I think that to observe a change in nature which within the constraints of the 'laws of nature' could not be caused, even in principle, by any natural event, force, or agent implies that that causal "something" is inconsistent with – not constrained by – the 'laws of nature'. — 180 Proof

Isn't this what often leads to something being ruled out and then later accepted in science. For example: people lving near elephants and then some non-African visitors thought that elephants could communicate over long distances - one non-African actually could feel what later was discovered to be the method of communication. I understand that one does not immediately accept things without evidence or sufficient evidence. At the same time ruling out can seem logical. A mere deduction from the known laws. But this can later be overturned when anomalies are found to exist.

Rogue waves is another example. Current fluid physics/oceanography/meteorology ruled out the possibility of rogue waves. It wasn't possible given what they knew or 'knew'. It didn't fit then current models. Later after changes in technology confirmed what was dismissed as faulty emotional judgments on witnesses, then scientists sought out to explain what was going on.

IOW saying something cannot be true can be rather tricky.

A small note to start: if it's a shop clerk he or she is not running the business, they are working for someone. (I realize 'running' is a bit ambiguous, but I think we should be clear about the power and role of the person).

I don't think we can make a rule. I think it depends on the boss/owner and how they might react. It depends on the specifics of the relation with the family. And in some ways it depends on the economic situation of the clerk and if there are dependents. If we as a society expect clerks to do such things, then that society should increase the protections clerks have.

I can't see a real problem with challenging the person. I think it gets tricky to expect the clerk to deny the sale.

I'm talking about the model, which I don't agree with, and how it is conceived.

Though I do think some believers think that eventually we'll all figure it out and rejoin the mass of Vishnu or whatever. Then others have a more cyclic system and people hurting each other and being dumb or bad is just built in. Kind of like how we always have new laundry to clean.

If I am not wrong about karma and reincarnation, I guess in your "new body" and "new mind" after you born again, you are not able to remind of or having memories of your past life and the cause of your death for being a Jew in Nazi Germany. — javi2541997

You don't remember, but you can still learn and become more compassionate or whatever. Later, in some conceptions of Karma, you do remember past lives - after a lot of meditation - and can slough off the whole thing.

But there are some real problems with these ideas, morally and otherwise.

No, that's the simplistic retributive 'solution' - — Vera Mont

It is one version of Karma though not necessarily thought of as retributive, but rather as teaching the person what they failed to understand in the previous life. Yes, one also may be 'demoted' to simpler forms of life in some versions of reincarnation/Karma. Other versions have this now you'll get to experience the other side of the dynamic format. Some have both.

If there's one thing I can't abide, it's lizards who make bad choices. — Tom Storm

:lol:

The real problem is the implication that the Jews deserved their punishment. They must have done something such that the universe needed to teach them this lesson of the Holocaust.

We're being put in a situation where we are told that we KNOW. Here is the truth, period. This is the way it is and now you KNOW it. We're not in that situation. Yes, sometimes we know more than others, but there is always room for possible error. So, we use the word know and this word can be very effective, distinguishing situations where there is a better chance our belief is incorrect. It's not a hard and fast category but one we place things in that we have very good reasons for believing. If we were friends with these people, we would think - before finding out otherwise - that they knew. Yes, what we consider knowledge may not be correct. But it's a pretty effective category for many people. So, on the ground, as a person in the world of those scenarios, I wouldn't consider having said one or both of them knew where there car was as some big error should it turn out that the car is not there. Because when I say 'know' it doesn't mean 'cannot possibly be revised stuff'.

In our day-to-day lives, we demand evidence and validation before accepting something as truth. — Thund3r

We do for some things, but not for many many others. For example, we have large sets of heuristics about how to achieve certain things: money, friends, romance, creative works: how to avoid certain things: being looked down on, being safe, figuring out the right things to do
and more.
Many of these we follow not based on evidence.
Then there are microversions of this. We have things like 'there I have analyzed that argument/idea/person/situation long enough quale. I don't need to look at it any more. IOW we use intuition about our own effforts, abilities, effectiveness, specific achievement in the moment all the time, without evidence - certainly nothing that would be accepted in a peer reviewed science journal.

These macro assessments/heuristics and then also microversions lead to decisions that affect ourselves and other people. They are not small stuff: they lead to voting choices, moral choices, assessments of parenting techniques or specific actions and attitudes in parenting, how we relate to other people and more.

