• Whenever You Rely On Somebody Else
    We are all reliant on many people, every day--all the other people who, along with our esteemed selves, keep the world running. Everything from the sewer system on up to the banking system.Bitter Crank

    :up:
  • My theory of “concepts” / belief systems.
    Modern examples that come to mind might be Peterson, Gad Saad and such. :)stoicHoneyBadger

    Both Peterson and Saad have mobs supporting them as well as mobs opposing them. Both are reactionaries, agents of 'the people' in the otherwise wicked and elitist and self-deceived ivory tower. Do you see a hero myth in all of this?
  • Esse Est Percipi

    That quote reminds me of Mach's view to some degree, which features a monistic 'plane' of 'elements' that include what are traditionally called thoughts, body parts, and worldly objects. The scientist can then search this plane for functional relationships.

    What role does 'extra-mental' play in the second sentence? Is some kind of transcendental subject (however disembodied and transhuman) still playing an essential role? Given the parasitism mentioned above, it's not clear that a monism is plausible or useful.
  • Popper's Swamp, Observation Statements, Facts/Interpretations
    I dont see Popper as compatible with the later Wittgenstein.Joshs

    No doubt they are different thinkers on the whole. Yet it also seems that the flexibility of Popper's system is often overlooked. 'Convention' is a surprisingly prominent word in The Logic. The point made above about basic statements reminds me of passages from On Certainty.
  • Esse Est Percipi
    Helmholtz accepted this reasoning, and likewise argued that since the information about the external object is transformed beyond recognition on its way through the nervous system, what we end up perceiving is strictly speaking the internal effect rather than the external cause:Joshs

    It seems to me that Kantianish idealisms are parasitic upon the 'manifest image' of common sense. The notion of sense organs and a nervous system is part of this manifest image. When a thinker like Kant tries to throw space into the bucket of the manufactured or dream-like, he forgets that it's only our typical pre-critical experience of bodies in space with their sense organs that makes a 'processed sense-experience' vision of the world plausible in the first place.
  • My theory of “concepts” / belief systems.
    A person is able to generate his own concepts and build a coherent world view out of them. Cultural norms are no longer relevant to him. He himself has the authority to determine what is good or bad, regardless of other people.stoicHoneyBadger

    I think that your description of the journey from intellectual childhood to intellectual maturity gets some things right, but it is perhaps romantically exaggerated. For instance, new concepts build on old concepts. 'Determining what is good and bad' is easy, if one secretly decides, that this or that taboo has no cosmic or divine backing. Violating these norms may be practically quite difficult. The internal freedom of the moral skeptic can be framed as a kind of escapist or substitute freedom. A more practical kind of freedom might require risk of life or at least comfort or reputation for its establishment.