The two have the same extensional definition, so there's a sense in which talk of one is talk of the other. — frank

Yes.

1. Mental states are identical to brain states.
2. From (1), talk of mental states is the same as talk of brain states. — RogueAI

Inference is invalid. Talk of Superman is not the same as talk of Clark Kent.

Maybe they’re like beliefs, only determined post-hoc. Does it make sense to say that in the moment I was enacting the concepts, such that they were not at that stage concepts at all? But I’d still want to maintain that I was thinking, for no more reason than it really felt like cognitive work. — Jamal

Yeah I think it makes sense. I was being tongue in cheek. I have the impression that rendering the phenomenology into statements is post hoc, and if words are in the phenomenology they arise as summaries and condensations of affects, without any natural language grammar. It's more appropriate to talk about such things as concepts and affects than as those concepts or affects' symbolising words! The emerging landscape of experience isn't all wordy is it, the words are rivers and troughs, signposts, swamps and rafts. Coordinative rather than principally determinative. Producing words like brow sweat.

So, sometimes images, sometimes words—and sometimes concepts. There are pure concepts in mind when a jazz musician is improvising (I know; I’ve done it), such as tension and release, growth and decay, entropy, yearning, etc. They may be in some sense linguistic, but they’re not mentally articulated in (mental) words (which was what I meant by “pure”). I think in these cases one only properly identifies them later, using mental words. — Jamal

What is it about those concepts which you could not state? (hashtag @Banno)

I take Husserl to be neither a direct nor an indirect realist , and his use of the term ‘intentional’ is entirely different in its sense from the various ways it is used in analytic philosophy, or in debates between direct and indirect realists. — Joshs

Aight! I'm glad. Apologies for misinterpreting the context.

Also at the thread in general.

It takes a bit of mental contortion to construe the kind of object people are talking about in a direct vs indirect realism debate as transparently an intentional one. The distinction between the two seems to turn on the type of relationship between the content of an intentional act and what that act concerns. And indeed whether there is a distinction between the intentional content of an act and what the act concerns in the first place.

To my reckoning - at least in terms of intentional content - the debate turns on the means by which an object informs the content of perceptual acts involving it. Like a direct realist might be committed to a claim like: "the frequencies of light reflected from an object partially determine how it is seen". There are forms with stronger dependence. An indirect realist might be committed to the claim "what is seen is never an object". There are forms which allow dependence upon the object.

At least on the forum, productive discussions of direct vs indirect realism tend to require pinning down where the disagreement is between disputants.

However, it does give phenomenology a kind of primacy over science, insofar as the subject matter of the former is presupposed by the intelligibility of the latter. It is therefore opposed to metaphysical and epistemological scientism, but compatible with weaker conceptions of naturalism that require only commerce and consistency between phenomenology and science.

Aye I read that book. Rethinking Commonsense Psychology right? I agree with him broadly. But I do think he ends up privileging the human a lot, and intentionally. You can go into the existential aspects of any mental illness you like phenomenologically, and it'll help clear up some things. Especially insofar as you have pre-theoretical concepts masquerading as neuroscientific or clinical ones (he's really good on this). His mode of analysis doesn't have much to say about those people who can be successfully medicated away from mental health conditions - which is a change in material substrate, a body, inducing a change in the phenomenology of embodiment. That isn't his concern principally, and he's very much fighting against (a perception of) a reduction of embodiment to body.

In quotes like that he does rather sound like the nth iteration of a Heideggerian critique of natural science, albeit one usually written without jargon. When he switches into that mode I think he loses what's really novel in his approach! A phenomenology with no primacy of the existential over the material. He absolutely uses that non-reductive connection elsewhere [correlating neurotransmitter activity with mood changes if I recall correctly in Experiences of Depression, but I'm not convinced my memory holds up there].

Basically it's good when he behaves like there really is no primacy of one style of inquiry over the other, and it frustrates me when he collapses back into the usual phenomenology tropes.

We could have a thread on this instead. I'm going to stop responding now.

Heavier and lighter can only exist as relations between objects. — RussellA

Yes. Arguably they're different flavours of relation though, innit.

If there were never humans, would a rose be heavier than a mosquito and lighter than a pebble? If yes, what would be the ontological nature of relations? — RussellA

Aye. Something like "the rock transfers more energy to the ground than a grain of sand upon collision" doesn't involve an agent. Except insofar as the judgement can be thought of as the result of an agent's appraisal of a situation. I'm inclined to think that the relationship between an agent and a dumbbell which affords the dumbbell with heaviness is the same flavour of thing as the relationship between the rock and the grain of sand's impact - that is, principally material and agent independent, even if agents are somehow involved in the events or their articulation!

