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Showing content with the highest reputation on 03/02/11 in all areas

  1. I pre-check my premises before reading the forum. It saves time. I prefer consistency in my enemies. It makes them predictable and therefore easier to defeat, or to protect agaisnt. The religious right has integrity in spades. The left doesn't.
    1 point
  2. RationalBiker

    Tattoo Ideas

    That's really your issue though, not that person's.
    1 point
  3. The canonical example of this kind of problem is the shape of a strawberry bush. It is easy to learn to recognize what a strawberry bush looks like, nearly impossible to describe in words. It simply is not true that explicitly held concepts are necessary to perceive and judge similarities and differences at the perceptual level. You do not need to have a concept of color to see color, or a concept of length for length, or every human and every animal would be blind. Colors, lengths and shapes are epistemological givens provided to us by the automatic operation of the senses, and in the form they are given they are not and need not be universals. The description of measurement omission must be conceptual and use universals because words are employed, but the performance of the process need not be for first level concepts. This critique is a manifestation of the assumed premise that all justification is linguistic, or propositional, that words come first, or in other words, the primacy of consciousness.
    1 point
  4. Grames

    Integrating Volition

    Binswanger is wrong. In what follows I'm dependent on Diana Hsieh's retelling of Binswanger's thoughts because I don't have the course mentioned. Where he goes wrong is his analysis of what it means for something to be a philosophical primary. He keys off the word reducible such as in the definition "a primary is not reducible" and then commits himself to a view consciousness that cannot be physical lest it be found to have parts and be reducible after all. His general description of what it means to reduce something is correct but not appropriate to a logical analysis. A philosophical primary is an epistemological designation meaning that it is at the bottom of the knowledge hierarchy, a first level concept known directly and defined ostensively. We can analyze consciousness into its parts, but it requires a scientific context and a third-person perspective. We cannot reach the scientific level without first learning to be logical. We cannot learn to be logical without relying at least implicitly (and preferably explicitly) upon the axiomatic concepts existence, identity and consciousness and the axioms employing them. We don't need to look deeper because the referents of existence, identity and consciousness are givens. Binswanger is in error to argue that an epistemological primary must also be an existential primary that cannot be analyzed scientifically. His statement that connsciousness “can never be shown to exist—at any scale—of subactions that are themselves non-conscious” commits the fallacy of division. All sorts of things are composed of other things of a radically different type: chairs are composed of atoms, mammals are composed of cells. Consciousness is the action and relationship of awareness and is composed of both the body and the object it is aware of. Reductionism, when it results in denying that the thing reduced still exists, is an error. Binswanger seems particularly interested in refuting reductionism that would deny the mind exists. His method of going about it is wrong. Binswanger really should have checked himself when he was led to the conclusion that “a new force of nature”, i.e. “the physical force exerted by consciousness on its own brain” will eventually be discovered by scientists. That's just plain embarrassing. This is the kind of thing appropriate to the Coast to Coast AM radio show. Mind is an attribute of a brain, attributes are existents, so mind and brain are distinguishable but not separable existents. That much is right. His claim to being a dualist could be chalked up to rhetorical "cuteness" if he had not also posited novel physics. The Binswanger/Searle argument against AI is that consciousness assigns the meanings to the 1s and 0s of computers. It has nothing to say about an AI technique which is a non-computational awareness, where there is no a priori assignment of meaning to certain bits.
    0 points
  5. writer1972

    Tattoo Ideas

    My experience with girls who have nose or facial piercings is that they are trend followers who have no regard for their bodily integrity or their beauty.I wouldn't want them for fear of hepatitis. Same with tattoos. When they get over the trend, they have a hole or scare hanging there, a lasting mark of their foolishness. When I see someone with a ring through their nose, I see a water buffalo just waiting to be lead around. When I see a tattoo on someone, that's all that I see. The person is reduced to their tattoo. To see a woman with Twitty bird on her ankle is not cute. I sense trash. I wouldn't want that for the mother of my children. My thought is that tattoos do not present individuality, but the destruction of self. "I don't want to be scene. I want my tattoo to be scene." Branden talked about visibility as a key to human intimacy. A tattoo eliminates that entirely. Not every Catholic carries a 3 inch cross around their neck to show their devotion. If a dollar sign is too cliche to show your support for capitalism, maybe the McDonald's arch will suit you. Do you get what I mean? There's a difference between a superficiality of holding a person's natural looks against them versus the bias or revulsion towards those who knowingly and by choice foul their natural endowments, usually for the worse.
    -3 points
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