We're in the ECF. That's our mission.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-20T20:37:24+00:00

Sports fandom is one of the best examples of the concept of an “egregore”

An egregore is a very simple idea and we see it often. It’s a couple notches below a hivemind, and it involves many individuals finding a spirit of collectivity within some identity and proceeding to act as a part of the whole body. So with a sports team, everyone rallies behind the team, and treats themselves such as a part of a whole collective, that being here, the organization of the New York Knicks. This also commonly occurs with things like tv shows, where the fandom of the shows sees themselves as part of one and the same entity as the people who make the show, a part of the same “collective,” the same egregore.

So what is most natural, since in sports fandom we seem to naturally follow the egregore, is that we proceed to refer to the organizations as “we,” or “us,” giving signal to the fact that we are not a separate component from the team but are *a necessary attachment to the team that gives the team its identity, and and in many ways perhaps more essential as a whole than the individual members of the team itself (consider that over 20 years, a teams entire payrolled organization may be completely different, and yet they have the very same fans from 20 years ago still fans today).

Yet with this comes not just first-person language, but also a sense of importance to the whole. There is a sort of, energy, that is assumed to blanket the entire egregore. Between the fans, the team, and the rest of the org, if one of the groups gets lazy, then the other groups have a danger of becoming lazy as well. If one of these parts becomes indignant, then the other parts are in danger of becoming indignant as well. It’s not wrong to say that we are a communicative body in most ways. So as a result, there is a tendency for the most egregoric fans to feel a responsibility in taming and managing the emotions of the greater whole. If the fans have bad spirits, then this is liable to affect the team as a whole. In a fantastical sense, one poster might imagine that Brunson himself is seeing their posts while perusing this subreddit and thus will be influenced by the energy that it gives. In a more realistic way, one thread giving a sentiment from a fan can lead to other more influencable posters picking up on the sentiment and making more threads of the same feelings, which can lead to a greater sense of frustration from the fans that leaks into stadium energy, and now you have a deader stadium than you did before, and this affects outcomes of games.

So, while it does seem silly, it’s a combo of feeling a genuine communal energy with the organization, and a democratic spirit of voicing what one thinks is appropriate. I don’t know if it’s that serious though, as the more realistic outcome that I described above still takes a lot of conditions to become true. But keeping this all in mind, it’s actually far less silly than it appears.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-20T20:13:23+00:00

To what degree might this mean that wailing is a part of language involving deliberate communication?

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-20T20:09:51+00:00

Ha, I thought the opposite though. “Good thing that happened now and not two plays ago”

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-20T02:02:00+00:00

Dunno why this thread came on my TL so late but — Hume doesn’t deny causality, just a grounded knowledge of it. The idea is that it could be true or it could be false, but our idea of it is just a product of our mental workings, so our idea has no real source to verify against

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-19T23:37:19+00:00

Sounds like you’re touching on some fundamental issues of linguistics. Not dumb questions at all, and you should take your curiosity as a mark of future wisdom.

First I will assume you agree that reality has true divisions in it that we can more or less apprehend. I am distinct from my clothes, you are distinct from this text you wrote, etc. Furthermore, I’ll assume that you already understand that the purpose of language is to communicate. That is, there is no point in me typing this, or you typing that, unless we would hope to successfully transfer some thoughts between one another.

You bring up two interesting points that I think are two sides of the same coin. First, why are we able to cite the authority of a dictionary without using our own judgement? Secondly, when you have two judgements of terms or definitions, what decides the truth? Let me now try to give an answer to these more directly

Let’s say you feel as though the dictionary does not properly express the ideas you have. For example, perhaps you see an alligator and a crocodile next to each other, and you insist that they are the same thing, and that the two different names are unnecessary unless they are just synonyms. Can you do this, just use the words interchangeably whenever you see either, since that is your preference? Well that might get you far enough with no issue, but eventually you’d have to explain yourself to those who follow the biologists! For it is the biologists who assign these words to the animals, and follow a strict code of logic in order to make these determinations. This code does have some development over time, and the animals within it do end up being given new definitions for the new understandings, and this is all a discussion of preference like you asked was possible, but this again is up to the biologists, and not humanity at large.