These heuristics and intuitive assessment processes are working for us, we assume, think, have decided, have faith in. And of course, perhaps they just seem to. Many we are not even conscious of.

Right, nor can neuroscience lay claim to this issue being just on their turf. Since we don't know, we don't know if it depends on neurons and other objects of neuroscientific research. Or only depends or is restricted to neurons. (There are hypotheses, just to quibble. hypotheses are a dime a dozen).

As with all justification, it all comes down to the consequences of being wrong. Is your justification adequate for the risk involved? Should I lend Aminima $5? Sure, they seem honest. Should I lend Aminima $10,000? I'll have to think about that. — T Clark

That probably seems like a good idea. He seems trustworthy. But once its more money it seems like there is too much risk. You have done some statistical analysis of your abilitiy to intuit trustworthyness. Or humans' abilities.

1) I think we all do this and 2) I think it is useful. To be at the stage of seeming, it probably has either worked ok for us or it is not worked to a harmful degree. It may have been harmful, but probably not in a blunt damaging way.

There has been some kind of natural selection process that it passed.

I'd want to go in again to the example 'the atmosphere', not to change your mind about your points about universe - which I think are good ones - but to try to present 'things' as more of a spectrum than objects vs the exception universe. But I've already made my points and babbled a lot. I was being somewhat polemical. It was that spectrum conclusion I've been heading for rather than a 'hey, the universe is just like a spoon as an object of perception'.opposed position.

I'd never heard of him. Stanford has this to say...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hare/#Aft

His philosophy is currently somewhat out of fashion, in part through a reversion to various forms of cognitivism in ethics, in part through changes in the style of philosophy, which now pursues the clarity that he desired through a new complexity and professionalization. At least in the short term, it is probable, and in accord with the “strange dream” from which we started, that his thinking will come to be viewed from a distance, as playing a once important role within the non-cognitivist strain in ethics that was dominant through much of the 20th century. And yet it may yet come to hold the attention of a new audience through its recognition of the tensions inherent in any practical thinking that responds without complacency to the aspirations of our ethical ideals, and the limitations of our moral capacities

Here's the strange dream, just to make that reference clearer...

I had a strange dream, or half-waking vision, not long ago. I found myself at the top of a mountain in the mist, feeling very pleased with myself, not just for having climbed the mountain, but for having achieved my life’s ambition, to find a way of answering moral questions rationally. But as I was preening myself on this achievement, the mist began to clear, and I saw that I was surrounded on the mountain top by the graves of all those other philosophers, great and small, who had had the same ambition, and thought they had achieved it. And I have come to see, reflecting on my dream, that, ever since, the hard-working philosophical worms had been nibbling away at their systems and showing that the achievement was an illusion. (2002: 269)

.

When you remember his work, what is it that you consider significant?

In one sense this is true and in another not. Most familiar objects we can move around to see the object from all sides. — Janus

Yes, we can. So, we get a series of snapshots of the outside

Of course unless we dissect something we see only the surface. We don't see the microphysical constitution of objects, but we can tell what material they are made of by sight and by feel and sometimes by sound, smell or taste. — Janus

Yes. My main idea is that we are always using a multitude of observations to construct a kind of whole image. After we have seen the thing once, we, I think, refer to the constructed whole image. I am not sure that is so different from what we do coming up with the idea of the universe.

If we take an ice cube as our example. It is more or less one substance, barring pockets of air and whatever impurities there are in the h20. We see the surfaces, and we luckily in this case get to see the inside. We make enough observations to get a sense of the whole and this seems miles away from what we do with a universe.

But as a next example we take a human or even a humble bee. Suddenly we have something made up of thousands of substances, most on the inside. I think the bee likely has some consciousness - in the sense that it experiences. This is also 'inside'. They are actually fairly complex cognitively - they can understand the concept of Zero for example.

Here we are building up a very incomplete model in our minds for the object we see. Some melittologist
may well have a much more complete model in his or her mind, but this has been built up via observations and mulling and reading over a long period of time. Must of the bee is opaque to the direct senses and to be sensed requires taking the bee apart, autopsy version or chemical. And probably also all sorts of indirect observations. Taking tests what show what is there or going on inside. or like the tests that showed the bees could understand or work with the idea of zero. There was no direct perception of this.

