But there's no call to point out when anyone stumbles, whether he's strong or weak. You see what I mean? It's bad for the soul. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. You never know what battles the people around you are fighting. I use that poem to silence the old internal critic.

He doesn't lord it over his employees, doesn't smack his kids, doesn't take advantage of vulnerable young women. — Srap Tasmaner

The Romans celebrated the story of a Roman farmer who, when discovering that marauders were attacking, put on his armor, went and kicked ass, and was back behind the plow in like 20 days. I think it's the same thing you're talking about: the Roman word for it was "gravitas." It means don't be a loud mouth jerk.

This is something I treasure, if you search for this poem, you'll come across versions that have it as "The Woman in the Arena." It's just as touching and meaningful. It's definitely something human, but we tend to associate it with masculinity.

Accelerationist! — Srap Tasmaner

No!!! I don't wish all that pain and suffering on the world. I just see the silver lining on the possibility.

For the record, no, not at all. Just realistic. I tell my son, who's further left than I am, though perennially at war online with the tankies, that as far as I'm concerned there's an empirical case for capitalism and I point at Why Nations Fail. I think that analysis is pretty sound and capitalism is fundamentally inclusive. That it eats through institutions has often been a good thing. But it'll eat through ones we don't want to, that's all, as it's eaten through American democracy. — Srap Tasmaner

I agree. But we're always just one catastrophe away from a fresh start.

That's the official story, certainly, and honestly I tend to agree, but I recognize that this is not the story as some people read it. I'm thinking of anti-colonial theory in particular. From one way of looking at history, the rise of capital is an incident in the history of race. And I'm sure there are people who see it as an incident in the history of patriarchy.

I tend to see capital as indifferent. If chattel slavery's working, fine, but if it becomes a source of inefficiency then it's got to go. In the long run, capital is an acid that will eat through any institution you've got. Roughly how I see it. — Srap Tasmaner

Tankie!! I think it's really more like this: a young woman is flawless and full of life. An old woman is shriveled up with one foot in the grave. The capitalism you're seeing is the old woman. You don't see how beautiful she once was. You don't see how much hope she once embodied. She was the way to the glorious free society. She was hijacked by time. It happens to them all. Roughly, that's how I see it.

But muh materialism! :D — Moliere

I'll have to think on it. :smile:

Sure, but here's the thing. The simplest history of power seems to go like this: first comes patriarchy, then the state, then capital. We have some reason to believe that the shift from 2 to 3 was a displacement, that the state is still around but serves at the pleasure of capital.

But what about the shift from 1 to 2? Certainly it looks like men invented the state, but what's the dynamic there? Is the state just another way of advancing men's interests, or did the state move to the top of the food chain, leaving patriarchy in place but making it subservient, using it? — Srap Tasmaner

You know how you might find yourself reading Nietzsche's assessments of history and think: "None of this is actually true, but there is valuable truth that comes from just going with it for a while?"

That's what I see going on here. It's not true that women were excluded from power in the earliest states. In fact, in Sumerian cultures, the daughter of the king was one of the central columns of the social order as the high priestess of the religion that underpinned the legitimacy of the government. Also, there was no money. Those first states were what we would understand as socialist (though that didn't exist since there was nothing to compare it to.)

But forget all that. Let's start the clock about 4000 years later, somewhere around 1000 CE in Europe. There aren't any states per se. The king has little power. It's the dukes who own everything and set out laws. The whole scene starts moving toward the rise of nation states when feudalism starts breaking down and starts to be replaced with centers of commerce. What does any of this have to do with patriarchy?

Um. :chin: Really, the only thing is that patriarchy was a feature of old Christian religion. Patriarchy was the norm in the world that religion came from. Strangely enough, early Christian women celebrated Christian values with regard to sexuality. In Rome, women were basically used as baby machines to support the population in the face of a very high mortality rate due to disease and war. Christian women didn't have to be baby machines. They could join a convent and do other interesting things. Some of the women wrote about how wonderful that was.

Northern Europeans didn't have quite as much native sexism as Southerners. Commentators would note that Northern European women had more power and freedom, but Christianity eventually changed that. When the capitalist class started taking over, they broke with the Catholic Church and started making Protestant sects. At this point, where you see female Christian leaders, it's in those Protestant sects that have more freedom to do whatever they want.