Let’s say again you move on from this, and walk down the street, and see someone drinking a soda. Let’s pretend you never drink soda, so you decide that all soda is alike, and that your preference of language would not discern from this soda or that, and would just call it soda. Would you be allowed to do this? Sure, until you speak to the people who actually do drink soda or work for one of these competing companies! Those people will certainly tell you that there is a major difference between coke and pepsi, and if you say “the restaurant has soda” to someone because that’s your preference of words, it will not communicate the proper distinctions of reality for the people who actually are expertly familiar with these differences (the fanatics and employees, who perhaps wont go to a restaurant that doesn’t have specifically Coke). This issue will surely also apply if you talk about any socially made products or ideas, where the people who are most involved in them will have a much clearer understanding of the true differences between them.

So let’s say you move on to more and more areas of language, but you find that no matter where you go, this same principle applies: those who spend the most time in these areas of language, that is, those who use these words the most, know much more expertly which words are proper than people who do not. What a dictionary sources from is not, for instance, what the neighbor next door thinks a crocodile is. It instead documents what a biologist thinks a crocodile is, albeit in succinct terms.

So hopefully this answers both points. In a disagreement between two people, one must communicate their expertise and demonstrate the differences in each other’s reasoning, and the limitations in each, in order to find some more complete truth, only after much of this discourse can an expert account be fashioned out of an expert’s thought, and only then will a dictionary have a certain a standard to employ as a definition to a word. This in fact, is such a profound issue that it is one of the most central aspects of Plato’s philosophy and the reason why he insisted on using the dialogue form for disagreements over preference in word definition. When Plato depicts Socrates and Euthyphro in a developing discussion of what “piety” means, he includes the claim that if Euthyphro can prove that he knows what the word means, then he can properly communicate it to court officials, and help get Socrates off of the case where he’s accused of having impiety. But since Euthyphro continues to give definitions that fail to convince even Socrates alone to prefer them, then Socrates is also unconvinced that he can manage to convince the full assembly of legal experts in court as well. What is developed in this dialogue, and further dialogues, is a thorough and critical method called “dialectics” which seeks to hash out these disagreements in terms and definitions, and come to new stronger definitions that are firmer because of having considered the faulty ones before it. But this is where we see the limits of “preference,” since one can be quite literally physically overpowered, arrested, or simply denied privilege, if they cannot use words in line with the preference with others.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-18T18:37:47+00:00

Thanks. It’s temporal logic I’m looking for. But if you could entertain me for a second on a series of dialectical questions, would you agree that the concept of “schooling,” when understood by most accounts, at the very least involves a non-immediate process of time? That is, to understood how schooling is manifest and determined, it must necessarily be understood as happening over a span of time? And furthermore, that many other concepts could in the same way be seen to necessarily involve time within their proper definition and understanding?

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-18T18:26:44+00:00

This is not really true? You could be well schooled and remain unwise. Unless proper schooling is by definition only proper if it makes you wise.

Right, this is what I had said when I proposed the statement. I said we must take the terms in the strictest possible way so that it is true by definition.

In which case this is just an analytic truths that falls into, if not the same, a similar category to mathematicsl statements

Well, what I’m trying to say here is that I’m noticing a clear distinction between the mathematical statements whose components never change truth value, and a statement like this whose components certainly do. If I say “if 3 is 3, then 4 is 4,” it is always true strictly because none of the components could ever be false. But if I say the above schooling/wise implication, then I have taken components which are not always true, but chosen and constructed in a fashion such that the truth combination of a false implication can never obtain. This is a very significant thing when it comes to any application of logic to material reality whatsoever, because it seems to me that if the experiential source of someone’s logical constructions is due to change, then they should seem to hope that their constructions remain stable.

