Srap Tasmaner

You're not going to answer the question?

Before I was born, did I have a right not to be born?

FWIW, it's a pattern than anti-natalism passes right by.

Of course. I wasn't suggesting absolute rules -- there are all sorts of things to take into account in a specific situation. Still, there's a pattern ...

Oh sure, neither of us is saying anything out of the ordinary. I'm just struck by how specifically the terms match up. There's a scale on each side (s...

Okay, cool. Curiously, we find the reverse of your scenarios particularly praiseworthy: that is, risking harm to yourself or knowingly sacrificing you...

We must not have the same things in mind because examples are infinite. I didn't enjoy being a young-ish hyper-stressed broke father and husband, but ...

?! I find that we do this all the time. Dunno what you're talking about here.

Everything you say is obviously true. However, @"khaled" (before his conversion) argued specifically from this uncertainty: not knowing means you are ...

Can you present this argument in different terms somehow? When you put it like this, it makes it sound like this person benefits by not existing, but ...

It's a funny thing that LW's other really salient metaphor for what he's up to is seeking a "bird's eye view" -- that puts you not only not on the rou...

I think that's largely right. One thing I'd emphasize is how one of the quintessential moves of OLP works: if X were true then it would make sense to ...

I have the same thing with dreams, and it's my impression that during the dream, I flip between first and third person often. I have had the thought t...

?

Maybe you're right, @"Pfhorrest"; but maybe Lewis and Jeffrey are right. Don't care.

Surely you didn't expect my eyes to be conscious, or my brain for that matter; I'm the one who's conscious, at least much of the time. What is it you'...

But what are we supposed to be adding color to? A little paint-by-number picture in our minds? Even if we did such a thing, how would we see it? The "...

If your use of "probable" isn't formal, you're not going to be "calculating" anything. Bayes' rule allows for your confidence, or your subjective degr...

You really didn't, and if you had said it you'd be wrong. Conditional probability is a whole different animal from material implication, and no adding...

I already tried exactly this line of argument (beginning here and here). It won't work. As far as I can tell, nothing will budge @"Pfhorrest" from his...

Absolutely, and I want to say your use of "shiny" is not coincidental. Let's call a concept (method, habit, algorithm, whatever) robust if it is impro...

Not to derail the discussion, but I think what you're discussing here is Sellars' distinction between "pattern governed behavior" and "rule obeying be...

Paul Grice tells a story about a college at Oxford offering a position to a young man who unfortunately owned a dog, and dogs were forbidden, so the f...

As someone with nominalist inclinations, I still find this charming, right down to the note of pragmatism: Not everyone who reads this site posts, or ...

I'm no expert on color, but I think there are ways of asking this question that make sense. For instance, I heard an explanation once of the differenc...

Suppose Steve and I are watching a high-stakes poker tournament, and Steve tells me that one of the players has a tell, but it takes a stopwatch to "s...

I think of that passage more often than almost anything else I've ever read. Another Austin gem:

Sellars went through all this in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" too: "looks" talk, as in "the apple looks red to Andrew", is logically poster...

To do what though? Again, what about quantum mechanics and evolution? Neither body of theory is entirely satisfactory to much of anyone, but the funda...

Hmm. But for you, beliefs can't have and don't need justification. You describe things here as if relying on a theory incurs a risk because we overste...

So to you the only value of GR was in making a prediction that, if observed, would allow us to rule out Newtonian mechanics, and that observation did ...

So assigning a theory the status of "falsified" or "not-yet-falsified" is not the only way to make progress.

You're being cute -- "guess" is wildly inappropriate and if your approach steadfastly refuses to see the difference between a guess and a real theory,...

No one would dispute that if theory A predicts X and theory B predicts ~X, and then we observe X, that we can claim progress by eliminating theory B. ...

This ought to be a clue that you've chosen the wrong way of formalizing the process, because confirmatory evidence just obviously does matter. If you'...

What is it to see something as red? Could I express such an experience by saying, "To me, the apple looks red" or maybe "To me, the apple looks like i...

That depends obviously on the lines, so unless you're really working up some math here, this analogy is not so good. I understand the impulse to talk ...

That's actually nice, but it only works if you believe there's nothing to stand on and nothing to hold onto, and if you believe you don't have to demo...

The math is interesting, but there's just no philosophical issue here. If I were you, I'd look at rectangles instead. Maybe have a look at partitions ...

Yeah that's a really funny thing. People seem to reach for "emergence" when expecting a story about how such-and-such unlikely something-or-other (usu...

This was my first thought -- the difference between the mereological sum of whatever bits make up a boulder and a boulder. Do we call the boulder an "...

Whoops. Was thinking about how I can't choose to see an un-colored world and forgot about attention, which I've also thought should be part of this di...

I'm not even clear on what you want an account of. Is it that a given cup of coffee seems a particular way to me? Or that I'm aware that the cup of co...

If knowing how a magic trick is done would rob you of the enjoyment, then by all means don't listen to the explanation, but on what grounds would you ...

We seem to have very different understandings of what the issues are here. Not sure there's much else to say.

All this stuff sounds so good in theory. We like falsification because we can imagine science as one Michelson-Morley experiment after another. It's n...

Personally, I find the dual process account pretty convincing, so I think there's lots of stuff going on with us we aren't aware of. If you want to in...

I would try to take this seriously, but you seem to have settled into thinking of yourself as the spokesman for life and flavor and joy and everyone o...

I expect you know more about the field than I do, but I would be surprised to learn that biology backs you up on this.

I'm with @"Isaac" here, @"Pfhorrest", for the most part. This is what I was trying to get at it, how you sort of oscillate between "hard" and "soft": ...