at solving a wide class of intellectual problems? Yes it does. If you are a boss wanting to hire a problem solver - such as a trainee computer programmer - then an IQ test as part of the selection process is a good tool.
But does it tell you how good a person's 'brain genes' are? That is more problematic because it is known that IQscores depends on 'nature AND nurture', on genes and on environment. Rightist tend to focus on the former, leftist on the latter.
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@TheDredPriateRoberts
Do you really think if we removed the guns, these guys would think dam I'd kill her if I only had a gun? But since I ain't got none I caint kill her.
Thinking isn't the issue. I've never killed anyone,but I'd guess shooting dead is easier than doing it with bare hands or a knife. i can imagine how in the middle of a flaming row the house gun comes out and BANG! - someone is dead. Of course that can happen with a knife or a hammer. but maybe a gun just makes it that bit easier to kill rather than injure.
I doubt many such murders are planned - it's not as if the killer can expect to get away with it! Ergo, they happen in the heat of the moment were the ease of access to a gun makes all the difference.
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In recent English 'true to' and 'true for' get used for things that are not truths at all, but merely beliefs. I suppose we can pin much of the blame for that on post-modernism!
You state that the professor was holding a pen at the time - in that case that is the 'fact of the matter'. As I prefer to use such terms, 'the professor was holding a pen' is the truth (or 'a fact', or 'reality') for the blind person, for you, for me and for everybody else too. The question of how we can - or if we can - get to know the professor was holding a pen is a separate issue, and conflating truth with belief is a serious obstacle to resoving it.
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@linate
Waal, as I see it, maybe he'd think twice if she had a gun too. More guns is my solution.</irony>
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Elizabeth the first is in with a shout.
But what exactly is 'badass'?
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I think I'll stick with what I wrote, subject only to using 'innate' in the sense of 'genetically determined'.
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At least RM's presence gives us something to post about.
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It seems to me that Pinker is saying that people who say 'Racism and sexism still exist so we have made no progress' are overlooking the progress that has been made.
In the West we are less racist and sexist than previously - that is good, but not grounds for complacency because obviously there is a long way to go yet.
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Surely intelligence is all about the ability to solve problems and an IQ test is a set of problems to be solved. Ergo, performance on a IQ test is going to correspond to problem-solving ability in a straight forward way.
But obviously that isn't just the case with IQ tests - any set of problems could be used to test a person's ability to solve them. The distinguishinig thing about IQ tests is that they are intended to be independent of acquired skills and examine a person's inherent, in-born 'intelligence'.
That is how IQ tests differ from regular 'exams', because exams usually focus on discovering how well a person has acqured some particiar kpwldge or skill.
The issue, then, is how well (or badly) IQ tests work for revealing innate as opposed to acquired problem solving skills. That is to say that IQ tests undoubtedly test and measure a persons problem solving intelligence. What I dispute is that they measure innate ability reliably.
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I'd look to more worldly reasons for the shift towards monotheism. I'd say there are still traces of a primitive form of judaism in te bible that imagined YHWH as one god amongst many, with each tribe or nation having their own god. Over time Hebrew ethnic and religious identity merged, so worship of any god other than YHWH was a mix of blasphemy and treason.
Thus YHWH gradually transformed from being one god amongst many to being the 'best god', to 'the true god' to the only god.
Islam inhertited monotheism directly from Judaism, possibly because it may have been useful to demarcating groups not yet assimilated into the Mohamedan empire who - we are constantly reminded in the koran - were polytheists.
Christianity has always struggled to reconcile the judaic ideal of monotheism with having two (at least) foci of worship.
We also see that 'duotheism' is attractive, with a pairof gods, one presentig light and the other dark. In the Abrahamic faiths the role of 'dark god' is satan.
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@drafterman
I came across a real life case... all involved were charged and convicted of 'vanilla' murder.
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I think we should start by trying to idetify what the word 'mathematics' refers to. I would suggest it is the study of numbers in the abstract. For example mathematics defines an operation on two numbers ('multiplication')that produces another number called the 'product'. Mathematicians are busy discovering relationships between numbers.
At some point in ancient pre-history it was noticed that if the numbers are, for example, the lengths of a rectangular patch of ground the their product is a useful value, ie its 'area'.