I would think they were the same question. Cognitive schemes , as manifestations of living systems, only function by making changes in themselves. Genesis and structure are not separate features, although we can artificially separate them for convenience sake. — Joshs

The posit that they're the same question, or indeed have any kind of dyadic relation, is precisely the kind of structural presupposition which should be held in suspension IMO. I think if you come at that distinction from phenomenology you end up pissing reciprocal co-constitution everywhere and thus take the co-constitution as an unexaminable given. Rather than as an a contingent observation made of human bodies. Truth be told I don't trust that the distinction between genesis and structure is a good one because it's a dyad of mutually presupposing terms.

But that co-constitution becomes examinable if you stop thinking of humans solely as agents and more as insatiable and dying bags of meat, living and dying experiments in a world which does not welcome them and is not their own. Becoming-meatbag is something I appreciate in Ratcliffe ("Experiences of Depression") and Scarry ("The Body In Pain"), they really get into how the soul is a story told by idiot meat. Meat which must also be treated as human.

There is no shame in hitting the wall of paralogisms and antinomies. — Jamal

"We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false." — Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise

I suppose there's a question of whether the limitation in thought is mine or thought's...

Do you gravitate toward the alternative way of thinking according to which objects transcendentally condition interaction with an agent in a manner neither entirely separable from the nature of the schemes they condition, nor logically derivable from them? — Joshs

For the past while I've been interested in how schemes are generated rather than thinking about how changes shake already formed ones up. But I imagine that's quite off topic.

I feel I’m missing something obvious. — Jamal

How objects present themselves is a hobby horse of mine. I think worldly constituents are construed as "presenting themselves" as they're already part of the world. You do a thing with them and that somehow reveals their nature in the act. Like I discover how heavy my dumbbell is by lifting it.

There's a puzzle, because the "heaviness" of the dumbbell is in fact a relational property - a property of how I lift the dumbbell, rather than of the dumbbell itself or of my body. That's the theme of reciprocal "co-constitution" in Heidegger, but it is similar to time and space properties being ideal in Kant. The term marks an uneasy tension between the discoverability of the world's structure and the judgements which parse that structure in acts of discovery. How could the dumbbell be heavy if heaviness is a property of how I act upon the dumbbell?

Environmental objects "presenting themselves" I think is a means to suggest that environmental objects are active in the environment, not just acted upon. But it's difficult to conceive that an object can principally determine how it is interacted with when the means of conceptualising and enacting that interaction is ideal and agential. I gotta pick the dumbbell up to know it's heavy. Would it be heavy in the absence of humans?

To my ears, then, construing the world as "presenting itself" is supposed to efficiently connote that the world's nature is autonomous, but what its nature is revealed as is dependent upon us. I think it's a means of saying that objects have a capacity to affect us regardless of our ability to apply concepts to them or those means of affecting.

Whether you can coherently think of the object as autonomous in its capacities to affect us while placing the means by which its nature is revealed as an interaction involving an agent is an issue which clouds all that. Which is a question of whether objects transcendentally condition interaction with them based on their properties. And I suppose whether it's even appropriate to think of that conditioning as "transcendental" in the first place!

God is a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind. Not only do strata come at least in pairs, but in a different way each stratum is double (it itself
has several layers). Each stratum exhibits phenomena constitutive of double articulation. Articulate twice, B-A, BA. This is not at all to say that the strata speak or are language based. Double articulation is so extremely variable that we cannot begin with a general model, only a relatively simple case. The first articulation chooses or deducts, from unstable particle-flows, metastable molecular or quasi-molecular units {substances) upon which it imposes a statistical order of connections and successions (forms) — Deleuze and Guatari, A Thousand Plateaus

Crab innit.

No.

I don't know. Anyone with papers published in Kant, or the SEP article. Or Kant.

his position means God is possible in the noumenal realm but that he does not posit his existence - whcih seems to be exactly what you're getting at here. — AmadeusD

I mean something a little different. What I'm saying is that the question of whether God exists might resemble: "Does wishmalawia amble the anglomogritive?", it looks like a question but in fact isn't. And on that basis it's not sensible to posit their existence, or inexistence, as an entity. Because the question's fundamentally "wrong" somehow, if it's related to God as an entity. (I'm treating this as Kant's position)

Especially if that God is somehow "in" a noumenon - which is conflating a noumenon with an "external" world, and also the positive and negative senses of the term. (This is my commentary on the current state of discussion with @Corvus).