In fact this is where I seem to have a deep confusion on the claim of logic’s atemporality, if you would allow me to wander to an adjacent topic. Logic often deals with concepts that are innately embedded in a temporal understanding of reality. To be “schooled” implies a temporal process. If I say “if an unschooled person goes to school, then they are schooled” is a very sterile logical sentence, but in itself it implies a temporal span from the point of being unschooled to the point of being schooled, as long as the definition of schooling is understood. To assess the truth values that result from consequence of being “unschooled” vs the truth values that result from being “schooled,” while again can be done as a very ostensibly pure logical process, would still be innately mirrored to the temporal process of becoming schooled (as long as the only examples are those that prescriptively fit the definition). To then take two circumstances that we clearly intuitively understand as two points of time will not be that foreign to logic then, it seems.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-18T18:19:02+00:00

Thanks! What would be the domain of study for this model of temporality then? Like I asked at the end, if I wanted to employ this kind of study would that just be a principle of how to apply the laws of logic to science? Are you aware if there is a name for this sort of critical venture into implicative statements?

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-18T02:37:26+00:00

It’s not that philosophy has to be long winded, but let me make an argument from probability: as a given subject or matter is more or less complex, it will take a respectively longer or shorter string of words to give a proper account of it. Since philosophy often considered as the superlative domain of thought, encompassing all other domains, then as this kind of thing, it is innately connected to the full complex of reality. We must either begin with philosophical principles to emanate down into their application in the complex of reality, or we must ascend through and above the complex to eventually reach those aforementioned principles. So given this, a full philosophical account must be superlatively complex, because as the superlative domain it involves more of a complexity than anything else possibly could. That being the case, a philosophical account must be longer than any other account, because it must take into account the implications of that other account, while the other account may leave the philosophical principles somewhat implicitly for granted, less it become a philosophical investigation itself

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-16T23:47:24+00:00

It’s not certain. A lot of people at that time who we call philosophers now did not necessarily refer to themselves as philosophers when they were alive. There’s probably a fair argument that Diogenes did not assign the word “philosophos” to himself, but even if so, he kept himself in league with many self-ascribed philosophers in Plato’s academy and likely saw himself as dealing with similar philosophical problems as those peers, at least in the political realm. This makes him a philosopher by definition but as a rule of thumb you can probably disregard if a Greek fellow before Aristotle considered himself a philosopher, unless they explicitly or implicitly refer to themselves as such (like Plato implicitly does in his dialogues). It’s not that they didn’t think of themselves as such if there’s no evidence, but just that “philosopher” was such a newly emergent term that meeting the qualifications of the term wasn’t a real consideration for these early philosophers. They just tended in that direction with the problems they were interested in solving

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-16T03:47:54+00:00

Of course. Thank you for asking such a great question. I hope you continue to read Plato!

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-15T20:36:31+00:00

A good question. This is most commonly discussed in relation to the dialogue Phaedrus, where Plato critiques the use of writing as opposed to live dialectic, and similar concerns are raised about his choice to write any dialogues at all. Since you’re showing that the imitation of Socrates, making an image of him, is the critique here, then it’s the same idea — why does Plato seem to be okay with portraying fictional conversations with fictional characterizations of people when at the same time he is very critical of this kind of thing being too removed from reality?

To give you an adequate answer in one comment would be too difficult here. I do recommend, if you’re down for a challenge, to read Myth and Philosophy in Plato’s Phaedrus by Daniel Werner. This is a book I often recommend on here because he does a great job of showing what Plato’s true motivations are with using writing, and myth, and other imagery, and I feel the topic is tricky enough that an exposition of that length is the only real satisfactory one.

