Oh. That's exactly contrary to my linguistic intuitions. (We don't need to argue about this, but if I take your word for it that you'll be at the rest...
Hmmmm. If you want to say that we don't take their word for some things but we do for others, the identity things, then you're back to having to clear...
Oh but I didn't say we make good, reliable judgements about the self stories of others, only that we do. All of our own biases will certainly be in pl...
Oh! You should have said the opposite. Identity is precisely an issue of the autobiographical self. Same. There's obviously something to this; I know ...
Good stuff! In that great Veritasium video about the Ames window there's some talk of the 'constructed world' hypothesis too, that it's exploiting our...
I like this, but I think I'd like it more if you aimed at the level of narratives instead of going all the ways down to words -- though I understand i...
Yes, exactly. We have a word for it because it's an interesting case and useful to us. (We also have special names for other curves that are interesti...
No, it's still a one-dimensional space in itself just as a line is. We tend to think of dimensions as axes like lines because of Descartes, but it doe...
Fair. That was poorly expressed. With the word "interest" I was trying to point at the physiology of sexual desire, why these arousal effects were sel...
A well chosen example. People on this forum accuse each other of responding to posts they haven't read, but as you note that's simply impossible. We a...
One thing I was thinking -- assuming we're playing this game for whatever reason -- is that it's a question of whether you think of getting a curve by...
Well, yeah. The question is not whether we want children and whether that desire is instinctive or not. Our interest in and capacity for sex is down t...
No, the opposite. Natural selection is clearly able to select for behavior as well as physical traits, at least by tweaking the endocrine system, and ...
Also we produce gametes and have specific organs for delivering and receiving those, and those organs respond to arousal in particular ways to facilit...
I'm late to the party, but curve is the more general notion and you could define straight lines as a special case, curves of constant curvature 0. @"j...
This is a Grice thing, natural meaning vs non-natural meaning, which then splits into sentence meaning and speaker's meaning (what you mean by saying ...
My all time favorite quote about a writer is on the back of a collection of Boris Pasternak's poems. Might have been Tsetayeva, I don't remember, and ...
One thing that interests me is how deeply embedded this is. When I find my misplaced cup of coffee, I might say, even to no one, "There it is," or I m...
It's almost always interesting to flip the script, just to see what you get. In this case the idea that our inferences about people might be the basis...
Sellars has that cool story about how the uniformity of nature is derived from the predictability of people, if you imagine how the natural world was ...
There are some patterns we can see, and we know something about the hardware, but yeah black box, and 'model' is kind of an approximation of what goes...
Then I expressed myself poorly. What I intended was to agree with Lewis Carroll (is that right?), that I'll know what I think when I see what I say. S...
I think I would say this: conscious beliefs of the sort we express by saying stuff aren't just sitting there waiting to be retrieved, but are produced...
And because the whole point is to pick on those who are weaker. The stereotypical bully is a big guy who just takes advantage of his god-given advanta...
The whole topic is very tricky for me, because I am pretty committed to a certain take on masculinity -- my sense of what it is to be a "good man" -- ...
What I specifically argued was that the transition from genetically driven reproductive behavior to culturally driven reproductive behavior is unlikel...
That's not a counter-example, it's an alternative description. And you continue to ignore the argument I've presented, in detail, that the description...
I just don't see how you can pull off attacking evolutionary psychology for its just-so stories and then, with a straight face, begin an argument Evol...
There are issues of moderation and extremism woven throughout this thread. Here's a note from those centrist souls at Niskanen on Goldwater and Aristo...
This thread needs a shout out to those Australian beetles that keep trying to hump glossy brown beer bottles, the poor devils. For their sake, let's h...
Perfect. What do you think you're saying here? There is no conceivable selection pressure that would reward the absence of procreative genes. There is...
Which is blindingly obvious, right? I suppose it's no use noting how much cultural capital has been spent trying to get people not to have sex, or to ...
It's not. I'm talking about how it came about because we're talking about what results and what does not result from natural selection. Your position ...
But do you understand what the measure of "good enough" is? For culture to take the place either of genes that more or less directly drive reproductiv...
I'll just focus on this, because I don't have a handle on how you understand evolution by natural selection. The word missing here in your critique is...
Suppose we start with some ancient single-cell organisms, alike in every way except their proclivity to reproduce. Natural selection is just the proce...
Is it? I thought that was the Quinean view, as distinct from instrumentalism. No matter. Which I remember being the exact point of my post. Why does i...
I struggle with this. On the one hand, there's a story that says, here's an organism and here's its environment, and here's how the organism is or isn...
That's perfectly clear in politics. Women can be just as committed to their bliblical understanding of gender roles as the men they marry and whose ch...
It really doesn't take philosophy, just an Ames Window or an Abelson square, a 'gorilla' walking past some kids bouncing a ball, an estimate of how ma...
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