Comments

  • Bang or Whimper?


    By the power of gray skull.
  • Language games


    In what context does a cat in the woods become a baby? You first say that things can't be said without words, and then say that for this reason, words constitute the empirical relationships between things...

    These jumping off points begin in midair.
  • Language games


    I think that that's like suggesting that water isn't always wet, because mirages aren't wet. Misidentifying something doesn't make it necessarily related to that thing, just because you thought it was.
  • Language games
    Not that I have any idea or anything. I don't like to determine or constrain things. I'm an agent of chaos, of liberation, emancipation.

    What keeps the engine running smoothly is faith, work, relaxation, and love. Believe that you're already the standard by which "smoothly" is to be judged. Work with the precision of Odin, relax like everything is perfect and beautiful in the world, and love at least one thing more than yourself.
  • What is "self-actualization"- most non-religious (indirect) answer for purpose?


    Personally, I'd rather read Un. That's why he should always post more.
  • Language games
    Only, I dunno, I'd call "entailed meaning" or something like that, meaning that actually does require the surrounding context to make sense of. Things that require inference, thought, putting things together.

    Not everything is like that though. A baby monitor works, because regardless of context, "I'm being harmed or terrified" noises are the same regardless of the surrounding context.

    Since racial slurs are fine in the right context, and with the right intent, they ought to be fine to say, and one shouldn't feel anything at all about saying them with abandon in the right contexts. This of course isn't true, it would always feel inappropriate to say.

    You could say that we're all just deluded, and emotionally invested in somethings, so that we read more into them than what's given, or that the meaning of things bleed out beyond their contexts.
  • Does might make right?


    I know, right? I think that when it's me though, it's just that Mandela effect, where I've like quantum jumped to a parallel reality where my keys are somewhere different than I remember. See, the universe is wrong, never me.
  • Language games


    Are they all on a bigger thing, like a boat or something?
  • Does might make right?
    What does right mean here, in this context? Getting what you want and making people believe you? That's what "right" is?

    Can might get you what you want and make people believe you? Sure it can. Can the money in your bank account, your ten million soldier army, 75 thousand nuclear warheads, and freakin laser beams from space make your math equations correct? The memory of where your left your keys accurate? Your perception of those around you and their feelings towards you more true? You metaphysical positions more factual?

    In any real sense of "right", then of course not. But, yeah, you certainly will find it easier to get what you want and make people believe you.
  • Language games


    What about Derrida's "differance"?
  • Philosophy of Glory


    You were no one else before that?
  • Philosophy of Glory
    Aren't you that Wolfmoon guy, or whatever it was?
  • Intention or consequences?
    What is the alternative to good intentions? Just knowing how things will turn out? Accident?
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    Different levels of ability, and different natural capacities that may contradict actual levels of ability are not the same things to me.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    I know what it means to say that people have different levels of ability, but you didn't say that until just now, you say a far less clear thing which doesn't mean that.

    You then go on not to talk about different levels of ability, but different starting potentials or something. How that works precisely isn't clear to me.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    I'm not sure what that means, so I'm not sure.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    Or I should say, that the "cortexes" visual, linguistic and such are the faculties of reflection, which utilize non-conscious sensuous modes symbolically.

    So that the development of one's visual cortex is indicative of their ability to access the non-conscious tools of visual formation.

    So, looking at it this way, I think you're also right.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    Not to just repeat myself, but I just feel like, given the knowledge of brain structures, that simply can't be the case. One develops their faculties through there use, rather than gaining greater and greater access to a static capacity.

    In practice, it wouldn't make much difference what one supposed what going on though, I would think. If I thought that through whatever process I was gaining greater and greater access to my sub-conscious visualizations, or I was just becoming better and better at visualization because of the activities I'm engaged in.

    The results of either idea are the same.
  • Why be moral?
    Infanticide is big in the animal kingdom in general, but I think that it's always about scarcity. When a population is having trouble supporting the group, they kill the ones everyone is least attached to. A hell of a lot of babies were just still born as well, so it's often hard to tell. Plus the Romans accused a lot of places of heavy infanticide and human sacrifice. They only fight just wars, you see.

    The Syrian thing is really probably about not looking to close to Putin, justified by war sanctions against chemical weapons, and fronted as a moral issue. This is a six year civil war, and it would have been fine if they just bombed them all normally, but it's illegal to use gas. 70 people killed, but last time when it was 1000 Trump said that it was no big deal, and not to get involved in it.