What is not obvious is whether the idea of using multiplication to obtain the area of field of corn is an invention or a discovery. That is, did someone invent a method of getting the area of a field by multiplying the length of its sides or did they discover that you can get the area of a field by multiplying those lengths? (Is there a difference?)
To solve a real-world problem using mathematics, what has to happen first is the problem must be translated into a set of numbers and mathematical operations and finally the result has to be translated back into a real world property.
There is a right way and a wrong way to do that. If you want the area of a field it is no good adding the lengths of its sides. If the field is 3 miles by 2 miles then the sum (3+2) is 5, but that isn't the area. The world is such that the correct mathematical abstraction involves mutiplication, not addition, so inventing a method of calculating the area of a field involves discovering you need to multiply, not add!
The world is as it is. If we are clever enough we can invent/discover a method to convert properties of the world into numbers ('take meaurements'), then use some mathematical operations to get a new number which matches a measurement we could make of some other property.
What is surprising is that it possible to do that! That means properties behave somewhat in the same way that abstract numbers do!
The must-read classic work on this id by Eugene Wigner;
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I did't make it clear that when I wrote "I don't know if there are innate genetic differences between the races and neither do you." I was referring only and specifically to genetic differences relating to IQ scores.
if you and I both do an IQ test today it would reveal which of us has better solving power today. I think it is obvious that how we do on such a test would depend on a whole raft of factors - it is not clear at all that the winner has better genes.
If we had taken the test as children it is quite likely the higher scorer would now be earning more in a better job than the loser - but it still wouldn't show that IQ score is genetically determined.
I do not dispute that IQ score measures something real about an individual - What is absurd is that racists use the 'average' scores to judge individuals. Consider person X. Whether he is 'ok' or not doesn't depend on his qualities but the average of which ever group he is classified as belonging to.
if intelligence matters so much then logically we should discriminate between high-iq and low-iq individuals regardless of race. But racists don't do that - they use the race average to excuse over-valuing low-iq members of their favoured race over high-iq members of non-favoured races.
It seems almost paradoxical that in this area it is the left that focuses on the individual and the right that treats people only as members of a collective.
i m sorry to have drifted off iq tesing in the narrow.. in the narrow, i agree iq tests reveal real something about the individual beng tested.
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@Analgesic.Spectre
My dear chap, I don't know if there are innate genetic differences between the races and neither do you. But we do know that there are social factors that come into play. Obviously if you want to investigate innate racial differences you have to eliminate all the non-innate, social and environmental factors first.or you won't know if you are measuring cause or effect.
l
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@vagabond
For fun, imagine there are three things on the ground - a stone, a watch and a snail - all about the same size.
No doubt the stone was not designed and the watch was designed, so what does that imply about the snail?
IMO, living things give every impression of being designed by a master craftsman.
But they weren't designed by a master craftsman - they evolved.
I'm not even interested in debating the point - there are 10 to the power 26 creation/evolution debates on the 'net already and lots of sites with better explanatory figures and graphics than I can put in post.
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@ethang5
You saw it here. I did not express disgust myself but spoke about just someone expressing disgust and got insulted and called a homophone and a bigot. Why are you wondering?
I'm wondering because there is no detail there. I assume 'just someone' did not say 'I feel revulsion about gay sex' out of the blue to some other person who then immediately replied 'You are a homophone and a bigot', (meaning homophobe, I expect). What were the actual words used, and with what tone of voice?
There is a difference between saying 'gay sex is disgusting' and saying 'gay sex is disgusting to me'.
I'd guess most straight males are a bit queasy about gay sex, but not every straight male is a bigot.
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I think the defining characteristic of a bigot is that they are intolerant. Loads of people have negative feelings about gay sex - I know many men who wouldn't watch male gay porn if you paid them. But I wouldn't call a bloke a bigot because he doesn't enjoy gay porn.
Ethang say he gets called a bigot when he expresses disgust at homosexuality. I wonder what it is that he says and how he says it!
I wonder if this thread is not so much about homophobic bigotry as about Ethang wanting to having a dig at 'lefties' being too keen to jump on anything even slightly PC?
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I suppose we can accept that all other things being equal a 'more intelligent' person will score higher on an IQ test than someone 'less intelligent'.
The problem comes when all other things are not equal!
