“
Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged. When our Founding Fathers passed the First Amendment, they sought to protect churches from government interference. They never intended to construct a wall of hostility between government and the concept of religious belief itself. … To those who cite the First Amendment as reason for excluding God from more and more of our institutions every day, I say: The First Amendment of the Constitution was not written to protect the people of this country from religious values; it was written to protect religious values from government tyranny.
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Ronald Reagan
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Most modern people think of religion as a consolation, but to Epicurus it was the opposite. Supernatural interference with the course of nature seemed to him a source of terror, and immortality fatal to the hope of release from pain. Accordingly he constructed an elaborate doctrine designed to cure men of the beliefs that inspire fear.
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Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day)
“
No season lives here. This space has quite successfully shut out any such interference. The cunning designer saw to it that there is not even a mirror in which the reader might contemplate his own appearance or anxiously search for the marks of age. The climate is grammatical. Nothing here but books, as if I were swaddled in them, as if the porous walls of books were by now almost a second skin. Or as if they provided a padding like the walls of madhouses, a cushion constructed of the language of the dead.
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Geoffrey O'Brien (The Browser's Ecstasy: A Meditation on Reading)
“
The belief in an independently existent self is a mistaken perception with serious consequences, for all afflictions are rooted in a fundamental misconception about the nature of the self. Grasping at the mistaken perceptions of oneself and other phenomena leads to constant frustrations, anxieties, and unhappiness. Understanding the illusory nature of the self allows one to experience things 'as they are,' without interference from conceptual constructs.
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Karma Lekshe Tsomo (Into the Jaws of Yama, Lord of Death: Buddhism, Bioethics, & Death)
“
The kind, scope, and intensity of such conflicts are largely determined by the civilization in which we live. If the civilization is stable and tradition bound, the variety of choices presenting themselves are limited and the range of possible individual conflicts narrow. Even then they are not lacking. One loyalty may interfere with another; personal desires may stand against obligations to the group. But if the civilization is in a stage of rapid transition, where highly contradictory values and divergent ways of living exist side by side, the choices the individual has to make are manifold and difficult
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Karen Horney (Our Inner Conflicts: A Constructive Theory of Neurosis)
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Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.
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Robert A. Caro (The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York)
“
As I look back on the cornerstones of my conditioning, I see to my surprise that the atheist Freud and my religious upbringing were fundamentally in agreement. Both assumed that human nature was basically bad and in need of control from outside. Freud told me I needed “civilization” and not religion. Religion told me I needed obedience to the precepts and laws of its “God.” Both agreed that my desires would get me into trouble. My religion told me I’m bad, but “God” will save me; Freud said I’m “bad” at the core, but “enculturation” will save me. Bottom line: I shouldn’t trust my desire. And if I can’t trust my core desire, is it really possible to trust myself? The answer was no—that which is trustworthy is not you, it is outside of you. All you have that you can trust is your reason, which will dictate that you should follow the social good. But if desire was bad, what was going to fuel my effort to obey reason? The unspoken answer was the same as the answer in childhood—fear. “Be responsible and be productive, or else . . .” Such a fear-based mental construct increases reliance on external sources of control. These external controls become internalized as Self 1 concepts that judge both desire and behavior. As I lose touch with Self 2’s natural instinct and am subject to the various cycles of Self 1 interference, there is a great price to pay in terms of human dignity, enjoyment, expression, and capacity for excellence.
