• How does a fact establish itself as knowledge?
    Unfortunately in a way that is rarely expounded upon in a fair manner. Perspective is a sense of knowing, but still knowing not. The end result existentialist horror.
  • Death
    I really just have no predisposition to the notion that it's nonexistence. It kind of irritates me when people act like that's the common sense approach. Here we are, alive, but how can we live. It's happened once, and maybe it only has to happen once.
  • Malus Scientia
    I don't know, though, maybe it's a true story.
  • Malus Scientia
    I just think maybe it's just a story to explain the difference between man and animals, but it's a little...contrived? Like, I don't believe there was a tree and a serpent.

    If the knowledge of good and evil is the original sin, then belief in sin is itself the original sin.

    Somehow this would be connected to the advent of language, which could be the fruit. But, like, animals don't experience the mental anguish we do at being able to describe our emotions. A fleeing gazelle may feel fear, but makes no higher judgment of it's being unpleasant.

    Similarly, the lion is innocent of being a cold blooded killer.

    So really I think it's just the somewhat artful tale of the ascent of man rather than the fall of man.

    I do believe we should disavow the knowledge of sin, perhaps, as that which separates us from God. But we can't return to being wild unevolved animals either who simply experience and make no judgment and aren't aware of death.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    Maybe, for some, if they get an inkling of the implications of the existence of the personality, it's easier to deny it as an illusion. It just seems less fanciful. But how do you put into words the universe that is implied by the existence of our very real personalities.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    I mean, there is a clear distinction between zombies and humans, though. We can't be zombies. We have a special spark of life that makes us not-horrifically-uncanny to each other.

    But I digress, dipshit talking here, carry on.

    That said, I'd posit experience, or qualia, is primary and all thought is just gymnastics. You can't explain consciousness as it utterly defines itself through experience rather than logic.
  • Good luck
    Our God is an awesome God
    We pray to our awesome God today
    He's an awesome God and he
    Is an awesome God to me
    He's an awesome God we pray
    To our awesome God today
    He's a very awesome God
    He's a very awesome God
  • Good luck
    Shouldn't you be busy putting razor blades in candy?
  • Kurt Gödel, Fallacy Of False Dichotomy & Trivalent Logic


    I mean isn't it really more so the ego's attachment to it's own thoughts. Thinking has always just been useful, but it's not a miracle worker. We work at this problem like we're going to find some underlying wisdom, but what if there is none? What if it's just the illusion of sense created by consonants and vowels? What's the difference between a paradox and gobbledygook?
  • How can one remember things?
    Even tails are 3-Dimensional. In all honesty I don't know what the fuck any of this actually is. Doors open, windows close, what's outside no one knows.
  • Kurt Gödel, Fallacy Of False Dichotomy & Trivalent Logic
    I just think everything that exists is true. Lies are truly lies; truths are truly truths. Objectively speaking, it's all just really happening. To take a step further back, you can just objectify the sentence. Whether it deserves more credence is a matter of opinion. It just kind of begs the question of thinking itself.
  • How can one remember things?
    All I can add is that I believe memories aren't stored in the brain, but the actual empirical world, and that the process of recollecting the past is every bit as psychic as it would be to recollect the future.
  • Does God have free will?
    I know this sounds fanciful, but since encountering God, I won't even name it. There is a world unseen, and that's all I'm comfortable saying.

    Back in the day I would have said "God is the sum total and expression of everything." Which some do believe, and perhaps is correct. To be honest, I dare not say it, though.
  • Does God have free will?


    I'm just saying, I'm a gnostic, and in my experience, God is not extreme.

    I know enough to know that I can't comprehend it, but am aware of a higher order. We need to be fair with this higher order as well. Come as a friend. Instead of all this. All this is nonsense. God (however loaded that word has become) is a friend in every sense of the word.
  • Does God have free will?


    Grandiose, but to me signifies nothing but the peacefulness of poetry, which God is.
  • Solution to the hard problem of consciousness
    There's just no way to use a brain to look at a brain and say, "This is what brains are like, according to my brains, and my brains must be right."

    I fancy myself a hard Mysterian: this problem cannot be practically solved.

    With greater perspective could come a more common sensical assumption. But we don't know, at this juncture, where we are or what we're made of. We see the Earth as still and it's hurtling through space. We see hard matter and liken it to something called "the physical" and at the same time know it's all in flux.

