Terrapin Station

Kudos to you if you can express an issue in this vein so that it's not simply muddled-to-incoherent thinking and so that it seems like an interesting ...

Your consciousness, your sense of self, etc. are simply brain states re your particular brain.

But then you need to ask it in different language. You can't say "Will I (re)awaken" or "Will he." And course, "Will some other consciousness awaken a...

You didn't define a time D above that comment by the way. I understand what you're asking though, but I'm just pointing out that you didn't actually d...

It's not just about law in my view, but of course law is part of it. I wouldn't have any laws against speech period. And I'm not in favor of social sa...

Oy vey. No it didn't. Prior to conception, there's no you with "a non-existence to interrupt"

Wait, you believe that you existed prior to your conception?

Why wouldn't you like that?

There's a lot of mythologizing going on in this thread already.

Well, they're produced in America because Marvel and DC are American companies and they've both been aggressive in pursuing film production of its pro...

Maybe it would be beneficial to explain what makes them "American" in your view?

I agree with pretty much all of this, except that I'm not in favor of ANY speech restrictions. I'm a "free speech absolutist." Also, re physical abuse...

Well it has the meanings and values that we give it, that we feel. Ah, I see. Was someone undermining the stuff we construct earlier in the thread? I ...

Well, you know that nominalists are not saying that we don't create and utilize universal/type concepts/terms, right? The dispute is over whether we b...

Yeah, as if that's an unusual thing for boys/men to do. The PC/SJW movement is insane.

Could you explain this question in other words? I don't believe in universals by the way.

One reason I hate Dennett is that I'm a physicalist who isn't an eliminative materialist. But Dennett is popular enough that people assume that his br...

The popular way around that lately is to treat that objection as naive, sophomoric, or at least hackneyed enough that you should feel embarrassed for ...

Your understanding of science is mistaken. You're describing instrumentalism, which is a philosophical interpretation of claims such as scientific cla...

It's not something one can be wrong or right about. Beethoven would have simply had whatever preferences he had. Him preferring A to B is A being bett...

First off, just out of curiosity, what is the source we're using for Beethoven's aesthetics, and specifically his opinion on the issue that we'd conte...

In the respect of being directed towards discovering objective things, yes. And just for context, by the way, I make my living as a musician/composer/...

I listened to seven minutes of it, actually. There are tons of problems with Deutsch's comments to that point--it's loaded with fallacious thinking, u...

I can't stand Deutsch. I have an extremely low opinion of him functioning as a philosopher. I'm not listening to him for an hour to see if he might ad...

Okay, although that would be pretty broad and I wouldn't say it has any moral connotations (whereas people often seem to have moral connotations in mi...

First, how are we defining harm?

Probably I do, which is why I'd bring it up. Meaning is subjective, by the way.

I bet most religious folks I know would be unacquainted with that, too.

Be surprised--that's my position. Libel isn't the problem in that case. Speech doesn't directly cause other actions, or at least it can not be shown t...

None of that seems to be saying "would have to be more complex than the complexity it allegedly explains" though. I doubt religious folks would object...

As I wonder what on Earth could actually be the argument for that--how is he quantifying complexity exactly? How is he determining how complex somethi...

What I'm not figuring out is why you'd think that only bees and humans being attracted to flowers would imply anything about whether beauty is objecti...

Well that's what I've been doing. For example, I was explaining preferences to you in my first post in this thread.

I wasn't saying that I don't agree that ALLEGED libel is sufficient for harm. I don't agree that libel is sufficient for harm period. It can't constit...

I'd agree with that, but I don't agree that libel is sufficient for harm, either. On the other hand, "harm" is ambiguous, so we'd need to define it be...

I don't see how that solves anything with respect to the argument presented in the first post of this thread. All one would have to do to counter that...

Some of us aren't in favor of libel laws, by the way.

Thanks. Okay, so what makes me say that is knowledge of what aesthetic judgments are gained by years of thinking about, reading about, etc. the issue.

That he did, but I believe he was wrong.

Which part, the "that would only be an issue" part, or the "that's not how it works" part?

I wouldn't say I'm "impressed" by it, but it just stresses the focus on generalized abstraction and a focus on relations.

That something is what I'd call subjective, which simply means that it's a phenomenon that obtains via your brain working in mental ways, doesn't impl...

Well-recognized, I don't know. I don't know what exactly would be the criteria for that. They're contemporary philosophers who teach and regularly pub...

The bulk of metaphysics, especially recently (as in the past few centuries) is ontology, which is simply philosophy of existence or "being" or we coul...

There's a ton of them. Universities around the world focus on a combo of analytic and contintental philosophy. Some Asian analytic philosophers: Byung...

What I don't understand is why anyone wouldn't think that it's simply their brain "behaving" differently. Again, I can't imagine anything like that wh...

I'd have to search for something. What I was referring to was personal experience. I can't really show you that.

Except that's false. I'm not just speaking hypothetically.

Shouldn't theory be subservient to reality rather than putting blinders on and making things subservient to theory just because? The latter emphasizes...

Which is another way of saying that if someone is starving yet says they're happy, you're simply going to claim that they're not being honest, because...