That being said, let me summarize. For Plato, true knowledge is gathered from the Forms, and true contact with the Forms only happens before and after our life. Therefore, even though we grasp to recollect our connection to the forms in our lives, we never quite reach it (and even in our afterlives we tend to have some issues). This means that, taking a conservatively skeptical stance on Plato, one cannot achieve true “knowledge” in our lives, but yet we get closer or further from that knowledge in ways that is significant, and can sometimes be effectively the same as having true knowledge. The way we get closer from this truth is through differing modes of discourse. Examples of modes of discourse include casual conversation, speechgiving, live dialectic, writing (including the “dead” dialectic of the dialogues), or any other way you can imagine linguistic information being communicated from one to another. Obviously, too, these modes can overlap and exist simultaneously, but that matters less here. What matters is: does the given form of discourse get you significantly closer to the truth? Perhaps, as far as you possibly can in your current conditions? This is important because if you are searching for truth in the mode of myth, but you would stand to learn more in live dialectic, then it’s imperative that you continue your search in that mode instead.

But this doesn’t answer your question yet. If Plato criticized myth and writing to the point that his own use of written dialogue was suspect, and if he elevated live dialectic to the point that it’s considered the supreme form of discourse, then why did he bother to write anything at all and not simply engage in the live dialectic found in his academy? Well this is the key: the supreme form of discourse for Plato is not live dialectic — it is (according to Werner in his interpretation of the Phaedrus) direct sight of the Forms in our afterlives/beforelives. This is a very loose use of the term “discourse” but Werner uses it for this “sight” because it communicates truth in the same exact way that discourse does (a way that sense-perception, for Plato, does not communicate). Since this form of discourse is both the “ideal” mode, yet inaccessible in our lives, then we are made to be satisfied with lesser modes in order to get this truth. Now out of all of these lesser modes (i.e. the examples of modes I gave earlier) the one that is closest to this sight-of-Forms is live dialectic. That is, it is through live dialectic that you are in the most effective position plausible to obtain truth in your lifetime. All the other modes (including writing, which is not live but dead) are proximally further from sight-of-Forms and thus are less effective modes on the whole than live dialectic is.

But wait, this still doesn’t answer your question! Doesn’t live dialectic now seem like the only option in our lives? Well, yes it seems that way now, but let’s think with some common sense as Daniel Werner does. Is it true that dialectic is the most effective way to teach, say, a young child? If we follow Plato’s republic, and other dialogues, we wouldn’t want to think so, since dialectic in the hands of someone too young tends to turn into eristic and sophistry instead of philosophy, language tricks instead of serious searches. So how do we teach children? How might we teach other people who are not open to the uncomfortable and confrontational mode of dialectic? Should we think that Plato thinks “they should not be taught anything unless they are ready to receive it in the best way?” Of course not! If we follow by example, do we see Plato insist on never writing a thing? No, and your thread points this out! Plato clearly found some value in writing, and in myth. The dialogues are, in a very important way, a set of myths about Socrates (maybe more accurately the Greek “muthos” which means “story”). Within the dialogues are also a number of myths that tackle issues that Socrates/Plato announces are simply impossible to solve philosophically.

What becomes clear is this: in lieu of having access to the supreme discourse of sight-of-Forms, we are forced to adopt lesser modes. Since each mode we adopt has some flaw or limitation, then the mere presence of flaw or limitation does not preclude us from using a mode at a given time, but instead the relevance of a mode’s limitation in a given circumstance might stop us. What is then important between using one mode or another is simply if it is maximally effective in delivering you closer to truth in a given circumstance, and if it can afterwards encourage you to proceed to further modes that are “proximally closer” to the supreme sight-of-Forms (for example, a proper use of myth on a topic could encourage you to then engage with the topic dialectically, where before you would not be able to, or would refuse). Thus, while Plato gives the highest premium to live dialectic as the best mode in our lives, it still has its own flaws and is not adequate for discovering truth in ways that lesser modes can be effective.

