Janus

What exactly is your issue with it then? If primordial experience, as distinct from conscious experience, is pre-conceptual then no discursive handle ...

This is perfectly normal parlance. Beyond what is consciously experienced we experience processes and forces just as the mountain experiences erosion....

Think experience in the sense of undergoes. Like the mountain experiences erosion. Conscious experience emerges out of a matrix of primordial process ...

I don't know what this even means, let alone whether I think it is true or not. Perhaps your notion of "randomness' or chaos is somewhat literal, that...

Read the exchange again. I haven't said you invoked supernatural intervention. You said we know enough about chemistry to infer that no supernatural i...

Is it a matter of epistemology as to whether "what 'knowledge' means" is a matter of epistemology? How would you determine a definitive answer? It's a...

What are you referring to if there is no coherent distinction? Now, don't get me wrong, I think human experience, primordially speaking, is prior to a...

No such inference is justified by any empirical facts or set of facts. The opposite is true; the empirical facts and our lack of comprehensive underst...

You don't seem to have discarded the distinction between the objective and the subjective. Can you rephrase the above sentence without using the terms...

Have we actually evolved according to your view, or is that whole picture of evolution just another one of our models?

I'm not sorry to see him go. He just kept repeating the same boring assertions and objections to other's arguments over and over while, ironically, cl...

LOL. I'm guessing that for Banjo it's really the law of diminishing interest. :wink: In any case it is for me. :grin:

And that is a paradigmatic non-answer. Apparently that whereof we cannot speak is not doing it's proper job in producing an appropriate silence.

What do you think it is contingent upon? I mean, insofar as it is thought as the origin of all things, what kind of thing do you think it could be con...

I voted "no" as I think it's a lame dichotomy. As caricatures I refer to the two traditions as the Anal Tradition and the Incontinent Tradition. :wink...

Yes, this highlights the fact that something only requires justification, and it is only appropriate to speak about it in terms of justification, if i...

It's an interesting question: how do we imagine feelings without actually feeling them? Winning the lottery, being lost; of course I can imagine feeli...

:cool: I can't think of any way that complex conceptualizations could occur absent symbolic language, but it may be a failure or limitation of my thou...

All of these are nothing more than you lying in the bath and farting, and being aware of it. ( It's fucking self-indulgent btw :joke: )

What else do think imagination is beyond forming images in some sense? Can you describe some further function?

You're joking I hope! Otherwise you are massively overreacting. I said: As I said before I have read of studies which seem to contradict the idea that...

I tend to agree: I actually encountered a report of a study which addressed this very issue, and concluded that it was just a preference, but I haven'...

Yes, bridging would certainly be better than conflation...

This seems to be all in the interpretation: alternatively, it could be down to a feeling of envy or a preference for grape over cucumber.

:cool:

Me too! And the fucking plutocrats too! Philosophical conversations by snail mail, eh? Hasn't that been done before? :joke:

I think that's a good point you bring up. We may not have enough time to think exhaustively about options before making a decision to act, and must fo...

I agree with what you say here. I would only add that likelihoods of success, although as you say they are never absolutely certain, can be more or le...

I don't see it as being a problem of "different senses"; optimism is optimism and pessimism is pessimism. What you call "broad" optimism and pessimism...

It seems to me that when it comes to understanding empirical reality conjecture, prediction and testing is the only viable method. We can do metaphysi...

Yes, it seems reasonable to think that animals, to varying degrees, do something like what we call imagining and thinking, and this seems justified si...

I'm not asking about things having "properties sans experience": I would say that properties are only known via cognition. To speak about properties "...

Contra your conception: lack of contraception...?

Yes, but optimism that we can do what? Keep on growing the population? Keep on with industrial agriculture? Keep on driving cars and taking internatio...

Realism says that the situation should be assessed as dispassionately as possible in order to weigh up the options. It also says that we should face t...

According to Spinoza substance has infinite attributes, and those attributes are necessary. But substance cannot be conceived through any one or even ...

With realism.

Something that is thought of as being necessary is something which is simply thought of as necessarily being. So, the laws of nature might be thought ...

:up:

As Popper convincingly showed, scientific theories, including those concerning "laws of nature" can never be deductively or empirically verified as ei...

The current boom is a "smoke and mirrors" credit-induced chimera. :clap: :rofl:

So do properties, for you, exist prior to our naming them? I think it is reasonable to say that they do, but they are not in any way separate from, or...

I'm not convinced this is helpful. In trying to diversify your conceptualization of what constitutes a concept I think you are, ironically, in danger ...

True. "Earth" is just a name, "concept" is just a name, in fact all proper nouns are just names. Were you trying to point out something more than just...

You say it that way. What if I said: Things appear (where 'thing' is taken in the broadest sense as objects, processes, colours, basically anything yo...

If it can be done then it is possible. So what you are saying just amounts to saying that an omnipotent being can (in some unfathomable way) do things...

To my way of thinking this is an unhelpful, misleading way of talking. The shape of the table is not different than the way the shape of the table is ...

Yes, but I was talking there about " descriptions of what it's like". I am familiar with the philosophical idea of quale, but I am not convinced it is...

If Mary can see other colours then of course that is the one salient analogy she could understand. Are there any other analogies at all you can think ...

Seems to me the "what it's like" is redundant here. Mary simply cannot see red if she is red colour blind. Descriptions of what it's like are analogie...