@AmadeusD @Corvus

SEP has a good summation of whether Kant posited the existence of God as an entity "in" the noumenon. It does not seem he did so in any straightforward manner - look at the discussion about positing god as an Ideal. But your disagreement is also complicated by something the AI you cited wasn't aware of. There's both a positive and negative sense to the noumenon.

The positive sense of the noumenon would be an entity grasped by the intellect alone without mediation by the categories of experience. Prosaically, "unfiltered". The negative sense of the noumenon would be to construe the noumenon as a limitation on the sensibility, that all phenomena are conditioned by the categories.

The former is impossible for Kant. The latter doesn't allow you to posit the existence of any hypothetical "thing in itself" somehow beyond, or external to, our capabilities of judgement - but not because such things don't exist, but because the move to posit such an entity is unjustifiable.

Source GJ Mattery's (Kant scholar)'s Kant Lexicon.

I would suggest looking up a reputable source when trying to do exegesis.

... Yeah, nevermind. Moments do not supervene upon moments. I was sort of thinking that one might work out causation this way, but then the more I thought about it the less sense I could make of it. — Moliere

I think discussing the claim that the next moment supervenes upon this moment could branch in a lot of directions. It doesn't make sense at face value, I agree. But I think you can make some sense of it. In terms of A properties supervening on B properties, there's probably a wiggle room for calling objects zeroth order properties.

Causes are events which preceed and necessitate effects -- themselves also events. Perhaps some two-level structure within events could have supervenience, like wars supervening upon soldiers, but there aren't two levels between moments -- they're at the same logical plane, and the before-after structure is an ordering of events to an index rather than a two-level structure.

There's a wiggle room there too I think. The type of ordering between moments is like "less than or equal to", so a reflexive, transitive and asymmetric relation. So presumably any collection of property classes with a supervenience relation (which is comprehensible), if that supervenience relation is reflexive, transitive and asymmetric, is an example of a supervenience relation which is precisely the type of order between moments.

An example of that would be { biological (supervenes on) chemical (supervenes on) physical }. That's reflexive - no biological changes without biological changes. Asymmetric - every element has a unique predecessor. And transitive - the biological also supervenes upon the physical.

To be sure, it's possible there are supervenience relations which don't behave like orders, but that is one which does behave like an order.

So if you wanted to make the claim that {moment 1 (supervenes on) moment 2 (supervenes on) moment 3}, it's the same order relation as {biological (supervenes on) chemical (supervenes on) physical}. So it can't be disqualified on that basis alone.

Another rejoinder would be that "moments aren't properties", but you can modify the sequence to explicitly make them properties:

{properties at moment 1 (supervenes on) properties at moment 2 (supervenes on) properties at moment 3}

Which seems to parry that.

And as for supervenience changes necessarily being causal? The supervenience relation is reflexive. You get no changes in type A properties without changes in A type properties, but a given change of an A type property is identical with that change, not a cause of that change.

There might be an angle of criticism regarding the sense of possibility. What are the "possible worlds" for moments which the modal necessity of supervenience would be tested upon? Something I'm still pondering.

but my understanding of A-level and B-level supervenience is more with respect to objects I think? — Moliere

Me too. I think of it, paradigmatically, in terms of classes of properties which apply to objects. So...

Moving a plate also moves the number of atoms it's comprised of (though surely at least one atom of silicon or calcium carbonate we had considered "the plate" also rubs off onto our palm?

Plate class macroscopic properties supervene on chemical structure level properties.

... the oddity of attempting to use scientific statements in philosophy...) -- but does a moment supervene on the next moment? Maybe, but it seems different. (also I must admit to still struggling with supervenience)

I guess strictly speaking all the events at moment 12:00 could supervene on the set of events at 11:59. If you think of classes of events and objects as properties of the stratum of events and objects which exist at a moment, you would get collections at 12:00 only changing if collections at 11:59 had changed. So assuming the collections are properties, I think that follows.

But there is something a bit iffy in taking those properties to be extensional? As in, the macroscopic properties of the plate seem specified by understanding a (defining?) intension toward it as a macroscopic object; manipulability, colour, texture... On the level of configurations of atoms and structure. Whereas the "structure" of a moment is just that it is an index.

