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Thanked Posts by Anal Turing
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2018-10-15 at 3:41 PM UTC in Enough has been said about Kavanaugh to disqualify his appointmentAs a justice of the supreme court. Whether or not things happened as CBF said, enough has been demonstrated in the course of contesting her claims, to say that Kavanaugh is not fit for the position, which is one of the most consequential and importantly positions of power in the USA and, by extension, the world.
This is including but not limited to his own multiple, demonstrable instances of perjury during the process, for example lying about what boofing means. Either he is so hopelessly incompetent and out of touch that he doesn't know what boofing actually means, or telling a bald faced, transparent lie about it meaning flatulence.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-24 at 4:31 PM UTC in what the fuck is lifeThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-25 at 10:24 PM UTC in How do I claw my way our of the epistemological void I find myself in?
Originally posted by Lanny It seems like the issue you're taking here is that you suppose Descartes is committed to a fairly specific conception of "self" or "I" or "himself" while I'm not so sure that he is. Like you take Descartes to be saying there's some kind of self with a wholly independent existence from thoughts and experiences, to which experiences are presented. And to be fair the way he talks about does lend itself to this reading.
But I don't think his argument relies on it, and in light of this objection his position seems salvageable by simply saying the self is an emergent property of thoughts, there is no "double perception" or "experience of experience". The "I" which doubts is simply a consequence of doubt itself, indeed doubt is position with respect to belief, it doesn't really makes sense to talk about belief just exist, belief by nature of the concept has to be relative to some kind of thing which can hold beliefs. We don't need to posit any kind of essential identity to the doubter, we don't need to say the subject which doubts has this "receives perceptions" quality. The "I" is not presupposed, it's necessitated by doubt itself.
I'm glad you said that, because it sets up the problem perfectly; from a pure skepticism perspective, the only thing that you can't doubt is the simple action of doubting (and not it's mechanism). No belief or judgment of truth value is actually needed: all you need is the act of rejection. That's what it boils down to.
The inferences of the mechanism, and thereby the existence of any "I" or subject of doubt follows from that. And that fact, the order, basically deletes the problem.Didn't you just say Descartes' method of doubt doesn't lead to solipsism? How do you reject a distinction between external reality and experience but deny solipsism? Are you arguing for a retreat into total skepticism?
There is no point where the external becomes internal. It's all "external", i.e. phenomena in the world. It is fine to see that action of doubt as the root of our epistemology but in an objective sense, it's just an ontological "peak" that our epistemology trickles down from.I categorically reject local experiences, I don't think it makes sense to talk about them in a strict sense in the same way I don't think it makes sense to ask "where is mathematics?". As they are non-physical, and quite obviously lack many physical properties like mass, I think it doesn't make sense to assign physical coordinates or volume to experience.
If you believe naive realists, then phenomenal experiences (and ultimately even conceptual things, like maths) are simply your acquaintance to the actual, real, accurate properties of the world.
So, as an example, would you consider mass to be nonlocal because it doesn't have any other properties? Or would you consider it a property of the world at the point where it manifests? We can treat phenomenal qualities in the exact same way.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-25 at 1:52 PM UTC in How do I claw my way our of the epistemological void I find myself in?
Originally posted by Lanny OK, I'm not sure this is really an well agreed upon fact but I would seem to agree. I'm not sure how that leads to:
There will always be crazy guys who believe in hidden spoops in the machine, but contemporary philosophers almost invariably agree on something between functionalism and naïve realism. This also includes people like John Searle, of Chinese Room fame.Why am I not my thoughts? And if I really am not my my thoughts then I can still defend Descartes by saying "well the cogito isn't "me", it's my thoughts".
I think you misread the quote. I would say "I am my thoughts" is a somewhat accurate statement. What I'm objecting to is the idea that you are anything except your thoughts (and what goes into making them), that you are some subject consuming these thoughts rather than just the result of these thoughts "happening".
If Descartes is fine with saying "I am just my thoughts", then there is no more problem left over. His statement is something like "I cannot doubt that I am doubting". Sure "you" can! Descartes's mistake, from which the problem of knowledge emerges, is simply that he stopped one step short: from a perspective of pure doubt, the only
statement you can make is just "there is no doubt that there are doubts", or simply "there are thoughts". If you can just admit that, the problem of knowledge epistemically disappears into just making sure your sensory "thoughts" corroborate one another.
The presupposition of "I" in the foundation is a critical error that creates a space for further doubt.Descartes is an interactionist but his interactionism doesn't really have anything to do with the cogito
Interactionism (or the dualism under it) is a direct and inescapable consequence of the cogito, thus stated.he didn't suppose the mechanism of deception was the presentation of false experience to his soul directly or anything. He's not committed to his soul being him, at least for the purposes of meditations.
