The 'We' is tacit in the use of that old tribal sign 'I.' — plaque flag

And vice versa.

Nice quote ! — plaque flag

True story.

The shadow’s wrong. — Mww

It's more of a reflection than a shadow. Did you notice that it reverses direction depending on how you look at it? Sometimes looking at the feet or below the picture will make it change direction. If you're on a cell phone try turning the cell phone a few degrees to the left or right. That'll do it.

I felt the thread needed more visual illusions.

over the last 10 years, the role of right-wing youth movements has grown even more central, helping to establish the guiding narratives and elevating some of the most visible faces of conservatism today

In America, blue collar workers, feeling completely abandoned by the supposed progressive party, are now devoted conservatives. Weird times.

If none of that makes sense it’s because I’m thinking on the fly. — Jamal

My on the fly thought is that throughout human history there's been an steady increase the rate of change and it's now moving to the vertical part of an exponential curve so that generation gaps are widening.

What that means for conservatism is that one generation's conservatism was the progressive view of the previous generation. The result is that everything is getting scrambled.

Cool, thanks

A Russian guy once told me: "You know what your problem is? You don't have enough problems."

If you play the guitar by yourself, you'll get better over time, but you'll be limited. If you play with others, your skill level will explode.

But only if you learn to listen.

If you were an idealist, you'd tell me that my assumptions about the material world around me are the product of training. You'd tell me I'm indistinguishable from a chat bot with all my talk of concrete.

You're a metaphysician. I'm an ontological anti-realist.

A 'language' in which you can 'call' something 'pain' or 'blue' lacks content. These labels would have no grip, no relation to reasoning or justifying actions. — plaque flag

I experience pain. As I said, I don't need to dredge any metaphysical swamps to know that.

Strange. I thought you were describing pretty why 'private language' doesn't make much sense. — plaque flag

Private language doesn't make sense. Most of us have private sensations, though. It's two different uses of "private."

You know exactly what sensations are ? Did you discover their exact nature ? Or is it a tautology ? Synthetic or analytics — plaque flag

If you don't know what sensations are, I probably won't be able to explain it to you. I definitely know what they are, though. I have them all the time.

metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk (private immaterial referents) is confused. — plaque flag

I'll take your word for it. I'm not sure what metaphysical dualistic radicalization of this mentalistic talk is exactly. I know exactly what sensations are, though.

It's like money. We can discuss the idea that each of us has our own 'immaterial feelings' toward 500 euros, but it makes more sense to me, in discussing what euros mean, to see how those euros are traded out in the open. — plaque flag

This seems like a strange way to go about it. I don't need any metaphysical issues laid to rest before I decide whether or not I have sensations.

But what role is 'sensation' playing here ? Does it clarify or obscure ? — plaque flag

Does it cause confusion for you?

It seems clear that we are able to remember a lot of sensations without words attached such as different tastes and smells and the feel of different textiles. — Andrew4Handel

I guess the question is: how would you confirm that odor-x that you're sensing now is the same thing you've smelled before? If you could attach it to some category like "herbal" or "plastic", then it would be easier, right?

What I have noticed is that there are many interpretations of what the private language argument is and that Wittgenstein does not present formal arguments. — Andrew4Handel

That's true. It's not actually an argument. It's just a set of observations.

The language became private when only he understood it. People can combine words from the current languages to create new meaning. That meaning may only resonate with them. — Andrew4Handel

It would help if we replace "private" with "unique and unsharable.". That's what Wittgenstein meant. It's hard to even conceive of a unique, unsharable language, that only you know. How could it have developed?

Imagine that you have some sensation that is unique only to you and there's no way to communicate what it's like to anyone else. The private language argument suggests that you might not be able to remember this sensation for lack of any external foundation for naming it.

More likely, your awareness of sensations is shaped by the language community you grew up in, since naming and remembering are grounded there.

gave the example of Einstein earlier. He formulated private ideas about physics/time/light and he didn't need to share them so they could have stayed unique to his own mind. — Andrew4Handel

He didn't have to use a private language to express his ideas. It appears that language use requires some sort of stable, external grounding to keep the rules straight. That's the intuition behind the private language argument.

I don't know the actual philosophy conservatives hold in their own minds — Vera Mont

I think it would help if you named a particular conservative.

:up:

Are they any good?

"Like public, social cases of representation such as writing or mapmaking, intentional states such as beliefs have truth-value; they entail or imply other beliefs; they are (it seems) composed of concepts and depend for their truth on a match between their internal structures and the way the world is; and so it is natural to regard their aboutness as a matter of mental referring or designation. Sellars (1956, 1967) and Fodor (1975) argue that intentional states are states of a subject that have semantical properties, and the existent-or-nonexistent states of affairs that are their objects are just representational contents." SEP

So some philosophers will say that intentionality is essentially a kind of representation, semantic in character like the hard copy of a novel represents a story. If we focus on the "mention" part of use-mention, we're focusing on the form of our representing activity. If we focus on the "use" part, we mean the thing being represented.

