Terrapin Station

subjective = mental objective = extramental, or the complement of mental (in other words, everything else) "Objective reality" - reality aside from mi...

No properties of something like a hammer only exist in the mind of an observer. Meaning isn't a property of objects like hammers. Meaning is a mental ...

Again, this has nothing to do with meaning. You're changing the topic from post to post. Just pointing that out if we want to stay on topic. Anyway, t...

"Patterns" are simply the fact that not everything is a completely uniform, homogeneous "soup," especially when irregularities have repeated similarit...

Nope. "Pattern" isn't the same as "meaning." I didn't use the word "pattern" at all. If in your view, meanings are patterns, period, and that's all th...

I don't see how you'd believe it has anything to do with solipsism whatsoever. Solipsism is "the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure t...

Yes. One of the most common misunderstandings of the subjective/objective distinction is the belief that it has something to do with disagreement and ...

Re your comments, I'd say that: (1) nothing whatsoever "embodies" inherent meaning (other than minds, at least), (2) meanings are not arbitrarily assi...

It doesn't indicate the presence of meaning (to be deciphered). It's simply that just in case there are people present, and those people think about t...

If the structure and processes are the same, it doesn't make a difference how it was achieved. Re the rest of the comment, dismissal of nominalism asi...

So it's not a common enough thing to argue that we could find a record of it anywhere?

It's just that that's the language we're using to describe phenomena. If we used a "natural language" instead, we could say, "All known laws of scienc...

Didn't we do this already? (Or was it someone else?--I don't recall). It doesn't make sense to talk about the weight of all physical phenomena. I didn...

It's easy to understand that you're reifying a potential.

That's S's (the thread-starter) view.

My answer to that is "there are no correct interpretations." There are interpretations that either match (if more or less exact with respect to a part...

If we were to artificially build a human out of just the same materials that naturally-formed humans are made of, in just the same relations, undergoi...

Mathematics is an abstracted way of thinking about relations, with some basis in external-world relations as we observe and think about them (which do...

It's easiest to understand if we add theoretical stuff to it. But it's important to remember that the theoretical stuff is just that. So from that per...

Really. (And people expect me to remember something like a Schopenhauer book I read 40 years ago., haha.) Sometimes I can't even remember what movie I...

Not all appearances are of us experiencing something though. Not all appearances are of us, as subjects, experiencing something. I'm just talking abou...

If "they share nothing in common" is sufficient as a comment, why isn't "they are identical" sufficient? Why should I be doing more than you're doing?...

Yes. It's not deterministic.

Re looking for an advocate, presumably you guys mean something other than someone saying "I'm in favor of political correctness," right? Also, would y...

I think it's possible for someone to "truly love" everyone. Can't we be talking about loving events, actions, situations, etc., too, though?

Yeah, they are. What they have in common with brain states is that they're identical to them. That seems painfully obvious to me. So just in case some...

I was agreeing with you. "A fortiori because I don't buy the notion of unconscious mental phenomena" was an emphasis of that, where I was trying to im...

I'm asking who, though. (As in I was hoping you could give some actual examples, because this seems very dubious to me.) Okay, but no one is going to ...

First, love is simply an emotional disposition towards things, right? A very complex and variable emotional disposition (enough so that it's probably ...

I was trying to imagine ways that it might make sense to say that someone is "lying to themselves."

Influence consists of a person experiencing something and either liking it enough that they consciously steer something they're doing in a different d...

No, a fortiori because I don't buy the notion of unconscious mental content. But I think that someone could think that any arbitrary action is "purely...

I'd agree with that, but who argues that? No one argues that the absence of harm for nonexistent people is a good thing, either. (I mean, outside of B...

If it's just a self-assessment like that, then any arbitrary desire could either be ordered or disordered, couldn't it?

Those are brain states. Brain states are measurable. Why would you think you need to explain change, anyway, by the way? If there were a lack of chang...

Okay, so how do we determine whether a desire "increases love" or not?

I don't see how it addresses it unless you're claiming that one can't, in fact, make a different decision.

So I went back to review the "ordered/disordered" desire distinction you're making. You said: "A very Jesuit way of looking at this is not that desire...

In making the point he was making, at least according to you, he talked about people not feeling sad for nonexistent people, as if that was significan...

I don't want to lessen prostitution. I don't think there's anything at all wrong with it. Rather I'm very much in favor of it. I think it's a good thi...

From that point, you can make a decision to drive the nail or not.

You don't have a right to physically attack someone just because they say something. Learn how to deal with people saying things that you don't like/d...

I'm excluding decisions from causes, as one could decide to do differently. The carpenter has to apply physical force to the hammer, though. (Just as ...

Was he figuring that? It seemed to me that he was wondering about a conscious entity with no needs, not arguing that consciousness is incoherent witho...

I'd say the desires do not cause that specific suffering. What would cause it is someone falsely imprisoning someone else or criminally threatening th...

I don't think anyone is lamenting the absence of pleasure for non-existent people. Some people are rather upset at not having kids, not being able to ...

I wouldn't say that free will has anything to do with "complete control." Influences are not the same thing as causal determinants. That choices may b...

I'd say that the only suffering happening there would be (a) if the women are really being held against their wills at least via what I'd classify as ...

Yeah, I knew that was a big tangent. The idea of that just always struck me as bizarre. As I mentioned, or hinted at, in my first post in this thread,...

This is going way off-topic, but why would something create something else to praise, revere and serve it? Well, I can see the "serve" part if we're t...