Terrapin Station

You asked why your thoughts aren't another sense.

Because I'm not going to play a game where we pretend that we're robots. Did you learn about your senses?

Didn't you learn about your senses in elementary school? Why do I have to pretend that you're a toddler who hasn't even gone to kindergarten yet?

Are you claiming here that you're a representationalist or epistemological idealist?

Yes. I don't personally see dictionary authors as Gods by the way. It's simply someone else, someone just like me in many ways, attempting to report c...

Because of the way it fits with how "perception" tends to be used in my experience. I don't expect you to not do this. I just appreciate one being exp...

Now hopefully you're playing retard here and not actually being a retard. I just told you that I define perceive in a particular way, and then I defin...

You can only have thoughts you don't perceive, per the definition I use of "perceive." Perception necessarily implies that you're receiving informatio...

I wouldn't use the word perceive. You don't perceive thoughts, you have thoughts--in other words, it's something your brain does. For them to be exter...

No I don't. Again, it's my experience that people engage in philosophcial discussion--especially on message boards and the like--by basically pretendi...

Do we have to play the robot/retard game? Philosophy shouldn't be about pretending that we're idiots. (That wasn't a rhetorical question. I don't mind...

First, "supernatural" was in quotation marks for a reason. Similarly here, the idea was simply to distinguish between a God and, say, Joe down the str...

So re "How could there be such evidence?"--by there being thoughts, emotions, etc. (whatever the list was) that are external to me (and not simply som...

Yes. And I don't think that laboriously going through any of this is important for anything.

Right. So all that I'm saying is that I was simply not using it as a synonym for "everything." You agree. So let's move on.

In general I have almost zero interest in playing a word game where I have to guess what words are kosher to you to talk about this. And of course, al...

If it's simply a synonym for "everything," then I'd say that a lot of the talk about it is nonsensical.

I'm primarily just using "being" to indicate that I'm not referring to, say, "everything," or "my consciousness" or something else like that. It's som...

Say that that's how I acquire my concept of "being." That does not imply that my concept of "being" includes an implication that beings are created. T...

If you were to ask me if "being" implies "created," I would say, "No." So that doesn't amount to disagreeing with me.

I don't want to keep doing a bunch of different topics back and forth, so let's do one at a time and finish it, then move on.. Which part would "Theis...

That there's some sort of being with at least some more or less "supernatural" control over events and entities in the world, etc. Yes. Because there'...

The individual in question's beliefs, which at least partially hinge on their experience base, as well as the sorts of things they require as support ...

I'd take that bet. Or in other words, I don't agree with that. I'd bet instead that there are some terrorists who are simply psychopaths.

I don't agree with this right off the bat. It depends on the claim, really. And it depends on things like where the claim is coming from--is it a sour...

Of course it's possible. You'd just be taking an instrumentalist approach to it--which is something that many people do anyway. It would be akin to en...

No one ever meant that seeing a star amounted to your eye actually touching the star, so he's setting up a ridiculous straw man.

???

What in the world do "internal" and "external" refer to there exactly?

Yes. I'm kind of an "irrational optimist" and I'm seriously very easily entertained.

I'd be easily entertained by visual things.

That there's no "stuff" isn't any better-supported, haha

The error there isn't with positing "stuff," it's with being uncomfortable just in case we can't prove that there's stuff.

You're underestimating my deviance. You could try not playing games and bullshitting though, and maybe that would be more productive for you.

No, I'd say not. Because Julius Caesar has nothing to do with whether there's someone in the doorway.

You should start with Jack and Jill if what I'm saying is beyond you. I can't guarantee you're not a moron or something. And in that case, you're not ...

Give some sort of example? You can't parse definitions?

The definition of "deal (with)" there is "utilize" or "make use of" or "involve ourselves (with)" Are you going to ask for definitions of some of thos...

Re the slingshot argument, this step seems particularly peculiar: "Every sentence is equivalent to a sentence of the form F(a). In other words, every ...

Because we obviously deal with the meanings of words in isolation. It's clearly not the case that there's any problem with this just because Frege or ...

The first big problem, then, is that that idea is ridiculous. The second big problem is illegitimately analogizing that to the relation of "things" to...

One fact in my view. "Fact" doesn't refer to a statement (with the exception of it being a fact that someone made whatever statement they did etc.)

Not really, because you said "I have a hard time seeing . . ." Do you have a hard time seeing how facts would be mind-independent or not? That still m...

The problem I have with stuff like that is that it's a "feature of facts," not an exhaustive definition of them, but philosophy has a tendency to trea...

We could say that facts are (dynamic) things and relations. Of course, things are also dynamic relations--what we're calling grass is dynamic relation...

So my thought process goes like this: "Are 'facts' observer-dependent?" Me: "Ah, might be a fun thread. I have an opinion on that." "What is the ontol...

Yes, and I suppose I could say that I basically agree with it, but the whole idea of separating properties and substances has always struck me as stup...

Okay, well, on that definition, I'm saying it's "arbitrary." Maybe you'd only call inherent/objective value "(an economic) good." I wouldn't agree wit...

Well, I don't know how narrowly you're defining "mental representation." For example, I don't know if you'd say that perception on a direct realist ac...

I'm very easily entertained.