Jamal

Let's instead take seriously the position that people and waves and other such composite objects don't exist, that patterns in general don't exist. Th...

It means if you haven't read the article and have nothing to say about it, scram!

Note to all participants: this is a reading group and I'll begin deleting comments from those who haven't read the article or who make no attempt to e...

All right... Nobody says that only things with mass exist, I don't think. Well, you do, but it seems eccentric. So as far as I can make sense of thing...

I like that way of talking about existence, but you don't make much use of it. If waves do exist, i.e., they stand out phenomenally against a backgrou...

You did. No, I really do think your definition of existence is wrong, and obviously so, and I don't think it's a popular view either in philosophy or ...

So you agree that forms and patterns are the same thing, but you've said that forms of energy or matter can be destroyed, after saying that patterns c...

I don't think so. So according to you, it is not just matter and energy that exist, but matter and energy that has taken various forms, e.g., water? W...

But things that exist cannot be destroyed either, as you stated. My point was that you seem to be assuming that to be destroyed, you have to exist, ev...

So I cannot be destroyed because I'm not the kind of thing that cannot be destroyed? :chin:

This again? Time to move on, HH. Work on improving your own posts.

This does not look promising, The Opposite.

ok

Well that's the grown-up assumption as far as I'm concerned. That debate is silly, in my opinion, but that doesn't mean I'll delete or move such a dis...

By writing a good opening post. The topic can be approached philosophically, but even purely psychological, neurological, or anthropological approache...

If you're going to complain about someone publicly, I think you should be specific. I don't see any evidence of unmodlike comments over the past few d...

Cool post :up:

:up: I read "Quining Qualia" this morning, to try and work out what Dennett was saying and make some contribution to this discussion, but then realize...

:up:

Like all public websites, this one can be accessed by web crawlers like Googlebot, and it gets crawled a lot because it ranks highly and changes frequ...

That's fair. Or he might be saying that there is no use looking for a "why" in the way that we look for causes in science (or even religion), and that...

I think this is about right, but it applies to both sides. Very disappointing. It's true that The Selfish Gene is partly ideological—I think that all ...

There have been very few submissions. Maybe just one or two aside from my own, and they were not what we're looking for. I'm as surprised about this a...

I didn't even know you had sent it. In our private conversation, you just went silent, giving no indication of what you were going to do, and I rarely...

Not Alabama, I'm guessing. I've been to Birmingham twice. The second time, I had a great time and ate some good Indian food. May you find success and ...

:party: What's the new city?

reMarkable seems to be first and foremost an e-writer, rather than an e-reader. That would put me off if I was looking primarily for a reader. Looks g...

I left a few hundred books stored in boxes in Scotland when I took up my itinerant life in 2012 and had to get a kindle. I went back to hard copies re...

:cool: Here's something about words that I find interesting, but I'm not sure if you Americans will understand it. When I'm bantering with my brother ...

I think I knew that already.

Yes I know, but I'm generous with my condescending approval.

That's the spirit.

Incidentally, I quite like "scurrilous". It's partly because it makes me think of squirrels and other rodents, I suppose because they're animals that ...

No, it doesn't. I want to criticize you for bizarrely trying to police this thread. Very nice. But I could say, inspired by you: may I remind you that...

Why on Earth would you be worried? Maybe you should have posted some rules in bold and upper case, like "Please post words that you love, unless they ...

:cool:

It's great. Interestingly, it's based on an earlier piece composed for ondes martenot, an early electronic instrument: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Yeh it's unfortunate that his fanaticism is what came to the fore. He was warned about it several times, so the ban didn't come out of nowhere.

:up:

You're getting plenty of engagement, MSC, much more than most who've been here only one week. If someone in particular doesn't reply to you, I suggest...

Please report any posts or discussions that you think should be subject to some sort of moderation. You can use the flag function or, like Philosophim...

If you haven't read it, I recommend Ben Watson's book Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play, which looks at Zappa's music through the le...

The thing about that song's lyrics that I've always found most interesting is the temporal transgressiveness: My python boot is too tight I couldn't g...

Unless you take Pinprick's easy route to engagement--which I don't advise--it can take a while to get noticed. The old timers here tend to engage with...

God-forward. I'm not keen on god-level sweet. There's a lot of crappy cheap god-level sweet Russian wines, but there are some good ones. Krasnodar Kra...

It's great. That's all I've got. I'm no connoisseur.

I like Georgian wine but in Sochi I was drinking local Russian (Krasnodar Krai) and Crimean wine.

Yes she's Russian, but no, just a three month visa. But they're changing the rules, so soon I'll be able to get longer visas. It's a big hassle so I h...

Thanks to the Russian President's ukaz decreeing that foreigners can stay for + 185 days, I've been happily stuck here in Russia since January (thank ...

Yep. Schopenhauer was right.