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I grant that one can't prove such (relatively internal) things. It's like proving that a love poem gets it right. I can say that such words sound abou...

I agree that we have a big space to play around in. For most of us here, this talk is (whatever else it is) a kind of conceptual music. Or puppies wre...

Yes, it could be argued, but I claim there would be a performative contradiction in such an argument. 'This account is just words' attempts to say som...

As I see it, you are trying to do justice to the entanglement of subject and substance. I think it's better to talk of equiprimordiality. Self, langua...

I bumped into a Gibran passage that spoke to me: Say not, "I have found the truth," but rather, "I have found a truth." Say not, "I have found the pat...

I can relate to some degree in my own way --- something along the lines of a shouting match..invasive compulsive thoughts -- but I was living a crazy ...

What I love about Popper is his respect for creativity and intuition. The (mysterious) source of a hypothesis doesn't (shouldn't) count for or against...

To guess as the adventure of those three months, I go back in time to something similar in my own life, that started long ago ---and which has somehow...

To me it's (metaphorically speaking) topologically weird, something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottle

Consider that we are in the world, so we don't construct the world ex nihilo. But the world is for or through our human sense organs, brain, and cultu...

Oh yeah. I've been an atheist so long that I can enjoy theological metaphors now. That god from the bible is about as real as Huckleberry Finn --and i...

It's endlessly analyzable right ? I guess we've got millions of years of R & D hidden away from our 'conscious'/linguistic investigation and (in some ...

In case it's helpful, I agree with the following: https://www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/apel-karl-otto-1...

:up: I agree, at least if we are thinking about history. But this doesn't cancel the (fleeting) reality of the music of that castaway composer. We don...

That may be, but it looks like our collective habit is the potential for intense individuality (differentiation, specialization, invention.)

If you want to PM me a link to your book, I'm curious. Or link it publicly, whatever you prefer.

Ah but part of the calculation, because she saw that he saw that you were with her -- carrot and the stick. Ah, but was there time for thoughts ? It'd...

Well I daresay biological evolution played a big role in it. We needed the brain, maybe the expressive face, etc. Something like memetic evolution als...

I was trained to be one, but I'm mostly infected with the need to play at philosophy.

It's the depth and complexity of his characters that's especially celebrated (Bloom's The Invention of the Human.) The 'personality' layer of reality ...

:up: I think we agree on the necessity of embodiment, at least in the abstract....

No. I never mentioned quantity. I'd say maybe reread some of what I wrote. I think you are casting me incorrectly as a subjectivist or Romantic. But m...

'Software' is just a metaphor for the time-binding sociality of reason. For instance, the linguistic-conceptual idea of the self is part of our herita...

The self has a social aspect (language centered around semantic-logical coherence norms) and a biological basis, a body guided by its own brain that c...

I've read several of Beiser's excellent books on German philosophy, which sketch the intellectual scene of Kant in great detail. Also read with great ...

Wow. Same book and same attitude for me at the same age. I loved that dude back then.

You bring up a good point too. I was sloppy in my terms. I meant basically that models trained on human decisions are 'parasites' on human skill (incl...

. I think this is basically correct. I'm biased and old blah blah blah but to be 'a fucking man' is to not be small and pushed around and defined by o...

:up: I studied neural networks for a little while, and we might also add that human intuition is the raw ingredient (if I'm correct that it was superv...

It is weird how one generation's rebel becomes the stumblingblock conformity of the next. One funeral at the time ! But Hegel is probably right that t...

. I think there is truth in this, but perhaps the genius and richness of Shakespeare is precisely his seemingly inexhaustible undecidability. I don't ...

Thanks! I also see it that way. Scylla and Charybdis, right ?

That does not follow. At least in the human context, that seems highly unlikely. We are born helpless and mute. Our killer app is language, which depe...

I saw myself as offering a mere piece of the story. What options should we not expect to find ? What options can we rule out ? I can put on my devilwo...

I think we agree very much that knowledge is primarily social. Language is tribal software. The individual nervous system 'runs' and updates the softw...

I say that one cannot remove either the world or the individual nervous system. I'm arguing against rampant subjectivism in another thread. I'm a holi...

This is where someone like Husserl comes in. The world exists through particular 'meaning-bestowing' nervous systems. Those nervous systems are in the...

The 'nature of which' implying a fact of the matter. The very idea of a 'nature' invokes a fact about a world that includes and transcends both of us....

No worries. I think a little comic relief is a nice lubricant.

:up: I knew you meant the first, but it reminded me of that Joyce joke.

Nice ! Bring 'em young !

Smith focused on mastering social knowhow, having decided it was the best kind of knowledge. I'd count him in the pragmatist camp, tho not in your sub...

I think we can safely limit ourselves to 'cognitive heroes' for the purposes of this discussion, yes.

To me that's not obvious. Outlandish, but let's imagine a shipwrecked composer with a harpsichord and plenty of coconuts. He soars to new musical heig...

Oh we agree on that. That's good thinking in general, right? What I'm getting at is that personality is the yardstick. My choice of criterion is my ch...

Right, and really that makes sense. Just the fact that our eyes are in the front is no small thing. Even if I build a general purpose neural network, ...

:up: Right. Related point and pet theory : Any position that is defined in terms of an opponent has about the same amount of complexity as that oppone...

I think the problem is related. We are social beings, primarily accountable to one another, offering reasons for our actions and beliefs. We have a st...

Sure, and illusions and delusions depend upon an actual world, something taken as real. Presumably "we are subject to illusions, for instance optical ...

:up: This reminds me of Keats writing about Shakespeare -- and the way that Joyce and Harold Bloom in their own ways treat him as a 'spiritual' figure...