He is committed to a "him", and the soul is his model for that, which shows his philosophical commitments. The fact that he recedes to "clearly and distinctly perceiving things because God wouldn't let an evil demon deceive me" to resolve the problem is telling.
His correspondences with Elisabeth are a very worthwhile read (PDF warning).
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/descartes1643_1.pdf
But the point of the discussion isn't Descartes himself, but whether or not his method of doubt produces the outcome of solipsism or the problem of knowledge: it does not, if you just go one step beyond and remove the I from the basis.If a contemporary had made this argument, and he was willing to entertain the thought-without-self idea (still not really clear to me) he could just say "look at that thought, even you agree that thought exists, that's the cogito".
If that were true, he would have no grounding to believe any deception was possible. I am fine with him just arriving to "there are thoughts".Descartes does seem to have believed in an "essential" soul, but again, I'm not seeing how it's critical to cogito ergo sum.
It's not critical to cogito, it just demonstrates what his conception of "I" was, which you have no reason to presuppose the existence of.Descartes wasn't doubting the "validity of your experiences to you", he doubted that they represented some kind of external reality. He'd probably say all our experiences are "valid" to us in that we truly experience them.
The error is "you", and this creates a further error of splitting off external reality from your internal experiences. This is simply not necessary.Well so see above for why I don't think a rejection of personal identity or personal essentialism really poses a problem, but I think this thought experiment fails long before that because even very naive accounts of identity don't rely on names as our essential quality.
The thought experiment isn't meant to show that personal identity fails (although it does), it is simply that he will be left with two sets of epistemically equivalent, irreconcilable doubts simply by any commitment to any "I", which is very simply solved by abandoning anybiota of fundamental idemtity. We can take any property instead of his name, the name is just an easy example.I'd argue experience doesn't really happen anywhere. Like sure, we have a sense of locality, like we experience touch as being local to some region of our model of the world, specifically the part we occupy (usually) and that's super interesting but I'd say you're wrong if you point to a limb and say "look there, an experience!", or if you pointed to a head and said the same thing. Asking "where is this experience happening" is a bit like asking "where is mathematics" or "where is Descartes' Meditations". I could point to a number of books or websites or brains that instantiate those things in some way, but it would be comical to pick up one and be like "look, here, this is mathematics. Mathematics weighs 1.2 lbs and is made mostly out of dead trees".
Is an instance of Descartes's Meditations sitting on your bookshelf? Might you say that an instance of pain is occurring in your hand?Experience very likely relies (supervenes) on material substance which does have a location and volume and other physical properties but that doesn't mean experience itself is local.
If the substrate is local and the content of the experience includes the feeling of being located at the substrate, what might differentiate a nonlocal experience from a local experience?I see what you're saying here, and I'll back away from saying sensory integration counts as evidence of a subject, but I still don't think you have a positive argument for rejection the notion of a self here. So sure, experience is experience, it's not some kind of information that's fed into the subject and mystically integrated there. But I still say look, there's an experience, it's thinking, it's the cogito. Maybe there's some kind of relation between some sequences of experiences that gives rise to an essential self across time or maybe there's not, doesn't matter, there's still something that's thinking, that's thinking about itself, and which is asking "can I doubt my own existence?" and concluding, correctly, "no, I can't".
Well no, this is the same mistake as Descartes: there is no logical reason that "there is doubt" necessarily entails "there is a doubter". All that does is saddle the experience of doubt with the experience of experiencing doubt.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-24 at 1:45 PM UTC in How do I claw my way our of the epistemological void I find myself in?
Originally posted by Lanny I've heard this argument before but I never really got how it was supposed to work. Like what is free floating thought without a subject to think? The idea of thought without someone to think is obviously something that's never been encountered in our experience
The idea is simply that the observer isn't some unitary "bottom level" that experiences are delivered to, rather it is a phenomenon that emerges from and supervenes on unconscious phenomena, of which experiences and thoughts are a few.
"You" aren't "using" your thoughts, "you" are just the "narrative center of gravity" for your thoughts (as Dan Dennett puts it).but OK, we're Cartesians, so is it logically invalid? Like it kinda seems like that to me but let's try and abuse the notions of "subject" and "thought" or "doubt" as much as we can and postulate the thought which happens without a mind to conceive it. So what? That thought exists, perception exists, would Descartes even be bothered by this? He just says "ah, that thought over there without a thinker, that's what exists, that's the cogito" and bam, done.And I'm still not convinced perception without the subject is coherent, I think the idea of a subject is embedded in perception and necessitates it, but even if it doesn't what thesis built on cogito ergo sum is overturned?