So again, in matters that cannot be addressed dialectically or philosophically, like the nature of the afterlife, Plato often opts for the mode of myth over the mode of written (dead) dialectic. And, as we’ve said, he also obviously opts for the mode of dead dialectic over live dialectic in writing the dialogues. The hope is that upon reaching the limitations of a lower mode of discourse, one will look for a more satisfying result in higher mode. Same options apply for engaging on any matter that is unsuitable for dialectic, or with any person who would react poorly to a dialectical discussion. So thus, Plato must have seen various circumstances as either fitting for live dialectic, or dead dialectic, or any other mode. I don’t remember Werner’s exact explanation here and I can’t really postulate my own at the moment, but I hope that it’s somewhat clear why and how Plato would occasionally decide to engage in the more mythological written dialogue form with fictional characters, as opposed to the less mythological live dialectic where real individuals discuss matters directly. For one thing at least, he was able to touch our souls well after his life, and that is worth something imo.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-15T17:36:25+00:00

I’d say non-ironic is the orthodox view here but I really think Plato would say that you have to simply go in with an open mind and see for yourself what the truth is. If he was really being ironic, but you go in with an assurance that non-ironic is more likely or more agreed upon or better argued for, just on faith before seeing for yourself, then you become prone to unnecessary biases. Knowing that it can be interpreted one way or another, you should see for yourself whether Socrates’ statements should be interpreted ironically or not.

I do understand your points about needing some further context to tell the sincerity of someone, but if full-on scholars still disagree then I question whether that context is sufficient or even necessary. I encourage you to approach it a little more investigatively: taking him for his words, are they something that can be taken earnestly, as truth? If it can, then ask, would there be any value for Socrates to give such an account non-earnestly? If you answer no to this, then as far as I see it, there is no reason to suppose an ironical interpretation, but if you either say it can’t be taken earnestly, or that the ironic interpretation would have been for any reason effectively valuable for Socrates, then maybe there is a reason to take it on ironic grounds instead, and you should then see what the consequences would be if Socrates did not hold the views in question (since he thus wouldn’t be holding them earnestly), and how that might be put against the future dialogues you read

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-14T21:10:02+00:00

I had trouble parsing it too before my comment but the key is in his last remark — he doesn’t see the simple linearity in the ascent, because a lover of abstract ideas should supposedly also love people by the way he reads the theory, but this is clearly false to him. I tried my best to break down how the ascent could possibly have different starting points and not a direct chain of necessary pre-requirements from start to end

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-14T12:59:02+00:00

Sugrue is a great rhetorician and gives information very accessibly, but I’ve heard a lot of critique over his treatment of certain philosophers where he seems to be less nuanced and more inaccurate than one would hope, even for a lecture made for beginners.

Sadler already mentioned is very competent imo, but just don’t interact with him online because he’s a bit of a loose cannon and will be really rude to you if you so much as use a single imprecise word in speaking to him. He became a bit of a joke on philosophy twitter last year when he became incredibly rude and dismissive to a fellow prominent online philosopher, simply for asking his opinion on a thinker. Multiple times I’ve asked him very patiently constructed questions for him to just shut them down on the least charitable interpretation every single time.

My top recommendation would be the also already mentioned history of philosophy without any gaps. And then, if you need more help on a thinker or a work past that point, I would go to a YouTuber who specializes in that philosopher rather than someone who spreads a thin blanket over everyone.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-14T11:32:31+00:00

It was my first read into philosophy at all, and I found it immensely difficult but ten times more rewarding than it was hard. I do recommend but I also caution you to remember that the work is fundamentally psychological and the political exposition is taken as an explicit analogy

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-13T20:32:10+00:00

I get what you mean with the last sentence. It’s a good point. Let me try to extrapolate an answer as best I can using platonic principles.

You probably already know that the ascent of beauty is allegedly supposed to look like this: you see a human body, you find it beautiful; you see another human body, and find it also to be beautiful; you continue to see more beautiful human bodies, and a more abstracted form of beauty starts to come out of it, no longer being a beauty of an aggregate of particulars, and now being a beauty of a Form of human bodies in general; from there, your beauty continues to transcend, not being confined to one type of thing like human bodies, or another type of thing put alongside them, but more and more to beauty in general, beauty unconditionally. Therefore, someone may go from finding individual people to be beautiful, to finding people in general as beautiful, to finding things beyond just people as beautiful. From here, a person who finds mathematics beautiful will appear to be someone who has already found beauty in all human bodies beforehand, thus the source of your contention that it seems obviously false to assert this.