Even if the state and capital use patriarchy, are they also dependent on it as a foundation? Take down patriarchy and capital falls? — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think either does use patriarchy for anything. One of the cool things about capitalism is that money is never bigoted. It doesn't matter who you are, if you have cash, you have power. That fact is directly related to the advances we've made in putting bigotry aside.

Oh, I see. I agree that there can't be a definitive definition of masculinity. It varies. In our world we associate blue with boys and pink for girls. We might think there's something fundamental about that, but there isn't. Just a couple of centuries ago it was the opposite. Little boys were dressed in pink, girls in blue. So there might be other areas where we're too close to it to see that what we're assigning to masculinity is arbitrary.

I just meant that we usually do know what our own societies dictate. The value I see in applying Jungian ideas to it is that we can be free of analyzing masculinity strictly in the framework of sexism. We could see the beauty in masculine ideals. You don't have to be a Nazi to see that beauty.

But none of that addresses Isaac's specific claim (I mean, he wasn't actually specific) that economic oppression is more important than any of that stuff, real though it is. He might argue that all of these other sorts of oppression are just tools of capital, and addressing that is how you deal with racism, sexism, whatever. But I don't actually know what he'll say. — Srap Tasmaner

Historically women's rights tend to go to the back burner. As Frederick Douglass said in advocating abandoning support for women's rights after the Civil War: 'Black men are being hunted down and killed now. Women aren't experiencing that, so their problems can wait.' One of the white women answered that though the plight of black men was dire, she warranted that Frederick Douglass wouldn't change places with her. And she was probably right.

As for how we should spend our imaginary power to make the world right, I'd say that one of the most important things we can do for ourselves, the climate, and other lifeforms, is to educate women and give them equal opportunity in the workplace. Societies that do that have shown diminishing population growth all the way to zero, and in some areas it's starting to go negative. We should do that for all women all over the world. When they have opportunities to contribute as adults to their societies, they have fewer children.

It's more that you can be well fed and well dressed, but still not know what it's like to be treated as an adult human being. It's called the "talking dog" syndrome, where a woman speaks, but instead of being received the way any man would be, she's just stared at and disregarded. This is what older women report experiencing. There are aspects of sexism that don't have any comparison in other kinds of oppression. In the case of women, their oppression involves brothers, fathers, sons, and husbands.

I've gone from totally failing to understand you to suspecting disingenuousness. I actually have a lot of respect for you, so I better just cut out of the conversation. Thanks!

Look at the sentence again:

nd it's not fairly easy to discover what aspects of the human potential are usually identified as masculine and which ones aren't, — Moliere

All you have to do is look at what things are generally identified as masculine. I think you're in the minority in not being able to do that.

And it's not fairly easy to discover what aspects of the human potential are usually identified as masculine and which ones aren't, — Moliere

It is for me.

There's the aspect of reducing masculinity to psychology, which I'd say is similar to the response to feminist criticism which puts their critique of gender in the personal, rather than the political or public, realm. Rather than concrete material conditions you're saying the psyche is an ancient power which re-manifests itself throughout all culture, something which is much greater than any material analysis or political project could hope to put a dent into. — Moliere

I see that I'm as opaque to you as you are to me.

Which may be true, but then the feminist critique is always bringing the psyche back to the material -- if it's truly a psychological power, rather than a material one, then we could very easily upend how families own and pass on property. It would be of no consequence. — Moliere

We did upend how families own and pass on property around the time women got the vote. Prior to the early 20th Century, an American woman couldn't own a business unless she was married. Women would get married for no other reason than to allow them to participate in business ventures. That's all changed. In fact, all the things that Mary Stanton lamented have now changed, and the new way is taken for granted. There is no conflict between recognizing masculinity as a component of the psyche and recognizing how those images play out in dollars and cents.

If it were easy to determine the masculine and the feminine then what's all the fuss about? Is gender-identity a numerology or astrology in your view? — Moliere

Every trans person on the planet knows exactly what counts as masculine. It starts with that recognition. I think you're maybe addressing something about non-binary people? I'm not sure.

This mental move is exactly what Kate Millet describes as the patriarchal move -- the mental is the explanatory intermediary between biological sign and social role in her description of the patriarchal relationship.

