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I'm trying to not pick "direct" or "indirect" from the menu. Too much baggage. Both focus on something important. But we tend to get trapped in our me...

That's a deep issue. I can at least agree that I can't make sense of a language developing apart on flesh (symbolizing desire, instinct, motive) in a ...

Perhaps we agree ? I'd add that no outside means no inside. I suggest we think of all of this in social terms. We can meaningfully talk about personal...

If I can jump in, it's at least a test. Let's say a demon comes to you tomorrow and brings your death and a choice. You can be gone forever or come ba...

:up: I agree with@"Fooloso4"'s emphasis on the importance of humility, but is it not somehow questionable to kneel and crawl before those who themselv...

I mean a footnote in the context of Saussure's point within his lectures. He's clearing the ground of certain prejudices, such as the one that the tho...

Some of the arguments you linked to are related to those I provided. So I'd say that yes there are some decent points made there. One approach that ma...

Right. And I'm saying that part of that is an expanding vocabulary. I can make more and more distinctions, more and more combinations. To be clear, I ...

I don't think Saussure would deny those kind of images, but I do think it's worth only a footnote in the actual context of his course. He's a linguist...

Maybe we should get it out of the way that philosophers can make up any kind of crazy talk they like. They can give 'see' a context-specific and even ...

That's OK. It's a compression of Wittgenstein and Heidegger and various other difficult philosophers. But it's the mainstream 20th century jailbreak f...

Life is terrifying. Love is a great act of courage. Solipsism might even be tempting as an escapist fantasy. You mentioned playing video games. Is the...

Though philosophy doesn't offer mathematical theorems which can be checked by a computer, solipsism has basically been proven wrong (or absurd or conf...

:up: There's no reason to imagine seeing as radically simple.

What indirect realism gets right is that an individual human's beliefs are a function not only of the world apart from that individual but also of tha...

True, but the idea of such a naked world is itself a object within our system of references. It's within our space of reasons, even as it helplessly a...

In my view, there's a confusing tendency around this issue to put objects beneath and not within the space of reasons, which is almost tautologically ...

This itself is huge. There are also tales of much smaller models, which can be privately owned by curious or mischievous individuals, with similar pow...

A great one, with so much to choose from. I can't think of any show that's better. The doctor's prayer for the minister's death still gives me chills....

These chat bots might be telling us things about ourselves that we don't want to hear. At the moment, I think the real thing is superior in terms of q...

I like to think that I care about truth, but in the light of the theory of evolution, I speculate (fear? pretend to fear?) that I might only tolerate ...

Hi. I don't think you are grasping my point. Definition is a blurry-go-round. Look up a word in the dictionary and all you get is more words, which ar...

Perhaps we are all bullshit generators, certain slant of light winter afternoons. But maybe it's bad to be too comprehensible. Shouldn't interpretatio...

Eerie. I've studied stochastic gradient descent and backprop, and I know it's 'just' (basically) curve-fitting in a "billion dimensional space," but I...

I see you appreciate Deadwood too. Great stuff.

Some bits and pieces from Wiki: Sigmund Freud, in his 1927 essay Humour (Der Humor), puts forth the following theory of black comedy: "The ego refuses...

It seems to me that the default view, which hides in the background, has to be dragged into the light in order to be recognized as a functioning and h...

One different kind of parallel does come to mind. Equivalence classes of expressions that have approximately the same function might serve to explain ...

Sounds like it. I was looking more into Husserl lately, and I got the impression that his massive output is tangled indeed. There are lots of concepts...

Your talk of blues reminds me of a great Cornel West interview : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfD3X3f5C_w Blind Willy's 'Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed...

Thanks for joining the thread. It seems to me that 'no need to make it mythological' is itself tangled up in the 'minimalism' I'm sketching. If this i...

--It's vulgar to trumpet one's motif, to wave one's sigil, to speak one's secret name. --Silence neither needs nor tolerates an advocate.

:up:

There's clearly something like retention, but did he really limit it to the just prior note ? I'd think there would be no 'natural' or obvious place t...

:up:

FWIW, I agree that there's some kind of thinking without language. But is this the ideal response to the invocation of structuralism ? Roy Harris wrot...

I think the way to understand Saussure is not to compare thinking-without-speaking to speaking now that you already have the sign system. Instead you ...

I'm suggesting (exploring the thesis) that our lifeworld and our semantics is inferentially articulated, and that our language ("an organ of perceptio...

I think so. The brain which is supposed to generate the picture is part of the picture. All arguments for the brain throwing up a picture depend on fe...

Yes. What is a self ? Persona, mask, costume, avatar. It looks to me like (among other things) a quilt of identifications, of belongings-to-groups. Ev...

:up: I'm interested in why we are tempted toward persisting presence ? Is it an evolutionary advantage ( genetic or memetic) to find and value pattern...

I don't know which 'ism' fits this approach best, but I suggest that the perspective metaphor is useful here. We don't see a picture of the tree. We s...

In case it helps understands where I'm coming from, anyway, here are some de Saussure quotes: **************** The ultimate law of language is, dare w...

It's hard to reply to your individual questions when for me the issue (not yours but ours as humans) is semantic. One might be tempted to say that the...

I don't mean narcissism pejoratively but neutrally. There are many pleasures, among which there is the sweet sense of being at or near the center or o...

Perhaps. But I'm digging for the biological roots of this theological power talk. The king who must expand is a metaphor for a dialectic that must neu...

It might be helpful to think of individuation as selective and creative assimilation.

That kind of humility is laudable and rare. As I see it, we have to take the risk and talk it out.

I agree. That's why I suggested googling the phrase, thinking you'd find this: Being is evidently not a real predicate, that is, a conception of somet...

:up: Also, I think Kojeve is great.