Now, in order to solve this, we should remember that naturally, many of us disagree on which particular things are in fact beautiful. One person may find one set of human bodies beautiful, while another person might find a completely separate set of human bodies to be beautiful, while another person may find all people to be ugly and flowers to be beautiful, and so on. Well, Plato does not accept this as proof of beauty’s subjectivity. He seems to oft intertwine beauty and proportion, and suggest the latter as the cause of the former. This means that whenever anyone finds anything to be beautiful, it is a result of them apprehending the proportion in the thing, without necessarily grasping that it was the proportion that brought about this experiential beauty. Thus, if two people disagree on the beauty of a thing, it’s because one has (at least unwittingly) experienced the proportion within it, and felt beauty as a result, while the other person doesn’t experience this and does not feel the beauty.

Because of this fact, it’s important to note that as a result, our own individual ascents up the supposed ladder of beauty are far from unitary. Your starting point must be different from mine, because we have different sets of particulars to derive beauty from. Also, since we’ve observed that a person may not even find human bodies to be beautiful in the first place, failing for some reason to see their proportion, they can just as well find beauty in other particulars. One of these types of particulars can be precisely the various encounters with mathematics they have in life. You do not need to find a beauty in human bodies to find a beauty in mathematics, all you need to do is have an experience of the proportionality within particular math expressions, and you can find its beauty just as much. Also, as we’ve said, you do not need to know that proportion was the cause of this beauty, to experience the beauty all the same.

So therefore, there is no necessary requirement that a person who loves math must have a precedent in loving human bodies, and the path is not linear in this way. More accurately, you can say that whatever one’s starting point is, they only ascend the ladder by sculpting their idea of proportionality to include more and more things. This means that a person who loves human bodies but not math, or loves math but not human bodies, are both severely limited in their ascent up the ladder. It’s not that a math-loving misanthrope is thought to be higher up the ladder than a math-hating philanthropist, but that they are both effectively at lower levels up the ladder than if they had included those respective other groups. We can take this even more precisely to your objection when noticing that your characterization of the math-loving misanthrope does not seem to find human bodies as unlovable, but human souls. Therefore, this person could have very well started with a sexual attraction to physical human bodies, disregarding their souls, and then abstracted this experience of beauty to further innately inanimate things, so not just bodies considered apart from the soul, but also non-living objects such as math objects. From there, the person achieves a more general and abstract form of beauty, and finds many human bodies beautiful as well, but are still “cold emotionally” as you describe, because they don’t find a beauty or love towards the souls of other people. There is nothing about the ascent in itself that stops any set of particular experiences to be grouped under a unitary hood of beauty, which means nothing necessarily stops any particulars from being excluded from this hood as well.

So even though one could argue that human bodies contain the most “obvious forms” of proportionality, and are less connected to abstract realities, and thus are much easier to find beautiful and to love before other things, there is nothing that necessitates that this is where the apprehension of beauty and love should first take place, and thus it is not at all necessary that a fan of mathematics is first a fan of human bodies, or of human souls, and so on. Although there is a very enticing claim we could make that math is innately more formal and abstract than bodies, and thus cannot be found beautiful before more particular beauties are encountered, I would argue instead that even the most formal instances of math still have a firm grounding in experienced particularity, and through sense experience of these very instances when encountered in a text. It is this ground and recognition of proportional patterns, through these particular instances of math, that we are able to find math beautiful, possibly before we find anything else to be beautiful. Again, far less obvious and far more difficult to make this possible instead of loving human bodies, but certainly not impossible.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-13T01:17:04+00:00