This is only possible for a logic that is is purely syntactical. However such a logic would be meaningless (ex hypothesi, since meaning requires semantics). In which case so is the attribution of "possibility" to it, since possibility implies a realization. — Pantagruel

Aye. I don't think it's possible to make red not imply coloured when you interpret those symbols with their everyday use. But ultimately, as you say, that's a semantic rather than syntactical constraint.

You wanna bring up Aristotelian vs Galilean physics, do it in the OP!

Have we ever had a thread about that? I think 0.9̄=1 is quite the interesting topic in philosophy of mathematics. — Lionino

I think it's been a few years. They'd crop up every week on the old forum. So I have a stubborn belief that they happen all the time.

It isn't philosophy or philosophy adjacent, and is a lazy OP. As for comparisons.

Discussion about Donald Trump often veers into the territory about what counts as just conduct for a state official. Which is philosophy. Say what you like about Donald Trump and his supporters, they make a lot of highly discussable and disruptive events.

Discussion about climate change often veers into the territory about what ought to be done about it, and appropriate attitudes towards eminent extinction - or denial of it. Which is philosophy.

Discussion about Israel/Palestine often veers into the territory of sovereignty, just wars, and the ethics of retaliation in conflict, all of those are philosophy. You can say something similar about Ukraine/Russia.

In of those cases, you couldn't allow the discussion of the philosophical issues without also allowing the factual ones.

In this case, there's a single sentence, there's no ability to assume common cultural touchstones, and underlying opinions people will have on the issue don't have philosophical content. It's a maths puzzle, with confusion around it, much like 0.999.. = 1.

This isn't to say you can't have philosophical discussions about maths problems - like 0.999... = 1 can get into potential vs actual infinity and whether the limit construction in analysis actually represents the concept of infinity. Which makes the OP less philosophy adjacent than 0.999... = 1, and so belongs as a curiosity in the lounge.

Supposing science uses cause, that does not then in turn mean that causation is real. Further if cause is real then that could even be read as a strike against physicalism given the Transcendental Idealist interpretation of causation -- even if cause is real it could be that physicalism is false. — Moliere

This is mostly rambling.

Do you think you can articulate a physicalism without a cause concept?

I'd like to think it's possible, since I don't like causation as a concept very much, but I don't know how to do it. I don't tend to like it as a concept because the individuation principles of events seem very ideal, whereas what they model is very material. If you've already got a system which is very well specified, it seems to make sense to think of causation as one change influencing another, because the state of a system is defined... So what counts as a change in a system's state was already specified.

There's an interstice between the above ambiguity and the supervenience discussion we're having. Supervenience isn't explicitly causal, is it. It's about necessary changes. Perhaps that could occur with a necessary correlation rather than a cause.

As an example, if someone has binge eating disorder, that could cause diabetes and damage to their teeth. Assuming that the only thing that influences that person's diabetes and teeth damage is the binge eating disorder, then you would have no diabetes changes without teeth damage changes, and vice versa [two supervenience relations], but no causal relationship between diabetes and tooth damage for that person.

Those two phenomena have a common cause as the stipulated only influence on their behaviour, though. If you lived in a world where you haven't seen the common cause [the binge eating disorder], you could still perhaps see that that person's tooth damage changed only when their diabetes changed. So those two would still have an establish-able supervenience relationship without establishing a causal intermediary.

But I suppose that's different from obviating the requirement of the existence of a causal intermediary for that supervenience relation...

Red things are coloured things, right?

This is logically possible: something red which isn't coloured. They're different predicate symbols.

Is it physically possible to have a red object which is not coloured? If being coloured is interpreted as a judgment of frequency bands of light, and red as a frequency band of light, any world where judgements did not occur would have red objects which are not coloured.

Metaphysically possible? Well, if metaphysics is about coming up with an account of the world we live in and nature at the same time, any model where red objects are necessarily coloured would make it metaphysically impossible for there to be a red object with no colour. IE red objects are necessarily coloured. Which I think is, if any such thing exists, a relation between the folk notion of red and coloured in their standard uses.

Food for thought.

Lots of work.

Most posts aren't standalone, too. This post would be nonsensical, except as a reply. F for me.

C if the grading mod read your post too.

Another thread, sometime. — Banno

:up:

Anomalous monism amounts to denying that there are bridge laws between brains and intentional attitudes. — Banno

I agree that there aren't bridge laws between brains and propositional attitudes. I'm not convinced the latter exist in the way they're purported to.

