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Now that you mention it- i recall a similar thing, sudden inspiration to reread lots of Tanith Lee the week before news of her passing. Something like your theory flashed through my mind then too.

It appears to me you have misinterpreted my intention in bringing up Occam. The point was not at all to use the razor in the argument, it was merely to show how what was once considered the least far-fetched hypothesis has shifted along with dominant ideas in society, i.e. how relative any...

Since you do not mention what it is that makes you unsure of my point, i hope this gives some direction: you do, i suppose, agree that it is Occam's Razor you applied there? ( He never phrased it thus but, you know, "the least complicated solution will be the most probable"&c ) Well, William of...

To the above points, in order: - You seem to be applying Occam's Razor here, which is interesting because it was once thought that the most plausible explanation in many cases would be the existence of a creator, which just goes toward showing that what 'makes sense' differs per epoch, pointing...

Just dropping by to say that i love how this thread ostensibly called "literary news" managed to evolve into a measured discussion of reality and fundamentalism punctuated by the continuous hawking of psychedelic substances by Cthulhu's Own Pusher. Only at TLO.

There are no pictures in books made up of words, we imagine the picture. How can a picture be a synapse? If you then would say that a synapse is not a picture, but synaptic firing creates a picture, you would basically be corroborating my suggestion that the material can be a way to the...

Some will use any excuse to behave like beasts, whether it be religion in the case of IS or secularism in the case of the French Revolution ( glorious awakening of the liberty of the human brotherhood, after which slave labour went on for a while longer, business as usual). But are we really...

Cut open the brain, where are the pictures.

As an aside- I'd cut that quote down to fit my own philosophy: Materialism keeps us.

Well, qcrisp has once again explained that better than i ever could myself, however the primary reason for posting that was to show that literature has the ability, through its playfulness, its aesthetics, to make one consider things that one usually wouldn't. What's more, the worlds and...

And then- also to bend the discussion back to literature -there is this ( from M. John Harrison's excellent review of Machen's autobiography in the TLS ) : "What if it is not the mystic but the office boy or grocer who handles every day 'the signs which tell the Secret of Secrets'? What if the...

At another point mr. V mentioned the scientific method going back to the ancients, and it strikes me that in the classical period there were less qualms about following an argument into the wholly abstract, with a sense, perhaps that describing reality is by definition "making stuff up"( reality...

Your argument here is based on what you state that i suggest; now, i take suggestion to mean an implied, not a verbalized meaning & since the implication one might then glean from it is subjective - an interpretation- you have only "invalidated an argument that wasn't being made in the first...

Accusing someone of a straw-man argument without proof & refutation being, of course, somewhat of a straw-man argument itself... At no point did i suggest that mr. Veech ( with whom i engage in this discussion with - i hope- a mutual measure of playfulness ) was making a declarative statement...

As with calling Justin's metaphorical door "magical", this is stacking your argument suggestively. Now, Justin doesn't need me to elaborate his points, but i can't help but chime in here ( despite being pressed for time ). The understandable difficulty with Justin's suggestion is that it...

It was my intention to use "required" in the same way mr. Veech uses "crucial." An unlucky paraphrase, perhaps. But yes, i do mean exactly what you explain so well - that by the very same token of his evidentiary criteria, his evidentiary criteria are justifiably doubtful.

except as artistic creation, and even then preferably as product & not as process. In fact, i'd say that imagination "undercuts consensus materialist ideology fairly reliably."

If perceptual experience in a public space is required it would follow that thoughts, as they are known to their thinker, do not exist. Also, there is no public space. If a religious person and a non-religious person watch a leaf drop to the ground, the latter has witnessed gravity in action...

Nor do i hope to steer anyone away from their 'unbelief'. It's just that i'm personally not sure if it's proper logic to infer from the apparent meaninglessness of suffering that existence is meaningless. A discussion like this brings these questions into focus without resolution, hence the...

Seeing that so many here have coherent thoughts on the subject is mildly intimidating to me. All i seem to come up with is questions. Has it been established anywhere in this thread how Meaninglessness has Meaning, if there is no Meaning to existence?