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From: pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor)
Subject: Re: Folk psychology (was: Is Common Sense Explicit or Implicit?
Message-ID: <Cwr6q7.410@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Organization: UTCC Public Access
References: <35vhoj$k64@mp.cs.niu.edu> <3604v4$9jj@newsbf01.news.aol.com>
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 1994 20:10:54 GMT
Lines: 37

In article <3604v4$9jj@newsbf01.news.aol.com>,
DrewDalupa <drewdalupa@aol.com> wrote:
>In article <35vhoj$k64@mp.cs.niu.edu>, rickert@cs.niu.edu (Neil Rickert)
>writes:
>
>>We have to [c]all "nature abhors a vacuum" as a
>>purpose, and we have to allow the rock's desire to lower its
>>potential energy as a purpose.  It seems to me that we have come full
>>circle.
>
>The difference is that in one case nothing militates against our
>freedom to interpret, and in the other case something does.  We could
>suppose that a rock *does not* want to achieve the lowest potential
>energy, and that other things force it to because it is so helpless.
>This would be how we would interpret the analogous situation, where
>we tie a person up into a bundle and roll him down a hill.  Or we
>could suppose the rock *wants* to roll down the hill and *wants*
>to break apart when it smashes to the bottom.  Who can say?
>Whereas with life there are a lot of things which pretty clearly
>harm it, such as throwing it into a vat of chlorine.  We are not
>as free to interpret things how we like.
>
What is there to stop us? Even today, slavery, i.e. treating humans as
objects, is being practised. You are again making a circular argument to
which I have referred in another posting. The only criterion is if inter-
pretation is useful in a sense of letting us cope better for our purposes
with things we interpret. 

>Edward
>

Andrzej
-- 
Andrzej Pindor                        The foolish reject what they see and 
University of Toronto                 not what they think; the wise reject
Instructional and Research Computing  what they think and not what they see.
pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca                           Huang Po
