Will aim to make an announcement soon. :up:

And Harris could still carry the popular vote. But she's a weak uninspiring candidate is the problem.

The average American doesn't want to be ruled by a woman. I never expected their sexism to be that severe. — javi2541997

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 though. Only lost due to electoral college set up.

Data looks bad for Harris for sure. She's even winning less women than Biden... Dems never gonna learn.

Not going to call it for Trump until Harris loses one of MI, WI, or PA.

Toss a coin. There's your winner.

The medium of education is to a large part also its message. — fdrake

:100:

Thank you. I just learned a new word. — jgill

As I've said before, @fdrake has all the words. Every one of 'em. :fire:

Ok, well, feel free to start a thread on that unorthodox position on ethics. We've rather veered off topic here.

Drinking coffee is morally wrong? Sitting too much is morally wrong? How about, spending countless hours without sleep tirelessly working on a suicide helpline is morally wrong? Or hurting one's elbow on a rock while jumping into a pond to save a drowning child is morally wrong?

You get the idea...

I think we more or less agree. E.g. The claim "abortion is wrong" obviously doesn't allow for direct application of the scientific method---it's not a scientific hypothesis---but scientific knowledge can certainly be (and certainly is) used both to support and oppose it.

It applies only to science and ethics isn't a science, so it wouldn't apply to that.

Either Trump or Harris could easily win 300 plus electors. Every single swing state is within the margin of error. I will only strongly disagree that Texas, Florida and Ohio are in play.

And I'l stick to my prediction that Harris will lose unless she wins MI and WI, though I think she'll win Pennsylvania.

Anyhow, we are---thankfully---running out of time to argue about it.

Yes and, to develop the idea, there’s a kind of bait and switch whereby what’s ostensibly offered, “knowledge” (of this and that) is offered as an implicit route to power, but functions to obscure the actual route to power (the meta knowledge of the system of power in which such “knowledge” is misleadingly elevated) both in terms of its content and mode, i.e. this “knowledge” tends towards a static “body of knowledge” that divides the individual against itself rather than an integrated praxis that would unify and dynamize it. And this exclusion of praxis, the inculcation, not just of disembodied “knowledge” but of the idea that knowledge (implicitly generalized as power) just is disembodied “knowledge” enables the gradual castration into the social that the social needs to inflict to reproduce its organs (institutions and those willing to be dispensable cells therein).

The process runs from the moment we are told to sit down in our groups and listen to the teacher to the moment we receive our high school diplomas. So, by the time we get to university and read Foucault and Nietszche or whoever, it’s too late. They too are castrated down to just more “knowledge” because we can’t undo the psychological sedimentation the education system inflicts on us with more sophisticated versions of the same mode of sediment even if, in abstract terms, it blows everything we thought we knew open. There has to be something else, from somewhere else, to crystallize meaningful opposition, and that’s rare.

So, the social reproduces itself through the education system by a process of immunizing itself against its own elementary structures—us—so that we may be subsumed in the organs that make it work. And it does so by training us against learning in any meaningful sense that would foster individual power and foment effective dissent. Instead, what we’re offered is a life of confusion where learning becomes either learning to integrate further into a diseased system that doesn’t want us qua individuals or learning for leisure, a form of relaxation / game of pretence that allows us to imagine we are doing other than we are doing (being integrated, subsumed, castrated), the former a direct route to individual annihilation and the latter only a distraction from it.

Techno-consumerism fits very well with the above as it feeds on this passive knowledge enculturation, transforming it into an almost ubiquitous opportunity to commodify us for advertisers, creating social cells split by our need to escape the suffocating banality of such without the means to actually do it. If there’s any “good” news, it’s that the more effective a society reproduces itself and exploits its own “human resources”---us— the more effective it (eventually) tends to be in exploiting other societies for its benefit—them. So, we get to be passive consumer worker bees, but at least fattened by our own honey and that of others.

Hello Michael, if that is even your real name. It is clear that you DO NOT understand America. Please DO NOT comment on matters you do not understand. The REAL President, DONALD J TRUMP is making the microphone stand GREAT AGAIN. You are currently spreading FAKE NEWS by immigrating your lies across our borders.