Descartes would be very bothered, because the idea he is battling is that his thoughts and experiences could be a misrepresentation being "presented" to "him". Descartes was an interactionist who believed that the soul interacted with the body through the pineal gland, and the body was just syntactical machinery for the mind to manipulate.
The whole problem of the evil demon hinges on a notion of an essential identity of experience. Simply accepting that the thoughts are what there are, leaves no problem: if an evil scientist is constructing these thoughts in a jar, there is no "essence" to pull out into the real world and give real thoughts to, any continuity between them would just be the persistence of a "ship of Theseus" blob of mental and physical states which are interrelated and form some kind of collective identity, none of which are at all essential.
If "you" are just constructed out of your experiences, then there is no reason to doubt the validity of your experiences to you.
Imagine if the evil scientist pulls Descartes out of a vat and retains all his memories except he changes the memory of his name in the real world to "Rene Detrolley". Is Descartes or Detrolley having the experience of being lied to about being the other?
There is a reason why he resorted to "uhhhhh, god did it" in his dialogues with princess Elizabeth on dualism.What exactly is this supposed to be a test of?
The fact that your experience isn't happening at some central location in your head, it is distributed throughout your body, and actually felt and experienced in your limbs. The head fallacy is a very easy mistake to make because our eyes and ears are in there, and both are central to determining our position in the world.Descartes would seem to disagree, maybe coordination of sensory information is also a function of the subject and the fact that we experience a variety of qualitatively distinct streams of perception is further evidence for the subject (i.e. the fact that there seems to be something which both sees and hears, even if these perceptions don't reflect reality, suggests there is at least a subject in which they are unified or integrated), but that that is something which "you" do doesn't seem like any kind of argument against "your" existence.
That road leads to what is known as the homunculus fallacy, i.e. it simply transposes the question of how you perceive things and weave these threads together, onto how the little observer in your head does it. They are the same question. Does he have a little observer in his head?
There is no need to reach for such silliness because the premise is just pointless and flawed: to experience sight is to experience sight, you don't need to have the experience and then another experience of the experience. The experience is the experience.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-27 at 3:48 PM UTC in The psychology behind ohfralala's tit pic.This thread is fucking trashThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-26 at 6:42 PM UTC in I’m really sad
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2018-10-26 at 5:26 AM UTC in I’m really sadThere is no god. There is no good. There is only the throes of the mortal wound of life, and our futile efforts to enjoy the pain.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-26 at 3:24 AM UTC in Guess what the user above you does for moneyAssbaby for rich big dick niggerThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-25 at 11:58 AM UTC in Goldmoney is fucking retarded and if you use it, you are a fucking retard.With the growing adoption of cryptocurrency, we will see the rise of the new crypto jedi.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-24 at 5:41 PM UTC in Life on other planetsThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-24 at 2:20 PM UTC in Guess what the user above you does for moneyJohnny had a reputation for being the class serious.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-24 at 2:22 PM UTC in Guess what the user above you does for moneyBarman = BatmanThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-24 at 4:05 AM UTC in I won the mega million.
Originally posted by PrettyHateMachine If I wins billion dollars I would start a record label, record store, fund some vr projects and a game development studio and fund some white nationalist groups.
Oh and I would give like $300,000,000 to a white nationalist to run for president they could use that money for their campaign.
The rest I would give to Japanese nationalist groups a d other nationalists in Europe.
This is why 70%+ of lottery winners go broke.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-24 at 1:59 AM UTC in You know how Kebab has this sand nigger yell ALLAHU AHKBAR when it's time to pray?Taiwan is basically China Pro, literally a better country in every conceivable way, and of course that's thanks to delicious capitalism.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-21 at 1:13 AM UTC in Nicotine makes me a better personSeriously. Smoking is alone of the few things I actually, passionately hate in the world.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-21 at 1:38 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Sploo Needs Attention
Originally posted by Ghost Nothing hurts more than buying several thousand dollars worth of bitcoin and blowing it all on drugs when it was like $200/BTC
No bro. That's a stupid way to think about it. Without people like you actually using the currency, it would not be worth shit right now. You can't just edit history like that. The people who lucked out on BTC... lucked out. There is no reason to regret that.The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-19 at 9:20 PM UTC in So wait, is RisiR = Darkhunter or no?The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
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2018-10-19 at 4:28 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Sploo Needs AttentionYeah, some good writing. Petered off in the second half, but some great nuggets in there.
"Its like you cant know yourself until youve found yourself in pieces"The following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire! -
2018-10-19 at 1:07 AM UTC in I'm so glad I bullied malice into killing himselfGrind his face up and down the wall till his nose rubs off redThe following users say it would be alright if the author of this post didn't die in a fire!
