Dawnstorm

I've been reading this thread since there was only one page, but I've never quite known what to say. This line stood out, and I have to ask: why? Me n...

I wonder if it's even that. As long as we don't have "fear of flying", aren't we just going along our way without giving it much thought? Like crossin...

Thanks; confidence isn't my strong suit. For every post I finish, there are probably two I don't, and for every three posts I finish and post there's ...

I actually think that eliminitave realism is of very limited use in social siences. Take sociology: the discipline was established by Emile Durkheim w...

I'm a sociologist by formal training, though I never went down that path professionally and it's now a few decades in the past, but I'm quite familiar...

Again, I know little about emotivism. I read up a little since my last post, mostly because I found it hard to believe that emotivism has no theories ...

I'm not that familiar with emotivism, and I'm unsure if I'm one or not, but I wouldn't rule it out. So: do emotivists really make claims like that? Th...

I tend to think of it very much like that, but I find there's a lot to talk about here. The line I've bolded is a good starting point: It's not entire...

I tried to respond to this when you rephrased yourself in response to me, but I didn't know how. This is fiendishly difficult to get a hold of. I'll t...

This is a difficult question for me. Back then I didn't quite understand some of this stuff, and now I don't have enough memory about it. It's made ev...

I'm not an expert on Husserl; my perspective on this topic comes from sociology - in particular from Helmut Plessner, Alfred Schütz, and Berger/Luckma...

I'd like to think about this for a while. When you were talking about tigers a few pages back, you suggested there were two things that were important...

I've never heard of permissivists before this thread, and I'm not yet done with reading Count Timothy von Icarus' link about "objects", but it turns o...

Sure. New words crop up all the time. Someone (or a group of people) would have named the computer mouse "mouse", for example. I maybe wouldn't call i...

What work does the "just" do in this sentence? They're cultural abstractions of a certain type of organism. If you're living in a society it's culture...

Hmm... I'm more familiar with linguistics than philosophy, but I'd say both syntax and semantics are patterns and how we use them. I think the actual ...

Ah, gotcha. It's all fluid anyway. And I can't say I know Black Sabbath well enough to have much of a view on their sound. A lot would have come out o...

I'm not that knowledgable about genre, but "hippie rock"? This is just a random comment triggered by this paragraph, but I just had to remember that "...

Well, in terms of D&D, this is mostly a rule-of-thumb to be interpreted in any way practical by the Dungeon Master. In terms of genre history (F/SF), ...

Sounds like "mono no aware" (loosely, the surprising poignancy of things), which includes an in-the-moment appreciation of beauty, sort of like being ...

Try lots of times, and if you never find the edge of the world... (It's not practical anyway, since you need to fly. This means you need to make a pil...

Travel in one direction until you end up where you start. (Unless you think the flat Earth was Pacmanesque warp points?)

I'm in this kind of mood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si554hC2Xq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD5OUF851NI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLU4...

P.S.: Never heard of him, but reading that poem and checking out the wiki-page made me curious. Sounds very interesting. (Also, I last replayed Planes...

To my knowledge, it only exists as a file on an usb-stick of mine (and an external hard-drive). It's also not really ready to be a book; it's a very r...

Think of magic as a psychoreactive substance, and think of the physical world as dead magic. The oldest human magic-making would have been unintention...

Okay, I've written a fantasy novel about "the death of magic". Basically, for roughly a century now magic has been disappearing, which leaves a few of...

That feels about right. Back when I was still writing, I was writing mostly short stories. I had a couple of concepts for a novel, but then most of th...

Oh wow, I've always gotten the song wrong. I'd always thought the singer engages in activity to stop thinking, but it's quite the opposite. (I've neve...

As is obvious, as you tagged him, which I completely missed. (I think it's what happens when I click a thread via notifications rather than via the th...

One or two. I seem to have lost my patience for reading fiction on screen. It's almost always paper these days. Oh, wow. What an unexpected honour, gi...

It's mostly introduced lots of clichés. I'd expect that from a statistical model. The most griveous flaw of the edit is that: it took out what made th...

Heh, for what it's worth: if someone had hired me as a slush reader, I'd have paused over your version at the very least. Not sure I'd have set it asi...

So what's the relationship between thought and language? I've often found myself confused on that topic when reading philosophy, as if there's a basic...

I honestly don't understand what you're after, though. "Preferable"? So I consider suicide: (a) Do I prefer to continue living, or (b) do I prefer to ...

I'm going to question what a "reason for living" even is to begin with. I was suicidal from, roughly, 12 years of age to... maybe 16 years of age, and...

This I find difficult to talk about. First, I did quote what you literally said, but the "you" in the line was supposed to be the generalised you (lik...

"Show, don't tell," is one piece of advice that's... vague. The problem is, since you're in a medium that almost always works with text, the only way ...

Sure, but let me address the following first: A bit harsh? Yes and no. It's not that I thought that's how I came across to others. Sometimes maybe, bu...

Oh my, this was six years ago? I don't remember this post at all, and I had to go back to read this thread for a while to see why I was saying what I ...

One of the reasons I tend to stay out of cogito-ergo-sum threads is that I never read Descartes and am only passingly familiar with it. I find the top...

I sometimes wonder how important it is to *have* a point. I remember, back at University, in a literary class, I was trying to explain my point. The l...

I believe I may have confused myself here, or missed something. Let me go through this step by step with "Torturing babies is wrong." 1. "Torturing ba...

I'm not that familiar with moral subjectivism, but with this you've given me something to react to. Let me try to make sense of this. Here you use the...

I've tried to look up what Kierkegaard said on the topic, but... it's impenetrable answers to impenetrable questions. I really need to go back a few s...

I didn't mean only right here in this thread. More like: at this point in your life, you're worrying a lot about this topic, and from a non-spiritual ...

. Aren't you inflicting one upon yourself right now? A question that occurred to me: Given the same act, do you find it easier to forgive it in others...

Ah, thanks. I could have figured that out, but didn't. Actually, I think I made some assumptions when I said this, so it's not necessarily true. For e...

Ah, yeah, I was talking Star Trek transporter as per the OP. I missed the two-line post about Parfit. I've never heard of that case, and am unfamiliar...

I've re-read your post, and I now think our differences might be this: A transporter accident results in: You: an original and a copy Me: Two copies o...