My Most Imaginary Friend

How do Quineians cope with phantom limbs, and, in particular, pain in them? Pain (presumably) has measurable physiological consequences.

1. The things that best scientific theory quantifies over exist

I hold that the things best scientific theory quantifies underexist. They are the hollow men, heads filled with straw etc. What? Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you said …

So it would be a little troubling if best scientific theory started quantifying over imaginary friends.

All product branding, and the concomitant implicit agency of the brand, is imaginary. But it has quite an impact. This is an observation of no small consequence to contemporary society. The philosophical issues are analogous to the trivial example of children’s fanciful playmates.

_Pace_ Quine and Quineans, science != physics. The best cognitive science has long since pretty much shed any inhibitions about recognizing the reality of intentional mental states like beliefs. And that kind of eliminates the problem here, no?

“All product branding… is imaginary”

That doesn’t seem quite right to me — a product’s brand is a (actual, physical) insignia on the product (or its packaging) which conveys a particular meaning, namely that the product is being sold by some particular company. This seems no more imaginary to me than language in general. Granted there is some kind of large imaginary structure built around many brands that I’m not sure how to describe — is that structure intrinsic to the branding itself? or am I missing your point?

Jeremy, I think the best way to describe a brand—an Althusserian way, ultimately, though one that every brand marketer I know of practices, or aspires to—is exactly as an imaginary friend. (Consumers are interpellated by the brand, cf. Althusser in “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”) In practice (as anyone who’s ever stuided a brand book will recognize), a brand is like nothing so much as a personality; brand assets (like logos, color palettes and such) are maintained in the service of that personality, which is far more “intrinsic” to the brand than any of its insignia might be.

One way to deal with the problem of imaginary things is to not call them “imaginary things” but instead to use “imagine” as a verb. For instance, some experiments in cognitive psychology suggest that people can form a mental image of a 3-D geometric figure and rotate that mental image at a constant angular velocity. In order to be ontologically precise, instead of forming theories about how people rotate their mental images, which imply that mental images are things that are in some way undergoing rotational motion, scientists can say that people imagine rotations. Similarly, we could say that a child imagines a companion, not that she has an imaginary companion. This reduces our ontological commitments.

Psychologists who create our current scientific theories are more concerned about the effects of a phenomenon like “imaginary friends” than with the precise ontological status of the phenomenon, so their theories might not be the best guide to what things exist. The definition of “best scientific theory” can probably take this into account, possibly by demanding that different branches of science combine to form a coherent theory. For instance, considerations of the physics of imaginary friends could help refine psychologists’ views of their ontology.

None of you guys have actual, real day jobs, do you?

You must definitely be academic parasites on some kind of tenure or grant system.

What do you call a bus of a hundred liberals going over a cliff with two seats empty? A crying shame.

How can you tell a dead dog from a dead liberal? Skid marks in front of the dog. Reverse marks after the liberal.

What do you say to a liberal who draws down a paycheck in the private sector? Fries and a coke, please.

When liberals die, why do they end up in limbo? Because even hell has standards.

Ha! You’re a funny guy.

I was independently wealthy by the time I was 34 from software development. No college education, in fact no formal education of any kind.

You keep studying obscure navel gazing metaphysics, dude, I just know that is going to pay off for you one of these days. There’s a huge demand for that stuff amongst other navel gazers, alas, who tend to be dead broke professors and other assorted uni losers and parasites. Remember, it’s all about figuring out how to never actually graduate. That way you’ll never have to become a man, abandon your hebephrenic and neurotic fixation on rubbish or stop collecting Pez dispensers and go to get a job.

Why does Cleve Blakemore have vowels?

Cleve Blakemore, toying with imaginary enemies since 1996.

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“I was independently wealthy by the time I was 34 from software development”. Yes, writing dodgy games for the Commodore 64 certainly does give you a penetrating insight into analytic philosophy & its alleged political commitments. At least Matthew Smith is an amusing mentalist…

Not to mention that anyone who now composes role playing games about wizards is not exactly in a strong position to dis a thread about the ontological status of imaginary friends.

