> you have paralized my questions by talking about something other...but 
> this
> was your aim i think.
>
Yes but not in a hostile way, my brain just shot off that way at the time.
  From your original message I knew this was going to be Philosophy 101 for 
a while. ENJOY!
>
> my opinion is that God is one of the categories we recognize...
Hmmmmm.....what if you 'don't believe' in a 'god' as such. Does he still 
exist then? To whom does the term 'we' refer to, define terms...'we' is a 
notional grouping in *your* mind based upon *your* experiences. You cannot 
assume anything about anybody else's precise background, you can only rely 
upon common shared experiences. As I quite often say, "The trouble with 
averages is we are all individuals."

>>>
>> I have never found a satisfactory answer as to *why* computers work.
>> Sure,  I know how they work, but *why* do they work. Anybody ever
> you are lucky if you think *how* computers work.
Believe me it's not *lucky*, it hurts my head every time I use one. 
Essentially, a computer is a device that allows / enables physical beings 
to manipulate the non-physical and then some! Ouch!!


> anyway "why" and "how" are
> just two words so there is surely no harm if we exchange the "why"
> with "how", or whatever word with whatever other word.
Oh boy oh boy oh boy! You can't just swap words around like that and 
expect it not to do harm! Next time I shake hands I shall say "Why do you 
do?" and see what happens.

Oranges pain dribble wobbly woobly frooboids. Dingo you never car 
marmalade???

That last sentence was in fact the opening line of UK national anthem but 
I just swapped words about. I am sure you understood that it was the UK 
national anthem didn't you. I am not going to eleborate further as that 
remark about being able to swap words, was, quite frankly, surprisingly 
dumb from a smart guy. Oh hell, I can't resist...words are only sounds 
attached to repetitive associations of experiences as you grow up.
My son is 19 months and really getting the hang of talking now and it is a 
real eye-opener for me to see how he's piecing it all together. If I tell 
him that the door is called a grapefruit, consistently, he will (a) 
beleive me and (b) get me into trouble when he starts attending 
play-school!


>
> i have read GEB too and must say that the impact was decisive. people who
> read that book usually end in the same way - wondering about the littlest
> things around them.
Yup! I've not been 'normal' since then! It is a profound book and I am 
glad that in my existence in this world I encountered it and understood 
large parts of it. I have my own copy and I always read a bit when I think 
life is getting dull! It can be a very unsettling book.
>
> i heard a professor on my university saying that he believes universe is
> discrete in its nature.

>
> people nowadays just "pass" cinemas by. but there were times, in the
> beginnings of cinematography, when people deeply wondered about how it 
> can be
> posible that they can see the past. philosophers have written essays
> concerning the god-like magic behind the process of filming and repetitive
> showing of the filmed. it has had something to do with time and space, 
> their
> interaction ....
Given that space-time is considered to be 'all there at once' and that we 
are merely 'moving through it', this is something that might come back to 
shock us all! I often freak out at rewinding the video, I mean, the 
timeline is going forward but the film is going backwards. Maybe if we all 
got together one day and brought a video each and all rewind it at the 
same time something quite profound might happen...and somebody can film 
the whole thing and play that backwards too to reset us all.

>
> there are cases in which i am unable to preciselly reproduce the numbers 
> i
> have obtained. as a said it is because i am not perfect (just like anyone
> else). you never enter the same river. development as such is a
> unidirectional process, it recurs but never repeats.
Hmmmmm. Depends what you mean here. You can *always* reproduce the numbers,
  what you may not be able to reproduce is the process that generated them.
  I think that's what you are trying to tell me!

Don't go too deep for an essentially simple process. Software is for the 
most part mechanistic (calm down everybody!) in that, if I write a 
function to return the sum of two numbers and hand it 2 and 2, I expect to 
see the result 4 every time, regardless of language or process. (Goidel, 
where are you!). I do agree however that there are environmental 
considerations; yesterday it worked, today the disk is full and it doesn't 
work. That's ok by me.


>
> does it matter after i have read what you have written above ....
Does any of it matter. Do we matter? What is matter?

>>> so, are we working with objects or just manipulating text ?
>>>
>> Yes and yes.
>>
>
> glass and glass. water and water. and and and. everything is nothing.
> (foolish, isn't it?) have we advanced ourselves?
OOOOooooooooh! Cheeky, you know what I meant (Ooops! Hoisted by my own 
petard!)...I simply meant that mentally, you are working with objects 
while physically it happens to be 'text'. Whatever that is. Sigh, I think 
I am losing it. What's it? Wotsit. A Cheesy snack.

>
> names do differentiate, but spatial position does also.
Agreed, but should you ever discover to a means to make two objects 
co-exist in the same space at the same time then you will be a rich man! 
Imagine a stack of oranges (don't anybody mention *that* mathematical 
problem, I think it was solved recently) and you want to green-grocer dude 
to give you the one from the middle. Surely by saying 'I want the one in 
the middle' you have attached a naming reference to that orange, sorry, 
thing you want to buy. You  *must* name things. It all comes down to the 
minutae of the naming process. Even if you just wave hand signals for up, 
down, left-a-bit, grab it then those hand signals, in that sequence 
required to locate the goal fruit constitutes a 'name' albeit a very long 
winded and long one but a name nonetheless.

> Mescalin etc...
> thanks, but i will not try it.
Why not?> Look what it did for me! ;-)

Sean Charles.