Word: paradoxes
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These experiments illustrate the paradox at the heart of today's computer science. The most powerful computing machines -- giant number crunchers possessed of speed and storage capacities beyond human comprehension -- are essentially dumb brutes with no more intellectual depth than a light bulb. At the other extreme are computers that have begun to exhibit the first glimmers of human-like reasoning, but only within the confines of narrowly defined tasks...
...everything from the origin of the universe to the history of life to human society and psychology. Sheldrake's ideas are tied closely to antireductionism and musings by some physicists on "the anthropic principle"--the idea that life and mind are somehow necessary to the universe. This sort of paradox leads Sheldrake to the radical position that changeless laws do not exist, and he has no use for what he disparagingly calls the "nominalist-materialist school,"--in other words, modern science...
...This paradox shimmers throughout Flights of Passage: the war makes men out of Hynes and his comrades but also allows them to remain boys, irresponsible, as free as the birds when they climb into their cockpits. The author and his fellow pilots get to Okinawa on April 19, 1945, and participate in the tail end of the war in the Pacific. Two of Hynes' closest friends are killed, leaving him bereft and confused: "I didn't know how a man grieves." Suddenly, the war is over. While waiting for orders to return home, Hynes and his surviving mates are nearly...
...great paradox tormented Stone as he confronted the Greeks. Athens was the glory of Hellas, "the earliest society where freedom of thought and its expression flourished on a scale never known before, and rarely equaled since." Yet Athenian democracy also put Socrates on trial for speaking his mind and voted to execute him for his "crimes." This horrified Stone, and, he writes, "shook my Jeffersonian faith in the common man." The Trial of Socrates is the result of his effort to understand, if not excuse, how Athens could have besmirched its good name and that of democracy by killing Socrates...
...often forgotten that democracy is an idea and that, like most great insights, it is not without paradox. One paradox is what to do with characters such as Socrates, who are vocal in their profound opposition to the democratic idea. Stone knows that the classic authors must be read, if only so that we can better refute them...