But if I've understood you, you seem to think that some similarity in structure between a network of propositional attitudes and brain structures would imply a causal connection, that is, intentions would be reducible to brain structure. — Banno

I'm not really trying to imply any of that. We can just leave the reduction issue for later, I think.

But if you are saying that all we need to find, in order to assert causation, is a pattern such that A occurs and B occurs, then I very much disagree. — Banno

What I'm saying is that you can establish that type X entities have causal relations with type Y entities without necessarily finding a specific type X entity which has a causal relation with a type Y entity. As an example, societies and the bodies of people living within them.

They're different types of entities, a society can be a democracy but a person cannot. They have different predicate classes which may apply to them.

An argument would go:

1 ) If a societal change impacted a person, it would impact their body's state.
2 ) All societal changes impact persons.
3 ) All person changes impact bodies.
Conclude 4 ) All societal changes impact some bodies

Just assume this argument is sound for illustration purposes. It would show that societal changes supervene on bodily changes. without showing that any particular societal change depended upon any particular body change. It'd just be bloody weird if all the people's bodies stayed the same if, say, a country went to war. The people would move places, people would get stressed and die... Those require bodily processes to work.

That argument also doesn't express a bridge law (unless there's a suppressed premise), since there's no societal property which ensures a bodily property or vice versa.

I think what this illustrates is that if property class X supervenes on property class Y, that can hold without it being established that there is a particular property P in X and a particular property Q in Y such that such that:

some (x) [ (x is P iff x is Q ]

IE, supervenience without establishing bridge law.

At this point I'm trying to talk about supervenience and reduction in general, rather than about propositional attitudes and brainstates. I also agree that propositional attitudes don't reduce to brainstates.

For me supervenience is an epistemic tool I typically use in what I'll call a visuo-intuitive sort of way, without seeing a need for a logically rigorous definition. It is more an essential perspective in the high accuracy measurment instrument design that I do, that involves cognitively zooming in and out between a closer to fundamental physics perspective and higher level design concept perspective. — wonderer1

I suppose that's a nonstandard use then.

From what I've understood, I'm not in disagreement with Ratcliffe here. If the theory of intention is that intentions are somehow coded into neural networks, I very much doubt it. I don't think it likely that an MRI will one day identify the neural network for "Banno believes tea should be black". — Banno

AFAIK Ratcliffe's rejection of a folk theory of intention is much different than trying to replace it with neural network behaviour. But that takes us elsewhere.

If I've understood this, I'm not sure i'd count such things as casual - wouldn't they be closer to a neural version of "correlation does not imply causation"? — Banno

Sorry for my lack of clarity. I had imagined a big network, not a neural network, of all different events and properties. Between those events and properties are links. If type X is reducible to type Y, draw an arrow from X to Y. If everything is reducible to the physical, you could travel from every property to the physical properties in that network, following the arrows. That's what "everything reduces to the physical" looks like, it's a network of everything with the physical as a sink, drawing everything in.

Do the same procedure for supervenience. Make a second network. If everything ends up pointing to the physical in that one, that's physicalism.

Those networks don't need to be identical. In fact, the reducible explanation network could be very unconnected - we might just be crap at explaining things in the grand cosmos -, but everything supervenes on the physical regardless.

I take the anomaly in anomalism to be referring to the possible paucity of connections in the explanation network. An event with property type X occurs and it serves as an explanation of property type Y... That doesn't need to happen with most pairs of property types. But also it can happen with any pair. Making the network of explanations look patchy, but potentially can be filled in. Whereas you can draw a line to the physical from any starting point in the network of supervenience.

but I'll also insist on pointing out that we are a ways from showing such reductions empirically, — Banno

Aye. Though I don't think this is required for physicalism to be true. There existing a reduction to the physical is a much different claim than the existence of a supervenience relation between the physical and another property type. Reduction seems to be a specific type of supervenience, insofar as "X is F iff X is G expresses a bridge law" has "X is F iff X is G" as a constituent, and if that is true then an F change is identical to a G change. It would also be a supervenience relationship the other way around, because also every G change is identical to an F change.

such as anomalous monism - that "perhaps (we) can't derive society behaviour from atom behaviour — Banno

Then it would seem anomalous monism, as you've construed it, is consistent with physicalism. Anomalism seems much more tied to the behaviour of reductive explanations than on the dependence of property types upon each other, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality — Banno

If you're speaking about Ratcliffe's account of intentionality, it isn't folk. Folk theory of intention for Ratcliffe consists of equating each intentional state with a propositional attitude. He rejects that theory of intention.