Ideally, a IQ test would measure something innate about an individual, ie something that is indepedent of culture and education, but current test fail to to that as is demonstrated by the 'Flynn Effect', ie the observation that mean IQ scores have risen over time. Unless people now are inherently smarter than their parents who were smarter than their parents (unlikely!) then IQ scores is not measuring an innate, culturally and educationally independent quality. What eactly IQ measures is a matter of hot debate!
This often comes up in the context of race. The sad fact is that there are inequalities in human societies(such as the quality of schooling) that impact on IQ scores. It's only when those social inequalities are erased that IQ scores might mean anything.
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@drafterman
I was thinking about possible reponses by people who felt revulsion about gay sex.
1 - "Ugh! That's not for me! Still, it takes all sorts, let's have a beer."2 - "Ugh! That is perverted and disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself - never come near me again".
The first repsonse is itended as typical of someone who is disgusted by the act of gay sex but is not bigoted.
The second repose is itended as typical of someoe who is disgusted by the act of gay sex ads bigoted.
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Supose that someone tells me they are gay.
Assuming I am straight and I find gay sex repulsive I can respond in either of two ways:
1 - "Ugh! That's not for me! Still, it takes all sorts, let's have a beer."
2 - "Ugh! That is perverted and disgusting and you should be ashamed of yourself - never come near me again".
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@ethang5
So how is it not bigotry to be repulsed at one act of homosexuality but not at the same act performed by others?
So far no one has gone along with the idea that being repulsed by acts of homosexuality sex is bigotry at all. I'd have said it's not being repulsed that makes someone a bigot; it's the desire to impose one's views on everyone else that defines a bigot.
Lots of straights wouldn't do gay sex themseleves but aren't bothered by what gays do in private - that is not bigotry.
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@ethang5
you asked: What is a "linguistic limit"? What does it limit you from?
SM's example is that you can't be (or create) a married batchelor, no matter how powerful you are!
He's right of course - Creating a married batchelor is something not even a god can do.
I'd say this is all very silly! The writers of the bible were more interested in praising and flattering their god than giving an objective description. I am sure we have all described our WAGs as the most beautiful woman in the world- saying God is 'omni-whatever' was, I suppose exaggeration, or hyperbole or just plain old flattery.
I'm sure people know I am a hard-line atheist, but I wouldn't use the problem with the definition of 'omnipotent',to 'prove' anything because its obvious an entity does not have to posess literally infinite qualities to be a god. Nobody really understood infinity until the 19th century. I think the bible described god as omnopotent because they imagined Him as being so powerful He was 'practically omnipotent', but 'practically omnipotent' wouldn't look so good on the page! It would have ruined the Hallelujah Chorus for a start:
Hallelujah!
For the Lord God practically omnipotent reigneth;
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
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@drafterman
I don't get the impression that AnalS is arguing that the difference in IQ scores shows that black kids are being let down by the school system. I do get the impression that he wants to suggest it's because blacks are inferior to whites.
He says "That way, we can avoid disingenuous conflation", but what is disingenuous is not conflating his attitide towards blacks with Hitler's anti-semitism. What is disengenuous is his attempt to suggest they are any differerent.
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@secularmerlin
That seems like a good reason to put it on a back-burner to me!
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@secularmerlin
I have no objection to other people spending their mental energies on proving and refuring solipsism, but it doesn't appeal greatly to me. If anyone comes up with something deeper than 'we could be brains in vats but we probably aren't' then I'd be all ears!
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@secularmerlin
Well we do have to add a caveat about definitions and tautologies - we can be certain that a batchelor is not married for instance. Another example where certainty is possible is suppose you see me throw a die 3 times and it comes up 4,2 and 1. You can be certain i didn't throw a six in those 3 throws because you saw me get a 4,2 and 1!
But sometimes we do have to risk being wrong and say all swans are white. The trick is to balance the risk of being wrong against the paralysis caused by wanting to reduce that risk to zero.
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Does it have to be one or the other? Consider prime numbers. We invent the idea of a number that can be divided only by itself and 1 but we discover that 43019 is such a number.
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@secularmerlin
You mean you presume that's the difference. I have no idea how to test that hypothesis without first making the presupposition that there is some correspondence between your senses and actual conditions.
As I see things, one can make the assumption external reality exists and get on with thinking about important things like ethics, free will and consciousness or get bogged down at square one forever wondering if you are a brain in a jar.
I spend about 1% of my philopical effort thinking about solipsism etc... it is obvious we could (in theory) all be diseembodied brains; it is equally obviously not so and anything else is just padding.