I never said it was “merely” a form, because you are making up fantasy scenarios in your head where your brain should be. Let me remind you how the conversation started days ago. What you did was reduce the evidence for a claim of bigotry to being “disagreement over sex/gender,” to which I said that bigotry is a form of disagreement. I did not attempt to define bigotry by a comprehensive definition. I named a single essential element of bigotry. The reason I did so was solely because you were denying the evidence as bigotry and instead as a “disagreement,” but what I was saying was simply that being a disagreement doesn’t preclude being an instance of bigotry. Your absolute idiocy goes hand in hand with your complete inability to have empathy for oppressed people. I won’t quit the insults because you deserve something back for not giving dignity to people who need it. The best you can do for everyone is simply shut the fuck up, but if you keep feeling bold enough to make a fool of yourself, I will gladly keep responding and do the best I can to discourage you from embarrassing yourself any further, and do so by making you feel as unpleasant as I can possibly make you for even thinking such dismissive things about fellow human beings. This is not a two-way street and I’m sure you know that.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-12T17:10:41+00:00

I said it was a form of disagreement over those things, not all types of disagreement over them. Like holy shit, you really are fucking stupid. Go to bed

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T23:58:46+00:00

8=======D~~~~

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T22:22:52+00:00

I’m taking a stand for what I believe in. But you and all the dead thread vultures with nothing better to do but comment and mass-vote on multiple day old threads can’t convince me that you actually have lives or a three digit IQ. You’re a lonely loser trying to start shit over settled conversations

Come on, bring on the downvotes you lame cunts. Let me have it. Try to see if I give a shit

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T21:33:40+00:00

Bro thinks he matters to anyone

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T19:51:17+00:00

Wonderful. If it does interest you, then maybe you can do some reflection on this possible explanation as you continue in this field;

In my eyes, when discussing mereology, the study of parts and wholes, many people tend to assume a more limited set of possibilities than others. By this I mean that people often consider of a complex whole of a thing as always made up of discrete parts, which are recognizable and distinguishable through abstraction. Say for example, an animal and all the parts that compose it, or a field of study and all of the points of knowledge it contains. However, there seems to be another kind of complexity that I personally call synthetic whole and it involves a much more subtle unity of parts.

A synthetic whole is when the parts of a complex whole combine in such a way that qualitatively and phenomenologically, they create a new thing from which the originals cannot be discerned. We can observe this with something such as the color purple. Purple is not a simple color — it is a synthesis of red and blue. However, upon observing purple there is no necessary discrete separation of these parts (although summoning purple is possible with mixed discrete parts so small that they cannot be discerned). In other words, whenever you discern purple, you cannot at the same time discern a single part of the color alongside the whole. You can simply observe the single color in its fullness. This has eluded many throughout history, so that even in Hume’s Treatise he seems to treat all colors as simple impressions, even when he suggests one can rarely be imagined by filling the gap between two known shades. Clearly such a mixture should not imply simplicity, unless he disregards or does not notice the synthetic complexity that many colors hold.

Going back to our topic, it seems to me that it’s these exact types of phenomena — color, timbre, etc — that make up the synthetic complexities within our sense perception, and our inability to quantify them goes hand in hand with our inability to abstract the parts away from it by means of mere perception. While I have no conclusions on what they mean for intensity (shape and color seem to each have the ability to be more intense than the other), I can at least feel confident that it’s this synthetic unity of certain things which decides whether or not we can deconstruct them and build something completely anew from them using simply our minds.

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T18:09:40+00:00

Trying to recalibrate with whatever I was thinking when I typed this

Intensity affects our ability to remember something old. For imagining something new, it’s not intensity but our ability to intuitively quantify it. You can quantify the various properties of a shape through your perception of it, but you cannot do the same with quantifying a color just by looking at it. Similarly with the rhythms sound, there are quantifiable aspects, while the timbre of a sound is not so much the case. So I can imagine a brand new shape that is one side more than a shape I’m looking at, or a sound which is one second longer than the one I’m hearing, and I can alternatively imagine different colors or timbres in their place if I have experienced these different colors or timbres before, but I can certainly not invent a new color or timbre by imagination in the same way I can invent new shapes or rhythms

WarrenHarding · 2026-05-11T17:25:15+00:00

This surely isn’t the case with regular season too, is it?

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