a fantastical Culture style utopia — Captain Homicide

As in Iain M. Banks's Culture civilization, I take it?

Please sir, can I answer this one?

No and no.

I really hope you enjoy it. I stopped at pg. 910 - no joke. Yes, I am that stupid — Manuel

300 pages in and loving it.

Excellent, gold star to you!

So, are you looking for higher quality content as per the OP? — Shawn

I would like to see more high quality stuff, such as more essay or book reading groups, like we did in the beginning. But I realize I’m not leading by example, as I hardly contribute to the philosophy discussions these days. Seems I could only keep that up for a few years.

Yes, it does demand commitment, though as you say it's not all that difficult to read (if you don't mind long sentences).

Enjoy the journey.

ISO...lost time — Pantagruel

Awesome box set.

Years ago I read the first two volumes but faltered in the third, which means I may have to begin at the beginning again if I want to read the whole thing (which I do). That's no bad thing, because those first two are excellent.

Given the right circumstances, I concur.

I find both the Tarot and astrology interesting as providing a kind of vocabulary or system for thinking about aspects of human experience and personality. — bert1

Yes, exactly, it's an arbitrary frame, providing a kind of window on to one's life and mind.

I only came to appreciate this when someone I know, who had her own personal Indian astrologer, convinced me to do a consultation. I was impressed with the complexity of the charts he produced, and by his non-trivial insights and sometimes weirdly specific predictions and warnings. The real Indian astrology is so much deeper than anything I'd heard of before.

Of course, I don't believe in it at all, but it almost seems like that's missing the point.

And as Niels Bohr said of the horseshoe that was hanging in his house when asked if he really believed it brought good luck...

“No,” Bohr replied, “but I am told that they bring luck even to those who do not believe in them.”

(probably apocryphal, but it's a good one)

EDIT: One of the warnings was "do not take a long-distance car journey in the second half of 2022."

Well it's good to see you back here. Why migrate? Why not?

My means are more subtle than crude authoritarianism.

Never underestimate a starling.

Am I reading to much into this? — bert1

I guess not, because despite what I said above, I have seen that attitude before around these parts.

An all-consuming lust for power.

I agree that it’s the height of bad manners for someone to say “you’re asking the wrong question,” without explaining what they mean.

However…

A question can be uninterpretable. It can be confusing. It can hide assumptions. It can be leading. But in what sense can it be wrong? — bert1

In the sense that the question already carries a view with it. Those hidden assumptions can indeed be wrong.

If your interlocutor explains this, as I think people here tend to do (correct me if I’m wrong), I think it’s fine.

I deleted it, because it was just a YouTube link with a question along the lines of “what do you think?”

If you want to discuss a video, it's best to make some effort to summarize it, and tell us what you think of it yourself.

By the way, there is a Feedback category where you can post questions or complaints about moderation, so I've moved this there.

You can block posts by certain members using SophistiCat’s browser extension:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5738/ignore-list-browser-extension/p1

But I’m afraid you’ll have to live with all the short stories popping up. It’s just once or twice a year.

Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, which I just finished, is stunningly good.

Now...

Banned @Varde for low quality.

At first, when I saw they were dancing around, I was sceptical. But yeah, it works!

Ligeti - Six Bagatelles

The only piece by Boulez that I really enjoy, probably because he abandoned serialism to do it. Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.

I'd suggest V or GR before Against the Day. It can be a real possibility that this latter book will erode your endurance. It's not a bad book by any means, but it far inferior to V and GR. V is probably his most fun book. — Manuel

Thank you for this excellent advice, which I have decided to ignore. :grin:

Just read Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon. To begin with I found it a bit annoying, and even once I got into it I thought it was kind of forgettable and ephemeral. Then in the second half it became more involving, and now I've finished it I miss it. In any case it's a lot of fun and paints a picture of a world I knew little about (early seventies Los Angeles, the tail end of the hippie dream). So I'll give it the much-coveted :up: :sparkle:

Before I take on the monster that is his Against the Day, I'm currently reading Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov.

I recently discovered Escalator Over the Hill by Carla Bley, Paul Haines, and the Jazz Composer’s Orchestra, from 1967. Weird and wonderful, I love it. It’s like some kind of prog jazz (in the rock sense of progressive, not the Stan Kenton third stream sense).

Blame Alanis Morrisette — Banno

In defence of Alanis...

