Terrapin Station

There's a difference between only being aware of a representation/a mental creation of a basketball and being directly aware of the basketball. The la...

You're saying that "they came from nothing" is an appearance. I'm wondering what that appearance looks like. It doesn't look like my dreams, because t...

But my dreams look like something, not like nothing creating something.

So what does "nothing is creating it" look like?

But you had just said that it's not an appearance: "no. It is nothing not a something. Which means it is not created."

So where is the claim that literally nothing created it coming from if that's not an appearance?

"Literally nothing is creating it" is the appearance?

Why would we settle on representationalism as the theory rather than alternatives?

Isn't that theoretical?

Presumably it seems I'm something your mind is creating? That's the only experience of me?

You either have a medical problem or you're stuck in some juvenile theorizing.

In my world, the experience is not normally of me watching a TV. There's just the TV.

To think that there always has to be me perceiving other things in some relation to them, I have to posit the other things, which defeats the argument...

Maybe it's being self-centered. You see everything as you somehow? In my world, there's often just a TV or whatever. It's not a phenomenon of me perce...

There's just a TV. With no experiential phenomenon of it being a perception of a TV.

In your world, there's only direct experience of perceptions qua perceptions?

Interesting, so I'd have to wonder if maybe something unusual is going on with you medically.

They're not saying something about people agreeing with "objective fact" Again, are you saying you're unfamiliar with direct experience of things like...

There is direct experience of a television set, say. Are you not familiar with this?

Otherwise known as "speaking for everyone."

There is direct experience of a lot of different things, including objective things. So that would suggest the opposite of your conclusion.

What do you count as an empirical support of this?

Are you basically referring to the "social contract" idea in your own words? A simple definition is "an implicit agreement among the members of a soci...

"But what is this so-called objective medium . . . from the reference frame of being a person observing it" do you mean? Because from a different refe...

A problem with this is we perceive properties. So if properties are form, we perceive form. Also "pushes back when you push on it" is a property, a pr...

Space and time aren't "things in themselves," they supervene on matter and its relations.

That's a good point in that there's a lot of conventional behavior that people do not condone. For example, it's a convention to acquire alcohol and d...

I'm not saying you can't use "rule" however you want to use it, but I can't recall anyone using it simply for conventions. Everyone I've encountered u...

Well, it seems pretty obvious. As Baden noted, "It's trivially true that language originated in humans."

Isn't there any way to discover which side is correct?

You said that we can value an abstract principle. I was saying something about that--about valuing abstract principles. I wasn't saying aside from tha...

The only way to know if you value an abstract principle is via your intuition. Re the earlier comment, it's the same rudimentary misunderstanding peop...

The only thing "extreme" about cases like that are whether an opinion would be popular or unusual. Some people tend to be swayed popularity of opinion...

I couldn't more strongly disagree with this, though. The sort of reasons one gives are things like "it's primarily plot-driven." It's not good or bad ...

I've seen many thousands of films, but unfortunately I haven't seen either of those two yet. I'm familiar with both to some extent. I just haven't got...

That's a lot to read into two simple questions.

Also, "fact" doesn't imply "not relative" by the way. (It also doesn't imply "not subjective," as there are facts about minds.) "Fact" does imply "not...

It was a rejection of a question?

Didn't I just explain that I use "truth" and "fact" differently, a la the conventional distinction in analytic phil, and then you said it was common k...

Right, especially when it was in lieu of answering a simple question. I was looking for an answer, not a deflection.

It indicates that you have Asperger's? Why would you be telling me that all of a sudden instead of just answering the simple question I asked?

Is it because you're expressing skepticism about it or something? I don't care if you don't believe it. I'm not going to reread the book to find a ref...

Invention.

No idea what that would indicate.

So something shouldn't be primarily plot-driven, dialogue shouldn't just be there to drive the plot, characters shouldn't be "two-dimensional" because...

I'd have to search for it, and I'm not about to reread the whole book just to give you a citation for whatever ridiculous reason you'd be asking for o...

So you use "rule" to just refer to a conventional practice? You could have simply said that if so, no?

Obviously they're aware of other uses. But the term isn't used that way in an analytic philosophy context, and there are reasons it's not used that wa...

Let's try this, then: how do we discover values?

Okay. Again, a common definition of "invent" is "create or design (something that has not existed before); be the originator of." The term doesn't nec...