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Consider that taking the metaphysical subject or Cartesian ego for granted with its qualia and Inner Light and other such mystified fireworks led to m...

I've thought about this objection before, and it's a good one. It's tempting to grant your point, but...It doesn't make sense to say either that they ...

I agree that a relative stability of physical laws so far makes sense with the rest of what we know, but this is no proof of necessity. I see how one ...

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To me it makes more sense to speak in terms of a restlessness with brute facts. To find necessity is to find causal linkage, possibly exploitable. The...

I think the 'law' metaphor just expresses our expectation that the pattern will hold. It's logically possible that the 'laws' could change. With compu...

I'm not aware of any evidence for it. My bias is that my 'thoughts' (minimally muttered strings of tokens) are not fundamentally private. I speculate ...

How so? By simply not talking about them? What I have in mind is that I'd confuse people if I talked about 'co-dreaming' with my brother in California...

I'm tempted to say 'yes, we both have dreams.' I think this is because our uses of the word 'dream' conform simultaneously to both of our grammatical ...

I know what you mean by correlates, but, strictly speaking, the 'private experience' grammar/logic implies (in my opinion) an empty data set. If we ta...

Exactly. That's how I see Wittgenstein see it and I agree.

I believe you.

I simply mean the written or spoken word 'pain,' as distinct from what it is supposed (assumed) to refer to.

One interesting thing about this plausible idealist is that 'his' vision or 'dream' of his own skull would also be a 'product of mind.' A skeptic migh...

This to me is more of the donut metaphor. The 'dream itself' is 'logically' (grammatically) inaccessible. We talk around it when it's time to make the...

It's a relief to me that someone groks the 'uselessness' of qualia I'm trying to sketch. It's so 'obvious' eventually and yet so absurd on the face of...

The 'raw feel' is generally understood to be radically or perfectly private. So only you have access to your pain and only I have access to mine. The ...

I'm a mathologer myself. You ask a deep question. But I think it's safe to say that Newtonian physics seemed so convincing because the speeds and mass...

And does that not just piss brute fact over inch and pore of us? Making havoc of explanations? If memory serves, there was a moment of hubris where so...

Especially when we seem to be merely a piece of that same nature, its 'creation.'

Another nice one!

Well put! Our oversimplifications are useful but not constraints on what we model.

Nice! As the old man put it, a living dog is better than a dead lion.

I was thinking of randomness on the level of particles, which must play a role in mutation and add up to whether a rock falls on the head of a critter...

Not to be contrary, but I think Wittgenstein's beetle analogy shows the semantic uselessness of sensation. 'Pain' gets its meaning from the public cor...

. Excellent point. Dawkins and Dennett also stress this. Randomness plays an essential role. So beyond the brute fact of the most general pattern ther...

One understanding of an explanation of an event is that the event is shown to be derivable from a familiar 'law' or pattern which is itself (for the m...

That depends on how a particular society treats religion. The modern way is to treat it as a kind of choose your own therapy. Kierkegaard writes about...

Good point. I take Wittgenstein to show that the meaning of the 'Yahweh' is not inside each of its users but rather in the outside in the way the mark...

Another problem with qualia or sensation as a channel for God is the strong arguments that Wittgenstein has made against the possibility of giving a m...

These are important, but what about intermediate theories which remain blurry and plausible? The 'crisp' thesis is an ideal we strive toward perhaps, ...

I can't pretend to take astrology or numerology seriously, yet I have no doubt there are those who are stuffed with knowledge of these things. Others ...

. We might look at the written and unwritten 'rules' or 'heroic self-image' of philosophy. How is a philosopher different from a prophet or a mystic o...

I think you are on to something, though the word 'real' is perhaps unnecessary. As I see it, one task of the philosopher is to reveal so-called necess...

I speculate that this 'one' is just reason or language, which is a unified system of concepts and a communal possession. The softwhere is one.

Why must it be 'one' experiencing the model? What if the singularity of the ghost of the soul is part of a contingent and inherited model inspired by ...

I suspect we go easy on some stuff for practical reasons. Our culture doesn't make much of dreams, so we don't care enough to challenge them. The God ...

This is fun ending. The story probably deserves the effort involved in polishing it up. It's a good plot for one of those philosophical comic strips t...

The grammar of sensation and pain is a bit special. In general, we do not question or doubt such statements. One 'cannot be wrong' about 'appearance' ...

Well put. The 'self' depends upon an 'other,' and language ('interior monologue') depends on a tribal language.

I relate to much of this, especially the blurriness of the word 'physical.' Wittgenstein asks in On Certainty when exactly a child learns that their a...

A nice issue to bring back up. 'What is the question?' mumbled Gertrude Stein who lay dying. Young Wittgenstein had his own version. I think the 'why'...

I take this metaphor to gesture toward the exploitability of quantitive pattern finding that maps from uncontroversial observables now to uncontrovers...

I agree, so we meet there and perhaps diverge on what we make of this recognition.

I can join you at a certain level of blurriness. We live in a lifeworld with something like a layer of significance, and language including math is pa...

I agree that it's a fact that deserves speculation and investigation. One immediate reaction I have is to stress the simple genius of just counting th...

I don't disagree that they are part of our softwhere, and of course I myself emphasize the centrality of analogy or metaphor in human cognition. The s...

To me this is just a fancy acknowledgement that the human world is not just stupid junk. We can talk about our talk about our talk. I do of course agr...

Consider, though, that taking this attitude to the extreme is a sanctification of whatever the tribe happens to believe at a given time. Philosophy is...

I understand where you are coming from. I imagine a kind of continuum that runs from the especially abstract to the relatively concrete. On the abstra...