hanaH

They don't have bodies (yet) that inspire us to change the grammar of "understand." We don't talk as if rocks or clouds can think or understand becaus...

I don't think so. Grammar in this context is not some fixed, formal thing but involves the entire world as we know it and live in it. For us, words do...

But not doing something is just as observable. It's not about denying the interior. It's about looking at stuff we can uncontroversially measure, reco...

I agree with you about why phonetic languages are relatively advantageous. I suppose I'm just stressing a certain skepticism about a framework in whic...

The question was not for me, but a possible answer is the centrality of a prophet/sage and his texts in most religions (monarchy-patriarchy happens to...

I can relate to this. To me that's more a mark of the philosopher or scientist. Anyway, I was also attracted to religion as a kind of ultimate science...

The world has got much better in the last few centuries. Yeah, we still have problems, and, as evolved bags of slow-burning water stilts, there's no r...

It's a beautiful system-myth-theory. The eternal is immaterial and intelligible. Or the intelligible is immaterial and eternal. Or the immaterial is e...

Don't forget that we have bodies! We also chew food, turn steering wheels, scrub cast iron pans. Even our symbols are physical, something our bodies d...

. Insecurity and jealousy may play a role, but so does embarrassment at a lack of tact or humility. You mention the 'look' in your post. I get that. C...

. If computers become able to socialize as well as humans, I suspect that the grammar of 'understand' will shift to include them. Given our 'meat chau...

I don't see it. The signs aren't arbitrary but inherited (unless you just mean Saussure stuff). I am thrown into a world of handshakes, salutes, and s...

Is it not a triviality that many concepts come in pairs? Like physical/mental, outside/inside, public/private? I think you are wandering away from the...

I read all of them through all of them, when I can manage it (all of them that I've gotten around to, that is, and within the limits of memory & inter...

I like Derrida, but this is still just talk about the occult interior. In this context it doesn't seem relevant. What you make of my prioritizing bodi...

For me it's not even there to begin with, not when it comes to the grand terms. (I can more or less intend to say thank you and accidentally say you'r...

To me this is drifting in the wrong direction, from the unhidden back to the hidden, from public doings back to the pseudo-explanatory entities of the...

Just to be clear, I'm aiming for something like the opposite of solipsism, insisting on the material (or sensual, if you like) nature of communication...

I agree that we alter context as we speak. Is the intended sense ever fully present? This is the heart of Derrida for me. We never know exactly what w...

Note that a closed system is not a dead system. Yes, we can talk and act when we are alone in ways that end up changing the way we talk and act around...

Sure. One might say that the soul is no more of a fiction than the liver. In both cases we are looking a human being in terms of parts that we ourselv...

I don't think leather ybags of firewater on a couple of stalks have evolved so that every moment of their brief lives is a pleasure. If you like, the ...

For me it wasn't metaphysics, but spiritual pursuits I also hoped for a great transformation of that kind. Now I just accept that I should settle for ...

We can't currently agree here it seems. "Toothaches" and "God" and "justice" and "truth" are, in my view, tokens, just like the cries of the vervet mo...

I almost mentioned that one myself. Consider also if, and, never, false, ... Actually I've read about some of this. Derrida talks about this stuff. Wr...

Spiritual types tend to say that they have the real thing while others are fakes. To secular outsiders this is one of the turn-offs of the spiritual h...

:up:

I enjoy the conversation. IMV the grammar of sensations is public behavior though. Toothaches and stopsigns both get their "meaning" (if we insist on ...

So it goes, the pretty and the ugly. We have the leisure to worry about forests we will mostly never see (I also care about these forests and the bios...

Sure. But the issue is what kind of experience spirituality is understood to offer. I'm asking about intensity and duration. And I'm also interested i...

Or showing that it can't serve the explanatory purpose that folks think it does, showing that it's parasitic on the same synchronization of public beh...

:up:

I like Pinker but I love his favorite philosopher Hobbes. First, back to the madness. Now for "real happiness." The point being that "real happiness" ...

Sure, though I wouldn't say there's just one. Angst, ennui, melancholy. Each name a general flavor of the inability to enjoy physical health and secur...

Read this in another way and it's just madness. A otherwise healthy man decides that not only he but everyone around him suffers from an undefinable m...

Devoid of a share, single sense perhaps, but rife with many different senses of over-arching purposes. We have the leisure and freedom to explore and ...

You and @"baker" both seem to be echoing Nietzsche's disgust with the last man. https://academyofideas.com/2017/10/nietzsche-and-zarathustra-last-man-...

I like that you stress professed metaphysics and looked at how these "spiritual" types actually lived. There's a place reserved in my heart for someth...

That sounds absurd to me. Look around and see the profusion of healers and gurus and visionaries now available without leaving your home. I doubt that...

What you are missing here, it seems to me, is the wild plurality of ways of going off reservation, and the wild plurality of error. There are far more...

Progress! But we can synchronize our behavior with words (marks and noises that get categorized), which shows that the meaning of a word is not ground...

I feel you. You're not.

But why assume that those with scientific attitude aren't curious about religion, for instance? Imagine a person who tried various spiritual fads and ...

:up: Or pseudo-explanations. It's such a simple rhetorical move, but it breaks a chain. Postulated images don't give life to the system. Why should th...

Cold fusion matters because we want a better deal on energy than we have now. So the proof for the masses is that the lights stay on without anyone ha...

It's a metaphor, like "God is love." Mentalistic language is common and useful. The word "meaning" has earned its supper in ordinary life. But, as Sau...

Personally I don't evangelize, nor do I expect religion or conspiracy theory to go away. FWIW, I've also read The Conquest of Abundance. Good stuff bu...

"Hey guys, I can cure cancer. Just drink this goo!" https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/products-claiming-cure-cancer-are-cruel-deception h...

I grant that possibility, and personally I'd find something like a transcendence of rationality more plausible in those who had transcended the need f...

What, by the way, do the self-anointed compete for? I think there's a kind of performative contradiction at the intersection of critical philosophy an...