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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/19/18 in Posts

  1. A continuity? The inevitability of mass deaths, corrupt leadership and poor living conditions used to justify a "no worse off" argument for what happened to native populations is counter-factual too, n'est-ce pas? What occurred was exposure to formidable interlopers whose actions demonstrated the practice of "might makes right", regardless of how they spoke about it. And that lesson was learned, went viral and continues to rationalize the actions of those who vie for power today. Therefore, I'm inclined to believe the practice of colonialism, imperialism and the like are immoral, regardless of whatever incidental benefits fall as scraps from the interloper's table, because the ends do not justify the means. Perhaps the Trader Principle is an unknown ideal too?
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  2. Animals don't have language and so cannot have concepts. Without concepts they cannot regard instances of the concept as units. What animals do have is abilities of pattern recognition and memory and patterned behavior and those do a pretty good job together of doing everything a conceptual capacity would do with respect to (for example) a mammalian predator taking a go at stalking a new type of prey it hadn't encountered before. So those mammals would not benefit from a conceptual capacity so evolution has not rewarded selection for it. Humans can operate at that level: Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink is about pre-conceptual pattern recognition and I am specifically referring the examples there of "antiquities experts who recognize a fake at a glance" long before they can articulate what exactly is wrong with the fake.
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