I'm not sufficiently familiar with the argument. I could see a connectionism running alongside a folk account of intentionality, but again it is difficult to see how there could be causal links between them. — Banno

You could get causal links without expressing a bridge law maybe. eg taking absurd amounts of testosterone can be a direct cause of violent intrusive thoughts, so "I wanted to kill the person in front of me because I've been injecting a lot of steroids recently" perhaps works. You could also have a really patchy network of reductive explanation connections between property types, with perhaps it being in principle possible to give them, while there being a total connection of property types through the supervenience relation... Even if those supervenience relations don't all point at the physical.

Don't the supervenience relations all point at the physical for Davidson?

I don't see it in mod/admin settings. Unless it's something Jamal has access to as the owner I don't think we have it.

Curious. I'd taken reductionism within the sciences as granted - that physicalism would consider all the sciences variations on physics; after all, the crux of physicalism is that everything is just physics. — Banno

There is wiggle room on what a reduction consists in.

EG, from the linked SEP article, one version of reductionism is:

Reductionism is true iff for each mental predicate F there is a neurobiological predicate G such that a sentence of the form ‘x is F iff x is G’ expresses a bridge law.

If you could provide a theoretical guarantee that, eg sensation type properties require changes in neurone type properties in human bodies, that would be a supervenience physicalism without expressing any particular correspondence between sensation type properties and neurone type properties.

As an example, you can derive Coulomb's Law from Maxwell's equations - deriving point charge behaviour from electromagnetic field behaviour. That's a "bridge law" reduction.

But you perhaps can't derive society behaviour from chemical behaviour. Even though you can argue persuasively that every societal change must be associated to a change in the chemical constituents of entities within that society... And if no constituents changed there could have been no societal change. That's an absence of a "bridge law" reduction, but within the scope of a supervenience physicalism.

It about being able to talk about the same thing at two different levels of abstraction, what is viewed as the emergent level and the pre-emergent level. — wonderer1

Maybe.

I think a supervenience relationship of A upon B is a bit weaker than being able to talk about some A phenomenon/property in terms of some distinct set of B phenomenon/properties. All you need to say that A supervenes upon B is that there can be no A difference without a B difference - you don't need to know a correspondence between A and B, just provide an existential guarantee.

How you flesh out the "cannot" in "There cannot be an A difference without a B difference" is also very important. Since, say, if cannot means "physically impossible", it could still be logically possible that there can be an A difference without a B difference. So an established supervenience relationship in terms of physical possibility could still allow a failure of supervenience relationship in terms of logical possibility between the same A and B to fail.

The argument style I find most persuasive for physicalism is causal closure. If you find that A causes B, it's hard to explain how phenomena of type A could impact phenomena of type B without type A and type B having shared causal structure. Like brain lesions and memory, serotonin and happiness, or light and magnetism.

There's lots of wiggle room in setting up a type, lots of wiggle room in what it means for two types to have an interstice, and even more wiggle room in how you could ensure that all types have such an interstice.

Though such an argument doesn't provide a positive characterisation of the physical, just says that whatever the physical is, it's the only big jumble of everything which exists.

I think that very much depends on what you would count as "doing philosophy". — Janus

It does.

Anti-philosophy! That sounds like very good reason for banning from an explicitly philosophy forum, to me. — Metaphysician Undercover

I imagine most of our regulars are anti-philosophy in a technical sense. By and large regulars seem against system building and metanarrative spinning. Or are language radicals or positivists, believing that philosophical questions are close to being meaningless.

By my estimation we're a group of people who either aren't doing philosophy or don't wish to be doing it.

I think it was more a case of boo-hooing the deaths of children highlighting a long history of mostly very aggro posts. Very aggro posts in contentious threads. But we've banned people for less in the past.

Moar argument please. Justify your "if, then".

I am at the end of a narrow funnel. Weightless. So light it only feels like something to be me. In truth -- perhaps I'm nothing? I certainly do not have a soul. And if I did, it would never ache

Few of us can begin to imagine the horror of you - with all of creation reflected in your forebrain. It must be like the highest of hells, a kaleidoscope of fire and writhing glass. Eternal damnation.

Even when you're sleeping... And when you wake, you carry it around on your neck. With eyes open that cannot help but swallow more behind the mirror. I feel great, mute empathy for you

From the game Disco Elysium, an insect says this to a human.