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I'd say it boils down to the problem of imagining a rock that is both liftable and un-liftable at the same time.
Matthew 19:26 applies, i.e. "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible."
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@secularmerlin
When you are in a dream don't you tend to go with the flow of dream events no matter how surreal? What makes "realkeith" accepting "reality" different from "dreamkieth" accepting the dream as reality?
Me dreaming and me awake is the same me. In each case my brain produces a neural representation of the world, the difference being that when I am awake sense data gets used so the representation corresponds more closely to actual conditions.
Even when we are awake much of what we are aware of is not a simple transacription of sense data - it is more like the brain's job is to continualy invent a representation of the world which sense data is used to correct.
Let me stress that I assume the existence of an external reality. That is not to say I don't see there is a philosophical problem with that; it's just that solipsism etc. is not a problem that interests me!
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@Stephen
And keithprosser has since come to the conclusion that the rape victim Willie Dille is somehow being held up by the right as some kind of a "martyr", I have yet to see his reasoning or evidence for this
The reasoning is that the right present Dille's death as the consequence of harrasment and rape by Muslims. Evidence for that exists in the quote above where Stephen says 'rape victim Willie Dille'.
Leftists prefer to emphasise that there is only Dille's claim that there was any harassment or rape.
There isn't enough evidence to know if Dille was raped or not. What one believes - and how one writes about it - depends on personal political bias.
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@secularmerlin
Given one perceives a baseball a 'mental representation of a baseball' is present within one's brain. Such represetations take the form of patterns of neural activity, so I call them 'neural representations'; what one perceives is the information encoded into the pattern of neural activity.
So if there is a neural representation of a baseball in your brain you will perceive a baseball whether or not there is a baseball 'out there'.
We have evolved such that the neural representations produced by and in our brains correspond to the real world, but in the case of (eg) dreams neural representations arise spontaneously, ie without any correponding external object.
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@Stronn
Yes, there will be a lump of rock nothing will be able to move, not even God. Which means God must have limits, which is the point.
There's a point?
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@vagabond
Which would be proof that he is not omnipotent. This is why it's a paradox, every argument you provide actually proves that the god is not omnipotent.
But does an entity need to be actually omnipotent to be a god? Even if He is not actually omnipotent, YHWH allegedly created a universe in 6 days, made man from mud, destroyed worlds, cities and peoples with ease and can grant eternal happiness or torture to departed souls. Even if HIs powers fall short of literal 'omnipotence' I'd classify God as a god.
English (and, I suppose, Hebrew and Greek) don't have a single word that means 'can do anything that is not inherently paradoxical'. If such a word existed perhaps the Bible writers would, or should, have used it. But the bible was written primarily with believers in mind, not for nit-picking pedants so its not surprising that the scribes didn't bother to add any caveats about the paradoxes raised.
I suspect God cannot create a stone He cannot lift because that is paradoxical. But as He can - allegedy - turn people into stones (and worse) it may not be wise to draw attention to that fact.
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@Castin
I'd wonder if the date is important. Newspapers, wider literacy, the telegraph, increased mobility etc were all kicking off around that time. We talked about the Mona Lisa which became the iconic painting around the same time and Einstein became the first scientist to be world famous then too.
I suggest such things became icons because they were the first of their kind that almost everybody had heard of. Shakespeare and Beethoven also became iconic in the victorian era. Once something becomes an icon it tends to stay iconic - it becomes a convenient shared reference point.
Only slightly different is the -gate suffix.
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@secularmerlin
it is likely that 'goose bump' music tends to have a particular distribution of intervals, discordant harmonies, dynamics and key changes etc. One can imagine a computer being programmed with such rules and coming up with an effect piece of music, but with no knowledge that it was composing music; that is a parallel to a chess computer that plays at grand-master level but doesn't know it is playing chess.
The other sense of the question is whether a computer can manifest the internal subjective states (emotions?) of a human composer and thus feel the need to express itself through music.
The difference is the difference between 'Artificial intelligence' and 'Artificial consciousness'. To achieve the former today would only require a collabortion between an average musicologist and an average computer programmer - we have no idea how to even begin doing the latter.
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@Buddamoose
I'd agree - Cuomo obviously places the bar for 'greatness' very high. I think it is useful to do so because it helps us think what our aspirations should be.
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