Indeed. It's hard to believe that until relatively recently people thought that sexual attraction was fundamentally based in biology rather than identity.
I was a visiting professor there in 1989, and sat in on the course, which was on math proofs. We had weekly homework, which I did. In one class, I told Dijkstra that his proof was wrong. He couldn’t see my point, and we argued briefly and agreed to disagree. It was the only time anyone spoke up in class without being asked to by Dijkstra. At the start of the next class, Dijkstra announced that his attempted proof was indeed wrong, and proceeded to give a revised proof. Everyone was impressed by his intellectual honesty. He wrote up the episode as EWD 1044 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/E...
Dijkstra asked me to sit in on one final oral exam which he was expecting to be tricky. It was a very intimidating atmosphere for the student.
Dennett models the mind on the idea of the computer. But computers are the products of human designers. Hence it makes no sense to try to explain the mind in terms of computers, since the existence of a computer itself presupposes the existence of a designing mind.
Very nice indeed to see a simple algorithm in an area recently dominated by complex beasts. Gives me those great 70s vibes. Seems like a major result. Would love to hear from an expert in the area.
In section III B (p.8) the paper states that “in 1982…Gries[24] devised another linear algorithm” for the maximum subarray problem. I remember that. Jon Bentley visited Cornell, and posed the problem to me and Gries together. We thought on it independently overnight and presented a linear solution to Bentley the next day. Gries had a simpler invariant, and I had simpler code (using min). I never knew he wrote the paper until now, and am not one of the several people he mentions in the Acknowledgement, although he does say “Bentley…challenged US with this problem”.
This was used to flip votes in Dominion machines from our greatest president Trump to China Joe, and the stupid Dems forgot to turn it off. Otherwise Trump wins CA easy. Wait till Sidney Powell hears about this.
Having just completed a drawing unit in art school, for which a major assessment task was a self-portrait in graphite pencil, I can say with some confidence that this is an unusually good account. Hell, it's excellent.
I'll add my voice to the chorus that says this is a symptom of a more fundamental issue: aphantasia.
As a card-carrying aphantasiac, I'm skeptical of the ability of most people to visualize. I recall hearing of an experiment in which people were asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. The results were laughable, yet, no doubt, the subjects would self report that, sure, they could visualize a bicycle.
It’s helpful, but if the task is to draw the imagined bicycle, then you would presumably add details as far as possible. But for most people the result is very far from what they would draw if a bicycle was in front of them. So what they imagine is not a bicycle. So most people can’t imagine a bicycle.
Then the “images” most people say they can imagine in their “mind’s eye” might be little different from what an aphantasiac like me would produce if asked to draw them. Perhaps I am not missing much at all.
Most people could draw a bicycle well enough while looking at it. But most people are hopeless when asked to draw a bicycle from their imagination. But most people don’t have aphantasia. I do, so am sceptical when people say they can picture a bicycle (say) in their “mind’s eye”.