Posted by zeugma on March 30, 2006, at 22:13:03
In reply to Re: Public Expression of Religion Act , H.R. 2679, posted by special_k on March 30, 2006, at 20:39:35
in which case... people could converge on a probability judgement (ie that there is .5 probability that phi is infinate and that there is .5 probability that phi is finite though maybe you don't like these disjunctive beliefs).>
I like those disjunctive beliefs. I couldnt even think about the Andromeda Galaxy containing sapient life (hopefully not in such dire predicaments as we are) without disjunction, being of a verificationist stripe if not verificationist outright, and I do not have an instrument of sufficient resolution to verify either limb, therefore I must opt out and say that I can verify neither limb, but can assert the disjunction (law of excluded middle).
Oh yes, I can have beta content of such, or think I have, say if like many sufferers of hypnagogic hallucinations (and I follow the eminent neuropsychiatrist J.A. Hobson here) believe I have been abducted in that dissociated state of hallucination to Andromeda by inhabitants of that beaetiful galaxy (I think the ancients thought it looked like a cluster of honeybees)only to find that it was nothing special, its inhabitants were as devoid of scruples as, oh, some Anglophone humans, and were willing to break their equivalent of our Geneva Convention in order to extract information they could not possibly need from me. Beta content, and having had such hallucinations, I can see why such elaborate stories get contacted to put an alpha frame on such otherwise deviant experience. Those states are really weird, and i am asking for them now, in boring everyone silly with my prolixity. But Hobson is alpha content that grafts some odd beta content into a usable map. He's got a nice diagram of it in "The Dream Drugstore".
-z
poster:zeugma
thread:624709
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/poli/20060322/msgs/626902.html