>Gerry: OK. So a group of signing Homo ss's spreads itself over a
>portion of Eurasia and break down into 2 small nuclear groups. Over
>time, each group will attain a vocal language but language A will >differ
>from language B. Is this what you're saying?
...Unless there is mutual interference during the development and then it
starts getting messy, but yes, that's what I'm saying. One point of interest
though is that some cultures maintain a use of indigenous sign for
overcoming spoken taboo. One wonders how old such sign languages are.
>>>Gerry: The given (back to Hawking) is that the universe has >>>always
>>>existed.
>>Glen (ME): Not really. Prove it exists and then I will accept it as
>> >>fact.
>Gerry: Don't be silly! A given is a given and doesn't need to be
>proved. Such with laws of God as well as laws of science.
Well then you must practice a different kind of science because as far as I
understand, all facts must be supported with logical reasoning whether these
"facts" are of God or of science. If they are not proven in some way they
cannot be rationally called "givens". They are _assumptions_ or _beliefs_.
Secondly, my view, that existence and non-existence are one and the same, is
the most scientific view since it assumes the least amount of things. In
fact, there are less assumptions than assertively claiming that we exist (or
that we don't exist as with nihilism), since we are also assuming that there
are specifically two states as opposed to "n" states. Zero/One state is less
assumptive than assuming a distinction between existence and non-existence.
Think about that!
>Gerry: Yup. Occam and his razor should turn over in the grave. No >one
>ever said things were simple and the more I learn the less I >know.
Well yes, Gerry that's right. The sage is the fool and vice versa. If
existence is non-existence then all oppositions blur together and logic
itself becomes irrational, yet it's just as irrational to assert that we
exist without proof. Thus, logic erodes yet again, hence proving that
existence truely is non-existence by the "can't-win" principle. At that,
indeed, the sage and the fool are One and distinguishing the two via the
internet becomes an exceedingly hard task :)
In fact, by loosely connecting this back to IndoEuropean, if we say that
existence and non-existence are the same, we could logically support the
view that there is only one declensional case and that there is no
distinction between noun and verb... Why we could even say that there is no
distinction between Indo-European and Uralic.
- gLeN
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