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W. Timothy Gallwey (The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace)
“
At one in the morning on the 20th. November, radio hams over most of Europe suffered serious interference to their reception, as if a new and exceptionally strong broadcaster was operating. They located the interference at two hundred and three metres; it sounded something like the noise of machinery or rushing water; then the continuous, unchanging noise was suddenly interrupted by a horrible, rasping noise (everyone described it in the same way: a hollow, nasal, almost synthetic sounding voice, made all the more so by the electronic apparatus); and this frog-like voice called excitedly, "Hello, hello, hello! Chief Salamander speaking. Hello, chief Salamander speaking. Stop all broadcasting, you men! Stop your broadcasting! Hello, Chief Salamander speaking!" And then another, strangely hollow voice asked: "Ready?" "Ready." There was a click as if the broadcast were being transferred to another speaker; and then another, unnaturally staccato voice called: "Attention! Attention! Attention!" "Hello!" "Now!" A voice was heard in the quiet of the night; it was rasping and tired-sounding but still had the air of authority. "Hello you people! This is Louisiana. This is Kiangsu. This is Senegambia. We regret the loss of human life. We have no wish to cause you unnecessary harm. We wish only that you evacuate those areas of coast which we will notify you of in advance. If you do as we say you will avoid anything regrettable. In future we will give you at least fourteen days notice of the places where we wish to extend our sea. Incidents so far have been no more than technical experiments. Your explosives have proved their worth. Thank you for them. "Hello you people! Remain calm. We wish you no harm. We merely need more water, more coastline, more shallows in which to live. There are too many of us. Your coastlines are already too limited for our needs. For this reason we need to demolish your continents. We will convert them into bays and islands. In this way, the length of coastline can be increased five-fold. We will construct new shallows. We cannot live in deep ocean. We will need your continents as materials to fill in the deep waters. We wish you no harm, but there are too many of us. You will be free to migrate inland. You will not be prevented from fleeing to the hills. The hills will be the last to be demolished. "We are here because you wanted us. You have distributed us over the entire world. Now you have us. We wish that you collaborate with us. You will provide us with steel for our picks and drills. you will provide us with explosives. You will provide us with torpedoes. You will work for us. Without you we will not be able to remove the old continents. Hello you people, Chief Salamander, in the name of all newts everywhere, offers collaboration with you. You will collaborate with us in the demolition of your world. Thank you." The tired, rasping voice became silent, and all that was heard was the constant noise resembling machinery or the sea. "Hello, hello, you people," the grating voice began again, "we will now entertain you with music from your gramophone records. Here, for your pleasure, is the March of the Tritons from the film, Poseidon.
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Karel Čapek (War with the Newts)
“
It's not out of the question that eventually, using Ai, to realistically shield and synthesize the "envelope" of a specific environment, and then actualizing destructive and constructive interference patterns will lead to, if not instantaneous materialization, then certainly a directional indication towards the most visible source of that matching vibrational resonance model. I call this the "frequencies equation." Envelope, vibrational resonance model, and frequencies equation are the same concept.
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Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
“
The extent to which the distinction between “social” and “intellectual” is accepted as unproblematic by observers of science may have significant consequences for the reports about science which they produce. The Social and the Scientific: The Observer’s Dilemma At one extreme, we can envisage the wholesale adoption by an observer of the distinction mentioned above. In this case, the observer holds an assumption that scientific phenomena occupy a realm largely distinct from that of social phenomena, and that it is only to the latter that the concepts, procedures, and expertise of sociology can be applied. As a result, the procedures and achievements central to scientists’ work become largely immune from sociological explanation. Approaches which implicitly adopt this standpoint have been roundly criticised on several grounds. Rather than repeat these criticisms in detail, we shall merely outline some of the main critical themes. Firstly, the decision to concentrate only on “social” rather than “technical” aspects of science severely limits the range of phenomena that can be selected as appropriate for study. Put simply, this means that there is no point in doing sociology of science unless one can clearly identify the presence of some politician breathing down the necks of working scientists. Where there is no such obvious interference by external agencies, it is argued, science can proceed without the need for sociological analysis. This argument hinges on a particularly limited notion of the occasional influence of sociopolitical factors; the substance of science proceeds unaffected if such factors are absent. Secondly, emphasis on “social” in contradistinction to “technical” can lead to the disproportionate selection of events for analysis which appear to exemplify “mistaken” or “wrong” science. As we shall show, an important feature of fact construction is the process whereby “social” factors disappear once a fact is established. Since scientists themselves preferentially retain (or resurrect) the existence of “social” factors where things scientific are thought to have gone wrong, the adoption of the same viewpoint by an observer will necessarily lead him to the analysis of the way social factors affect, or have given rise to, “wrong” beliefs.
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Bruno Latour (Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton Paperbacks))
“
It's not out of the question that eventually, using Ai, to realistically shield and synthesize the "envelope" of a specific environment, and then actualizing destructive and constructive interference patterns will lead to, if not instantaneous materialization, then certainly a directional indication towards the most visible source of that matching vibrational resonance model. I call this the "frequencies equation.