Brock–you seem to be right about translucency–but it’s not obvious to me that the transaltion captures the intended meaning of what’s being translated.

If I say “Peter has an imaginary friend, a Pegasus,” I don’t so much want you to imagine that Peter has a friend. I say that Peter imagines that he has a friend.

That said maybe “Peter imagines that he has a friend, a Pegasus” would be an acceptable translation.

I’d like to respond, but the moderator of this board feels the need to either delete my posts or else run them deliberately through a scrambler. Yes, that’s what you do when somebody presents an uncomfortable viewpoint that is false – you delete the post.

Actually, that is what liberals do when somebody posts uncomfortable truths. It’s classic, classic liberal behaviour. The reality is, liberals are weak and shallow men who cannot defend their own viewpoints. That’s why conservatives are always censored, anywhere you look on the web.

You should see what happened over on the “Black and White” thread when I wrote a long, patient post about why blacks produce no great or even good writers. The moderator was sweating bullets and insisted on deleting the post as well as the one that followed it.

I’m just jerking your chains, anyway. I browsed here for a long time for a laugh to see how the academic halfwits talk privately amongst themselves. It’s exactly the kind of childish, hebephrenic rubbish that conservatives are always saying it is.

The post above that got scrambled was just hitting a little too close to the bone for the moderator – it was just too penetrating of the liberal mind.

Remember, speech is free around liberals as long as you play into their basic premises, which are infantile rehashed failed ideas from previous socialist losers. Trying to force them to swallow the red pill and make them go through the looking glass only throws them into a tizzy and they run around shrieking and bawling like 8 year old girls crying out for a censor.

Last post. Yawn. You guys are not even interesting. Marry, get a job, become a man. You can’t remain a sophomoric Star Trek fan and postmodernist your entire friggin’ life. Star Trek and its entire paradigm, very pretentious Quine-style crap, is essentially about communists in their pajamas exploring outer space and spreading their weirdo bolshevist ideas to aliens who just wish they would stay away.

Cleve:
Somebody needs a cookie and nap!

Seems to me you’re the closed-minded “liberal” (i.e. in your worldview liberals try to suppress rational discourse, so your behaviour is very liberal indeed). You can’t just let people have a discussion without shitting on everyone (a discussion that obviously doesn’t interest you in the least, even if you are able to understand it). I don’t go on to right-wing intellectual blogs (are there any?) and behave like a shithead. In reality you’re just taking pleasure out of being obnoxious. So go away. We don’t want to play with you.

And speaking of quantifying over imaginary friends, according to computer gamehead friends of mine, ole’ Cleve has now spent ten years obessively working over his fantasy role playing game, announcing and backtracking on release dates so many times that’s he’s become a laughing stock on gaming groups – which is probably why he’s trolling new pastures.

It may be efficacious for someone to believe in as of yet unverifiable mystical or religious concepts, might advance him in society and so forth, but that does imply that what he believes in (immaterial souls) is not itself a product of physics or chemistry. At some point (already occuring–ie Changeux) the religious concepts and impulses will be fully mapped, genetically and neurologically.

Cleve has imaginary enemies, it seems.

He’s surprised and angry that, after his charming introduction made up of hostile cliche jokes we’ve all heard before (what he calls “uncomfortable truths”), no one likes him. Hm, reality-sense problem?

“Postmodern Star Trek Communists?”

Retired with too much time on his hands. Perhaps craft work like macrame will help him channel his energies.

On topic: Something that would be unquantifiable might be potential imaginary friends that no one actually has. I think that does get into angel-dancing-on-the -head -of-a-pin territory.

Speaking of computer roleplaying games, one of the best ever made, Planescape: Torment, was designed by folks with degrees in such subjects as philosophy and literature.

Sadly, it didn’t do too well on the market and I don’t think we’ll see another like it anytime soon.