Here 2 gives a partial metric on grrreatness, where a real mermaid is independent, self-aware, sentient, alive, which a fictional mermaid is not. — jorndoe

Ariel does have all of those attributes. She's fictionally independent, fictionally self-aware, fictionally alive. An empirical concept, and an ideal/imaginary one are not distinct in some attributable way that bares on the concepts themselves, that's why we have to go out and look for things.

You're just equivocating between two different concepts of "Ariel".

All obscure, arcane, and complex is it? That's usually the claim. If it's any good, it's straightforward. If it's ineffably enchantingly dumbfoundingedly mystical, then it's usually shit, or just more and more and more words to hide up an inability to square some circle.

Yeah, which is why movie "examples" of the way the world is has made us all idiots. The cooler thing is how examples are just that, particular examples of members of a category, but the experience of an exemplar is an experience of the universal itself instantiated in the particular. It's not merely an example of a car, it's an example of how cars ought to be. It's a combination of an analytic judgment, and an aesthetic judgment. The former being on the determination of what something is, and the latter a judgment of beauty or aesthetic that this is precisely as it ought to be. The exemplary is the only example of a judgment that it can be said that the world as it is, and as it should be, are one and the same.

Yes, that's what I mean, not you, him.

I knew it was irony, as Wayfarer just isn't the kind of guy to quote Crowley with veneration. He stole the quote from Augustine, and omitted the thing that made all the difference. "love, and do as thou wilt, and that will be the whole of the law".

Mums the word.

I really like this angle, which I haven't pursued in depth, and need to. I think that this is a fruitful angle, that I'm going to explore more.

Thanks for your characteristicly exemplary posts.

If you want to talk about normalizing, and recruitment then lesbians are demolishing gay men. The numbers for men that have reported homosexual experiences have remained the same, and used to exceed women, but now women beat men by like almost four times. I think that it went from like 4% to 16% or something.

You don't all see that if guys don't smarten up, then it's going to be subterranean milking facilities for the lot of them.

I'm highly sympathetic to this view, I think that most enticingly, it creates the largest window for novelty and innovation. The draw back is that without truly universal principles, we can only account for local cogency, sensibility (window so big, everything else falls out).

Haven't read all of these newfangled moderns, but I liked how Madoka Magica dealt with it. General principles can be novel, and are generated with particular exemplars, but the principle then retroactively effects the past as if it were present all along, and projects into the future.

Interestingly enough also, this is a theological problem too. One cannot account for a universal savior that shows up at a particular time and place, unless in some sense this reverberates throughout the past, as well as the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrowing_of_Hell

Problems with it is that if we want to keep things at the level of the apparent, or physical, then to become exemplary is to follow a certain path, as it were, to reproduce material circumstances, and conditions. The preciser the conditions, the closer the result.

The fusion of is and ought (I like that) is still really reduced to more is, than ought. As unless something were the static maximum, rather than a surpassable, or point along on a path with more road, then it still is just an is, and the ought in the sense of what is better cannot be shown, until it is literally shown, and then it too, falls to the "is" bin immediately.

Not nearly as well read as you are, just giving my cobbled together perspective, and if it seems like I'm just repeating things I've heard nonsensically like an infant baby person, then just cut me some slack. Gotta start somewhere.

I doubt that anyone suggests that homosexuals are incapable of celibacy, it's rather that just like a heterosexual person, they don't consciously decide to be attracted to what they're attracted to. Just like I really really love dog walking. Best thing ever. If I have to refrain from dog walking, then that's torture. I'm going to want a good reason for why I ought to refrain from the best thing ever. Emotive insubstantial analogy to murderers and pedophiles notwithstanding.

Pretty bad at its job though... to be a bomb that is sent on the enemy that can be easily persuaded to come back and blow you up instead.

I dunno... bomb seemed pretty gullible to me.

You could prevent the bomb from exploding with zeno's paradox, convincing it that it has to actually count an infinite string of numbers before it can finalize its count down.

