Yes, and 'tropes' is a good word. They were just taking seriously the directive to know thyself. The 'rational animal' is the symbolical linguistic an...
Yes, there is something going on. But maybe Aristotle got it backwards. It's the 'external' synchronization that leads to the 'logical illusion' of 'i...
I believe language means also, I just don't know exactly what it means to say so. So I'm a semantic finitist rather than a semantic nihilist, right ? ...
Right. And if metaphors are central and mostly visual, then our talk aimed at the ear is nevertheless hieroglyphic and aimed at the inner or spiritual...
Yes! I agree. Philosophy is that chase. The chase for clarity ? Power ? Beauty ? Novelty ? We leap from stone to stone, from sign to sign, trying to s...
That sounds right, but how do we define 'meaningful' ? That which signifies ? Is the sign "that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instit...
Beautiful question. Because 'ground' is a metaphor. We want our feet on the ground. But perhaps we could talk of them hanging from the ceiling ? But w...
:up: I like to insist that promises and marriages are no less real and no more real than quarks and crossbows. They are all caught up in a single syst...
For me the essence of Heidegger is thinking of historicity and what it entails. It's as if he purified and amplified and liberated a Hegelian insight ...
I don't think we have any serious disagreements then. The mentalistic talk is great for practical purposes. I do think Sellars' and Popper's criticism...
But why stop with transistors ? They are also abstractions or icons in a particular framing of the situation. Consider also that certain structures ar...
:up: Nietzsche wrote of the necessity of a hard heart, and I think he was right. This doesn't mean I don't like being kind. But life is indeed pointle...
Perhaps consciousness is something that networked cooperative/competitive brains do. I think was already implicit, but perhaps emphasizing sociality i...
This adds some context. If the teacher is successful, he clones himself. (I mean he clones the relevant part of himself.) If there is a binary predica...
It sounds like a bad situation. I think you should consider getting some professional help. I've wrestled with negative compulsive thoughts before, an...
It can be beautiful and amazing indeed. I know that those current tormented will only be further nauseated by that kind of talk, just as I have been w...
How would you fix the issue ? As far as I can tell, it's by looking at sense organs like the eyes and talking to people in the world that we develop t...
While structuralism suggests one kind of ambiguity, metaphoricity suggests another. In short, we are savages trading hieroglyphics. Lakoff and Hofstad...
I've debated getting into Suttree. I am now more motivated. Same here. I can't think of anything better. Is there anything as good ? There are many gr...
It's tough being human. I've been reading The Denial of Death lately. It really brings home what an accomplishment it is to operate with relative sani...
Exactly. And this also works against any 'veil-of-ideas' metaphysics. The idea that we are trapped behind a screen is itself based on the content of t...
I think you need to infinitely nest your Cartesian theatre image. The mini-me needs his own control-room in the skull, with its own screen that shows ...
Last point. You can also think of signs as imperfectly repeatable patterns in the 'tornado' of what we humans do on this planet. It's as if there were...
To me there's also the problem of establishing what one even means or can mean by mind-independent abstract objects. It's a bit like the hunt for roun...
To me it's the opposite of puzzling. One of the things a philosopher does is help people see that they don't or only barely know what they are talking...
It seems to me that, without realizing it, you assuming what you want to prove. It's as if you are still assuming some kind of transhuman ideastuff th...
I'm interested in a deeper structure or in a generalization of religion. There's no need for supernaturalism. Someone could make Richard Dawkins their...
The brand is the envelope. The point is something like the inside being promised by the outside. The content, which is presumably profound, is not imm...
OK. Perhaps in fact a particular band of warriors was being more practical than symbolic. I still maintain that this kind of gesture exists. 'I can ta...
Good mention! This stuff happens, and I think we agree it's not essentially about the concepts involved, because most of the time we can safely play w...
Here's where I think we are at. Solipsism isn't logically coherent, but the issue, in my opinion, isn't really logic. There's something irrational and...
David Markson sounds great and is a new lead. Thanks ! I've read a few of Cormac's and at the moment, after Blood Meridian of course, it's Child of Go...
Just to clarify, I had three characters in mind. There is the sage, who is basically a gleaming icon, with no interior. There is the young novice, tru...
Great example. The skill of the therapist matters. 'The envelope is the letter' sounds better though than 'perhaps the way a message is delivered or i...
I can guess at what you mean, but it's not clear as it stands why desire is not a personal feeling. If you just mean it's a deeper more generous drive...
Who would refute it though ? And what would refutation mean ? If the self is all there is, there is nothing the self can be wrong or right about. How ...
To me there's a relatively reasonable interpretation of 'mindscape' along the lines of 'geist' or 'spirit' or culture. We humans live together in a sy...
If we stick with the equivalence class metaphor (with a blurry substitute for the mathematical version), then the idea dies with its last representati...
But that's exactly the step that I'm questioning (I go into this in my Semantic Finitude thread.) It is arguably the basic superstition and the basic ...
Good post ! Rucker is great. Let me throw a wrench into the machine. What is an idea ? One approach, that might save us some trouble, is that it's an ...
I suspect that we are evolved to enjoy bringing resources back to the tribe. We tend to love children and pets, just for being there. It's even one of...
That's very kind! Thank you for taking the time to be so kind. And it's nice to hear that my writing is doing what I want it to, which is spread/inspi...
I'm not quite clear on what you mean here. Hopefully this is related. I claim that pure math (the proving of theorems) is not the practical or 'genuin...
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