    It isn't saying anything to say that the mind is physical anyway, because we don't know what the physical is.

    The best we can do is tinker with it and exploit its resources and capabilities. We cannot, ever, in my view, precisely dictate what it is. Is everything mundane or completely abstract? There's just no way of dictating this.
  • Does God have free will?
    Omnipotence guarantees only all power that actually exists. God can still be all-powerful and not be able to perform the paradoxical.
  • What is 'Belief'?
    It is possible to believe things that are true.
  • What is 'Belief'?
    When I say I believe something, it's usually something I know, just to be conducive to conversation.
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?


    Dude, you gotta watch "Sound of Music."

    That said, there's much to consider between how disjointed this all must be, yet how operable.
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?


    How do you solve a problem like Maria?
  • The Decay of Science


    It's just my estimation. Physicalism implies something they weren't. The jury was out on God, and it still should be.

    We need to get corny.
  • The Decay of Science
    Old fashioned scientists were too innocent to be likened to hardcore physicalists.

    It was a different time, a different mindset. There wasn't even cool and uncool. No pretense to assuage one's enemies, the sky the limit.

    We even laugh at how hokily optimistic they were. Their big dreams. Religion claimed answers; rogue scientists claimed magic.

    We need to reinvigorate ourselves. We've taken too many minor setbacks to heart. We can do this. We can do anything.

    Fuck cynicism. Encourage each other, regain our innocence.
  • How do we know that our choices make sense?
    I've been in this same mire all day.

    How do you forget the common sense that you have no idea the variables at play.

    Do we just believe what's convenient, psychologically (if even that.)

    I'm just trying to ignore the question. I don't know if I've got a grip on reality or not.
  • How would a Pragmatist Approach The Abortion Debate?
    He or she would say simply what everyone can agree to, that abortion isn't beautiful, and though it's admittedly more complicated than simply "abortion is wrong," its ultimate eradication should, ideally be kept in our sights. And let the pieces fall where they may.

    Sometimes all you can do is the best you can do.
  • The Conflict Between the Academic and Non-Academic Worlds


    All limited to the scope of preconceived "laws of thought." And the ego's crippling desire to be inerrant.

    "You talk about day...I'm talking about nighttime."

    Nevermind, carry on, truth will out.
  • The Conflict Between the Academic and Non-Academic Worlds


    I don't necessarily blame the universities, but we all know ambition and ego poison the well.

    Don't ascribe any limits to reality, is a good suggestion, in my opinion. We have to experiment with out-of-the-box hunches. There is more here than meets the eye.

    Space is not the only frontier.
  • The Conflict Between the Academic and Non-Academic Worlds


    I'm against the idea that there are "greats."

    Einstein wasn't concerned with being "great." That's folly.

    What concerns me deeply is our attitude towards our knowledge base, and how we're limiting exploration and imagination.

    It's such a slippery slope, and so easy a trap to fall into, the notion that humans, by consensus, are an authority on what can and cannot be. That anyone is an expert on what is.

    And that our scope is narrowing the more information we acquire.

    We desperately need to take everything with a grain of salt; that's why I say it's a toy.

    Question everything, ruthlessly dissect our statements for accuracy.

    Conformity and acceptance of the forms that be is deadly.

    Because to truly understand the complexity of nature is to understand weirdness that is unlikely to ever cross anyone's mind.

    Academia isn't complete. There are arenas of thought we lack the perspective to grasp, as of yet.

    When it comes to the universe, the more "unrealistic" the imagination the better.

    Mad science, in other words, is the future.
  • The Conflict Between the Academic and Non-Academic Worlds
    The problem with academia is that it's pompous. Men are idolized and academics live vicariously through them.

    It's doomed to be a world apart from simple truth. It's a matter of taste and not pure fact.

    Arrogance is the root of popular thought, a defense mechanism.

    In my opinion it should be assumed everyone must be completely wrong, if not partially right.

    In the end we're left with the sum totality of our lives and relationships, and none of it was meted out by books, and how well you understood everything had nothing to do with the richness of your experience. Much as academics would love to make pretense otherwise.

    A slice of humble pie is not in our future, though; we're too impressed with ourselves.