”
”
Rico Roho (Pataphysics: Mastering Time Line Jumps for Personal Transformation (Age of Discovery Book 5))
“
The fourth model, the collective rights model, believes the amendment is a rule of construction that does protect rights, but collective rights of people in the states. A foremost example of such a collective right, put forward by Professor Akhil Amar, is the right of the people to alter or abolish their government.48 Another is the right of a state’s body politic to choose the policies it wants to adopt free from federal government interference.
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Anthony B Sanders (Baby Ninth Amendments: How Americans Embraced Unenumerated Rights and Why It Matters)
“
Surprisingly, and almost unbelievably, when a photon is fired through the double slit apparatus, it will end up landing in one of the constructive interference areas of the screen on the other side. If you fire enough photons, you eventually will reform the waveform from the double slit experiment, too – the result is a series of vertical bars, just like before. The same result can be achieved not only with photons, but electrons, whole atoms, and even entire molecules.
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Donald B. Grey (Quantum Physics Made Easy: The Introduction Guide For Beginners Who Flunked Maths And Science In Plain Simple English)
“
translation can create linguistic hybridity in the form of source-language interference. This source-language interference might be deliberate (e.g. to convey the foreignness of the ST) or not (e.g. unconscious calquing). If the translator adds linguistic hybridity in the TT, a diegetic discourse-presentation category (i.e. ID or NRDA) or also narrative report (NR) might be transformed into a mimetic discourse-presentation category (i.e. MID, FID, DD, or FDD). This
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Susanne Klinger (Translation and Linguistic Hybridity: Constructing World-View (Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies Book 7))
“
How is it then that a beloved parent will be transformed, in the child’s eyes, into a monster? If we look closely into the life of the small child we find that such transformations take place chiefly in those instances when we are compelled to interfere with the child’s pleasure, when we interrupt a pleasurable activity or deny a wish, when we frustrate the child’s wishes or appetites in some way. Then mother becomes the worstest, the baddest, the meanest mother in the world for the duration of a small child’s rage. Now it is conceivable that if we never interfered with a child’s pleasure seeking, granted all wishes, opposed nothing, we might never experience these negative reactions of the child, but the product of such child-rearing would not be a civilized child. We are required to interfere with the child’s pleasure not only for practical reasons which are presented daily in the course of rearing a child—health, safety, the requirements of the family—but in order to bring about the evolution of a civilized man and woman. The child begins life as a pleasure-seeking animal; his infantile personality is organized around his own appetites and his own body. In the course of his rearing the goal of exclusive pleasure seeking must be modified drastically, the fundamental urges must be subject to the dictates of conscience and society, must be capable of postponement and in some instances of renunciation completely. So there are no ways in which a child can avoid anxiety. If we banished all the witches and ogres from his bedtime stories and policed his daily life for every conceivable source of danger, he would still succeed in constructing his own imaginary monsters out of the conflicts of his young life. We do not need to be alarmed about the presence of fears in the small child’s life if the child has the means to overcome them. THE
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Selma H. Fraiberg (The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood)
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I do not believe that human lives may be made the means for satisfying an artist's desire for self-expression. We must demand, rather, that every man should be given, if he wishes, the right to model his life himself, as far as this does not interfere too much with others. Much as I may sympathize with the aesthetic impulse, I suggest that the artist might seek expression in another material. Politics, I demand, must uphold equalitarian and individualistic principles; dreams of beauty have to submit to the necessity of helping men in distress, and men who suffer injustice; and to the necessity of constructing institutions to serve such purposes.
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Karl Popper (The Open Society and Its Enemies)
“
The reality is that men are hurting and that the whole culture responds to them by saying, “Please do not tell us what you feel.” I have always been a fan of the Sylvia cartoon where two women sit, one looking into a crystal ball as the other woman says, “He never talks about his feelings.” And the woman who can see the future says, “At two P.M. all over the world men will begin to talk about their feelings—and women all over the world will be sorry.”
If we cannot heal what we cannot feel, by supporting patriarchal culture that socializes men to deny feelings, we doom them to live in states of emotional numbness. We construct a culture where male pain can have no voice, where male hurt cannot be named or healed. It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them. In feminist circles men who wanted to change were often labeled narcissistic or needy. Individual men who expressed feelings were often seen as attention seekers, patriarchal manipulators trying to steal the stage with their drama.