Yep, it's that or the Cum Cruise / Leon Musk ultra dystopia of cyborg super consumers with the only free beings forced to live like rats at the edges of the internet and in their mother's basements.

Details of Ukraine war are off-topic here.

And what do animals value, then? — Wayfarer

Food, territory, mates, power in a hierarchy, freedom of movement and lots of other things. Just because animals don't have explicit values they can articulate to us---as they are non-linguistic---does not mean we can't infer from their behaviour that they (depending on their species) value many of the same types of things we do.

In any case, listing differences between us and other animals does not necessarily bear on whether we are animals. Animals differ widely between each other too. Corals are animals and so are apes. The argument could be made that there are more and more striking differences between apes and corals than between us and apes and yet both are indisputably animals.

Meanwhile, a moderator comes into scold the expression of exasperation while not a word that it is at least seriously frowned upon to cite bot misinformation and confusion, despite that (at least last I happened to read) the forum has said in general that that is not acceptable. — TonesInDeepFreeze

I'm making efforts to clarify the sourcing issue in the guidelines and the mod forum. I'd ask for some patience with us and with other posters on this issue while we sort it out.

Another way of saying this is it's not the knowledge that is primarily identify-forming in an educational context, it's the context itself as a way of framing knowledge as power that forms the soclal identity and the ground on which individuals' navigation of this embedded framework rests. You might call individual strategies for negotiating the framework individual identities. But the framework is what's primarily internalised and grounds them.

It's a very broad question. At root and primarily what you learn through the education system can be contextualised by viewing that system as a microcosm for society as a whole. And what you learn in that context is not the knowledge that is transmitted (and knowledge transmission even within the domain in which it is transmitted is no longer considered a satisfactorily comprehensive description of the function of that domain), but the way in which power is distributed through the distribution of knowledge and how this creates structures through which social life is controlled and regulated.

My analysis FWIW is that Harris (now) will probably carry Pennsylvania and the election will come down to Michigan and Wisconsin which are toss ups (I expect Trump to take Arizona, Georgia and NC). If Harris loses either MI or WI, I think Trump wins. But Trump can afford to lose one of either and still win, giving him some advantage (as things stand).

It will be close with Harris carrying the popular vote by between 1 and 2.5 %. Trump will get at least 46%. @180 Proof's prediction of Trump at about 42% is way off in my view. Not long to go and things could still change, but it will take something dramatic to reset the race now.

Well I can't wait for the cognitive dissonance freakout here on this thread when Harris-Walz wins (possibly declared as soon as next Wednesday night). — 180 Proof

Why would there be a freakout? Almost everyone here and elsewhere has said the race is at best about 60/40 in favour of Trump. A 40% probability coming true isn't going to cause anyone to freak out or even bat an eyelid.

There would only be a freakout if your prediction of Harris winning the popular vote by nine points or so and a blue tsunami carrying her to a landslide victory is correct. That's not going to happen though.

OK, I think I actually clicked with this comment. The bit about being numerically identical with a human animal makes more sense. The desired answer is No. We are fundamentally something else, and we only have temporary control (a free will thing) over this particular animal. Is that it? — noAxioms

The animalist would claim that those who argue "no" are wrong. That it's incoherent to consider ourselves as fundamentally something other than a human animal.

In that case, my question becomes, at what point in the evolutionary history of h.sapien did this animal suddenly cede its self control to something else? — noAxioms

That's a problem for those who disagree with animalism as a philosophical position.

The argument in the OP still seems to make no sense. It seems to beg that the human animal in the chair is complete, not requiring a separate thing to do its thinking. There's all kinds of problems with the model of the animal not doing the thinking, but that doesn't seem to be the point here. — noAxioms

There are several ways to critique the argument as it's laid out but @Wayfarer's issue seemed to rest on a misunderstanding re human (as in human animal) vs "we" (persons).

