The truth, who cares about the truth! I want to be happy! — Agent Smith

Another good theme. The norm/ideal of rationality is not our only concern. It may be a detour the, invention of some darker need (such as to replicate without reason or excuse.) This is of course Nietzscheland, where the critical mind turns on itself.

We can only ever have knowledge of representations in our mind. — RussellA

This might be truish but seems like 'bachelors are unmarried men.' There's also the problematic issue of 'private knowledge' (Cartesian baggage). I suggest, inspired by Robert Brandom, that to 'know' something is to take responsibility for a judgment. We are always already within the space of reasons. If you disagree, please make a case. (And there's the rub. )

It is true that I find it impossible to question the ontological existence of a mind-independent world....
Otherwise I would be diagnosing myself as schizophrenic, hallucinating about things that are not really there. — RussellA

As I see it, the idea of the self always already includes the idea of the other. Your 'I' or 'self' is the bearer of responsibilities and entitlements, the 'virtual' source of deeds and claims, and the target of rewards and sanctions. It's absurd to rationally question the very framework of rationality. It's literally anti-social madness.

We learn by observing nature. Then we take those observations and extract their essences. — jgill

I'm with you in spirit, but perhaps we dream up those essences and only later learn to check if they or their implications are compatible with observations.

It's more likely because some stranger has just accosted them with an unclear and possibly provocative intent and they are not sure how to react. — Cuthbert

Checkmark.

An argumentum ad consequentiam is a fallacy they say...naaah! — Agent Smith

That's a nice issue to bring up. The fallacious version seems to point at practical consequences, so that an inconvenient truth is no less true for all that. But inferential consequences are something else. If 0 has a multiplicative inverse, then it's easy to prove that 0 = 1. I must abandon my belief that 0 has such an inverse or, far less likely, modify a vast system of related beliefs.

I don't understand why metaphysics gives some people conniption fits. It is like arguing since we cannot determine what is always the right thing to do, we must eliminate ethics. — Jackson

Good issue. For some it seems to suggest something too much like religion or superstition (insufficiently rational). Others may see it as a stuffy father figure (too rational.)

A critique of 'logocentrism' (a term invented by Ludwig Klages) initially suggests that Derrida was a hippy. Mikic's Who Was Jaque Derrida emphasizes the 'revolutionary' timing of the early work (Of Grammatology in '67.) But the rebel who was going to fuck things up from the inside was honest enough to admit that all his weapons were stolen from the enemy. If there's something outside the haunted house of metaphysics, it's only to be fetishized at a distance. (What's so bad about metaphysics and dad's rock'n'roll? Is it not always already an assimilated sequence of failed revolutions? Derrida leaves a few nice stains of his own.)

Here's a nice quote from a mic drop moment that introduced him to the world at large. (I come not to prays structuralism but to berry it.)

From then on it became necessary to think the law which governed, as it were, the desire for the center in the constitution of structure and the process of signification prescribing its displacements and its substitutions for this law of the central presence-but a central presence which was never itself, which has always already been transported outside itself in its surrogate. The surrogate does not substitute itself for anything which has somehow pre-existed it. From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a beingpresent, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse... when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum.

Where and how does this decentering, this notion of the structurality of structure, occur? It would be somewhat naive to refer to an event, a doctrine, or an author in order to designate this occurrence. It is no doubt part of the totality of an era, our own, but still it has already begun to proclaim itself and begun to work. Nevertheless, if I wished to give some sort of indication by choosing one or two "names," and by recalling those authors in whose discourses this occurrence has most nearly maintained its most radical formulation, I would probably cite the Nietzschean critique of metaphysics, the critique of the concepts of being and truth, for which were substituted the concepts of play, interpretation, and sign (sign without truth present); the Freudian critique of self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession; and, more radically, the Heideggerean destruction of metaphysics, of onto-theology, of the determination of being as presence. But all these destructive discourses and all their analogues are trapped in a sort of circle. This circle is unique. It describes the form of the relationship between the history of metaphysics and the destruction of the history of metaphysics. There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language --- no syntax and no lexicon ---which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

I'm interested in 'the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations' that seemingly cannot be evaded. What is it that's already there, wherever we have gathered to philosophize? What are the unwritten rules of the game that, among other moves, allow for making these rules explicit?

The fact that I can codify and quantify using reason, logic and mathematics the "laws of nature" that I observe on the train, and still be applicable on the far side of the universe, is not a measure of success of my reasoning, logic and mathematics, but rather is a measure of the regularity and invariance of the "laws of nature".

Without such regularity and invariance in "the laws of nature", our reasoning, logic and mathematics would count for nothing.

IE, mathematics is only effective because of the unreasonable regularity in the "laws of nature" — RussellA

That sounds right. If nature were more chaotic, we might still have a rich 'science of formal systems,' but this would probably have little interest or prestige apart away from its specialists.

A spout that shoots out all the clean hot water you want into a container convenient for soaking a human body in, with little bricks of white slime that gets the grime off skin and makes it smell good.

8. Fully balanced, nutritious meal in pill form. — Tom Storm

Or make it liquid, to save having to chew.

Let’s be honest.

1. Sexbot — praxis

Design the face and body to millimeter precision. Skin texture, internal temperature, audio could be controlled by AI monitoring user response.

All discussions therefore, even if frutiful, are only fruitful in service of the "concepts" which are ultimately empty labels for the "thing". — SatmBopd

Hope this isn't too much of a tangent, but this reminds me of something I read in Brandom recently. (If anyone has studied his work, it'd be fun to discuss.)

we cannot understand the ontological structure of the objective world . . . except in terms that make essential reference to what subjects have to do in order to count as taking the world to have that structure -- even though the world could have that structure in the absence of any subjects and their epistemic activities.

https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/a-spirit-of-trust-a-reading-of-hegels-phenomenology/

He regards philosophical problems to arise from linguistic confusion. — Fooloso4

We might also say that he gave us new problems to think about.

"Grammar" gets to be a bit abstract with Wittgenstein. — Jackson

I like thinking of W's 'grammar' in terms of norms (as featured in Robert Brandom's work). The tacitly 'proper' way to use words, among those who are therefore 'our' people, tends to be mistaken for some deep law of reality.

everyone on board perished, they just don't know it. — Agent Smith

Nice. Instead of the cave, we have the sunken ship. One analogy is used to dissolve another.

science studies nature from the macro to the subatomic. — universeness

Good point.