The article goes on to discuss whether qualitative states (like redness) are representations in this sense or not. If you're interested, we could do a reading of this article.

When you think of the Big Bang, you just mean inflation, right? You're not adding a singularity to it, are you?

The guys at Nuremburg made the mistake of identifying with their jobs. "I am a soldier. Soldiers do what they're told."

Humans can decide what and who they're going to be, how they're going to be useful. You're human first. The job is a choice.

Sorry Frank, it is easy to misinterpret in this medium. My apology, if I offended. — boagie

Not at all. It's very easy to get defensive around these parts. Some of the participants are not here to discuss. They just want to dominate and be done with it. :yikes:

Actually, that is the essential point, energy is not an object/thing, and indeed without energy being processed through biological processes there would be no thing/object. I shall watch your video; will this show me the error of my ways? — boagie

I'm not attacking you. Just discussing stuff. I'm open to your point of view, truly. I think the video just explains that energy is not an object, so you probably already know that. :smile:

Modern science, however, tells us that matter is not made of matter and that all is energy — boagie

I don't know about that. Energy isn't actually a thing, per se. Awesome video on that:

Well, to start with I guess some basics must be accepted as fact, there are two concepts of reality, apparent reality which is our everyday reality, and that of ultimate reality; — boagie

I do agree with this. I wonder if it's a built in concept, stemming from understanding what it means to be wrong or mistaken.

Good. So we can conclude that mental activity requires additional glucose.

Now where is your example of additional glucose requiring features of physiology which provide no survival advantage yet persist over available alternatives? — Isaac

So now your argument is that anything that uses glucose must have a survival advantage? Why do you think that?

Your argument was as follows:

1. The brain is a high energy organ.
2. High energy organs are likely to have survival advantage.
3. The brain produces thinking.
4. Thinking must have a survival advantage. (from 2 and 3)
Conclusion: Since thinking must have a survival advantage, experience, if it exists, must have a survival advantage.

1 and 2 are true. And the brain most definitely provides a survival advantage since it regulates every life preserving function in the body.

3. Is probably true. We don't know all the details to how mental activity works.

4 doesn't follow, though. Thinking is only one of the things the CNS contributes to, but you're pinning all of the energy used by the brain on thinking.

The research you offered shows that some kinds of thinking are associated with glucose consumption. I don't doubt that.

If 'experiences' are some kind of mental activity, and evolution has not yet produced features which are energy intensive but also useless, then we can, quite rightly conclude that it is unlikely to do so here. — Isaac

Do you know of research that picks mental activity out from the rest of the CNS's activity an evaluates it for calorie usage? I don't even know how someone would do that.

I explained that. Thinking is one of the most calorie intensive actions we do. The brain is a very expensive organ. There are no examples in the natural world of traits evolved which are calorie intensive (or otherwise costly) which nonetheless survive in the face of competition.

If you are arguing that features can be costly and still evolve, and that evolved features have no correlation to survival (or sexual selection), then you are literally arguing against the theory of evolution by natural selection. — Isaac

The brain is an obligate glucose consumer, yes. The brain does more than think, though. It directs the neuro-endocrine system, which controls blood pressure, metabolism, digestion, pretty much the whole enchilada.

I thought your argument was that there's no clear survival advantage to having experiences. My point was that if that is so, it doesn't rule out experiences. Evolution doesn't dictate that every feature of an organism provides survival advantage.

or evolutionary benefit, if you're working within the same framework as me) — Isaac

Organisms may have features that have no evolutionary benefit.

:up:

That seems tantamount to accepting the ghost as ghost? Which could turn out to be appropriate, of course. I'm just pointing out an alternative. — bongo fury

Newton was accused of introducing mysticism into physics with the idea of gravity. He protested that he didn't know what it was, but was just pointing out that it is. If someone accepted Newton's answer to the charge of mysticism, would that be tantamount to accepting that gravity is mystical?

Semantic direct realism doesn't work on a number of fronts. One is because of multiple realizability, which, as the SEP article explains, is the reason non-reductionism is the prevailing view in philosophy of mind. Pain doesn't reduce to particular actions for the same reason it can't be reduced to mental states.

Having red or blue mental images in the brain, to meet that purpose, is kind of having a ghost in the machine.

Having the brain reach for suitable words or pictures, isn't. — bongo fury

And I appreciate this. You don't have to think of experience as a collection of ghosts, though. You can just note that you do see red, and leave it unexplained exactly how.

Semantic direct realism is afflicted with multiple realizability issues on steroids.

His teachings become like someone’s great-grandmother’s bone china dinner set, entirely too rare, valuable, and historic to actually be used at a dinner. — Art48

Nice. :grin:

Exactly that. I take aspirin because I'm in pain. It's not that me being in pain just is me taking aspirin. — Michael

:up:

What if we cut out the middle man ? 'Seeing red' is acting accordingly, etc. We wise others decide that you saw red because you stopped at the light. (Stopping at the light is part of seeing red.) — green flag

If you stopped at the light because you saw that it was red, seeing was the cause and stopping was the effect. How can the effect be part of the cause? That appears to be an abuse of language.