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No worries. I wish I too was a model of clarity! "If it is not possible, then it is in some sense necessary." — Count Timothy von Icarus This proposal...

It's a very good one. But we'd have to say that either 1) institutional Christianity has paid little attention to it, or 2) institutional Christianity...

Certainly you can find that in the Bible, but in general Christianity has tended to stop at "loving humans" and not considered what it might mean to a...

This is good. I would amend it slightly to say that "love" in English also tends to be construed as family love (storge), not just eros. The "imperson...

OK, let's try to plug that in to the quotes: "Hegel shows that the condition for the truth of an immediate experience is that the things that appear t...

Of course not. Our wires got crossed here. Your wrote: I took you to mean, "Is it possible for this putatively true statement to be shown to be false?...

I wonder if you've ever read the novel "A Clockwork Orange" by Anthony Burgess, or perhaps seen the film. The story explores exactly what's wrong with...

But if something could stop the sun from rising -- or, in the case of the rock and window, prevent the rock from breaking the window -- why would we c...

Again, this doctrine is remarkably like the traditional distinction between "soul" and "spirit" (psyche and pneuma). The one is individual, particular...

But we still need to ask: Relations among what? I don't think we can talk of "relations" that have no relata.

And there's the rub: what are "the things that flow"?

This seems a little too conclusive to me, but it basically affirms what I was suggesting about separating the two senses of "consciousness." I just th...

I read his Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions -- first-rate essays.

What does the bolded phrase mean, exactly? And is this what happens for an infant (which was my original question)? I hope you can fill this out a bit...

Hmm. Well, some things are conscious and some are not, unless you're a hardcore panpsychist. Understanding why this is the case seems perfectly legiti...

"Replace" may not be quite the right word. I'm asking into whether an infant, when she sees a shape, is already constrained by the textures of "flow" ...

I agree with nearly everything you're saying (very well!) in Part 3. I would slow down a bit for the above, however. Can we differentiate between "con...

That might work. Or "tautology" may be more trouble than it's worth, since it has two common usages that are easily conflated. In logic, a tautology i...

This is perhaps a good place to pose two related questions that I think we ought to try to answer, if we're serious about a Husserlian "underlying rea...

Thanks, I will check it out. It isn't silly at all. Along with many other similar questions we could ask (what about all those microbes that live insi...

Very interesting stuff, thanks. Returning to my question about "accidental necessity," let's consider your example of the rock and the window. This in...

My remarks above about ontological primitives shouldn't be read as excluding this possibility as well. Subjectivity may be as primary as "flow".

I've bolded the question above. We want to understand how something called a flow can have order and patterns while lacking formal features. We also w...

Yes, I think we're on the same (or closely adjacent) page. The proliferation of definitions/usages of "exist" in philosophy makes it a poor candidate ...

I think you're saying that "the evening star" (description) is not a rigid designator, but "the Evening Star" (name) is? So "the evening star" is like...

OK, I can see that. Going back to the integer domain, though: I'm not sure why including more than integers would be the same kind of domain change as...

mis-post

I take the point about definitions being sometimes non-truth-apt, but in the case you cite: Joe defines "bachelor" as "unmarried male", while Mary def...

OK. I will think about this vocabulary of "textures," "consonances," "dissonances," and "affordances." These terms pose some obvious problems, as you ...

Indeed. In this matter, we're in much the same position as 18th century scientists speculating about Democritean atoms. We don't even have a vocabular...

Agreed. Or as I said in the "Mind as Uncaused Cause" thread: " a completely different understanding of what terms like "physical," "mental," "subjecti...

I looked for a juggler emoji but couldn't find one! So I'll just smile :smile: I hope you do come back to this discussion. Obviously I don't think I'm...

Welcome back. As Quine explains it, doesn't the collapse occur regardless of the domain? It has to do with existential generalization itself, no? But ...

This was posted seconds before my post above, responding to a similar concern. So now I can ask: Is the utterly formless, structureless flow neverthel...

I think this is largely correct. And it foregrounds the conceptual challenge: If we do not invent objects out of whole cloth, what are the constraints...

Here's a good description of what Husserl opposed, from The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (also quoted by Bernstein in ...

Let's slow it down a little. I think you're assuming that the binary "embodied/disembodied" is clear enough to cover all the cases we're interested in...

Why doesn't a definition have a truth-value? You probably mean something simple that I'm overlooking, but I would have thought that "a bachelor is an ...

Compare the difference between psyche and pneuma in Classical Greek, or "soul" and "spirit" in Christian theology.

Closer to the latter. Good science should say, re consciousness and subjectivity, "We just don't know. Stay tuned." Scientism, in contrast, rules out ...

But then doesn't that prejudge the question of whether there could be anything else other than embodiment that characterizes a self and its attributes...

Very good OP (Part 1), thank you. In fact, this might be two distinct difficulties. First, as you say, subjectivity appears to be left out of scientis...

This assumes that the only way to be "mine" or "yours" is to be embodied, doesn't it? Moreover, a mind can be affected by our interactions with the lo...

Chalmers was contrasting his "hard problem of consciousness" with what he called "the easy problem of consciousness": finding the places in the brain ...

Yes, good summary. The question of how experience, or subjectivity, can be "in the world" if the world is understood physically is currently unanswera...

It certainly is. I don't know what your philosophical background is, but this is one of most entrenched questions in philosophy. Often, it's not a que...

OK, except the last sentence? When you say "reference for the word" do you mean intension (in logic)? Some words presumably wouldn't have any extensio...

I'm afraid this is over my head, but I appreciate your response.

God bless you! (or substitute "the Universe" if you prefer). If only more posters did the same.

To which we can add a third wrinkle, as I referred to earlier: necessity as opposed to tautology. '9 is greater than 7' is presumably analytic and lik...