What Are You Reading 2013 - Page 10

On January 18 2013 10:24 Sumahi wrote:
My first book for the year is The Alienist by Caleb Carr. It takes place in the late 19th century and is a psychological crime novel about the era before we had a regular lexicon of words and concepts to describe psychopaths and serial killers.

On January 18 2013 07:36 mcc wrote:
No, you are in trouble when you start questioning meaning of well understood words. It is common trick of sophists like you. I am just waiting when will you ask me to define what it means "there", "is", "no".

On January 18 2013 07:28 mcc wrote:
EDIT: Your posts are so full of actual arguments.

On January 18 2013 07:13 mcc wrote:
Ah, beautiful example of creating issues where none are by playing with words.

On January 18 2013 10:36 sam!zdat wrote:


Ridiculous. questioning "well-understood" words is the whole point. The alternative is intellectual tyranny.

Actually, defining "there" and "is" is a really interesting philosophical question. Indexicality and existence? Scandalous!

edit:


What? I think we have a translation problem.

edit:


The problem is not this. The problem is people who assume there are no issues because they don't see how the words can be played with.

On January 16 2013 03:19 DavoS wrote:
Edit: Whoops, forgot to put my book critic hat on

Last book I finished, I was surprisingly disappointed

Not that this wasn't funny, and luckily the 3D was barely in the book at all, but it was honestlyjust a rehash of I Am America (And You Can Too!). A little disappointing out of such a good comedian

Currently working on

If you aren't familiar with GoT by now, you aren't doing a very good job of being a nerd.

Next on my list

Purchased entirely on the recommendation of a store clerk, the premise is about a young man who is socially awkward (not that "trendy awkward"thing, but the painful sort of awkward that makes phys ed terrifying) and spends most of his time in a virtual reality game where the creator hid a fortune and left a trail of clues based on old (read:current) pop culture references within the game. Everything about that premise sounds like what my life would be if I lived 40 years in the future

Or this, I really liked book one of this series. Do other people know about this?

Book one had an awesome narration technique, wonderfully intriguing characters, a plot where the characters motivation is never contrived, and that absorbing quality where you don't realize how much you've read until it's 3 am and you have work at 7. Hoping book 2 takes me on a similar journey.

Ready Player One is simple one of the best books I have read.
Or maybe even this, I started it, and while I guess I technically "gave it up", I was starting to get intrigued. It's like if the Da Vinci Code had time travel and didn't explain every mystery immediately

A team of researchers working on behalf of a corporation has been working on uncovering the ruins of an old French... Monastery? Church? Castle? I forget. Anyway, one of the lead scientists goes missing, then they find a glasses lens in a part of the ruins that was completely sealed off, and one of the sponsoring corporate spokeswoman knows exactly where the team should dig to uncover new structures and wings and artifacts, and it all snowballed into part of the team learning that the corporation agreed to sponsor the project to test their new time travel technology and that the lead scientist was the first tester. The concerned members are offered to go back in time as well to try and find the lead researcher, but as they're sent off, it becomes clear that there's a hidden danger to what they're doing.
And that's where I stopped.
I'm a terrible person.



Funny to see this, two of my friends were obsessed with this in high school, and I didn't read it because they made it sound like it was targeted towards women, but I was always curious about it :O

On January 18 2013 11:21 ZapRoffo wrote:
The way mcc is talking is exactly the sort of talk I was reacting to in my rant about hating scientists in the last reading thread. Taking science or empirical study on as an entire governing philosophy without being able to defend it as such, and consequently deriding objections related to philosophy as nitpicking or semantics or whatever other irrelevant thing, or deriding all of philosophy while making that poorly-developed philosophical argument.

On January 18 2013 12:20 sam!zdat wrote:
Ok, so what do you want to argue about? I'm an equal opportunity sophist. I think everything is useless so I don't have to worry about what topics "actually matter."

On January 18 2013 12:56 farvacola wrote:

What exactly constitutes nitpicking?
+ Show Spoiler +
Anyone who is interested in philosophy of language (and, unbeknownst to mcc, anyone who is interested in any sort of philosophy is interested in philosophy of language, but that is neither here nor there) really ought to give the above a shot. While I am limited to a recommendation based on having read an English translation (the edition pictured above is definitely recommended, as it contains both English and German), I still have no doubt that Philosophical Investigations presents, albeit in a strange manner, one of the best arguments for an acknowledgement that the words we use play an irreducibly influential role in the propriety of the utterance in which they implemented. Keep in mind that the work requires a degree of levity, "If a lion could speak, we would not understand him".

In terms of communicative use value, what good is the agreement between two speakers that "there is no God" when the actuality of the concept of God is known to neither party? Is it useful to agree on nonsense? Maybe, but the real problem arises when two parties disagree. A faithful woman may claim a fair bit of nonsense when prompted for a spoken justification of her belief in God, but what if her beliefs are founded in very difficult to explain or rationalize experiences? Now don't me wrong, I am not defending the notion that we ought to rely on feelings and momentary epiphanies for constructing our worldview, but a fair number of intelligent, tolerant Christians implement a very loose set of belief structures that are far more difficult to indict than the stark lines of church doctrine, for they acknowledge the importance of rationality and empiricism alongside a difficult to describe feeling that saying a prayer before a roll of the dice will improve the outcome. Doubt and angst are important components of faith, as any Augustinian will tell you, and the process of mediating elusive, temporary experience with rational knowledge can take many Christians their entire lives to figure out. So when you say "there is no God" to a believer and he responds in opposition with clearly flimsy logic, consider the possibility that he is thinking to himself "I know he's right, but I just.....can't quite say why I disagree".