Terrapin Station

Explanations are sets of words, right?

Yeah, reading up to 155 in a week is way too much in my opinion. That's over a quarter of the book . . . and I'm probably going to have a good 10 obje...

Exactly. And explanations of photosynthesis, say, are not photosynthesis. And explanations of how to play a C major seventh chord are not a C major se...

Your support for "Our cognition mediates or distorts the object" is that you don't drive without your contact lenses in? How is that a support for "Ou...

What is the distinction supposed to be between "think it would" and "think I think it would"?

What would you give as an example of a shared meaning?

By the way in music, harmony obtains simply via simultaneous pitches. "Harmony" has no connotation of assessment or value judgment. If you want to tal...

Are you saying that the explanations of neural etc. activity don't seem like consciousness to you, and you wouldn't count something as an explanation ...

I don't believe that's the case at all. As long as the involved parties parse things as going smoothly, consistently, coherently, etc. it doesn't matt...

For that one I simply say "wrong." An individual could look at meaning that way, but it's simply a contingent fact about how that individual thinks. S...

I left out anything you didn't specify immediately above. As I said re PI, "I need to read it again.". I was just going by what you had said. Two thin...

When I was a kid, I was more or less sheltered from religious beliefs. My parents are atheists, my maternal grandfather was a Russell-like atheist, I ...

I don't believe it is obvious, though, and I wouldn't say it has anything to do with language. Re your second paragraph, I have no idea what the topic...

Why would you read my comment as if it was supposed to be a falsification of something?

There's no problem that some preferences lead to preservation overall and some lead to extinction overall. The problem is that that doesn't imply that...

Justifications period are subjective.

Justification is simply a matter of an individual feeling that they have good reasons to believe something. Do you agree with that?

This is similar to what I was getting at earlier. What in the world would it be for any phenomenon to be wholly defined, described and explained?

?? That has nothing to do with their opinions on whether the child was in phyiscal danger. It could only be inconsistent via the way that you're conce...

I'm fine with speciesism, yes. I'd favor the cat. Morality is ultimately just our individual dispositions, the way we feel about interpersonal behavio...

I was saying something about descriptions period--that's why I didn't qualify it further than just saying "descriptions.". NO description is like what...

I need to read it again, but if that's his argument, one obvious flaw is this: in saying that language is learned via ostensive definitions, and in co...

What makes any explanation necessary or not necessary? (I mean in general, not just re this issue.) Also what makes any explanation sufficient/adequat...

I already have a problem when we get to #2. (I'm fine with #1.) I don't necessarily disagree with #2, but we need to be very careful re just what we'r...

As I said, I knew that would be your response, hence why I didn't bother. It tells us merely something about how you use language.

Because consciousness is a physiological thing. Mentality is a physiological thing. Experience, what something feels like, is a physiological thing. T...

I'm not bringing this up to disagree with you, just to emphasize that one way they get misled is by noting that calling it "hydrogen" rather than "flo...

Re descriptions, sure. It also dismantles a criticism about any description that the description doesn't convey an experience of the thing it's descri...

Sorry re not answering this above. Re "What philosophy is for?" The answer to that is different for different people. There is no right or wrong answe...

That's a claim. What's the support for it? How would you know this? (Note that I'm not suggesting an answer either way--that either they do or do not ...

The differences are trivial to whom? We need to ask individual people whether they matter to them, don't we? Importance, mattering, etc. are to indivi...

It's fine to challenge it, but the challenge had better be good/well-justified, and you'd better expect the challenge to be challenged. A challenge fr...

I'm familiar with this stuff, I'm just challenging aspects of it that make no sense.

"Also" there doesn't make any sense. Sure they do. It would make no sense to say that they're not talking about consciousness as a mental phenomenon, ...

Exactly. Again, it's a conflation of how we know about things, what we understand, etc. with what our knowing, etc. is about.

It's a common mistake to think of evolution as only allowing things that are geared towards survival/reproduction, by the way. At any rate, why would ...

That paper doesn't actually use the terms "asleep" or "awake"

So, aside from having some problems with the way that's phrased (for example, "presents to reason" seems extremely wonky), my immediate response to so...

All ideas exist within individual skulls, so this isn't saying anything. It's like saying, "patterns of paints exist on individual canvases." Yeah, ob...

You're off the tracks here already. What in the world is this sentence even saying? What in the world does it have to do with anything we were just ta...

Why are you assuming that there's any difference?

No one is saying that we don't have ideas, etc. But that's exactly what I'm talking about re it being like some weird OCD/obsessiveness about talking ...

"Sure" as answer to the question I just asked should indicate that you'd just say, "Then they didn't really have such and such as a goal."

Sure. Okay, here's something about it. "There are lots of rocks on the Appalachian Trail near the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border."

Lord yes. I'm more of an iconoclast. Most philosophers have said some phenomenally stupid things. Some made doing that their bread and butter.

Hence "If that sort of thing doesn't answer the question for you, you probably need to define just what question you're asking better." Just what sort...

I think you're completely avoiding the need to support the notion that there is some fundamental difficulty to it.

I'm sending you a bill for needing to have my eyeballs rotated back to the front of my head.

Mind independent reality isn't beyond human conceptualization in the slightest. Why would anyone believe that it is?

Which question, "When would anyone feel good about their goals being inhibited"? The reason I'm not bothering with that is that you'd just say, for an...