And even the humble ice cube is known by many to be made up of atoms and perhaps the patterns of those atoms in ice. Then the make up of the atoms, then that in a way the little solar system model of the atom is, at least in qm, a reification of, well strange stuff and patterns and more like energy, though not energy, etc.........Most people manage without this, but then their models are more incomplete, even if the best experts' models are also incomplete. And then there are individual differences between ice cubes, some visible, some not.

And as I said earlier this isn't really going into the nitty gritty of our perception. Which is not like a direct seeing, but rather interpretations and translations and filtering to make a kind of internal images of each snapshot taken of the ice cube. So, we are building even in what seems like a mere direct looking at the object. And past viewings and expectations are added in also.

So, when we talk about the universe, yes, it's not direct. It's a built up model each of us have, some more informed than others with idiosyncratic foci. Well, the universe is the most complicated thing we know of. Of course any building up of a model for this is going to be very complicated. And sure, we may get this model via more inferral or more steps, since we use the observations of others, generally, to build up this model. It's at the far end of a spectrum, but I am not sure that it is qualitatively different.

I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I am not sure it's so different when someone says TV or Russia or atmosphere or school or squirrel to me or my father's desk or......

I think they have focused their senses on a fraction of these things, in some cases (the squirrel, Russia, even the TV and my father's desk for most people, certainly the atmosphere, just a tiny fraction, and have some model in their heads.

I don't see universe as the exception. Not because it is outside us (as is the atmosphere). And not because we have direct perception of other things, but not it.

Inferring is not the same knowing as seeing the "object of perception", — L'éléphant

Yes, I got that. My point was that there is inferring in pretty much everything we look at, even small stuff. But also the atmosphere, rivers, and other bigger stuff. When we sense another person, we get a series of snapshots. As I mentioned we don't see their insides, body or mind. A mass of approximations are made and a kind of model - and that's not even bringing in all the filters and interpretations in everyday sensory experience.

Knowing through the object of perception means you actually use your 5 senses to get to know an object — L'éléphant

That's only part of what we do with even mundane objects.

Yes, we know something about the universe. i.e. the totality of everything, but this did not come about because we saw the "whole universe" in front of us, — L'éléphant

We never see the whole anything. Even if our perception was somehow direct, without models, filters and interpretation, we only get series of perceiving facets of the object. And then, of course, it's only surfaces we perceive and from these snapshot facets we build up an internal model or set of sensory symbols.[quote="L'éléphant;778892"

]woud this mean one can't study the atmosphere (unlike a car), unless one can go outside the atmosphere. — Bylaw

En fait, we can. No one here is saying this. If you're introducing a new twist in this discussion, write that bit in a way that you don't attribute it to me.

I wasn't attributing it to you. I was pointing out that your objection to universe would hold for atmosphere. I also am extending this to smaller, everyday objects in this post and the other. I specifically chose atmosphere because you said that being inside something was a problem. We are inside the atmosphere.

I also don't see how inside vs. outside is relevant. Hence the Gamow image and idea.

We don't/can't perceive whole objects. Not even a spoon in our kitchen. We'll see one angle but not others. We don't see the inside. We see it in this particular light. And we build up a kind of cliche image in our heads and we generally see that and perhaps notice significant deviations from that when seeing a new style spoon. Once you are dealing with something more complicated than a spoon - like a squirrel or a human - the interpretations, series of snapshots, all that is missing from any direct view (or hearing, smelling, tasting, touching) is only more significant.

IOW I see your objections to sensing the universe as present in all our sensing. We never look at whole things. We are always inferring and interpreting and working with mental models, ready in advance. Just as we fill in our blind spots but globally instead of locally.

I give a kind of retake of this post in response to Janus 4 posts down from here.

That was me being playful.

I thought you'd never say Uncle.

woud this mean one can't study the atmosphere (unlike a car), unless one can go outside the atmosphere. And aren't we really studying lots of incomplete sense impressions or anything we study and creating some kind of model of the whole, regardless. I mean, we don't study eachother's innerds (mental or physical). We infer things and build up models, much of it based on indirect contact with effects. Why is inside inherently worse than outside? Toplogically----

From George Gamow's 1, 2, 3 Infinity...

So, you're sayin', we use the same brain to do both politics and science, but they're apples and bicycles? — Agent Smith

Well, we certainly use the same brain for whatever we engage in. Each of us, that is, have but one brain.

