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Just to be clear, I'm an egostic human like most, so this rather speculative transcendence of the ego convention is largely a flower in my theoretical...

Descartes was deceived by grammar (or pretended to be). Paraphrasing Nietzsche, mutterphysics is substance abuse. We learn to say 'I think' and we lea...

Try to imagine that the subject is an invention/convention so ancient that we mistake it as the single most obvious fact. 'The soul is the prison of t...

Thanks, but that meta-map is more treasure from the chunk yard, so I can't claim it.

If you stare at the world and recognize an interesting pattern, you'll be map making? I think we gather here to make maps, meta-maps ,meta-meta-maps,....

Example. 'I love her and yet I don't love her.' The point is that outright contradictions can work just fine for expressions of ambivalence. More spec...

No man is a island. As I see it, one of the discoveries of philosophy (and not just of philosophy) is the primacy of the social. The penisolated ego g...

Excellent question. This is actually the problem with taking qualia seriously. If there's a gap between the thing and its label (if words get their me...

Why are you so sure there's a you in there in the first place? We've been brought up to behave as if there's a little self in here who pinks at a litt...

Whale sud, front ! Drink you for not asking me to spore you my hypnopontificatory solemnitease ! I was afraid I'd be asked to stop spanking my nine sc...

Perhaps 'logic' is largely a ghost story. I don't deny that our reasoning has a structure. I also do not imply that anything goes. I just mean that 'l...

It could be that taking 'mind' for granted is the end of philosophy and not its beginning. If you make this or that concept sacred, you're just scribb...

Very well put. Especially when I was young I would be almost overwhelmed with a sense of the beautiful absurdity of stuff just being there. One such S...

Here again. A typical tail would be that the New Age woo woo is 'ferry dust' sprinkle on the otherwise egolisciously satanic Mill of the world. To me ...

Fascinating. Almost a reversal of what's expected. Some consider theism to be a position that insists on the wizardry of the world, while they think o...

I agree. I'm personally interested in celebrating how 'miraculous' the so-called ordinary already is. I was arguing lately with a person who thought w...

Agreed, though I think the bias cuts both ways. I'm a longtime atheist, and it'd be quite an inconvenience for me if I had to rewire myself to take go...

Language is a bathtub full of acid, where acid is 'as it' or 'as if' or metaphor. We live in an inherited garden of metaflora, the flowers of yesterda...

That's a bag biggy question, friend. 'Conscious' and 'matter' are 'draping what' (dropping went, drooping wait) with ambiguity. In social animals like...

I believe you'll find it hard to make sense of 'cognitive relationships' without dragging in the so-called 'physical' and various semantic conventions...

Very fun way to end a post.

Economics, I'd say. (I don't just money, but practical constraints and tradeoffs.) Because it'd be useless, right? It'd be just as easy to stare at th...

One problem with arguments from (in-)conceivability is that what are called 'private mental states' can have no significance for serious inquiry. A mo...

Why is good knot a very tail? You argue that atheism is a belief. The standard reply is that it's a lack of belief (which is more strictly correct, IM...

So skeptical cynics are the true enemies of scientific progress? One funeral at a time, right?

A 'mental image' is problematically private. The usual grammar suggests that anyone's only 'seen' their own. The absurdity of taking such 'images' and...

Good question. The next would be whether "mind" should be taken for granted. On one side noumena or ur-stuff. On another side qualia or languageless t...

Nice.

I'm reading him, and I took 'obsolute' from the buttockbefriending bard, as the brick fit perfectly wall in the whole I was building, abbreviating an ...

I don't believe that a purple man with seven arms rules the Omniverse on a throne made of cotton candy.

Agreed. The worst cages are perhaps those with invisible bars. Thanks for the clarification. Endless indeed. And it seems that we must fight fire with...

My current position is no. Even the bone machine of math is a pile of analogies. It seems that we can only incorporate the new mostly in terms of the ...

Feyerabendian fire, friend. I'm not so much to the left on this issue, but I can understand the concern. Specialization is troubling, and no one can s...

. I agree: simplicity is good. But why? Seems that economy is involved. One might mention esthetics, but perhaps this boils down to economics. A pract...

That's my leaning. Of course I expect the science to keep advancing. Precisely. Add also practical reasons.

Yes indeed, friend.

Well put. What do you make of the notion that cognition is largely analogical? Here you have Logos striving like Sisyphus against a Mythos which inclu...

It's a good one. I'm sure there are others that are just as good, but I can vouch for that one. I like that two philosophers with very different style...

Yeah, the laughing philosopher. Great dude. I do think W is great, but I also try to avoid the too-common off-putting my-big-hero-daddy thing that som...

That 'is' the answer perhaps, if it's understood as an insight into the limitations of the smoke machine of language. The 'and of history' is somethin...

Thanks for the kind words. My monikor is Whit Farder, and my pieces is mail. I do try to encode actual substance within the playfulness. Above I sugge...

Thank a grin, my friend. I know we don't see high to high on Dawkins, but that doesn't need to mess up a fun conversation. It'd actually be less fun i...

Could Zeno have intended to throw late on the smoke machine noun as lung-wrench? Maybe not the motion of legs but rather that of jaws was his target ?...

Thou ought knot door such impiety, sewer ! For the gods are jealous of end-sores in the gobs of their sorry apes. Yet progress, yes, I do incest on it...

To me he makes a pretty good chase that, among odor thinks maybe, we are moist row boats or dank blow pots or draping what chew chew drains. I like 'w...

. Unless we understand the movements of our limbs as answers. Life throws us hungry into a mess. We enact beliefs all the time. Philosophy can change ...

That made me laugh. Thank you.

That still doesn't sound right. I do find it plausible that many working scientists consider their biological or sociological work to be in principle ...

I'm thinking of the work of 'Lard-rag Rat-gum-slime' and his demolition of so much traditional confusion on the mind-matter issue in that indiscipline...

Hi. The bolded part doesn't seem quite right to me. Perhaps the 'physical' is too readily equated with that which we can be scientific or objective or...