I'd be all like "saw that you were alone besides 'false data' apparently... look only the precise content can be doubted, but whether things look, sound, smell, taste or whatever as they appear is irrelevant to their ability to be sensible, and nonsensical, significant and insignificant. Doubt itself requires grounds, which is why you never doubted your senses until prompted to. What's important is not whether they're possibly false, but whether they're plausibly false... now get back out there and fucking explode asshole".

because there is a folly of wisdom that thinks it can encompass even itself, let alone the world, let alone God. — unenlightened

Speaking of thirdness, that's Kant's right there. The transcendental illusions, the three transcendental objects that we can't help but posit, but can never be possible objects of experiences (according to Kant): the soul, the world, and God.

The wosret is many things.

To further expand, what's implied in the way you're talking is that Ariel is really thoughts in people's head, pictures, pixels on screens, words on pages, recorded sound vibrations by people pretending to be her and such, and then you're equivocating this with what Ariel actually is supposed to be.

She only can't speak because of a magic spell, not because she's fictional. That's like saying that a hypothetical 100 pound weight is actually weightless because it isn't real.

Or worse yet, that there isn't actually any different at all between Ariel before and after she is muted.

You're going to have to expand on this "grrreat" concept.

Now that said... weirdo reclusive defiant hoarder with only animal friends with no consideration at all whatsoever for others. Isn't tricked or anything, seeks out, and signs a contract in plain english knows what she's in for, doesn't give a shit about talking to her prince at all enough to think of writing a note... and then is unwilling to deal with the consequences of any of her actions, and just gets saved from them by her dad and boy friend...

To insert some Hegel here, we can say that an essence is both limited, and finite. It is limited in the sense of physical constrains, but also finite in that it isn't everything, and begins and ends. The former is an other relation, and the latter a self-relation.

Say for instance that we want to say that Sherlock Holmes can fly. We can achieve this in one of two ways. We can either change his physical circumstances, or we have to change the thing that he is. We can put him on a plane in modern times, or in some sense his very being must be altered. When we change him to be able to fly, then his limitations become different. No matter where we put Sherlock Holmes, he cannot fly unaided, survive in space, or something like that because of the thing he is. None of that it included in his identity -- and it is this that determines his physical limitations.

So... I would suggest the obvious, that "greatest" here has to just be an evaluation, and can't be a quantifiable difference in affectiveness or potency, or ability, as the capabilities of a thing are implied in its very essence. Existence isn't a predicate.

Peirce strikes me as less than interesting. Most significantly, he doesn't actually explain in any way how objects constrain their signs. I also don't quite get the unbroken symmetry concrete vagueness... which really just seems to be saying "the relationship between singularity and unity is unclear, because it just is objectively unclear".

I was just playing around. I don't know if we would have a name for it at all. I imagine that nothing actually would be visible without contrast, quality, saturation, shading a such, so that even if it were all "green" there would have to bee different kinds of green, I would assume.

Not to be pedantic, and miss any points. Besides that, I dunno.

Opposites are different than negatives though. Like the opposite of up is down, but the negation of "up" is just "not up" but could be any arbitrary direction besides up.

Would the smell of peanuts, the taste of coffee, and the feeling of freshly laundered cloths all be green too? Is justice green?

Well, right, left, up down are all positive things. "not-me", "not-us" and "not-shit" are not, and could really conceivably be anything at all except for me, us, and shit..

I've still going to have to think about what you've said more, do a little reading on the subject before I get back to you. Probably tomorrow, I've been up for too long to try to read complex stuff right now.

It's moronic because it insinuates that I'm some naive idiot, particularly when I'm being sarcastic.

Besides that, "winning someone over" is just another way to say to persuade, or endear someone to something. It carries no sexist, romantic, or sexual significance in itself whatsoever, it's just a common expression.

Even if it wasn't though, and it could have been interpreted that way, I was just insulted that she thought that I would be someone that would think that way. Clearly didn't know me at all.

Thanks a lot for the post, gonna have to give it more thought.