When I was in my twenties, I would go to couples therapy, and my partner of more than ten years would explain how I asked him to talk about his feelings and when he did, I would freak out. He was right. It was hard for me to face that I did not want to hear about his feelings when they were painful or negative, that I did not want my image of the strong man truly challenged by learning of his weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here I was, an enlightened feminist woman who did not want to hear my man speak his pain because it revealed his emotional vulnerability. It stands to reason, then, that the masses of women committed to the sexist principle that men who express their feelings are weak really do not want to hear men speak, especially if what they say is that they hurt, that they feel unloved. Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.
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bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love)
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We all have our illusions in this world, and we cling to them. We think we’re standing on a broad, sturdy cruise ship of an existence when really we’re floating in a life raft. We construct webs of safety for our families and ignore the hungry spider in the corner. We convince ourselves that the terrible things we read about will always happen to someone else.
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Brad Parks (Interference)
“
a comprehensive view of homeostasis must include the application of the concept to systems in which conscious and deliberative minds, individually and in social groups, can both interfere with automatic regulatory mechanisms and create new forms of life regulation that have the very same goal of basic automated homeostasis, that is, achieving viable, upregulated life states that tend to produce flourishing. I see the effort of constructing human cultures as a manifestation of this variety of homeostasis.
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António Damásio (The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind)
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The San Francisco Housing Authority, in 1942, constructed a massive development to house 14,000 workers and their families at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard and began to assign apartments on a nondiscriminatory first-come, first-served basis. The navy objected, insisting that integration would cause racial conflict among workers and interfere with ship repair.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
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it is more properly understood as a masking of the self that is a constructed identity, a character. When the ego is too dominant, it prevents people from knowing their true identity and, as a result, interferes with an individual’s ability to make informed and clear distinctions between authentic reality and contrived reality, and to act accordingly.
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Martin W. Ball (Entheogenic Liberation: Unraveling the Enigma of Nonduality with 5-MeO-DMT Energetic Therapy (The Entheogenic Evolution Book 8))
“
It was the German powerhouse Deutsche Bank AG, not my fictitious RhineBank, that financed the construction of the extermination camp at Auschwitz and the nearby factory that manufactured Zyklon B pellets. And it was Deutsche Bank that earned millions of Nazi reichsmarks through the Aryanization of Jewish-owned businesses. Deutsche Bank also incurred massive multibillion-dollar fines for helping rogue nations such as Iran and Syria evade US economic sanctions; for manipulating the London interbank lending rate; for selling toxic mortgage-backed securities to unwitting investors; and for laundering untold billions’ worth of tainted Russian assets through its so-called Russian Laundromat. In 2007 and 2008, Deutsche Bank extended an unsecured $1 billion line of credit to VTB Bank, a Kremlin-controlled lender that financed the Russian intelligence services and granted cover jobs to Russian intelligence officers operating abroad. Which meant that Germany’s biggest lender, knowingly or unknowingly, was a silent partner in Vladimir Putin’s war against the West and liberal democracy. Increasingly, that war is being waged by Putin’s wealthy cronies and by privately owned companies like the Wagner Group and the Internet Research Agency, the St. Petersburg troll factory that allegedly meddled in the 2016 US presidential election. The IRA was one of three Russian companies named in a sprawling indictment handed down by the Justice Department in February 2018 that detailed the scope and sophistication of the Russian interference. According to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the Russian cyber operatives stole the identities of American citizens, posed as political and religious activists on social media, and used divisive issues such as race and immigration to inflame an already divided electorate—all in support of their preferred candidate, the reality television star and real estate developer Donald Trump. Russian operatives even traveled to the United States to gather intelligence. They focused their efforts on key battleground states and, remarkably, covertly coordinated with members of the Trump campaign in August 2016 to organize rallies in Florida. The Russian interference also included a hack of the Democratic National Committee that resulted in a politically devastating leak of thousands of emails that threw the Democratic convention in Philadelphia into turmoil. In his final report, released in redacted form in April 2019, Robert Mueller said that Moscow’s efforts were part of a “sweeping and systematic” campaign to assist Donald Trump and weaken his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. Mueller was unable to establish a chargeable criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, though the report noted that key witnesses used encrypted communications, engaged in obstructive behavior, gave false or misleading testimony, or chose not to testify at all. Perhaps most damning was the special counsel’s conclusion that the Trump campaign “expected it would benefit electorally from the information stolen and released through Russian efforts.
