Terrapin Station

If you're familiar with Shoemaker's "Time Without Change" paper you'd have the same dilemma as inhabitants of Shoemaker's fictional world when a freez...

Knowledge by acquaintance, not propositional knowledge.

You can want to complain, obviously.

I probably do what I do because that's what I want to do.

What is the context for that comment? Was someone saying that change has volition?

I had answered that, but I guess it wasn't clear that it was an answer. I said, "On my view, everything extant is physical, but that's not necessary f...

What does talking about something that no one knows about have to do with what I was talking about though?

Why "that no one knows about"?

How would you know that you're in a state of changelessness? You couldn't be aware of it without it no longer obtaining.

The issue is the subject matter, not the perspective.

At which point my eyes simply roll.

Yeah, when you think about change in your life, but don't be so self-centered. Not everything is about you, or about people in general.

You can know about something like a rock, say,. The rock isn't you. How you know about it--your perception, etc., isn't the same thing as what you kno...

No, change is just things in motion/in process, etc. That would obtain whether there were any creatures to do any observing or not.

Well, people get stumped by it, but what it is is really simple (namely, change). That the realization of that might make time uninteresting to folks ...

?? I don't think we're at all talking about the same thing. You can know about things that aren't you. That's not the same as how you know about them.

What? How? Yes, since the two are identical on my view. This is a view I've been developing for decades, by the way. I'm interested in ontology in gen...

It's simply change A relative to change B

I don't know why that would be, unless you're conflating what you know about with how you know it.

But again, I mean independent of us. Imagine we don't exist at all. I don't think it's the case that everything necessarily has a cause in that situat...

Why wouldn't changes we don't notice be time too?

Not at all. It's just that I don't buy that there is necessarily a cause for everything. I don't think there's any good reason to believe that.

No--I don't mean an explanation of mind. I mean what are your criteria for something to count as an explanation? It's no good formulating arguments ar...

What are the criteria for explanations for you?

You'd have to describe that in some detail in order for there to be any hope of it making sense to me. If you're saying that you even mentally got "st...

"By definition" wouldn't be a very good argument though, haha.

Okay, but re our experience, you can't have an experience that doesn't involve change. That doesn't really make any sense.

I'm sure I read that way back when, but I don't recall it. What was the argument for it?

What is time? It is change. Where does it come from? The fact that things aren't static. There's no reason to believe that something caused that in my...

Re what he asked me about, that time is identical to change.

Well, it's separate from what subjective and objective refer to, but obviously I don't believe that it's an "impoverished concept"

That is my view. You would just be extending it to other body parts too, maybe, or maybe other things in one's environment.

Yes. And re your other question, I'm not primarily saying something about us.

There's no reason for you to be confused. I explained everything you need to know already.

No (except for the existence of thought)

That's why I just went through that whole rigamarole with you. You believe minds exist, that not only minds exist, and that minds have a location. Hen...

Yes, obviously. Otherwise a "mind location term" wouldn't be very useful.

Right, so subjective/objective are just terms distinguishing whether something is occurring in a mind location or a location devoid of mind.

Sure. So isn't there a location of your mind in that case? For example, it's on the planet Earth and not the planet Jupiter.

That's fine. What I asked you, though is yes or no, whether you believe that minds have a location. It's a simple question.

Do you believe that minds do not have a location (even if the location is complex, fuzzy or messy)?

And do you believe that only minds exist?

Just so you know where I'm coming from, I'm a physicalist. Re your argument, though, why couldn't someone argue that, assuming the law of conservation...

I explain this in the post you're responding to: Obviously I want to post. I enjoy philosophy discussions on the Internet. I just keep hoping that (a)...

Do you believe that we have minds?

It's not exclusively one way or the other. At least some people, with some actions, will hesitate because of possible consequences. But others, or eve...

That one I don't agree with, Belief can involve accepting propositions without evidence, but it often only arrives with evidence. I believe that I hav...

So the answer to how a change would be temporally divisible is relative to some other change, right?

Hume is one of my favorites (see my profile), and I'm pretty sure I voted for him in that poll (our board poll that you referenced), as most of the na...

Not to hijack your thread--hopefully lots of people will comment on just what you want to talk about--but it's frustrating to me that there are so man...