commie

Sure. But why does it seem so? That can be explained using neither.

What are you talking about? How can I tell if someone is "real"? On a web forum, no less! I'm not convinced everything is an illusion and you don't know how I behave. The strawman is strong in this one.

So you have not looked into other explanations and chose to setup a strawman instead. What does "real" even mean in this context? The word is just as meaningful in dreams. And why would it make more sense to talk to you if you weren't imaginary? There could be something objective but we do know the word "tree" normally refers to a mental object.

Why not? What has been your process like when you ruled out other explanations?

If there are only thoughts, then there are no phenomena to being with, unless you decide that phenomena are thoughts. What could possibly be the point of such word games? You are of course free to set up any number of definitions but when they do not match the definitions used by others and you do not explain your definitions first, all you're doing is bringing about confusion. And for what?

The trouble with your reasoning (and that is also a very common problem with the reasoning of many others here) is that you are effectively setting up a strawman, even though you probably didn't intend to. That you haven't grown wings is only an argument against a theory which implies you should grow wings. That you can't walk through walls is only an argument against a theory which implies that you should walk through walls. You may sincerely believe that this is what any theory in which things are mental objects implies, but that is of course not the case. Likewise the people ranting against materialism here do not as a rule know the first thing about it.

According to a quick web search, the author looks legit. Possibly somewhat right wing (I don't know) but certainly not the Fox News type. Simply never trusting the information people push on you is less stressful than being suspicious I think.

I don't care for the colors but it sounds like this guy doesn't understand the pre-modern world.

Nothing is unbiased but the Saudi regime is generally considered to be very brutal, like most of the region's regimes basically. I don't know the first thing about the author or the book but I don't know why you'd think it would be right wing propaganda. The Saudi regime is right wing after all. I'd be more concerned about the reliability of the bizarre take on al Gahazli you posted. Nothing signals bias like making a such a big deal of Averroes.

Sure but like I said, how did you prepare for technical exams? With HW-type drudgery, unless you were some kind of genius. Even in my HS, I'm not sure whether HW was theoretically compulsory (in practice some teachers didn't even require attendance) and you wouldn't get a diploma if you failed the finals badly enough. But then only one in 7 or 8 kids would go to high school. You can't change the demographics without adapting the teaching. And the reason too many kids go to high school or college isn't pedagogy but bourgeois hegemony. I feel you on the deeper understanding (one of my HS teachers wouldn't even answer questions about the exam material if it went beyond the correct calculations and I probably learned more QM in middle school) but actual science has technical foundations, to varying degrees. Maybe lookup the word "technical". Even outside of science, learning languages (especially dead ones) can involve quite a bit of drudgery for instance. Ideally kids would have worked through much of this stuff in high school or earlier but...

HW sounds childish but this kind of thing is useful to learn technical basics. If the topic isn't technical, you could have the students write research papers or something straight away but otherwise, instead of the actual professor giving actual HW, you might have had study groups or some such run by people who typically wanted into faculty if they didn't already have a junior position. A distinction without much difference, I think. Unless by "back in the day" you mean the the time before the boomers I guess. The demographics were so different then...

You asked a question about abstractions. All I know about these abstractions of yours is that you're speaking English so I gave you a simple answer based on what I know about English, as if your question wasn't rhetorical. In other words, it was simply a friendly tease (there are far more offensive abuses of logic in this thread, no worries).

It explains appearance (in a way that makes sense to me anyway). If that's all you care about, that's fine. It's not all I care about so if I may... What if, instead of trying to explain "reality" (I wouldn't know where to start), you were to content yourself with gaining some insight some of its beautiful features or consistencies as @from chaos into self would perhaps say?