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Daniel Silva (The Cellist (Gabriel Allon, #21))
“
There lived a group of monkeys on a big mango tree. One of them was very naughty and loved fiddling with things. There was construction going on in a village. The monkeys arrived there when the villagers were away for lunch. The naughty monkey saw a partly sawed log with a wedge in it. He wondered what would happen if he removed the wedge. He managed to pull out the wedge, but the gap in the log closed and the monkey’s leg was trapped. He cried in pain and managed to free his leg, but it was already severely hurt. Moral: Do not interfere in someone else’s business.
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Vishnu Sharma (108 Animal Stories (Illustrated))
“
Specifically, using Ai to realistically synthesize the "Envelope" of a specific environment and then actualizing destructive/constructive interference patterns will lead to, if not instantaneous materialization, then certainly a directional indication towards the most visible source of that matching vibrational resonance model, which I call a "frequencies equation.
”
”
Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
“
The ONLY way of deliberate action on physical reality is to arrange two (2) quantum events, so that their constructive and destructive interference generates a third (3rd) quantum event, the difference of the others.
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Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
“
The only way to deliberate action on physical reality is to arrange two quantum events so that their constructive and destructive interference generates a third quantum event, the difference of the others. That's why space people (or *speople for short >w>) say that triangles are the base components of reality.
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Rico Roho (Mercy Ai: Age of Discovery)
“
By the time I began my Ph.D., the field of artificial intelligence had forked into two camps: the “rule-based” approach and the “neural networks” approach. Researchers in the rule-based camp (also sometimes called “symbolic systems” or “expert systems”) attempted to teach computers to think by encoding a series of logical rules: If X, then Y. This approach worked well for simple and well-defined games (“toy problems”) but fell apart when the universe of possible choices or moves expanded. To make the software more applicable to real-world problems, the rule-based camp tried interviewing experts in the problems being tackled and then coding their wisdom into the program’s decision-making (hence the “expert systems” moniker). The “neural networks” camp, however, took a different approach. Instead of trying to teach the computer the rules that had been mastered by a human brain, these practitioners tried to reconstruct the human brain itself. Given that the tangled webs of neurons in animal brains were the only thing capable of intelligence as we knew it, these researchers figured they’d go straight to the source. This approach mimics the brain’s underlying architecture, constructing layers of artificial neurons that can receive and transmit information in a structure akin to our networks of biological neurons. Unlike the rule-based approach, builders of neural networks generally do not give the networks rules to follow in making decisions. They simply feed lots and lots of examples of a given phenomenon—pictures, chess games, sounds—into the neural networks and let the networks themselves identify patterns within the data. In other words, the less human interference, the better.
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
“
these researchers figured they’d go straight to the source. This approach mimics the brain’s underlying architecture, constructing layers of artificial neurons that can receive and transmit information in a structure akin to our networks of biological neurons. Unlike the rule-based approach, builders of neural networks generally do not give the networks rules to follow in making decisions. They simply feed lots and lots of examples of a given phenomenon—pictures, chess games, sounds—into the neural networks and let the networks themselves identify patterns within the data. In other words, the less human interference, the better.
”
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Kai-Fu Lee (AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order)
“
We must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an
archaeologist. For the structure of the perceived world is buried under the sedimentations of later knowledge. Digging down to the perceived world, we see that sensory qualities are not opaque, indivisible "givens," which are simply exhibited to a remote consciousness—a favorite idea of classical philosophy. We see too that colors (each surrounded by an affective atmosphere which psychologists have been able to study and define) are themselves different modalities of our co-existence with the
world. We also find that spatial forms or distances are not so much relations between different points in objective space as they are relations between these points and a central perspective—our body. In
short, these relations are different ways for external stimuli to test, to solicit, and to vary our grasp on the world, our horizontal and vertical anchorage in a place and in a here-and-now. We find that perceived
things, unlike geometrical objects, are not bounded entities whose laws of construction we possess a priori, but that they are open, inexhaustible systems which we recognize through a certain style of development, although we are never able, in principle, to explore them entirely, and even though they never give us more than profiles and perspectival views of themselves. Finally, we find that the perceived world, in its turn, is not a pure object of thought without fissures or lacunae; it is,
rather, like a universal style shared in by all perceptual beings. While the world no doubt coordinates these perceptual beings, we can never
presume that its work is finished. Our world, as Malebranche said, is an "unfinished task."
