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The Great Whatever

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People are more or less born solipsists, and have to develop a theory of mind -- I'm not sure that an infant is ever 'looking toward someone else' in ...
May 19, 2016 at 16:40
I do, this is the ancient opposition between skepticism, which suspends belief regarding a possibility, and negative dogmatism, which pronounces negat...
May 19, 2016 at 04:29
No it doesn't.
May 17, 2016 at 13:29
I don't need a correct account to see yours is wrong. It's possible you ought not to do something, even if there's no rule against it. It's also possi...
May 17, 2016 at 11:51
No.
May 17, 2016 at 11:42
John 3:8: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is eve...
May 17, 2016 at 02:40
Would a picture help? http://s32.postimg.org/6cdu09g45/20160516_143509.jpg The blob is the mess of pathe (though you can never really visually represe...
May 16, 2016 at 19:48
I doubt it. I think the extent to which the world is shared is exaggerated, and it's done so in part because we're free to project our own way of seei...
May 16, 2016 at 17:51
But if you admit the squirrel projects no acorn, then this way of putting it is infelicitous. We don't tamper with the squirrel's projection by moving...
May 16, 2016 at 15:17
Yes, and there are some thinkers in the Western traditions that describe this process. The most complete account is found in Henry's Essence of Manife...
May 16, 2016 at 03:34
This enters into mythopoetic or religious territory. I take it to be roughly the Kingdom of God in the Gnostic tradition. Not at all. Some philosophic...
May 16, 2016 at 01:24
I would say that in psychological projection we see others that aren't there. We think we're seeing someone else, but we don't engage with them in any...
May 15, 2016 at 07:06
Think of it like projection in the psychological sense -- trying to place one's own feelings and frustrations onto something external, or seeing onese...
May 15, 2016 at 04:26
Yeah, the gods left us behind, and we could leave squirrels behind, in the sense that we could form an entire maze for them that they will never have ...
May 13, 2016 at 21:04
Sure, but such an explanation is only going to be a worthwhile one if you're a human. The way you've put it makes it seem like the humans' special pri...
May 13, 2016 at 21:02
That's fine. But then, I'm not sure of the hikkimori's relevance. Sure. I think if I were in 'esoteric mode,' or had a few drinks, I'd be willing to s...
May 11, 2016 at 19:20
None of these claims, so far as I can see, is incompatible with what I said. That there is the possibility of a squirrel eating an acorn doesn't mean ...
May 10, 2016 at 18:57
Think of it this way: there could not be an acorn in one part of the yard in the first place without there being the possibility of a squirrel satisfy...
May 10, 2016 at 03:07
As opposed to the way people often present the waking world as being in philosophical reconstructions: in reflection people often put up a difference ...
May 09, 2016 at 16:38
I don't think I want to make any sweeping claims about the general nature of everything or how it ties into willing. Everything we project is tied to ...
May 07, 2016 at 21:08
Yeah, I think it's pretty close, though I don't know if he would have outright agreed with what I'm saying. I don't really preserve the distinction be...
May 07, 2016 at 17:34
A world taking shape just is the desires and pleasures and pains becoming more convoluted in a certain way. They gain a kind of competence over themse...
May 07, 2016 at 11:41
Yeah, but it's not like there's some real thing outside of the creature that it then has to use a kind of sensory apparatus to go find. The mystery of...
May 06, 2016 at 06:52
It doesn't get to choose whether it's hungry or not -- it just has to face the fact that it is, and sometimes that hunger gets satisfied, sometimes no...
May 06, 2016 at 06:34
No, the world came after (and in a sense 'still' comes after). But the world, once there, presents itself as having come before. The naive position is...
May 06, 2016 at 06:29
What do you mean by newly conscious? Like, newly able to represent time as linear? Because if so it was already hungry before that (and there are anim...
May 06, 2016 at 06:20
You don't have to answer all of it, not all of it is equally important to me and I imagine to you. Whatever you think is relevant for the topic.
May 06, 2016 at 06:06
I'm not sure the determinist position as I've outlined it here makes any commitment to causality. I think it's intelligible to say that right now 'wil...
May 06, 2016 at 05:50
Well no, its end and beginning aren't now, they're in the future and past respectively. I'm not sure what you mean by what determines the conditions.
May 06, 2016 at 04:19
It seems to me yes. A lot of philosophers dispute this, so maybe people don't have robust intuitions on this issue. But yes, I'd say clearly you were ...
May 05, 2016 at 03:23
However, treating the future as determinate is only an artifact of the present linearization of time, which itself will eventually be undone. So there...
May 05, 2016 at 03:03
I'm inclined to believe the determinist. It's plausible that something like 'It will rain' means 'at a future time, it rains ,' and if such a thing is...
May 05, 2016 at 02:59
That depends -- a determinist will say it was true even then that it would come about in 1966 -- the fact that you didn't (or maybe couldn't) know tha...
May 05, 2016 at 02:46
Why not? You mean because if you're not a determinist, it might not be true until 1966 itself? But why does that matter? Schop talks about retrojectio...
May 05, 2016 at 02:38
I think the question is orthogonal, but if you wanted to make things as simple as possible you could assume a deterministic position, with one linear ...
May 05, 2016 at 02:33
Well, you're switching the tenses. Now that it's past 1966, asking: Is fine, assuming we don't go back before 1966. But once you do, you need to chang...
May 05, 2016 at 02:14
Good question, but I don't think any particular answer follows from what I've said. If you think the future is always genuinely open, even if you don'...
May 05, 2016 at 02:01
Before, since there were already calendars by then. The retrospective structure makes it so that once time became quantifiable, in retrospect that eve...
May 05, 2016 at 01:54
Yeah, so the right formulation would be 'it was only at some point in time that Alice came to have become ten years old in 1987,' or something like th...
May 05, 2016 at 01:45
Hey, welcome back. I won't commit to defending everything Schopenhauer says, but I think he's basically right. I'd answer yes to both questions, and t...
May 04, 2016 at 04:24
Is it typical to have part of a thesis written in your second year?
May 03, 2016 at 19:57
Aristotle has never given me 'the fire.' What I get out of Plato I mostly get from the extent to which he is trying to portray Socrates, who from this...
April 30, 2016 at 03:08
Sapientia, just because someone quotes you doesn't mean they're quoting you out of context. Most of your posts only have a couple words that are about...
April 27, 2016 at 01:09
"In a figurative sense?" No, in no sense. Then what are you actually saying? What does the word "actually" do here? Is anyone missing out? No. Would a...
April 18, 2016 at 21:05
I don't think there is anything that makes up for it, or even comes close to doing so.
April 18, 2016 at 20:16
Then why did you say it? This is irrelevant, isn't it? They neither DO nor WOULD miss out. In a hypothetical scenario in which a child was born, that ...
April 18, 2016 at 20:12
It's consistently painful and tedious.
April 18, 2016 at 20:02
Nope. If no one were born, nobody would miss out, either.
April 18, 2016 at 18:16
Yes. For me anyway, waking up is horrible. I really can't stand it, because then it hits me that I'm still alive and have another day to suffer throug...
April 18, 2016 at 00:26
Idk Sapientia, it seems to me like you're just not very good at following a conversation.
April 13, 2016 at 22:56