Welcome to humanity. I don't feel a significant amount of what you might call guilt for numbers which are probably wrong anyway but I do for the specifics I am aware of (regarding only a tiny fraction of the suffering in the world, but that means more to me than events I don't know anything about). And I don't feel that so much simply because of the suffering but mostly because of what I (don't) do about it. And I don't feel like this only about acute suffering but also about harm more generally and wanton destruction of the biosphere in particular. Mostly, I go on with my life by paying attention to something else most of the time of course but much of my life is also structured around dealing with this because, while I've gone through phases of intellectual denial, drug abuse and so forth as a teen, mostly I've been facing this in one way or another since childhood. By the looks of it, many of the people here who aren't psychos numb this feeling (or calling or whatever you want to call it) with grandiose delusions and drugs (though extreme meditation or sports, social media, harassing women, self-harm and whatnot work as well as drugs for some people I guess). I've discussed it (usually indirectly) with different kinds of people over the years and the most basic response is typically: me, God, me. That is, people talk about their hardships and responsibilities (often imaginary or blown out of proportions) as a way to justify selfishness. Some people make direct appeals to God to excuse their selfishness but mostly they talk about their troubles in a religious framework in order to justify selfishness. People who aren't actively religious often do this as well because they've picked up their values and morality from religion.

This is no novelty. I already had to buy US college textbooks for high school "back in the day". If you aren't teaching kids much in high school, you gotta teach them the basics later.

My question was: what's the assumption? I have no idea what "the materialist' view" is even about. That "exist" is defined in a way that is compatible with Barack Obama life.

The bicycle kid has already demonstrated that's not where the "whole devil" is I think. Instead, I'm curious about what assumption you figure the materialist is making because I can't guess what materialism has to do with this.

No, that's not what I was saying. But it hardly matters since neither of us disagree. Sure, that is what not being a solipsist implies.

Such definitions only impoverish language. Unless one intends to play word games, better only speak of appearance and leave existence out of it. By leaving existence out of it, one could also perhaps focus on doing something useful with whatever doesn't appear. That said, I doubt your "in other words" is quite accurate. Evidently appearance is supposed to be inclusive of conceptual objects.

How do actual things differ from things which aren't actual? And do you not also use names when you're not communicating? Am I misusing names when I'm not communicating? Or are some names only for communicating while others can safely be used for other purposes?

I wasn't talking about being dependent on each other but about being dependent on something larger than either of us. What does "existence" mean in this context anyway? Obviously the whole point of the "deeper layer" is that it is somehow separate from appearance but what does "existence" mean in this other context?

Since no other person wants to provide a straightforward answer... I didn't watch the video. This "second layer" idea is indeed a solution, and it should be distinguished from dualism. As I mentioned earlier, the mainstream physicalist account of your experience has "layers" even though it is monist. This account is useful to explore the tension between "layers" and non-dualism because it is much more developed than the idealist account. But, as has been hinted at earlier, there is another obvious alternative to solipsism hinging on how "you" is understood. You might say this is just another kind of "layer" theory but parts of "you" could in principle be functionally independent enough from each other that they might sometimes (when they're kind of sleeping we might say) communicate in a non-solipsistic way. Note that if you were to require full independence for communication to be non-solipsistic, you'd run into problems such as: how might fully independent entities acquire a common language? By the way... Strictly speaking, you can and do make sense when you're talking to yourself (that is, when there's not even an illusion of independence).

Most of the tossups don't matter. The blue-leaning states matter more because Biden still wins if he only loses the tossups. I think it's fair to say the consensus view is 538's and they have a convenient "tipping points" thing in their forecast according to which PA has the most chance of being the place where the race is decided (FL and Wisconsin being each about half as likely to be the tipping point according to that model). The likelyhood that any single state might decide the presidential is very small to begin with but it makes some sense to focus on PA, not just because of its size but because Biden is likely to lose some blue-leaning states in the Great Lakes area if he does poorly in PA. I know: so consensual, so boring.

A commie radio station in occupied Mexico.

Space isn't that empty (or unchanging). In the pop physics department, I'd go with the catchy it's-the-same-electron thing for commonality instead. Wasn't that the name of that all-week, all-night KPFK show? Maybe I finally get what its name was supposed to mean.