Anyway, I started reading the article linked in the OP, and I really didn't like it, so I'll leave this issue to the other participants. — Wayfarer

But that details the argument under discussion. In fairness to @NOS4A2, he's tried to keep things on track by providing context.

I have no comment on that. Thank you for keeping things polite on your end anyhow.

And it is intellectually shameful... And risible...

Get outta here with that bot garbage! — TonesInDeepFreeze

How pathetic... — TonesInDeepFreeze

Meanwhile, you need to not litter a philosophy forum with confused, misinformational, and malformed bot garbage. — TonesInDeepFreeze

Calm down, please. You're making this emotive.

:up:

I would agree provided the implication is that humans aren’t just animals, or only animals. It’s the philosophical implications of that I’m wary of. — Wayfarer

If you're open to that implication then your begging-the-question objection isn't water tight, is it? Although I think it's better to phrase it as "people aren't just human animals."

Cross posted. But that might help if it was in the OP.

@NOS4A2 I think your approach is fine, but maybe you ought to add a bit to the OP to clarify because not everyone will look at the paper.

The debate isn't whether human beings are animals. They are. That's just a fact. The debate concerns whether we (the persons reading this thread) are animals.

@Wayfarer Have a look at the E.T. Olson link. There's an animal sitting in your chair because it's a truism that human beings are a type of animal (a scientific fact).

'the human condition' is identifiable as a unique state. — Wayfarer

Yes, it is. But that doesn't mean humans aren't animals. I've just had a look at the first paper @NOS4A2 quoted and the issue is as I've laid out. It's a truism that human beings, hominids, are animals. But the debate leverages the idea of personhood as making us more than that.

Humans are animals. That's an incontrovertible scientific fact. You would have to disbelieve evolutionary theory to dispute it. However, it could be argued that people are not wholly animals, that the person transcends the human. Personhood could be considered a metaphysical category (depending on your philosophical worldview). Maybe that's where @Wayfarer is coming from.

Personally, I think we can acknowledge even a fundamental difference between an animal with language (and all that comes with that) and other animals without being bothered by the fact that we are all animals. But if there's any opening to debate the issue, it's got to leverage a distinction between human and person.

I don't run a car and walk a lot. Now @Tzeentch is going to tell me running a car is decadent. I agree. Although if you live in the states with little or no public transport, maybe not.

A human doesn't need that extravagance, but people don't realize that. — frank

:up:

No. I know what language is because I've worked in the area most of my adult life. I cited the wiki page because other academic sources were ignored as were the explanations of the few here who have some background knowledge of the subject. But it looks like another of these conversations that may go nowhere due to being swamped in misunderstandings that people for some reason cannot let go of. That's fine. I think I've done what I could. If the conversation becomes sensible, I may be back.

I think if you read this, you will see it's consistent with the wording in my post. (Maybe we could add a few caveats, but that's about it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language

Edit: In any case, leaving that aside, under normal circumstances sign language develops in the same way as regular language and is of an entirely different category to body language.

I guess people can either believe me or you.

Or they can just look it up and see that I am correct — I like sushi

I think most posters here will be willing to read, e.g. the WIki page on language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

"Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning"

"Communication systems used by other animals such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited, number of possible ideas that can be expressed. In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to create new words and sentences. "

Your claims are just based on a lack of basic knowledge of what language is. That's fine. But I don't know why you keep insisting on them.

Why isn't it language? You used a sign intentionally to communicate something to others. You folded your arms "to communicate." This looks like a form of sign language or body language, in a non-metaphorical sense. — Leontiskos

I understand why you might think that, but sign language just is language. Children who are deaf will, if put together in groups, develop sign language just as they would regular language, in the same way, along the same developmental axis, and with the same resulting richness of potential expression. Body language is nothing like sign language or spoken language. It doesn't fulfil the basic criteria I provided earlier, but sign language does (including e.g. distinct linguistic units that can be recombined to produce new meanings, and indicate grammatical categories, such as case, tense, voice, mood etc).

You can demonstrate that to yourself by trying to write a post on here by taking a video of yourself in various "body language" poses, posting a link to it, and seeing if we have any idea what you're talking about.