Also, I'm not so sure about a psyche developing over millennia. Masculine-Feminine distinctions are common across cultures, for certain, but their mode of expression isn't rigid. Even what counts as something worth evaluating under Masculine-Feminine changes. — Moliere

I'm coming up blank trying to discern your message. But if it's working for you, :up: :grin:

Nope. That's why I've been careful to say men and women can have the same characteristics, and a difference cannot be found in differentiating characteristics.

So far I've been of the mind that it's a manner of expression, rather than a set of characteristics, that makes a gender-identity. But, then, some gender-identities get tied to characteristics in their particular way, so while in general it's better to say gender-identity is a manner of expression, a particular gender-identity may very well fixate on particular characteristics and act to put those on display more often, or improve them, or some such. — Moliere

A manner of expression? I mean, masculinity as a kind of archetype has been around for thousands of years in multiple cultures. It's fairly easy to discover what aspects of the human potential are usually identified as masculine and which ones aren't. So maybe we're talking at cross purposes, or maybe just about entirely different subjects. This is not fundamentally about politics. It's about the heavy hitters in the human psyche as that psyche has developed over the millennia. Current politics is a sniff in a hurricane compared to that.

And while I don't think it's the traits or characteristics that make up a gender-identity, so that men and women can share characteristics, I'm not sure I'd go all the way and say women are the same -- some are the same, sure, and they are definitely sanctioned for not conforming to expectation in those cases, whatever that expectation happens to be in the particular cultural milieu. — Moliere

Are there characteristics we associate with masculinity (I'm talking gender identity here) that women never have? Like what?

Are we in a position at all to speak of a post-patriarchal masculinity, while the old family laws are still in place? — Moliere

We aren't in a post-patriarchal world, so probably not. I think it's important to distinguish between masculinity as the portion of the human potential we traditionally associate with males, and toxic masculinity which is the result of a pathological mindset, that is, the need to look down on someone else, or fear of women. The first is a fount of creativity. The second is something all need to be aware of.
When one decides that there is no difference between the two, that's misanthropy.

Masculinity isn't something males have a monopoly on. Women have the same characteristics, though they may be sanctioned for broadcasting it. That's why criticizing the way some males behave doesn't contribute much to understanding the animus.

This is just the axiom that things have already happened have necessarily happened in temporal logic. It doesn't entail that probability only exists subjectively. For that you also need eternalism, the claim that all events already exist at all times. Frequentism does not entail these though. There are plenty of ways to embrace frequentism and not rope yourself into determinism and eternalism. Otherwise, frequentism would have been much less popular in the face of observations that the universe behaves in a fundamentally stochastic manner.

So sure, probability is frequency is you take that definition as axiomatic, but I don't think there are good reasons to accept such a proposition. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I guess actualism is just an interest of mine. We can put it to the side. The point is that talk of probability can reflect frequency. When it does, this does not represent information about the outcomes of unique events. In fact, all it really gives us is historical information.

It's true, we do have confidence in contiguity past to future, but Hume pointed out that this confidence can't be based on either empirical or logical evidence. This is the problem of induction. This inspired Kant to present the view that what we experience is conditioned by a priori knowledge. The idea is that we see and experience what we're wired to see and experience. This would explain why we're so sure about contiguity: it's coming from us in the first place.

Cause is there even if there is an attempt to banish it to the background. — Count Timothy von Icarus

As an essential element of the way we think, yes.

By the same token, if we looked up one night and saw "there is no God but Allah," written in Arabic in stars across the sky we wouldn't say "I guess some protostars brighten much more quickly than others and the existence of such stars is tied to the initial conditions of the universe, so there is nothing exceptional here." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Accepting that our powers of prediction and understanding are limited should leave us open-minded. Your touchstone is what you directly experience. If you saw a message written in English in the sky, you saw it. No question about that. Explanations should remain in flux. Was it a dream? Were you tripping? Is someone playing a joke? Is Allah talking to us? You go with what works best for you until some new information comes in and reorganizes your entire brain from top to bottom.

