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Sure. But I also think people are different. I can't pretend to think all interpretations are equally good or that communication is impossible or offe...

In case you missed it, I wasn't endorsing James but saying that a certain way of thinking (reducing all the subject, etc.) points toward the dissoluti...

I wholeheartedly embrace a certain style of metaphysics. I even like the way Emerson uses 'God.' I call myself an 'atheist' as a shorthand for not 'th...

Of course I understand what you mean. But consciousness is very close to just being being here. 'Consciousness' gets its meaning socially. We have no ...

Thanks. But you haven't addressed my criticism of this kind of quasikantian dualism. For instance, can you clarify what a self is this theory ? How co...

One theory is that humans take the world as a stage for heroism. I'd frame the existential angst of my youth, in retrospect, for the fear that there w...

This is a whiff of the structuralism I was arguing for elsewhere. Concepts are contrastive, a system of differences.

The world, the self, the others, language...are all equally foundational or primordial..are in fact a unitary phenomenon. Yes. This is about what I me...

From my perspective, you are interpreting the situation in terms of antireligious scientism, addicted to certainty, and the courageous quest for genui...

This is not such a difficult idea. It's one of several flavors. In this version, the self comes of as the being or presence of sensations, that they a...

Platonic theories need ideas to have always been here (I neglected to account for this.) Or to have been suddenly created all at once. Postchristian P...

No. I'm saying that any explanation must make sense in the context of evolution. I'm suggesting that language is fundamentally a tribal kind of softwa...

I've tried to make it vivid and explicit. There is a 'mindscape' thread out there at the moment that invokes this idea in pretty much this way. The fa...

The finite, as I understand, is something that is independent and enclosed and detached from everything else. The finite entity is an abstraction (a u...

While some may want to deny consciousness, I think the reasonable approach is to emphasize how difficult it is to clarify what is meant by the word. T...

I don't claim 'naive realism.' I reject that baggage as more harm than good. The point is to get out of the metaphor that structures the pseudoproblem...

But that's just it. It's the 'obviousness' of the veil of ideas or veil of sensations or veil of the given in general that functions as the invisible ...

I think the point is that being is being-in-the-world-as-time-spirit-etc. Equiprimordiality may be the key thought ?

Or we can pretend that philosophy didn't die in 1777. 'Naive realism' is like the word a particular cult has for outsiders. 'If you doubt the genius o...

Can we tell me how the phones are wired ? How do my words get to your control room ? Please give me the entire journey from my control room to yours. ...

I don't think you are seeing the issue. Do you think we are all trapped in individual control rooms ? Locked forever in or behind sensations and conce...

It just means hidden. This is just Ryle's classic target, the ghost in the machine. 'Your' experience of redness or love or the meaning of meaning is ...

To what is the (purely mental) 'idea' of reference supposed to refer ? To a Donnie Darko cleargoo snakebridge from the (shared) Platonisphere to desol...

I think Wittgenstein is saying that we tend to imagine signifieds or pure meanings as existing in some 'purely mental' realm. This seems to be what Ar...

Yes, it was 'intellectually' beautiful. Which is correct in some sense. But there's an explicit expansion of the concept of music to include the theor...

:up: :up: Both great examples of the admittedly vague phenomenon I had in mind. It's how of communication opposed to the what and yet serving as the e...

Something like the mind of God seems to be necessary for the 'prestructuralist' theory of meaning. The assumption (not usually made explicit) is that ...

If humans go extinct, then I guess you are right. There are finitely many expressions, even including context as part of the expression. Chalk up anot...

As Hegel noted, we can always try to summarize a philosophical point with a banal platitude. This is why the point is clarifying what the hell we are ...

:up: A profound pleasure ! But it also makes me feel powerful, and I think that's part of the pleasure.

I have a 'clear idea' of the will of God myself. Why do you think phenomenology became hermeneutic ? What is the essence of human historicity ? Let's ...

:up: What's funny is that even the rhetorical failures or troubles of semantic finitism serve as examples thereof. To me this thread is about making d...

:up: That sounds right to me (as you imply, it's embodied.)

Your account leaves out how we have contact with one another in the first place. Do we have Kantian bodies in the thing-in-itself ? If so, we shouldn'...

I agree. I will concede that arguing for one usage or another might be worthwhile in certain contexts. But I think it's very much case that one should...

You claim that we "represent" an X that is otherwise completely unknowable. But somehow you believe there is a we in the first place, that we all repr...

My objection to approaches that want to call everything 'mind' is that only make sense in a world where we see animals with nervous systems and specul...

I haven't looked that deeply into Hoffman's claims. I will admit that. I saw some of his interview with Lex and recognized something akin to a self-su...

The conception of depression as a hidden mental state is itself the incorrect presupposition here. Wittgenstein's beetlebox thoughtexperiment shows th...

Of course we know well enough for practical purposes how to sling these tokens. That's never been in question. What I'm trying to point out is this st...

If this is true, it's not a discovery about seeing but only about the grammar of 'see.' But I don't think it's even simply true, though I understand t...

:up:

You are presupposing in what you say that we all already exist in some (the same) actual world. Where are we supposed to be alive and looking at these...

This Hume quote includes the veil-of-ideas (intuitions, perceptions) presupposition I was talking about. As I see it, it's just a metaphor gone wild, ...

The music metaphor is complicated. Did you hear that old joke about 12-tone music ? 'It's better than it sounds.' We probably mostly agree. I'd just r...

You can think of an infinite number of tokens in a certain sense by adding context to each traditionally conceived token. You might never use 'token' ...

Sure. We are practically successful. There are billions of us. I imagine philosophy as wanting a tighter and tighter grip and yet a larger and more ar...

What exactly do you mean by 'causal' or 'mechanical' though ? The problem of meaning haunts everything, which is not to say that it itself is not haun...

This implicitly casts intentions and emotions as otherworldly or outerwordly, evading our embodiment. Language is marks and noises in the world, not a...

I'd go so far to say that it is the structure of reality in some sense. And I'd say that of course it's determined by real facts of the world -- and t...