The notion of cosmic irony (or the irony of fate) might be stretched to cover the unlucky situations that she describes in the song.

He won the lottery and died the next day

The gods bestowed the winning ticket upon a man whom they had already condemned to death the next day, so that he could not enjoy the money. They do it all the time, subverting our hopes and expectations just for a laugh.

Alternatively, the fact that her examples are not ironic is what is ironic.

"Hollywood" of course is a synecdoche or metonym for the mainstream film industry (in America). The cowboy is in Mulholland Drive not because there are cowboys hanging around in Hollywood, the place, but because of the iconic status of the cowboy in the history of film.

Anyway I agree, it's one of my favourite films too.

:ok:

Couldn't make it fit.

That would make him, according to you, a hotheaded ginger Dutch fish out of water in a cryptoworld he never made.

I'm sorry that you feel I'm being uncharitable. I'm only trying to get my point across, but I'm probably not doing a great job of it. — Luke

Same here! No problem Luke: right now I don't have any more words.

I didn't say I can't show you "the" experience. I said I can't show you "my" experience. — Luke

Yes, but as far as showing me your experience has any meaning at all, it means just the same as showing me the experience, which is why I put it that way and why I made the point.

How do you know that "there's some level of qualitative identity"? Can that ever be anything more than an assumption? — Luke

There is little that is more certain than that we share lots of things, so I wouldn't want to characterize it as merely an assumption. (Obviously though, I could have lost the feeling in my finger, so we're not always right).

I have not described this as ineffability. I have said that language may not be able to communicate one person's experience such that another can "fully" understand their experience only from the language. — Luke

My point was that this is tantamount to saying what I said.

I don't presume or have any sympathy for an undistorted view from nowhere. — Luke

I didn't think you did. It's precisely because I thought you didn't that I used it as an analogy to help get across my point.

But this is going around in circles and I don't think you're reading me charitably, even though I'm being pretty clear. If I'm misunderstanding something (to do with knowledge and understanding I suppose), then you could try to explain what it is.

I think the main difference is that I can show you an apple, but I can't show you my experience. I can show you my expression of pain, but not the pain itself. — Luke

First, I think you can show me the experience. If you prick your finger with a pin, you can show me the experience by pricking me with a pin. Are the experiences the same? Well, there’s no numerical identity, but there’s some level of qualitative identity. There can’t be total qualitative identity because that would be equivalent to numerical identity, and that would require that I experience the pinprick as you, which is just to be you. I don’t think it’s right to describe this as ineffability.

I see this kind of how I see perception. Some around here will say that perception is deficient or distorted because we perceive in a particular way which is determined or conditioned by our anatomy and physiology and our behaviour in our environment. This view presumes that perfect, undistorted perception would be a view from nowhere or, in Kant’s terms, an intellectual intuition. This is a bad account of perception.

I don’t really disagree with the bulk of your post; we just draw different conclusions. In fact, I’m not yet even sure that I’m absolutely against your use of “ineffable”. I do think that the position I’ve set out goes some way to clarify things.

Second, all analogies will break down at some point. The apple, unlike the experience, is not subjective, so I agree that there’s a significant difference.

Then the parser appended an incomprehensible sentence, something that I must accept the answer that ansers my question — god must be atheist

PICNIC

"Question" and "poll" are options available as checkboxes under the main text box. You're never forced to choose one of them, as far as I know.

My post covered all of those points, I think.

I'm with @Moliere on this, because I thought of the same objection. To say that in talking about an experience, something is left unsaid--because it doesn't convey what it's like to have that experience--seems to imply an expectation that is too high, namely that my words can give you the experience.

We can no more expect to convey an exprience in this way than we can expect to convey an object: we can talk about an experience, but there is always something beyond the talk, namely the experience itself; similarly, we can talk about an apple, but there is always something beyond the talk, namely the apple itself. But we don't say that apples are ineffable.

What makes it tempting to say that experiences, but not apples, are ineffable? Whatever the answer--and that might be the most interesting thing, I'm not sure--is it too easy here to just say that when we realize that experiences, rather like objects, are to be had (in the case of objects, to be), the issue dissolves?

What I suggested might be "the most interesting thing" could be to do with the supposed Enlightenment and scientific effort to explain everything away.

First time listening to Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart. I'd been led to expect unlistenable cacophony but a lot of it's really groovy to my ears.

Telekinesis by Tyondai Braxton, released yesterday.