frank

I'm just a super bold guy, you know. :strong:

For the most part language is a collection of abstract objects. The bodily part is utterances (sounds and marks, reading and listening). But words and...

:chin:

I was thinking about this while making coffee this morning. The OP touches on something that comes down to who you are rather than empirical or logica...

Apparently Socrates got a lot of mileage out of being picky about the definition of justice. You could think of philosophy as an exercise gym and tryi...

yep

Gotcha. :smile:

I don't think we can have direct perception of other minds. We need representations. The people from SETI (search for extra-terrestrial intelligence) ...

Yea. I don't think they're the type of thing that can be held. I think we've known this for millennia, wine, and all that. My only point was that thos...

I don't think a thought is like a blob that dwells somewhere. Thoughts come and go, like little moments of reflection. Parcels of awareness or recogni...

You can still have thoughts while your body is paralyzed, though.

Rationalists like Leibniz and Descartes would have agreed whole heartedly. The Empiricists would caution that a fair portion of our logic is grounded ...

:up:

Why?

The Jews have the oldest known living culture. Opinions vary about what their secret might be.

Sure. You can't really dispense with the self though. Unless you want to become a homeless lunatic living under a bridge babbling and being hit in the...

No, it's that "we" means a group of individuals. Yes, the ego is an idea. It's a kind of construction. Monotheistic divinity reinforces the primacy of...

I sense some hatred of the ego here. What's that related to?

We do that with pink and red. It's different shades of the same color. Originally, boys were dressed in pink and girls in blue. Somewhere along the wa...

And vice versa.

True story.

It's more of a reflection than a shadow. Did you notice that it reverses direction depending on how you look at it? Sometimes looking at the feet or b...

I felt the thread needed more visual illusions.

In America, blue collar workers, feeling completely abandoned by the supposed progressive party, are now devoted conservatives. Weird times.

My on the fly thought is that throughout human history there's been an steady increase the rate of change and it's now moving to the vertical part of ...

Cool, thanks

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/21/Spinning_Dancer.gif

Yes.

A Russian guy once told me: "You know what your problem is? You don't have enough problems."

If everything in the universe was green, you wouldn't notice that the banner is green because you wouldn't have any idea of greenness for lack of anyt...

If you play the guitar by yourself, you'll get better over time, but you'll be limited. If you play with others, your skill level will explode. But on...

If you were an idealist, you'd tell me that my assumptions about the material world around me are the product of training. You'd tell me I'm indisting...

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that.

Private language doesn't make sense. Most of us have private sensations, though. It's two different uses of "private." If you don't know what sensatio...

I'll take your word for it. I'm not sure what metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk is exactly. I know exactly what sensation...

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations.

Does it cause confusion for you?

I guess the question is: how would you confirm that odor-x that you're sensing now is the same thing you've smelled before? If you could attach it to ...

That's true. It's not actually an argument. It's just a set of observations.

It would help if we replace "private" with "unique and unsharable.". That's what Wittgenstein meant. It's hard to even conceive of a unique, unsharabl...

He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep t...

I think it would help if you named a particular conservative.

:up:

Are they any good?

"Like public, social cases of representation such as writing or mapmaking, intentional states such as beliefs have truth-value; they entail or imply o...

When you think of the Big Bang, you just mean inflation, right? You're not adding a singularity to it, are you?

The guys at Nuremburg made the mistake of identifying with their jobs. "I am a soldier. Soldiers do what they're told." Humans can decide what and who...

Not at all. It's very easy to get defensive around these parts. Some of the participants are not here to discuss. They just want to dominate and be do...

I'm not attacking you. Just discussing stuff. I'm open to your point of view, truly. I think the video just explains that energy is not an object, so ...

I don't know about that. Energy isn't actually a thing, per se. Awesome video on that: https://youtu.be/PUn2izowBkw I do agree with this. I wonder if ...