Comments Elsewhere

In another thread, a friend was polling people for their oddest, fringiest views. Of course I could just list a bunch of things about political radicalism, but yo that’s what I do all day, and where the fringes of a conversation are at is relative to an audience. So yeah, believing that the state as such ought to be abolished or being against voting or public schools or whatever is weird in some circles, not weird in others. So here’s what I went with instead: 1. I think that mathematical objects can be, and often are, the objects of direct perceptual experience. (Including supposedly ideal objects like planes, triangles, perfect circles, pi, e, complex numbers, etc.) 2. I also think that modal properties can be, and sometimes are, the objects of direct perceptual experience. (So e.g. you can under the right circumstances gain knowledge of possibility and necessity not just by inference but by literally feeling possibilities, seeing necessities, etc.) (I will also say that I’m a modal realist, but my understanding of what modal realism actually entails — contra Lewis — makes this a somewhat less sexy and less fringy view than it might initially seem.)