The Great Whatever

OH baby, your visual cortex is so big, etc. etc.

Good point, I think that's fair. I've been using the term in the wrong way, or at least loosely. But I still think even the idea that there are people...

The term comes from David Kaplan – LD means 'logic of demonstratives.' His classical example was 'I'm here now,' but that one seems not quite to be a ...

I'm not sure what it means out of context to say people have limited visualization skills – limited as judged by what standard? Obviously people can't...

I took Dennett to be talking about people's capabilities of imagining a horse visually specifically (hence the reference to the fact that the image di...

The Latin pronoun is ego, which can be added, but even without it the cogito and sum are inflected for the first person singular, so the sentence mean...

It's not a tautology: it's LD-valid, which means it can't be uttered in a context by an agent without being true. But the proposition that it expresse...

There have been studies conducted showing that men and women differ in a statistically significant way among the philosophical positions they adopt – ...

Also relevant is certain empiricists, like Berkeley, claiming to be unable to visualize e.g. triangles in the abstract, and so claiming to have no gen...

I wonder if men are worse visualizers than women, or tend to have more p-zombie tendencies. It wouldn't surprise me if women generally had a greater d...

I think it's more plausible that Dennett has ideological prejudices so powerful that they can overcome any intuitive evidence whatsoever, than that he...

I didn't mean to imply that all imaginings are visual – surely they aren't. But I took the situation to be one about the visual imagining of a zebra, ...

Those are phosphenes. I forget the exact physiological explanation for them – it's like manually stimulating your retina.

I didn't mean to imply that most people visualize a zebra with an exact number of stripes. Personally, when I imagine a zebra, I don't. I suppose I ca...

Who knows? I can't think of a reason to rule it out a priori, though to be clear I'm not advocating epiphenominalism. Maybe qualia are a sort of genet...

Also, to be clear, I think it would have functional differences at some level – for example, I can totally buy a lot of AP is done without qualia. But...

I also heard that Dennett claimed the reason when people imagine say a zebra, that they don't imagine it with an exact number of stripes, is because t...

The possibility of p-zombies would be an extreme possibility along the spectrum. Obviously there's no good reason to have a positive belief in them ri...

They do until they are explicitly asked questions about consciousness. Then they become noticeably different.

The point is that in conducting philosophy, it seems not to be assumed that people differ in a very basic way as to their experiential capabilities an...

Yeah, it wouldn't, but I'm not sure how much actual application of moral principles, to the extent people are moral, really has anything to do with co...

Well, I never said they couldn't, so I'm not sure of the relevance.

This can't be tenable with modern scientific evidence. I once read an article by a guy who claimed dreaming was a purely linguistic phenomenon – that ...

I remember a debate on a philosophy forum once in which someone alluded to hearing songs in their head, in the sense of 'having a song stuck in your h...

The guy in the article says he doesn't dream, but self-reports of dreaming frequency are well-known to be unreliable. I think some aphantasiacs have i...

Presumably, you'd start to think something is fishy if you asked them about something like the hard problem, and they insisted they didn't know what y...

That depends on what's in the test. The guy with aphantasia passed the visualization 'Turing Test' for 30 years – none of his friends or loved ones ha...

But of course they would know – they know the sorts of things people say, and say one of those, based on what's happened to them in the past.

Aphantasiacs can't replicate experiences 'internally' in any sensory modality, even when their sensory modalities are perfectly healthy. It also isn't...

A circular argument still isn't a tautology. A tautology is a single sentence that's in some sense 'always true.' An argument relates premises to conc...

Many sports are de facto racially segregated despite not being de jure segregated, as anyone who has watched the Olympics knows. My guess is that if y...

Also, to get clear on this, an argument can't be a tautology. A conditional with the premise as antecedent and conclusion as consequent can be.

I think A. J. Ayer had an article about this way back in the 50's, about how the premise having a truth value requires the reference of 'I' to be secu...

I think the issues between these views arise from a misunderstanding of how tense operates in natural languages. The eternalist makes tensed claims, i...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdqRK7D3Qvc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Xo4VXQ5ufk

It is a fact about English that things stated in the present tense are anchored to the speech time (for the most part – it's more complicated than tha...

If they are using the English language, that's all that sentence can mean. It's not up to them to decide what it means. "Exists" must mean "exists now...

Because throughout this conversation you have not used English words with their ordinary meanings, so it's difficult to know what you mean. Good. Then...

They did exist. I experienced both. I have no idea what you mean by 'the passage of time,' if you're using that phrase somehow technically. If you mea...

I asked you to use a new word because you were abusing the English word 'now' by using it incorrectly.

When did they happen? If they both happen in the past, I would say they both existed. I think a more sensible thing to say about past events is that t...

So why use the word NOW? Can you just reword your claim using the word 'exists' instead? Are you asking if I have both experiences while I exist. Of c...

What does it mean to generally exist? Is that different from existing? Is your question, 'Do both of these experiences exist together what generally e...

No. What do you mean by the passage of time? It requires that there be different times, with each of the experiences had at different ones.

Do both of these experiences exist together NOW? I really don't know how to answer this question. Is it translatable into English? One of them happens...

'Truth' also seems to be a noun predicated of propositions. So we can say that something 'is a truth' just in case it's true. That also seems not to b...

I'm not sure they're superfluous, or it depends on what you mean by that. It's more like, certain constructions converge on synonymy. It's the same wi...

If I have an experience of getting up and going to work, that experience might both involve sitting in my room, and then later being on the train, yes...

What do you mean by 'parts of that experience?' For example, I could describe an experience that takes place over the course of a day, in which I firs...