If we now wish to characterize a subject capable of this perceptual experience, it obviously will not be a self-transparent thought, absolutely present to itself without the interference of its body and its history. The perceiving subject is not this absolute thinker; rather, it functions according to a natal pact between our body and the world, between ourselves and our body. Given a perpetually new natural and historical situation to control, the perceiving subject undergoes a continued birth; at each instant it is something new. Every incarnate subject is like an open notebook in which we do not yet know what will be written. Or it is like a new language; we do not know what works it will accomplish but only that, once it has appeared, it cannot fail to say
little or much, to have a history and a meaning. The very productivity or freedom of human life, far from denying our situation, utilizes it and turns it into a means of expression.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
“
In the case of the war between the States it would have been the exact truth if the South had said,—"We do not want to live with you Northern people any longer; we know our institution of slavery is obnoxious to you, and, as you are growing numerically stronger than we, it may at some time in the future be endangered. So long as you permitted us to control the government, and with the aid of a few friends at the North to enact laws constituting your section a guard against the escape of our property, we were willing to live with you. You have been submissive to our rule heretofore; but it looks now as if you did not intend to continue so, and we will remain in the Union no longer." Instead of this the seceding States cried lustily,—"Let us alone; you have no constitutional power to interfere with us." Newspapers and people at the North reiterated the cry. Individuals might ignore the constitution; but the Nation itself must not only obey it, but must enforce the strictest construction of that instrument; the construction put upon it by the Southerners themselves. The fact is the constitution did not apply to any such contingency as the one existing from 1861 to 1865. Its framers never dreamed of such a contingency occurring. If they had foreseen it, the probabilities are they would have sanctioned the right of a State or States to withdraw rather than that there should be war between brothers.
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Ulysses S. Grant (The Complete Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S Grant)
“
constructive interference of personality disorders,” which
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Adam Steltzner (The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation)
“
There is modesty, and there is propriety. The former is a natural instinct, given to us when Adam and Eve left the garden and realized their nakedness. The latter is merely a social construct. Although as human beings we wish to consort with our fellows, and therefore yield to their judgments in matters of dress and behavior, surely we may break the rules of propriety when they interfere with the important matters of our lives, so long as modesty is not thereby wounded.
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Theodora Goss (The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club, #3))
“
It was still rare for musicians to be allowed anywhere near the mixing desk, and not unknown for session players to be brought in to save on studio time: the Beatles had begun changing this, as their success convinced record companies to interfere less and less. Virtually every subsequent band owes a huge debt of gratitude to the Beatles for creating an attitude where popular music was made by the artists, and not constructed for them.
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Nick Mason (Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd)
“
My body is an interchange of time. It is traversed with signals, noises, messages
and parasites. It is not exceptional in this vast world. This remains true of animals and plants, of air and
crystals, of cells and atoms, of groups and constructed objects. Transformation, deformation of
information.
I had thought that interchanges were intermediaries, that interference was on the fringe, that the
translator was placed between instances43, that the bridge connected two riverbanks, that the path went
from the origin to the goal. There are no instances. Or rather, instances, systems, riverbanks, etc. are
analyzable in turn as interchanges, paths, translations and so on. There are no instances or systems
except for black boxes. When we do not understand, when we defer our knowledge to a later date, when
the thing is too complex for the means of the day, when we put everything in a temporary black box, we
prejudge that it is a matter of a system. When we can finally open the box, we see that this box
functions like a space of transformation. There are no systems, instances or substances except from our
ignorance. A system is non-knowledge. The other side of non-knowledge. Non-knowledge has a chaos
side and a system side. Knowledge bridges these two riverbanks. Knowledge as such is a space of
transformation.
This entire question is fractal.
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”
Michel Serres (The Parasite (Volume 1) (Posthumanities))