Mongrel

I had two two-week prednisone bursts recently. It's magic. Unfortunately it won't do anything for Jackass Syndrome... obviously.

Possibly. I think Godzilla is actually an image of the US.. walking around eating cars...

OK

I don't imagine I have anything to teach you about Descartes' scenario. If we differ in our take on it, maybe it's a difference in what we think the c...

I asked how you know you aren't dreaming right now. What does it suggest.. that you don't simply answer the question?

Normal is fiction. Nobody lives there full time. Just 20 years ago, I'd say just about all the lesbians and bisexuals I knew were crazy in some way or...

LOL. Totalitarian flavor game. Chinese totalitarianism is Szechuan and bright yellow. French totalitarianism was lavender and juniper trees and their ...

Sorry... "In the dream, you asserted P." is true IFF in the dream, you asserted P. Did I assert P in the dream? Yes, I did. Problem?

Gay Science

"You said that P in the dream" is true IFF you said that P in the dream.

I'm going to get some bacon and eggs. How about that one?

PTSD sucks.

You'd say exactly the same thing in the dream if the question came up.

Among the table's properties is that you can fly off of it? But one can fly off a real table. A real table can change into something else. There may b...

Is there a difference between the dream table and the real table? What properties does one have that the other doesn't?

https://dp1eoqdp1qht7.cloudfront.net/community/projects/6a0/7d7/102950/1911835-o_19la26049bm7kf21a391c001g4r7-full.png Complete with blue meanies.

"In principle" is enough for a hefty argument. If it's true that there's nothing I might observe (even in principle) that would tell me whether I'm dr...

There's a "Get Creative" thread where you can put poems.

Well, anyway. I think Kant is a significant part of the conversation because AP is partly rooted in a reaction against Kant that flowed into an attemp...

Maybe you could help me understand your argument a little better. Kant noted the intuitiveness of Euclidean geometry. What's the next step in the argu...

Special Relativity is the one that does in absolute space. Kant beat Einstein to it (so did Leibniz, btw.. but that's beside the point.)

I also think this is a significant feature of the question's landscape. But isn't it that the idealist believes we shape the world by what we think? T...

Because my version is better.

Per Fine, it's a belief in a definite world structure and belief in epistemic access to this structure. Language regarding the mind-independence of wo...

I don't think so. An anti-realist denies that a statement of materialism can be truth-apt.

It probably calls for some narrowing down, otherwise pitting this nebulous realism against a very specific sort of idealism (the consequences of which...

I think that statement would make you a neutral apologist. To be a realist apologist, you'll have to make the case that realism is more successful or ...

What do Russians have? Vodka and snow?

So just be aware that although you may not like the concept of ontological dependence, that may be the concept in play in someone else's thoughts. I'm...

There's an SEP article on ontological dependence.

True. Maybe I could formulate it a little better... I'll work on it.

I wouldn't call it co-dependence because that term has a significant psychological meaning. Interdependence... yes. I disagree with you there. Probabl...

Well that's a challenge. Maybe write a play that starts off really well, things go really well and then the ending is joyous. Wouldn't it put people t...

Cuba si. Castro no.

But pathological situations are dramatic. From a certain point of view life is drama.

But why not? Could the nay sayer believe in dreams within dreams?

Distress may or may not be harmful. It's a reaction to something (at least potentially) harmful. Respiratory distress, for instance, means the body is...

We could start a thread to explore different sorts of ontological dependence.

The world's most famous perpetrators of infanticide were Chinese atheists under communist rule. Apparently buckets of water were kept at the bedsides ...

If the fleece could persist beyond the removal of the hay. It's not the definition of "world" you should be preoccupied with here. It's "dependent."

A bit of hay may adhere to the fleece. It doesn't mean the fleece is hay-dependent. (I'm shopping for a spinning wheel. Woo Hoo!) I'm not overly fond ...

In what context?

Just stipulate a definition and move on. What's wrong with that?

Leftist are just more sensitive to the possibility of crimes being committed against Muslims who live in their communities.

That was all pretty standard stuff per Scott Soames.... check out Understanding Truth. Awesome.

Why on earth did I used to think you were a cool person? Tendency to spout nonsense, I guess.

That's cool. I didn't realize how much of my life I spent just continually psychologically pushing back against US Cold War propaganda until I read a ...

Don't really have to.

"It's a terrible thing to lose your mind, or not have a mind." -- Dan Quayle

I agree.