An IQ and EQ test assesses cross-domain skills, oui? — Agent Smith

I think that's a pretty incomplete test. Yes, it would tell us stuff about our ability to develop skills in a number of fields. I mentioned other qualities also. EQ measures certain things, but it does not measure our interests and passions, for example. Me personally, I wouldn't be interested in a lot of the activities politicians have to engage in, so it doesn't suit me. Which would make every step in skill acquisition harder for me. Some parts of physics, especially the approach Einstein took with his thought experiments, would be ok, but not the math. I was decent at math, but not very interested after a while. Neither field suits me. And oddly my skill set probably suits politics better. All of my work has involved flexible communication and reading people - though much less negotiation and the Machievellian end - but the parts of that job that I would hate go way past any distaste I have for any parts of physics. Just ot use myself as an example.

The evaluation 'harder' involves a lot of things not on such a test.

As far as I can tell, politicians almost always fail, but a horde of scientists have made it big. — Agent Smith

And you're point is? Does this mean that poltics is harder because more fail. Or politicians are dumber and scientists would succeed as politicians cause they did in science or.....?

What does that tell you, mon ami? — Agent Smith

I think it's more important for the discussion if you tell me what it tells you?

You're good at philosophy, but something tell me you'll excel in science but will be utterly disoriented as a president/(prime) minister. — Agent Smith

I wouldn't be disoriented. I would hate it and I would know why I hated it. And I doubt I would succeed in it. Neither science nor politics suit me as professions. But if I had to choose, I'd go for science, perhaps a marine biologist or, like the people who hang out in nature staring at baboons or elk. All day in a lab would break my soul. But I did quite well on the tests in high school and college that might mislead one into thinking I'd be good in a lab. I'm a science sprinter, but not a marathon runner in science. And you need to be a marathon runner in whatever field you choose.

Whew. You have a thing about physicists. The ones I've known had none of these characteristics. :roll: — jgill

I don't have a thing about physicists. I was trying to show the different needs of two professions by showing what one could possibly get away with in one of them.

Did you understand my main points? Do you agree or disagree? Do you think politicians and physicists have the same skill sets and temperments and interests? Might one need different skill sets etc.? Can one be extremely competent in one field and not at all in the other? Might not temperment, natural gifts, interests and passions, different skill sets mean that one could be an incredible politician but a terrible physicist and vice versa?

Before we get all worked up about the issue, I suggest we define difficulty in order to answer the question is politics harder than science? — Agent Smith

As I said: that's apples and bicycles. If I need a snack and my blood sugar is low sucking on the bicycle doesn't help me. If I need to commute to work and I have 15 minutes, sitting on the apple an peddling doesn't help me.

And then science vs politics is way too abstract to be meaninful. Is it harder to do what in each field, what jobs, what roles? Are we talking about 'harder for someone starting from scratch intending to be great in each field, which will be the harder task? What's hard for Einstein may be easy for Lincoln? What's easy for Lincoln may be hard for Einstein?

Depending on training, experience, temperment, natural gifts, atttitude, interests and more.

If something bores us, it is much harder for us. If you are interested in the elegance of equations you my plough ahead in research into light warves, where someone else with an interest in making practical changes in a legislative bill would find it so boring he or she falls asleep reading one paragraph of a peer's research on light.

I am not sure how to come up with an objective standard of hardness. I could make guesses about some fields, but these are so broad and one's skill set can always get better in both, I wouldn't know how to compare them.

I didn't bring up Einstein's possible interpersonal toxicity to bash Einstein. It was to point out just what I said about the difference between abstract empathy and the kinds of saavy and direct empathy or at least 'reading-other-people-using-mirror-neurons' skill politicians need.

And it was not a sign that I am worked up. It's part of my core apples vs. bicycles (what others might call apples vs. oranges) argument.

Just cause he was a genius in one field doesn't mean he'd be good in another field. For a wide range of reasons, some of which I have been describing.

And hey, could you respond to at least one of the points I made? Because what you did here was not doing that.

