Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
However I suspect that none of these things are anywhere near the same experience as it actually happening.
I guess that comes down to how vivid an imagination you have.
I'm not trying to suggest imagination is a perfect substitute for experience. That's crazy. You can't learn to swim by imagining it. But it's also not worthless . It's a key part of human understanding. Indeed, in learning to swim, I engaged my imagination a lot. I imagined what I had to do beforehand, then did it. Of course it wasn't quite the same, but a lot of it was the same.
. It's a label, so the definition makes it what it is, surely.
It would seem like a silly thing to fight over, but I guess the point of these battles over words is that they are battles over thought, over how people can express their ideas. If you say I'm not a feminist, then you're trying to place my ideas in a certain position, relative to other ideas.
I don't get too bugged over it, really. I think what I think about the subject and if some group of people refuses me a particular title for those thoughts, even if those thoughts are identical to the thoughts of some women on the subject who are granted the title, then whatever. They can't take away the thoughts, and they can't take away the position as expressed. They've merely placed themselves in a position. They probably need a word for men that hold those opinions then. Good on them. That's how they want to talk, fine. I'd take any label, so long as it seemed that people still understood the thoughts themselves. It's when they don't, when the purpose is to obscure my thoughts, to change my expressions, that I'd fight back. Usually by generating more expressions and thoughts.
-
Experiencing and imagining are quite different things.
I'm not sure if that's cast in stone, TBH. If you imagine something exactly how it actually is, then you have an experience of it. You experience your imaginings, after all.
The chances of it being similar are related to how much effort is put in. My imagination of entering the Pantheon in Rome was actually very much like how I'd imagined it, because I had studied the building intensively from afar, seen pictures, watched movies, read accounts, knew the history. The only bit that really hit me was I had not expected to have a gypsy try to sell me copied CDs on the porch, but otherwise, it was pretty damned close.
And the kind of imaginings I'm talking about are drawing from potentially identical experiences, with only the intractable difference of group membership between them. Being violently oppressed as a man is not identical to being violently oppressed as a woman, but it is quite possible to assume that the important similarities are shared.
Naturally, a lot of imaginings are totally wrong. That's why I say it comes down to the effort spent finding out the truth.
Sure, one can't really expect preeminence as a male feminist. But that doesn't mean you can't wear the label, unless, as I said, the label by definition contains the stipulation "Is a woman, and....<the rest of the definition>".
-
Yet I'm never going to know what it feels like to be autistic, nor what it feels like to have my rights advocated for, for that matter.
Autism is a condition, not a position. You don't become autistic by subscribing to the doctrine of autism.
I can imagine what it is like, too. It's not even very hard. It's like being interested in something that no-one else is interested in. It's like being unable to communicate (which happens abroad). It's like being a stickler for rules to an extreme degree, rules that you have invented for yourself. It's like having a different mind to other people.
I can also imagine what being a woman is like. I've read hundreds of books about women, spoken to tens of thousands of them, heard their opinions, seen their actions, etc. It's not exactly the same, of course. But neither are women exactly alike to each other. Many have not experienced much sexual oppression. They can, however, try to appreciate what it would be like, to advocate against it, to join organizations that fight it, etc. I think they are feminists if they do so, and so are men.
This might be less likely to happen in those cases, but that is a completely separate question. It draws a funny parallel to the point that women might be less likely to be heads of business, or engineers. Sure, but that doesn't mean they can't be.
-
Because, not unlike other ideologies, it is meaningless without lived experience. I don't think I could be rich and be a socialist.
Unless this stipulation is "By definition" then I disagree. It doesn't seem contradictory that you could believe in socialism (and thus be a socialist), and yet not actually be poor. But if you insist that someone can't be an -ist without belonging to the oppressed group referenced, sure. Then the statement is true by definition that no men can be feminists. I'm not sure that that kind of definitional debate isn't just contributing to the 1000 camps issue, though. It just doubles the number of camps, by making one for every man who also sides with one of the camps. Indeed, it divides each camp against itself.
