Undergraduate metaphysics meets Bloc Party

[alasatyr]

One of the things that distinguishes a human intelligence from a computer is that we can have degrees of belief.  A computer is binary, it either believes something or it doesn't.  But humans can believe something just a little bit, we can have opinions of the form "Right now I'm tending towards thinking x" or "I'm pretty sure that y".  And we can

Comments

[doc_spatial]

Up until I saw/heard 'The Prayer' on some music TV channel, I'd assumed they were some form of God-Awful punk band*, based on the son of my landlady being really into them. All the rest of his music collection seemed to be varieties of the aforementioned God-Awful punk, so it made sense at the time.

Turns out I was, ... well, wrong.

* - This is not to say that all punk bands are God-Awful. It was just the ones he listened to, and indeed corrupted the hard drive of my computer with

Geeky Addendum

[doc_spatial]

On the binary nature thing, there's been a bunch of interesting work done on fuzzy memberships using computer systems. I can think of several hundred applications in my particular sub-field, as, unsurprisingly, many features of the real world do not have what you'd call a strict binary boundary.
In fact, legal boundaries and built structures are the only things that immediately come to mind, and I'm a bit iffy on the built structures.