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frank harley

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    frank harley reacted to Ilya Startsev in Existence exists subsidiary thread   
    Do you agree with their views on economy?
     
    I realize that markets are not natural, but they are human. Nonetheless, we can make markets to be in harmony with nature and can build wonderful societies on top of them.
     
    How can dreams be involuntary? Aren't they related to our volition, especially the lucid ones?
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    frank harley reacted to Mikee in Difference between human emotions and animal instinct   
    An article tackling concepts in animals can be found below:
    http://comparative-cognition-and-behavior-reviews.org/2008/vol3_zentall_wasserman_lazareva_thompson_rattermann/
     
    I also found some very clear conclusions succinctly stated, such as the following in Sec. 1.3:
     
    "The research reviewed in this section strongly suggests that nonhuman animals very ably master perceptual or basic level concepts[*]. Such mastery appears to rely on the familiar behavioral principles of discrimination and primary stimulus generalization. The roots of conceptualization thus appear to lie deep in the perceived similarity of external stimuli. Differential similarity influences the responses of nonhuman animals in much the same way as it influences the speaking of humans. Although it may not always be the case that humans and nonhuman animals categorize stimuli in the same way (see Roberts & Mazmanian, 1988; Yoshikubo, 1985; Fujita, 1987), based on the results presented here, one can conclude that both conceptual[*] behavior and its underlying cognitive processes are generally similar in humans and nonhuman animals.
     
    substitute "perceptual generalization" in place of "concept,". The authors of the study use the term "concept" entirely too loosely.
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    frank harley reacted to aleph_1 in Concept-Formation & Mathematical Process   
    I think that one can overplay one's hand here. One can and does quickly arrive at floating abstractions within mathematics. I believe that this discussion should be limited to a discussion of natural numbers. Primitive societies, such as existed in Europe during the dark ages, can lose sight of what "two means". As a result, you end up with differing words for this concept, such as a yoke of oxen, brace of geese, pair of threes in poker, a couple, duo, dyad, etc. Through a process of unit reduction, we can identify each of these concepts as representing and instance of "two". Such an identification might have seemed remarkable to a primitive consciousness.
     
    This does not mean that there is an isomorphism between Randian concepts and those within mathematics.
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    frank harley got a reaction from Acrophob in Joule economics   
    Debt to GDP reflects a nations basic capacity to repay what it owes, In this sense, smaller nations borrow against their ability to repay as a sort of credit report.
     
    Richer nations, however, can simply print their own money to repay debt, or extend credit to themselves. The assumption here is that money itself has no intrinsic value, rather serving no purpose but as 'ability to purchase.
     
    OTH, Austrian School Philosophy, by maintaining that money represents real value, obviously finds serious fault with padoodling with the money supply. 
     
    The problem, with the Austrian POV, as it were, is their refusal to enter the empiricist fray with numerical-based proof; This is why it's advisable to call their work 'Philosophy' rather than 'Economics'.
     
    For better or worse, what's normal, paradigmatic behavior for economists is to use math to fight out their positions.
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    frank harley got a reaction from StrictlyLogical in Hannah Arendt   
    Yes, 'great idea to scare children out of reading!
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