Anyhow, in your view is it possible to meaningfully talk about the probability that Biden wins the 2024 election? Does it make sense to say that aggressive anti-Chinese rhetoric by US politicians increases the probability of war? Or, as one time events, is it impossible to say anything about them because they are one time events? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'd have to dissect what the speaker means in talking about the probability of unique events. I would look for signs that they're starting with a logical analysis, and weighting possibilities based on various factors.

For unique events, you can use probability based on logical analysis. You can't use frequency. You just can't. It makes no sense. You can't play out a unique event more than once.

One of the problems here is that populations can change. If the US passed a constitutional amendment that dictated that the winner of the national popular vote should become the next president, that would seem to make it more likely that the Democratic candidate would win in 2024 because, in the relevant population of recent election results, they have won the popular vote 7 of the last 8 times. But giving them just a 1/8 chance of losing the popular vote in the current climate, and given polling data, probably greatly overestimates their probability of winning the popular vote if Donald Trump is their nominee, as he lost the popular vote by large margins both times. So what then is the relevant population for frequency? — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can't use frequency for a unique event. Ever. It makes no sense.

Knowledge is about something, no? So it's necessarily tied to ontologically. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If it's knowledge about a unique event, it's knowledge of logical possiblity. This is just an assessment of which statements about the outcome are self-contradictory and which ones aren't. This is apriori knowledge. There is no empirical aspect to it. So yes, it's about something: it's about how we're bound to think.

Medicine does not say, "smoking doesn't cause cancer, bullets to the head don't cause brain damage, etc., all we can know is that previous samples of groups of people who have been shot in the head have a higher incidence of brain damage — Count Timothy von Icarus

When we say that bullet to the head has the potential to cause brain damage, this reflects experience with brains and gun shot wounds. It's fully possible for a person to receive a GSW to the head and suffer no brain damage. It happens all the time, especially in suicide attempts where they just end up blowing their faces off. Again, you have to take it case by case.

There are all sorts of ways to explore cause, do-calculus and the like, which are employed heavily in medicine. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Medicine is heavily and pervasively empirical. Most medical decisions are not research based. We do what works. We take ideas about causation with a grains of salt because the real world has so many variables.

If you don't believe in propensities, then you have absolutely no grounds for making classes whose frequencies you compare. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Could you explain what you mean by "propensities" here? It seems like you're trying to smudge the different kinds of probability together with folk expectations of the kind that drive gamblers?

I do believe in propensities. I just don't believe it tells me anything about unique cases. It tells me something about populations. So if you've been drinking a milkshake everyday at 2pm for the last 27 years, that tells me nothing about what you're going to do today. I won't be surprised if you drink a milkshake at 2pm, but I don't know ahead of time whether you will or not.

. If I flip a coin and it comes up heads 100 times in a row, and I don't believe in propensities, then I should just say that the probability of a coin coming up heads has changed, rather than positing that the coin is rigged. Indeed, what grounds would I have for saying the class of rigged coins and the class of coins are — Count Timothy von Icarus

Say you have a balanced coin. You have to face the fact that it's possible to flip it an octillion times and see it come up heads every time. That doesn't mean it's not balanced, and it tells you nothing about what it's going to do on the next flip.

Frequentism has problems with all one-off events. What was the probability of Donald Trump winning the election in June 2016? If probability is frequency then it was already 100%. But then what is the chance that Joe Biden wins in 2024? Does it not exist? Do probabilities only exist for one-off events after the event? Or are we forced to posit eternalism, that all events exist eternally, so that there is some frequency for one-off events we can reference? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Exactly. Frequentism is what underlies actualism, a form of determinism.

Imagine that you're rolling a die at a craps table. You'll say that the 5 has a 1/6 chance of appearing face up. This is an assessment of logical possibility. We have to be careful about what we say after the die has landed. If it was a 5, we know it's possible that the 5 could appear face-up because it did! But could the 2 also appear face up? Logically, you can't have more than one side of the die face up. If the 5 appeared, it isn't possible for any other number to be face-up. So what happened to the other possibilities? Where did they go? What exactly are those other possibilities?

One way to look at it is to say those other possibilities are information we possess about how the universe works. We use that information to make predictions. But we can back off of imagining that those other possibilities have some ontological implications. They don't. They're just the result of our analysis.

