Janus

I would say that what we think about those things we find is over and above them. What exactly do they take him to be denying? Perhaps their interpret...

As I said I take him to be denying that there are experiential entities, qualia, over and above the qualities that we find in things. I don't see how ...

I don't agree that liking or disliking certain foods necessarily has anything to do with judgement. The taste may simply be unpleasant and you might s...

It's not the "only reasonable surmise"; it's a surmise based on certain assumptions that Dennett rejects. What we experience is what we experience, an...

If you want to make claims about what Dennett says, then nothing will substitute adequately for Dennett's own words. That should be obvious, even to a...

From Dennett himself, Fool.

And typically nothing directly from Dennett to support your claim. Reviews of Dennett by others are not definitive in establishing just what it is he ...

C'mon Wayfarer, taking what I said out of context like that is "an act of desperate intellectual dishonesty". But, in any case I don't flee screaming ...

I don't think Dennett means we are robots in the sense of lacking any experience. He thinks experience and consciousness are real, and are functions o...

As I understand it Dennett favors a functionalist view of consciousness. On that kind of view consciousness emerges because of "causal or other functi...

I don't agree with Strawson's claim that Dennett is denying the existence of consciousness on the grounds that he uses the word in a way that "exclude...

I'm not defending him against anything but being misunderstood. I actually addressed @"TheMadFool" because he or she repeated that same strawman attri...

Despite your assertion I doubt you do grasp it, because if you did you would have no reason to erroneously contend that Dennett claims consciousness i...

You mean it wouldn't matter if panspychism were true or that it wouldn't matter whether we thought it to be true? Some likes and dislikes may change o...

Right, you're just repeating what I have said in different words. Our understanding of ourselves as agents (or of what consciousness is) is an illusio...

As I said, I don't have a settled view on the matter. Perhaps I am not as concerned with whether the world warrants our understanding of it as McDowel...

I have no idea what you mean by "a misstatement not justified by any history of science or of thought", but in any case it is not an "absolute presupp...

You're probably thinking more about technological advancement than changes in scientific theories. Changes of aesthetic paradigms in the arts have bee...

You beat me to it! Of course aesthetic taste does not change that way, but is driven by gradually shifting paradigms, even more obviously than scienti...

I'm not sure what you are aiming at here. But whatever, bear in mind when I referred to the idea that the world is always already conceptually shaped ...

Of course it's easy to see the rough equivalence of 'meta' and 'super' and 'natural' and 'physical, and etymology may show an even closer ancient equi...

On reflection I think you're right. The terms 'metaphysical' and 'supernatural' cannot be synonymous, since there is a metaphysical position termed me...

I think so, inasmuch as physicalism claims that the metaphysical (in the sense of meta-empirical) nature of reality is physical. Since it claims that ...

Any position regarding the metaphysical would be a metaphysical position I guess.

The nature of things as we experience them is certainly physical or material. Those very words have been created to denote the way things are as we ex...

Sure, but. all other things being equal, we have no more warrant to suppose that they don't operate the same way than that they do. Add to that the in...

:up: I've no doubt you wouldn't have it any other way! (I know I wouldn't).

'Metaphysical' seems to be, in a certain sense at least, synonymous with 'supernatural'.

That seems reasonable, but then the 'machinery in itself' of the human cognitive system is also, in the final analysis, noumenal, part of the "great w...

Mass, size and distance, for example, are not relative to perspective.

True the idea in a particular form is in Plato, the noumenal world of the Ideas as opposed to the phenomenal shadows of the Cave. The idea is fascinat...

I agree, I think the idea is useful and inevitable just because we can make a logical distinction between something in itself and something for us. It...

Sure, we could have had any other word instead of 'God'. That is trivially true But the idea we have which is signified by that word (or at least the ...

I don't think the question has any real sense. It might have been a configuration of microphysical particles or energy fields, but then even that is p...

Rubbish! The definition of the God that we are discussing necessarily involves omnipotence, toss that and you have a conception of some other kind of ...

The world would seem to be necessary for there to be a priori cognitions as far as I can tell. If I remember correctly Kant acknowledged that the synt...

I don't see any inconsistency there. Existence is commonplace until we try to explain it; at which point ti becomes mystical. Woo is the attempt to ma...

I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you saying that it is knowledge of a tree (tree of knowledge :wink: ) only because of us? Again there wo...

I don't think the notion of internality is helpful here. Certainly the presencing or presenting of the world to us would not be without us, but it wou...

That's a bizarre comment. Existence is the very most commonplace. It is the attempt to answer the ill-formed question: "what is existence" that leads ...

I think it makes sense, in different senses, to say it both is and is not a tree prior to the cognitive workings.

I agree, it is a collaboration between us and the world (which are not separate except per conceptual distinctions) so yes the making present via us i...

Or it could be said differently as "there is nonetheless a direct presentation (as in "a making present) via us".

:100: In Spinozistic terms, nature or God (as substance) is neither mental nor physical, but mental and physical are distinguishable attributes of sub...

Or Swedenborg, or Madame Blavatsky, or Gurdjieff, or Aleister Crowley, or Eliphas Levi, or Sri Aurobindo, or Ramana Maharshi, or Yogananda, or Bubba F...

What is the much-vaunted "unity of consciousness" if not merely a sense and/ or idea of unity? We cannot be aware of everything at once, but aware onl...

I can't answer for @"Banno", but I suspect he is quite capable of the thought: "I am conscious"; which would mean that he is capable of remembering th...

Saying that a mental state is a mental state is tautologically true, of course, but tells us nothing. It is only if we can determine that something is...

The interesting thing about "the whole comparison thing" is that. on the one hand we can say that being human or being a bat is not like anything, in ...

I have no idea what else they could be, although I prefer the term 'processes' to 'states'.