-
Gotta agree with Danielle - it was a pretty funny show at the start. Then it got old and corny. Like most shows. And it's much easier to get bitterly offended by it when it's not funny any more. I don't think it got more edgy or offensive, it was just old hat, the actors were older, it turned into a soap. I despised the first movie and will not bother with the second until it comes out on Sky.
Nothing to do with the "message". I could not give a flying shit about the message in movies. It's how the message is done that matters, if there must be a message. It was just not funny or entertaining at any level.
As for the Feminism label, it's the same conundrum for every word that is based on a theoretical position. On the one hand, words are convenient labels and make speech faster. On the other, they must also necessarily compress the meaning down. In the end, they are never sufficient to define anything - nothing short of actually reading/hearing a lot of someone's opinion will ever properly capture it - everything else leads to information loss. I find myself constantly finding that people who adopt the exact same label as I do for something highly specific very often have quite different opinions about that something. Very small differences can lead to total flips in support. It's rather like finding someone really hot in a thumbnail, and then realizing they're actually not that hot when you see the hi-rez version.
But what can you do? Words are the way we speak. They are necessarily information losing, slippery beasts. Every word is a stereotype. Only in combination can they lead back towards precision. Which requires of the audience that they actually put the effort in. It also means that you can only really talk with great precision about a very small domain, and word like Feminism do not cover a small domain (any more).
If you take the path that it's very important how words are defined and used, you get the problems Emma describes, that it turns into a thousand camps. If you take the other path, you get the problem that the words lose meaning. Both ways are a Tower of Babel, one is from refusal to understand, the other from inability to do so. The only way out is taking the time to understand what people mean. Labels don't really do any work for us at all.
-
10 Theories on the decline of film quotability
1. It isn't, you're just old
2. Old stuff always seems more quotable because it's been quoted longer
3. There's a lot more film so it's hard to remember
4. Film is becoming increasingly visual
5. The quotes have been used up
6. "Having a memory is so 20th Century"
7. Theatrical overacting is in remission
8. Screenwriting has become less inspired due to corporate pressures
9. People quote computer games now instead
10. Quoting has become uncool and/or it was actually always uncool -
My favourite from LOTR will always be "Your love of the Halfling's leaf has clearly slowed your mind".
-
I think it safer to say there's no evidence for it that can be shared. There is also no evidence against it. It's not a scientific question at all. Which is part of the reason I'm always rather mystified that so many scientists proclaim materialism as a scientific position on the matter.
Even if a perfect and complete model of the human mind could be created, simulated, and understood, we would still not really know whether the device had 'consciousness', in the same way that we do. I don't know if anyone else does, for that matter. I could be the only one. Or you could be, and I could just be a materialistic meat machine pulling your tit.
It's not a question that I expect a scientific answer to. I'm surprised scientists bother with it, frankly. I suppose the reason is likely to be because each of them does actually have some kind of consciousness (whatever that actually is), and desperately wishes to understand that, just like the dualists. They want a scientific answer as to why they inhabit only one body, this one particular one they're in, and also to know what is probably going to happen to it after it dies. Their way of answering that question gives them a deep sense of satisfaction, even though their answer, if they are materialists, is that it's the end, a ceasing to exist. At least having an answer means one doesn't have to worry about it any more, even if, in fact, the answer is really unknown.
I'm kind of curious how Gödel comes into it. Presumably the incompleteness theorem? So if humans are 3rd order predicate logic machines then their axioms are either incomplete or inconsistent? That's definitely mathematically true. But I can't see why that would mean that brains can't be implemented on meat, and nothing but. It would just mean that some things those brains thought would be either incomplete or inconsistent. Or more like both and in spades, if the brains refer to any actual humans that I've ever met.
-
Recalcitrant dualists eh? Suffer them not.
-
What Bart describes is pretty much my experience of the word too. It's not heartbreaking or anything but I can't ever recall it being used nicely. Usually it's been a way of telling me what I think, how I am, what I feel, etc. It might even have truth to it, the way stereotypes often do.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 745 746 747 748 749 … 1066 Older→ First