I feel like we could never truly understand each other if that were the case, and I find that too tragic...

Oh, I don't know what's what. I'm just saying ideas and positions I like more, or find more satisfying. Definitely not claiming to know what I'm talking about her. I'm just thinking out loud.

"Crisp" is "yup, definitely that", and "vagueness" or a "heuristic" is "ya.. kinda... close enough".

It's unsatisfactory to say that there isn't a real standard that shoots through all things of a kind, through time and space. Otherwise we may be talking about an entirely different world now than we were then... like literally. If the standard is floating and relational, then nothing keeps it tethered at all, and things could be entirely unrecognizable throughout space and time.

Also, it would call into question the idea of innate categories or dispositions, as there'd be no guarantee that they'd be at all applicable, or helpful through time.

All of this leads to unpalatable places, in my view.

Yeah, it's all part of its meaning. They definitely form each other's meaning relationally, but the relation itself is abstract, and applicable to many things with zero physical, or structural similarities themselves. Is then, up down left and right just shit we made up?

Kant interests me a lot lately. If categories are synthetic a priori, then this implies that all contents can be correlated. The understanding can be completed. See, the way we really arrive at understanding is through reduction to general principles through summary. We summarize information, and then summarize the summary, until we finally arrive at the general principle, whether intuitively or explicitly. It's what we all are always doing, all the time.

Thing is, that Kant was a godbotherer, so he may have assumed that when we've maxed our understanding, correlated all of our contents, then there is nothing left, and we've got to all da secrets now! But, if we're just evolved creatures, then completing our understanding, may not be all that impressive. It also implies that an alien species could be entirely incomprehensible to us. I do prefer the idea that what forms the categories of the understanding are real general features of the world, which are not "for us" specifically.

Hemispheres are not really distinquishable besides through their specific features, and orientations. I mean, the polarity could shift, and the south pole could become the north pole and vice versa.

Thing is though, that a comparison for difference and similarity has to be crisp in my view. Can't be simply a heuristic, as if the thing in question itself were both simultaneously the same and different. Something is similar because it has points of sameness, and points of difference. The different things are different, and the same things are the same.

Otherwise we have like Humean "bleen" scenarios. Say that "blue" and "green" are not self-identical, but merely self-similar. If the "similarity" between them is always vague, moving, and relational, then five hundred years ago all of the colours everyone else saw could have been entirely different, and nothing at all similar to how they are today.

You don't have much of a bastion between quotes and rhetoric do you?

Just sounds like perspectivism. Universals would have to be immanent, maybe something like exemplars, and similarity reduced to a historical track of particular effects, and signification.

I dunno... it's basically just physics as metaphysics.

They do indeed, but I think that a proper explanation outlines how they interact and form one and others, like the length and width of a rectangle forming its area. Whether one is properly basic and the other derivative, or both are fundamental or whatever.

All of these choices of words are psychological terms. A "difference that makes a difference" suggests a difference that matters, a significant difference... by what standard does a difference become a significant difference? Why does this difference matter but not any other? The only non-psychological approach to this I can see is to suggest that "making a difference" means literally, quantifiable more of a difference than something else -- but then what could indifference be in this context other than no difference at all.

Not trying to be confrontational, I just don't get it.

What does "a difference which makes a difference" mean other than "a difference that matters"? Which is, again, a disposition.

I don't see much import of talking like that.

Significance is also a psychological disposition. At best these must be metapors or analogies for some third thing which must be of the same kind of thing as difference and unity...

Maybe those are not the best terms to use when discussing the topic... but are psychological terms really better?

"Indifference" seems too anthropomorphic to me, too steeped in intentional emotional states. I do think that intention or emotion is ubiquitous with living things, so that the flea is a fine example, but it seems to me that I'd have to yield to some form of panpyschism. Maybe the rocks are toeing lines. It makes sense to talk of the fleas investments and indifference... but the rock can't be indifferent in the relevant sense, otherwise it wouldn't be similar to other rocks. It must be invested in being a rock.