I did say 'be false', but that's what almost all professional life with some kind of regular contact with strangers includes. Your doctor can't honestly react to your hygiene if it's terrible. They may need to inform you, in a delicate way. I'm someone who has a hard time with this. Not that I blurt out everything, but it weighs on me that I can't. But being false is not the same as lying, but really, no politicians can manage to state the truth all the time. It would cause all sorts of problems. Negotiation requires skills that a physicist does not need. I never said cheat. A politician must hide all sorts of reactions to negotiate well and interact with people he or she has distaste for, either on a personal level or the level having to do with worldview. A physicist, especially one who is a genius, can manage to be an eccentric, offputting, raw truth blurter with poor hygiene, even. Being able to hide your real reactions, not make a fair offer first in a negotiation, butter up people you personally dislike, ally yourself on some issues with terrible people short-term, and many other qualities my temperment has trouble with do not a bad person make. That is genuine statecraft, because we do not live in a world where all players play fair. Someone going in, deciding to always be honest, to always start with a fair offer in a negotation, who always puts his or her cards on the table, who will nefver ally with someone whose other policies they find offensive, never butter up someone they don't like, never pretend to be interested at the end of a long day in the complaints of a constituent, never play games with major players, never call in favors with a lot of pressure...well, they'll be honest and can pat themselves on the back, but they will get eaten alive. Everyone will know how to play them. But a physicist, yup, they can manage all that and be a world hero. Further a physicist might be terrible at reading people's emotions. They might react with tremendous confusing when encountering subcultures other than their own and might have no interest in trying to understand them. They might have little interest in winning people over: here's the study I read, this is what we should do, they might say over and over. They might be utterly incapable of speaking in different ways to children, poor people, working class people, rich people, people going through trauma and so on. Another way to more neutrally put all this is they could be socially rigid. You could say, such a physicist is socially honest. Or you could say they are a very poor communicator. You could even say they lack empathy. Einstein might have only had a conceptual empathy. Humanity, people in the abstract. This need no mean he can read people or is moved by people.
https://medium.com/@editors_91459/turns-out-einstein-was-a-cold-hearted-misogynist-who-attempted-to-control-his-wifes-every-move-c3f1ff70bf8c#:~:text=The%20two%20were%20open%20to,demanding%20ones%20for%20his%20wife.

It's comparing apples to bicycles. Politicians need to be able to read people very well, use people, negotiate well, be false and be comfortable with at least some Machievellian routines. You can be a great physicist without any of that. You could find all of that utterly unpleasant or impossible. Some think E might have had Aspberger's Syndrome and just not been able to, read people, in the necessary ways, but this would be little obstacle to doing thought experiments, studying math and physics and so on. I don't know enough about him to know, but the skill sets for success are very different. So, it's not a difficulty issue.

Wars often exemplify clashes of worldviews. As a solider in battle , I am not only not going to come to the aid of an enemy soldier in need, I actively try to induce their suffering. Their needs represent for me the desires of an alien and hostile worldview, and thus what benefits them causes me suffering. One can extend this to political and religious clashes. — Joshs

Sure, a soldier is in a specific situation, though even there some show mercy to wounded enemy soldiers. What I was saying about empathy was that one need not have insight to feel it. One can see-feel. Even other social animals show this kind of reaction.

Einstein refused the presidency/prime ministership of Israel. Was it because he understood reality or was it because he didn't? — Agent Smith

He certainly could have been influenced by thinking he understood some things, that made the job unappleaing, and didn't understand other things making him not competent for the position. But Einstein was very good at finding out some new things about reality faster than other people and in specific areas. This doesn't mean he'd be better at running a cash register in a grocery store or doing marketing or, yeah, running a country. He might have had all sorts of confusions about the parts of reality one needs to know about to run a country.

Yes. We are faced with the challenge of achieving a new kind of social consciousness whose operation is predicated on empathy. — Pantagruel

And in those who weild a great deal of power. IOW it's not something that printing books on parenting or changing pedagogical practices, I think, will change in the least. Using just a couple of ways one changes social consciousness. I don't think most of the common methods - protests, op-ed pieces, social media campaigns, legislation, movies, documentaries - will make any dent on this 'faction'.

On the ground, between groups with different worldviews, there is a lot of propaganda (not using that term pejoratively or not pejoratively) and a lot of suggestions, demands for changes in the various ways of raising/changing social consciousness. And, the differing ideas about this is often part of the conflicts.

And those I see as lacking empathy are lovin' it.

I don't think any of it matters to them, except to the extent it keeps people divided and focused on the bad attitudes and behavior and nature of other people with little power.