But in that case, frequency is just a useful way to observe propensities and discover them, in which case it is absolutely fine to apply probability to one off events. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Woe. I don't think so. This is the fatal mistake people commonly make about statistics. Statistics allows you to make predictions about populations, not individuals. For instance, people who smoke have a higher incidence of COPD. So I can say if a person smokes, they're more likely to get COPD. However, among smokers, only about 10% will actually get it. As a pulmonologists told me once, most people who smoke "get away with it." So all you can tell an individual smoker is that they're in a category that has a higher incidence of COPD. I can't tell an individual anything about their medical future.

How does this not apply to all natural phenomena? Every event we observe only occurs at one time, in one place, in one way. I don't see how it doesn't generalize. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It does generalize.

But if you buy that, I don't see how it doesn't generalize to all arguments from statistical ensembles, making the entire scientific enterprise invalid. Every paper using statistics, every significance test, is bunk, because there aren't actually possibilities of different outcomes, but actually just the one outcome that exists. After all, the only set of observations are just those we do make. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It's the misinterpretation that's bunk. You have to remember that probability is about knowledge, not ontology.

Yes, because there is a connection. Take the normal argument for Fine Tuning. If the constants of our universe and its initial entropy are such that the odds of their occuring are significantly less than 1 in 10×10^123, then it doesn't make sense to assume such things have occured by chance. You don't bet against a coin that has come up heads for 5 hours of flips because it is obvious that the coin isn't fair given the result. Hence, the Fine Tuning Argument has been taken seriously to date. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think probability can be taken one of two ways: it's either an assessment of some number of iterations (so we toss the coin 100 times, it comes up heads once, so we say it has a 1% chance of coming up. This assessment has to be considered in the light of the data from which it came.

The other way to assess probability is to examine the logical possibilities. Look at the coin and determine how it's weighted. If it's evenly weighted, there's logically a 50% chance it will come up heads.

If we've done an assessment of logical possibility and determined that of all the ways the universe could appear, the chances of it appearing as it is are 1 in 10^10^123, that doesn't really tell us anything about how this one possibility manifested, whether there was divine intervention or not. It just means we can imagine a huge number of other ways the universe could have been. Logical possibility is about our imaginations and logical dictates.

Unless you can prove the necessity of the laws, under determination makes it more likely that you're actually in a universe that lacks such laws, and that this will be revealed at any moment as order breaks down. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I see what you're saying, but I don't think it works that way. The universe either has a pending breakdown in order, or it doesn't. An assessment of logical possibility won't help us determine which universe we're in. We can't use the iterative form of probability either, because by definition, the universe is a one-off. However it is, it had a 100% chance of happening that way because the assessement is 1/1.

The multiverse does not solve this problem at all. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree. What's true of our universe is true of a multiverse. Each individual universe had a 100% chance of being the way it is.

The only way to diffuse the Boltzmann Brain problem, or the related question of "why the universe should be rational," is to find out why the universes' incredibly unlikely traits should be necessary — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to be drawing probability (with the word 'unlikely") and possibility ("necessary") into it.

There are some good arguments for determinism, more along the lines of actualism than causality. Would that solve the problem?

"The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible". --Einstein

It's true. William the Conqueror died as a result of an injury to his groin caused by the horn on his saddle as he was proceeding out to squash someone. He should have allowed a peaceful transfer of power.

Hell, at this point it would be an improvement to have a republican president commit to a peaceful transfer of power, and then honour that commitment. — flannel jesus

Peaceful transfers are for losers.

But -- but -- isn't it true that there are true statements?!"

It can be hard to convince yourself -- hard even to see the possibility -- that the answer to that question does not matter. — Srap Tasmaner

Because truth and an affirmation of realism are so basic to speech, thought, and action, even if you're in a dream.

I think for some, the emphasis on true statements is about smuggling in correspondence theory. If there are true statements, and truth is correspondence, then there must be a real world for our true statements to correspond to (even if it's a hologram.)

A realist doesn't need correspondence, though. I could adopt Davidson's approach to truth (if I could remember how it works) and just add realism on as an appendage. I wouldn't have an argument, though. Just sentiment.

