frank

The uninitiated state in Genesis is a child-like state where there's no shame for nakedness. The initiation is an exit from this paradise to work, dru...

I'm guessing he's testing the American commitment to Ukraine and NATO. If he guesses that the US, post pandemic, has zero will to fight a war, he's ri...

Sure. A soft version of Sapir-Whorf is generally accepted by linguists. It's the hard version that's rejected. ds

"Here the best starting point for distinguishing between the two usages is to note that the animate and the inanimate often elicit different linguisti...

The Shadow is hidden in moral knowledge.

Putin is pissed that NATO won't promise to never accept Ukraine. That's the horrific western aggression causing him to need to rip a new one for Ukrai...

Even Kripke's use?

You're pretty grossly misinformed. Pm me if you want discuss it further.

The Pentagon doesn't control the Western media. Beware of click bait It's not equivalent because the US is a superpower. Russia is not. I don't think ...

The US military is mainly interested in getting American citizens out of Ukraine. They don't want to a war with Russia. Putin knows that, so he's expl...

Manuel, read the NYT. The US is only threatening sanctions if Russia invades Ukraine. StreetlightX is deranged as usual.

:razz: It's a 20th century take on the classic by Joseph Conrad, who was Polish and had nothing to mea culpa for. And it's a masterpiece.

I'm guessing you aren't familiar with the illustrious Colonel Kurtz?

Yep. Same with his ideas about morality: all bluster and nothing of substance behind it.

Maybe it's normal to try to push our present conceptual scheme to its limits before giving up and calling for new ways of thinking. I'm pretty unsatis...

Sure. I think Chalmers suggests accepting consciousness as an entity in its own right, in pretty much the same way Newton put gravity forward as somet...

But this is different from claiming we can't gain an understanding of how consciousness works. That claim could be based on the belief that we can hav...

:grimace:

"Because there's a conflict in every human heart, between the rational and irrational, between good and evil. And good does not always triumph. " Some...

As any weight-lifter knows, it's dangerous to hold your breath while lifting a load. Your lung expansion is maintained by your ribs and diaphragm, not...

Chomsky's primary opponent was Skinner. You're kind of dancing on Chomsky's shoulders claiming to have killed him.

OK. But you can't do without argument, analysis, and theory. There once was a guy who had no theories and life was constantly like salt on a wound. A ...

For Nietzsche, morality isn't essentially a set of true or false statements. It's an activity. A society is doing something with its ethical approach....

I'm going to have to ponder that for a while.

Well, yeah. I said "Nietzsche." You said "perspective."

Could you explain why it misses the point?

Just don't want you to be typing stupid stuff on the internet when you should be in the hospital.

You have a raging pain in your kidney? Are you peeing blood?

I don't think so. They've reconstructed proto-Indo-European. They know how, for instance, Semitic languages imagine events vs other languages. The ver...

I don't know if you have any interest in this question, I was just curious: if you were going to launch a serious attack on the OP essay, or on innate...

Values vary by culture and class, as Nietzsche pointed out. If there's a foundation, it's the complex of human emotion that gets sorted post hoc in et...

:up:

Yep, but the basic idea is nothing strange. You're born with an innate capacity for walking, but the structures needed for walking won't form until yo...

don't smoke pot, cigarettes or drink caffeine

Political realism is about what influence and power are, among other things. It's a view at odds with constructivism.

Is there some overlap between political realism (from the article) and realpolitik? Sorry if that was answered in the article, a paywall kept me from ...

:grin:

I dreamed I met some guys who proposed to take over the world through boycotting. I didn't want to tell them it wasn't going to work. When I woke up I...

:up:

Mutation isn't random.

Voodoo magic is pretty easy to explain. They just make you say what you want over and over as if you already have it. It's just the power of an unconf...

https://absolute-dental.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/teeth_tiger.jpg

Tigers are pre-wired to hunt. Humans, to speak. You're the one who's trying to make it into something spooky.

Sort of in line with that: I've been thinking lately that imagination increases options and possibilities. A lack of imagination closes down options. ...

As a child, I saw a cat presenting a half dead mouse to her kittens. They tortured it for a while and then ate it. I think most people are profoundly ...

What separates the present from the past?

No, it's either swinging a battle-ax into some idiot's head or drinking tea with your pinky up. One or the other.

Well so think about our ancestors who were always gutting people and having plagues and just generally getting all up in the blood and gore on the reg...

It was pretty horrifying actually. Hawk held squirrel on the ground and squirrel was wiggling. Hawk picked chunks of fur out and spat them away, occas...

I started filling a bird feeder in my front yard and it ended up being a squirrel feeder. Last week a hawk got a big fat squirrel and ate it in the dr...