Terrapin Station

Sure, that you don't have a legal right to do something doesn't imply that it's impossible to do that thing. It simply implies that you can be arreste...

The idea isn't whether anything "needs a definition to exist." Presumably we're calling something, some x rather than some different y, "suffering," a...

Not that I'm for the moment agreeing or disagreeing with your "according to you," but If it refutes an argument for anti-natalism, then it does addres...

Meant for the other thread?

I'm not sure I'd agree with that.

Well, yeah, because we'd be doing epistemology there instead.

Ignoring how that would even imply anything about determinism, that's something water-tight and rigorous that stands up to scrutiny?

Why in the world would you see ontology as a topic only in continental philosophy, first off?

What i asked you was how you're defining injury or suffering so that they don't have anything to do with desired versus not-desired states. An answer ...

That's a sentence you could write. I just don't know why you'd write it.

Haha--touche. Unfortunately philosophy should have something to do with critical thinking.

Well, a good reason would be something that would count as evidence (and in a water-tight, rigorous way that would stand up to scrutiny) for the unive...

That comes across as both patronizing and as a deflection designed to avoid critical thinking.

You mean you think you were stating good reasons to buy determinism in those posts? I certainly wouldn't agree with that.

I basically agree with all of that, but it doesn't seem to really connect to anything else.

What do those have to do with the term "spirit," with truth, etc?

Those posts don't seem to have much to do with my comment above.

Atheist "spiritualism"? The idea of nonphysical existents in general is incoherent.

For me it's good enough that (a) it seems to be the case that I can make choices with some element of randomness to them between at least two differen...

So some religious nonsense basically? Again, this board can be frustrating in that there are so many religious believers here as well as so many fans ...

<shrug> Why would you see "experiential truth" as a term for "ideal goals" that someone might have?

That doesn't actually do anything besides ignore the question. Anyway, re "the example," do you mean this? "The association context of the comprehende...

Not to hijack your thread, but I'm curious why, on this board, we get both (a) so many people with religious beliefs, and (b) so many people whose pri...

I could live for a million years and I wouldn't be too old for college girls.

I'm stumped why you see truth as being another name for a goal one would have, so that one is working towards some ideal.

I have issues with every sentence basically, so start at the first one. Why would we think of reality as in any way hinging on knowledge?

Legal rights obtain via people who have the power to do so, because of their social position--because of how others treat them in a social context, th...

That fails because for one, moral stances aren't the sorts of things that are either correct or incorrect. That's not the case if we're talking about ...

That's conflating the notion of knowing something with the idea of learning a language.

Do you believe that Augustine would have said that learning implies being given something wholesale where the person receiving what was learned is ent...

My tangent with Metaphysician Undercover involved clarifying a definition.

So if we're defining things so that it's impossible to learn anything solely via ostension, why would we even ask the question in the first place re w...

What you have to explore is why you care about certainty to that extent. A psychologist or psychiatrist may be able to help you figure that out.

Would you say that it's impossible to learn anything, regardless of how limited we make it, via ostension? For example, would you say that it's imposs...

You mean just abstracting it so that the techniques could apply to anything? Sure. That would be easy enough, and it's been done to some extent. For e...

Simply ignoring what I asked you isn't actually a defense against the objection.

And how do we define injury and suffering so that we avoid desired versus not-desired states?

Sure, we can teach and learn how to generate ideas. We do that all the time in the arts. We teach music composition, creative writing, visual arts, et...

On your view it's harmful because?

I'm not at all talking about a right to bear arms though. I'm not stating any belief at all about that. What I'm saying is akin to this: let's say tha...

Harmful is a value judgment, too. It's a way of saying that someone desires state x but state y is obtaining instead.

That's evil per what?

"The emotional response they have to it" is a fact about individuals. It obtains so long as the individual in question has that emotional response. It...

Again, that is a subjective judgment.

In other words, you and many other people would have a very strong reaction against their disposition. Yeah, no shit. That your reaction is strong or ...

That's a subjective judgment. Someone could easily make the opposite judgment. It would be incoherent to say that they're incorrect for making a diffe...

To me, disagreeing with it is simply disagreeing with facts, not realizing facts, etc. You can disagree with factual info about what the world is like...

I'd say that depending on the definition being used, the estimates would be more like 0 to 7.7 billion people.

If that discussion got to the point of anyone concluding that good is mathematically better, it really went off the rails--comically so.

The problem with trying to achieve that is that we don't all have the same views about just what should be permissible, recommendable, etc. behavior. ...