    They were also sending out strikes from the air base that the US bombed an hour later.
  • Philosophy of Glory
    The Iliad.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    I have a big family of vivid visual thinkers, a couple of whom are great artists. When I was a kid I knew something was wrong because I couldn't look away from something, and then draw it, because I couldn't keep an image of it in my mind.

    My little brother was great at art, and had an imaginary friend when he was really young. He told me that he could see images pretty good in his mind. I got a book on "drawing for left brain people" or something like that, which was basically just about drawing when you suck at visualizing.

    Long story short, I still draw for shit from imagination, but I can replicate things alright, I just had to learn to draw without looking at my hands.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    Lol, yeah, I knew it was more fellating, and you weren't actually questioning the legitimacy of your life. Yourself that time.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    That is wise. Not to make you question the legitimacy of your whole life, but I can have that effect.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    I think that it's simpler, and less fellating, based on both the knowledge that he wasn't super quick to pick up language, and his language brain regions are smaller than average, while his spacial and mathematical ones are bigger than averages suggests that he leaned more into these faculties because of a deficit in his speech faculties. I doubt that he was just too brilliant to figure out "dog" and "cat" because he needed his first words to be about complex physics or something...
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    "Scientific studies have suggested that regions involved in speech and language are smaller, while regions involved with numerical and spatial processing are larger." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein%27s_brain

    Not according to what I've read about him, or his brain. Why disagree?
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    Lol, it's not the size that matters, but how you use it!
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    I don't claim that anything is constructed after the fact.

    In Schopenhauer's the art of controversy he says something about it being great if people's head were transparent and you could see their brains. Unlike Phrenology, it is true that people's brains can tell you a lot about them. May not be able to explain consciousness and things, but lots of different characteristic structures have been linked to certain practices, and skills. This is basically what neuroplasticity means, that the structure of the brain can be changed based on the things you're doing. So that, there is a characteristic structure for playing piano, and things like that. As I mentioned with Einstein, he had a big visual cortex, and wasn't as great with language.

    I doubt that I have a super vivid visual imagination hiding in the subconscious that I just can't access. I think that it's more likely that I have a small, or even damaged visual cortex, and you have a big and well developed one.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    What's the visual property of being a diabetic racist? How could you see that the cover-less book was the Lord of the Rings? What about the image of the location showed it to be that person's home?Michael

    Having no experience myself, I think that I can authoritatively field this one. There is no inherent meaning in sounds, sensations, images, smells or tastes, so that I think that it doesn't matter the form or mode, they're just used to represent things to ourselves that reside in the understanding. What detail about anyone's house makes it their house? It's simply understood to be their house. Likewise, a coverless book is just understood to be the lord of the rings, and etc.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    I always thought that "photographic memory" didn't literally imply visual memory, but really accurate memory.

    It seems a more accurate use of the word to say that I had a photographic memory if I can precisely itemize every detail of an image, or words of a book without missing anything, then I think this would be called a photographic memory, because of my perfect recollection, not because the mode of my recollection is visual.

    Nor do I suppose that really super vivid visual imagination skills necessitates a better memory of anything at all, but just a better ability to represent visual images to oneself, and that is all.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies


    That's a true fact, you got me there.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    You know, Einstein had a huge visual cortex apparently.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    When talking about psychological gender differences, there are many folk ones that might be right, but the differences statistically that have been discovered, though existing, are way too slight to be predictive. Like the greatest differences are like 60/40 one way or the other. Physiologicaly differences are much much greater, like men are on average better at throwing a rock than 90% of women.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    If I press hard on my eyes, with them closed then it kind of makes colours, that I can kind of imagine are things, and warp into things. Maybe the ability to visualize has something to do with pressure, or shape of the eyes, which is why most people need glasses, and it's just my astounding visual acuity that prevents it.
  • Aphantasia and p-zombies
    I think that it does clearly affect what we think, though this fact hardly escapes everyone. Socrates seemed to take people that had audio revelations seriously, but not those that had visual ones. No doubt because his daimon was a voice and not an image. Spinoza knew this though, and suggested that hearing the voice of god meant that one thought in a predominantly auditory faculty, and seeing a burning bush suggested a visual dominance, etc.

    I also mentioned earlier the college experiment, and keeping track of a minute from Chomsky, where he discovered that he was audibly counting, and his friend was imagining a clock counting. This meant that Chomsky could read, but not talk, he was too busy counting in his head, and his friend could talk but not read, because he couldn't take his "mind's eye" off of the clock.

    And, indeed, some people do always visualize everything they think and hear.