I’m going back and forth on whether to tap out here. On the one hand I feel like I’m making progress in understanding your perspective. On the other hand the progress is clarifying that it would take a large amount of time and energy to derive a vocabulary to converse in a mutually transparent way about material truth claims in this area. It had not occurred to me that pulling on the word “intrinsic” would flip the conversation into a solipsistic zone by way of Cartesian skepticism. Ooof.
Perhaps we could schedule a few hours of IM or IRC to try a bit of very low latency mutual vocabulary development, and then maybe post the logs back here for posterity (raw or edited) if that seems worthwhile to us. (See private message for logistics.) If you want to stick to public essays I recommend taking things up with Tyrrell; he’s a more careful thinker than I am and I generally agree with what he says. He noticed and extended a more generous and more interesting parsing of your claims than I did when I thought you were trying to make a pigeonhole argument in favor of magical entities, and he seems to be interested. Either public essays with Tyrrell, IM with me, or both, or neither… as you like :-)
(And/or Steve of course, but he generally requires a lot of unpacking, and I frequently only really understand why his concepts were better starting places than my own between 6 and 18 months after talking with him.)
I’m going back and forth on whether to tap out here. On the one hand I feel like I’m making progress in understanding your perspective. On the other hand the progress is clarifying that it would take a large amount of time and energy to derive a vocabulary to converse in a mutually transparent way about material truth claims in this area. It had not occurred to me that pulling on the word “intrinsic” would flip the conversation into a solipsistic zone by way of Cartesian skepticism. Ooof.
Perhaps we could schedule a few hours of IM or IRC to try a bit of very low latency mutual vocabulary development, and then maybe post the logs back here for posterity (raw or edited) if that seems worthwhile to us. (See private message for logistics.) If you want to stick to public essays I recommend taking things up with Tyrrell; he’s a more careful thinker than I am and I generally agree with what he says. He noticed and extended a more generous and more interesting parsing of your claims than I did when I thought you were trying to make a pigeonhole argument in favor of magical entities, and he seems to be interested. Either public essays with Tyrrell, IM with me, or both, or neither… as you like :-)
(And/or Steve of course, but he generally requires a lot of unpacking, and I frequently only really understand why his concepts were better starting places than my own between 6 and 18 months after talking with him.)