    Men without original thought memorize the complexity of dead minds, speak in maths, and hold human genius (an arbitrary popularity contest) up as a monolith. Lost in the details, we forget to believe that it's our time to shine, the living.

    You can't write the equation that states anyone has to indulge in any of it and yet still can't learn the lesson they need to learn.

    I'm not against the free proliferation of profound thought, but it needs to be put into perspective. It's a toy.
  • Logic is evil. Change my mind!
    You're a real out of the box thinker. I can't make a cohesive argument without being logical, though.
  • The Symmetry Argument/Method


    I'm not sure there is such a thing, to be extremely anal. There are so many shades of gray.
  • Some remarks on Wittgenstein's private language argument (PLA)
    We need to explore further. What a tangled web we weave, though. Invent new words at your leisure, some might catch on. Because there are salvations as yet unconceived.

    Words can be so soothing, but they don't necessarily correlate to their definitions. Sleep, for instance, such a soothing word, while "love", in my opinion, seems rather coarse. "Evil" is empowering, yet maligned.

    There are hints of potential words that just soothe an aching conscience. Speak in tongues.
  • The Symmetry Argument/Method
    I could entertain the concept that two alien realities once collided, resulting in sound and movement, but I don't see opposites per se. I don't see light as necessarily the "opposite" of dark. It's just an abstraction from dark, and there could conceivably be another abstraction to complement darkness, who knows.
  • Epistemic Responsibility
    As far as politics are concerned, we've kind of collectively agreed to the lie that it's supposed to be duplicitous.

    I think it's the concept that one has to be duplicitous to deal with duplicitous people. For a sum total of ubiquitous dishonor.

    Or, the "common sense" of the media that more is more, the acceptance that these guys can't stick to the facts because the facts are dull and they HAVE to make money.

    People can be conniving and totally self-centered, and such people are often pompous, self-important, and gravitate towards the spotlight of politics.

    They poison the well. And people trust them, often, because they have no real world experience of just how truly insipid a person can be. All they can do is fall victim to being exposed to one of these people pointing the blame at others.

    Capitalism and honesty don't exactly go hand-in-hand. There are people who are only concerned with their own benefit, and they climb the ladder of social influence and poison the well.
  • Simulation reality
    I don't think, even were it proven to be a simulation, that the ultimate truth of everything could be "it's merely a simulation." Or that you'd yet be able to define it as ordinary rather than somehow indescribable.

    I also think everything that exists, however far removed from the grandest of perspectives, is, technically "real." There's nothing about being artificial that would make it unreal, per se.

    I'm just not sure how you simulate consciousness or take an objective step outside of reality and say, "All it is is this code, and that's mundane."
  • Kurt Gödel & Quantum Physics
    I'm of the opinion reality can't be understood, even with a language so esoteric as math.

    You can't possibly make things more self-evident than they make themselves via any language.

    Math is really just an area of wizardry, so to speak. Useful, but not sufficient.

    The truly best understanding is just that feeling in your soul, in the pit of your stomach. If you could write mathematical poetry, that might be something, cause poetry is closer to the ephemeral heart. And reality actually just happens to be just as ephemeral, as much as we were hoping for immediate solutions.

    There's so much more to this all than any current area of expertise.
  • What Mary Didn't Know & Perception As Language
    I'm missing the point I guess, because if 750nm=red, you're fundamentally saying red is red.

    It being a wavelength makes no difference if it's being a wavelength describes nothing. There are other wavelengths that aren't red, and I doubt one could intuit the direct perception of the color red by knowing the regularity of its frequencies.

    Of course one garners new knowledge from seeing 750nm (or red.)

    Sure, you can argue red is "just" a wavelength, but you haven't thereby established that wavelengths aren't "special" or "possessing esoteric magical qualia."
  • Does consciousness exist?
    Consciousness is just primeval language, accidental communication. Matter becomes aware of "self" via influence of an "other," identity forming in this way. All things are identified by that which they are not.
  • Socialism or families?
    It is all economics, but it's the economics of capitalist oligarchies that are destroying families.

    Consume, consume...trash the Earth and your neighbor and you trash yourself and you trash the soul of your family.

    You can't have it both ways. This life is archaic. This is not order.
  • Why being anti-work is not wrong.
    Work is for the poor. Period.