I only started seriously looking at philosophy about a year ago
   - via groups like these. I wanted to know the names a little,
   some of the basics, and learned as I went along in discussion
   and debate. I treated it like "on the job training". For me a
   lot of it was trying to understand the psychology of people who
   were into philosophy because they sometimes seemed to speak a
   foreign language and have a foreign attitude to me,
   disassociated from reality. So, I learned a lot. I discovered
   I'm primarily a pragmatist, although I enjoy a little bit of
   head-in-the-clouds. Somewhere along the line I discovered
   Embodied Cognition, which fits my worldview a little better than
   straight logic or math along with a few other things. So, it's
   been worthwhile. It was hard at first but I believe "sword
   sharpens sword" and found ways to be convincing in my arguments
   which usually ended up going beyond philosophy and into "what's
   really happening right now": We're people sitting at our
   computers or behind our phones, writing on the Internet in a
   little forum somewhere because it's likely more interesting than
   something else we might be doing. Its' amazing how that little
   fact can escape us when we get caught up in online discussion
   and debate. smile emoticon