It's why Isaac -- though he considers himself a kind of realist -- considers words like "real" and "true" useful mainly for bullying your opponents. — Srap Tasmaner

:lol:

According to Rouse’s reading of Witt, “No rule can specify its correct application to future instances. — Joshs

Witt or Quine? Quine is famous for demonstrating that the ability to apply a rule in new circumstances has to be innate. You can't learn it.

Since the beginning of this, I'm more confused about what's going on over there. Is this going to be like a hundred years war where eventually nobody remembers how it started?

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.
— frank

No, it was a provocation about the relativistic dimensions of postmodern thinking. But your point is interesting. — Tom Storm

Relativism appears to be built into thought itself, as we mentioned earlier wrt science.

Anyway, the question at hand is, do we ever arrive at an approach where genocide can't be seen as different to charity? — Tom Storm

Are you asking if we can dispense with morality? I think we do when we look at ourselves naturalistically, anthropologically.

It simply allows us to enrich such concepts by revealing a basis for them that they are not explicitly aware of. — Joshs

That would require a transcendent vantage point which is unavailable. There's no basis for perception being revealed, but just a parade of myths, metaphors, and speculations, which is fine. It's just not ontology.

In other words, by dropping the focus on truth as correct match between subject and world in favor of truth as the invariant features of our constructions of experience, we enrich concepts like material reality with the dimensions of self-reflexivity and interactive reciprocity. — Joshs

We should have long since dropped "truth as a correct match between subject and world." That's correspondence theory. It has a infinite regress at its sprouting point. If you're looking for something rigorous, look into the ways logician's have demolished correspondence as the measure of truth, and the same rigor would do away with any other theory, including that truth is the invariant features of our constructions of experience.

This is what I'm saying, you've arrived at the crossroads of AP and continental philosophy. What do you do next?

It’s a phenomenological analysis based on what actually appears to me — Joshs

Sure. And that kind of data can be interpreted in a thousand different ways. There's no way to determine which is correct. It's fun to work on philosophical projects, but that fun is as far as it goes.

From a naive vantage, I see empirical objects existing in the same world as others,but from a more rigorous vantage, after having bracketed what is contingent and relative in my experience of the world, what remains for me are synthesizing processes that correlate never-repeating elements of experience based on patterns of perceived similarities. — Joshs

And that doesn't get you to a transcendent vantage point. When phenomenology pretends to become ontology, it's language on holiday.

I find
Husserl’s phenomenological analyses of the construction of empirical objects helpful here. According to Husserl, in my perceptual experience of the world, my empathetic connection with an intersubjective community in the form of apperception of alter egos leads to an ‘objective’ social space in which each individual believes himself to be living in the same world, in which his own perceptions are mere appearances of the identical things that everyone else experiences. But this sense of my own perception as mere appearance of what is factually the same for everyone is the appearance for me of what can never be actually identical. The ways in which I apperceptively fuse others perceptual contributions to the constitution of objects with my own perceptual adumbrations will always provide me with constituted appearances of things which are unique to my own construing, even as I calls these personally construed appearances a mere representation of the true world, identical for everyone. — Joshs

But this doesn't go beyond the realm of speculation. Notice that you're giving an account of the nature of reality, but you don't have the transcendent vantage point implied by the narrative.

Antirealists point out that for "The kettle is boiling" to be true, we need "The", "kettle", "is" and "boiling". And seem to stop there.

But we also need a boiling kettle. — Banno

Nah. A deflationary account of truth is compatible with either realism or anti-realism.

democracy is a bad system when most of the population is insane. — unenlightened

I don't let my diagnosis define me.

therefore there are no truths. — Banno

They've just been deflated till they're flat as pancakes.

Something bigger than any individual is very wrong.
2h — unenlightened

But imagine that you're one of of Trump's
supporters. You really believe Trump has been unfairly targeted by authorities to keep him from fulfilling his Godly mission.

From a certain point of view, it's just a big movie screen we're projecting our myths upon, as we've done generation after generation. An epic saga is partly history, partly religion, partly a justification of the power structure, and partly entertainment.

You just have to allow yourself to be enchanted.

Give me your number. I can call you and you can confirm whether I’m awake or dreaming. — NOS4A2

We're aiming for the philosophical 17th Century. Somehow we keep missing it. :blush:

I have no proof that you just posted that. But evidently you did. — unenlightened

One assumes someone posted it. Maybe it was Floyd.