Is empathy possible without first being able to understand what appears to one initially as a dangerously alien worldview? — Joshs

I don't think we need to restrict empathy to situations where we have a worldview difference. Do you wince when you see someone get hurt? Does it disturb you if your actions or the actions of those serving you (in some way) lead to the suffering of others? Then we can start to see if this doesn't happen when the other people have other worldviews or races or cultures. Of course, I am reacting to the use of the word empathy in the way that I meant it in the post PG was responding to. He or she may be using it differently. Whether I am correct or not in my sense of today's situation, I meant people who really do not care at an abstract level or should they actually see it happening if other people suffer, even if it is due to them (the empathyless ones). I actually don't think they care about worldview. I'm not sure they care about each other very much either, but have common interests.

There are certainly conflicts between worldviews, but I suppose if I were to generalize I would say there is a war between people with no empathy and everyone else. The everyone else is involved in a lot of paradigmatic conflict. Which helps the people with no empathy.

I'd go even further and say that not only is it redundant, it's misleading. It's as if we can not only see it's truth AND consider it's justification has merit. I could deal with JnFB: justified, not falsified belief (as far as we know), but if we're claiming it's true, then we are claiming it is not revisable. Whereas if we just say it is justified, it is not ruling out that some better justification for a different take may come along.

I don't mean it's a farce. I think there may be significant overlaps with what they actually believe. I just mean that I don't assume it matches, and often behavior and things said in other contexts show these other views seeping up to the surface or not hidden well.

I mean, it would be a kind of fascistic self-relation to eliminate all of this. I am not trying to put people down for inconsistancies in a general way. But I do think that there is a lot of explaining our positions after the fact of having them or wanting to have them.

Bylaw it is, after all, a war of worldviews. — Agent Smith

I'm not sure what the 'it' refers to.
I have a sense that people have official worldviews and then often something else and/or something more complex going on (underneath, sometimes, on the side). We want to varying degrees to be seen as (including by ourselves) Good, Rational, Smart, on the Right Team, Spiritual, Not Fooled, Brave, Noble....The 'wanting to be seen as' is like a virus in our worldviews, how we deal with other worldviews and what we choose to say is our worldview.

Like the older brother is not going to admit that he disagrees with his sister about school, music, films, etc., because he loved it before she was born when he was an only child and she came and ruined it. (that's a metaphor. I'm not suggesting Freudianish reasons for all these splits.) He might not even know or be able to call it up. And there are all these old battles two between 'sides'.

Philosophy aspires to something more than utility. — Wayfarer

Philosophy is a field of study. We aspire. And pragmatists aspire to utility. (and if you read between the lines of other types of philosophers, even they come down to being able to do things. Even if they focus on Being, they need a philosophy that gets them to whatever being they're after. And since I have my pragmatist hat on today - sometimes other hats find their way to my head - I'd say that all knowledge is a doing, but it gets reified into that noun for convenience's not ontology's sake.

Yes, I think it add entitlement. It also perhaps is just simply a natural bias. The closer something is to me, the more likely I am to give it a pass in relation to the problem of other minds. There are a number of scientists now considering plants to be conscious and some having already decided in the positive. And there is somewhat of a resurgance of pantheism. Which is parsimonious,giving matter or everything consciousness, but specific cognitive functions to more complex organic life. In science animals did not start being granted consciousness up into the early 70s. Before that it was professional improper (and professionally dangerous) to talk or write about that in professional contexts.

Yes, and 'we' have a history of not granting consciousness even to some races in our species, in the science and philosophy communities (with exceptions) there not granting consciousness to animals. IOW we have a bias in our educated guesses. And a bias that many of the less educated or not educated generally managed not to have in relation to animals.

Thank you. Yes. I mean, yes to the category of value I think the thread lead to. It lead to seeing people sum up their positions on a number of philosophical areas. It was interesting to see what got batched in a single person. And then also some of the terms people used were either coined or new to me and I wanted to explore those. We don't really get to see that kind of information batched like that about people. Which I think gave the thread value. We tend to encounter indlvidual positions from individual posters. I liked seeing overviews. Might not have gone anywhere, but I thought it already provided value. That you got threatened with banning seem a stretch. Also, it seems like my asking about what happened to the thread led to your getting a threat. Though perhaps you got a pm or something. Anyway, I liked it. And despite seeing how it didn't lead to a traditional discussion, I thought it led to interesting crossections and information.

I'm not sure coherence is one of my goals for my philosophy (ies). I would like to find out deep stuff and perhaps solutions to how to live and live well. Those can be coherent (or not).

I don't see it there.

The hard problem seems inescapable. Even if you claim, "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion", the question remains, "why do some systems experience this illusion, and others do not?". — hypericin

And how do we know they are not, those that we deem not having them?

You mean like in Russia and China? — alan1000

You don't have to go that far. In people's homes in the West, at private parties. Try exercising a wide range of free speech while at work (including lunch and breaks) and see how long you keep your job and get to keep talking there. Corporations are happy to fire you for all sorts of speech and ban you from the property. There are all sorts of organizations and businesses that will also ask you to leave if you continue cursing, screaming, insulting people or interfering, through speech, with people enjoying their bowling, lunches, chess games or yes, even philosophical discussions. Drop in yoga classes and meditation groups will ask you to leave for certain kinds of free speech. You get the idea. No particular private entity has to put up with everything free speech might include. Such entities get to remove people who disrupt the functioning of their activities. Gray areas abound and you could try taking The Philosophy Forum to court. But I think you'll find that it's not that you get to impose your free speech anywhere, anywhen on people, but rather that there are ways for all positions and types of speech to be expressed in the country. And, my God, the internet makes this vastly easier to do and reach people. You just may find yourself or some of your speech not welcome in other people's websites.

There are certainly people who get harrassed by the government and other kinds of authorities for exercising their free speech. There are groups on both the left and the right, in Europe and the US, say, who try to shut people out of public view.

Russia and China don't have to rely on doxxing and trolling and online bullies to the same degree. The worst cases of silencing in the West are business as usual in those countries, especially China because they are just vastly more organized than Russia. Exercising free speech in Russia is a bit like insulting Italians on a mob controlled speech. You might get lucky. In China Big Brother has the monitoring down to a science that unfortunately the West seems to be curious about: social credit systems, for example. Generally in the West marginalizing is the method. In R & C, it's all on the table as possible consequences. Censorhip is just step one.

You seem to be heading for taking a stand in a way that is probably not noble, just stubborn. Can't really know without having seen the posts in question. I think the above suggestion to ask the mod politely is good approach.

As far as the response including 'subjective'...that's honest. One could come up with objective criteria, but the application with always have subjective facets. How could it not when evaluating interpersonal relations, use of language, value of a post in ratio to disruption, when is an insult and insult, etc. I'd vastly prefer a forum where the moderators admit that there is a subjective element.

I doubt they are getting paid. But would probably respond to polite questions and challenges, even though that's part of their free time they don't need to give you.

Recently, I have been engaged in a plethora of relationships that all insist on the importance of small talk, creating a superficial expanse of which my real identity seemingly cannot traverse. — john27

Small talk certainly can be important. It's like a dance. It's not the content, but the near play of it, the feeling the other person out on trivia or not very important things. Getting sense of voice tone, how much emotion a person is comfortable with and what strikes them on that level. Hi, nice to meet you, I am depressed and I get the impression you're on the pompous side is something to work up to in baby steps.

If by relationships you mean you already know the person for a while and you are friends and partners, then the working you're way to being more open phase has passed - at least in some areas. But then the dance is still nice or can be. I think we can take these things way to literally. Like the two people are really conveying information. I think it's much more like grooming in apes.

These interactions have begged the question of if I WERE to cut across the other side, what would I find? What would constitute their real self? — john27

Do you mean 'if you went beyond small talk'? It seems here and above that the small talk itself is a way to meet the real other, in some people's opinion? I do think that can be true, but it's certain not the main moments one meets what many would call the real person. I suppose I can go with the facade and real personality model, though not always. I think it has pros and cons.

A part of me believes that a real identity is simply a convenient illusion, the other believes that any real identity is immensely perverted — john27

Can you expand on this. Convenient illusion I can understand in a very broad way, but how do you think it is convenient? then how is one's real identity - in general, as a rule, it seems here - immensely perverted? Or is the idea perverted?

However, that could also just be me projecting my innate perversion on the rest of the world... — john27

Or projecting what you judge to be perverted that others may or may not also 'have.'