I quoted you and tried to make sense of it. I am not trying to put words in your mouth.

If one rejects any kind of "thinking alike" in forming polities, that doesn't explain how such polities come into being. Saying: "I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people" does not explain it by itself. There is more to life in society than saying where its boundaries are.

There is a gap between two things you are saying. If you find this observation to be moronic, ignore it.
And if you do so, I will return the favor.

Jeff Beck.

What I want to know, is if our collective goals are wholesome or unwholesome towards one another. — Benj96

I don't understand how your thought experiment connects this question to the results you express interest in. The proposal suggests we are experiencing the immediate result of such decisions.

That sounds more like a thesis than a poll of other people's experiences/opinions.

Was that an instance of a Richardean paradox?

It seems odd then that you would want to say the notion lacked any mechanism. It seems even a cursory glance at any sociology or psychology textbook would provide you with a dozen such mechanisms without having to lift a finger. — Isaac

I was trying to figure out how your view of society worked. You declare the self-identification of persons as participants in a group to be meaningless in regard to the polity they find themselves within:

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. It does not in any way 'capture' some natural grouping of people all of whom think alike. — Isaac

This line you draw between the appearance of a will and the forces actually driving events is not a self-evident fact. It is a part of a theory you are using to interpret events.

I agree. The emphasis has been on what can be confirmed by shared and repeatable experiences. The point Chalmers is making about the use of reductive means to discover functions is echoed by the early cheerleader of modern science, Francis Bacon:

But my course and method, as I have often clearly stated and would wish to state again, is this--not to extract works from works or experiments from experiments (as an empiric), but from works and experiments to extract causes and axioms, and again from those causes and axioms new works and experiments, as a legitimate interpreter of nature. — Francis Bacon, The New Organon, Book 1, 67

It is from the dialogue of Plato named Parmenides. Here is the bit about time:

Does the one also partake of time? And is it and does it become older and younger than itself and others, and again, neither younger nor older than itself and others, by virtue of participation in time?

How do you mean?
If one is, being must be predicated of it?
Yes.
But to be (einai) is only participation of being in present time, and to have been is the participation of being at a past time, and to be about to be is the participation of being at a future time?

Very true.
Then the one, since it partakes of being, partakes of time?
Certainly.
And is not time always moving forward?
Yes.
Then the one is always becoming older than itself, since it moves forward in time?

Certainly.
And do you remember that the older becomes older than that which becomes younger?

I remember.
Then since the one becomes older than itself, it becomes younger at the same time?

Certainly.
Thus, then, the one becomes older as well as younger than itself?
Yes.
And it is older (is it not?) when in becoming, it gets to the point of time. between "was" and "will be," which is "now": for surely in going from the past to the future, it cannot skip the present?

No.
And when it arrives at the present it stops from becoming older, and no longer becomes, but is older, for if it went on it would never be reached by the present, for it is the nature of that which goes on, to touch both the present and the future, letting go the present and seizing the future, while in process of becoming between them.

True.
But that which is becoming cannot skip the present; when it reaches the present it ceases to become, and is then whatever it may happen to be becoming.

Clearly.
And so the one, when in becoming older it reaches the present, ceases to become, and is then older.

Certainly.
And it is older than that than which it was becoming older, and it was becoming older than itself.

Yes.
And that which is older is older than that which is younger?
True.
Then the one is younger than itself, when in becoming older it reaches the present?

Certainly.
But the present is always present with the one during all its being; for whenever it is it is always now.

Certainly.
Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?

Truly.
And is it or does it become a longer time than itself or an equal time with itself?

An equal time.
But if it becomes or is for an equal time with itself, it is of the same age with itself?

Of course.
And that which is of the same age, is neither older nor younger?
No.
The one, then, becoming and being the same time with itself, neither is nor becomes older or younger than itself?

I should say not.
And what are its relations to other things? Is it or does it become older or younger than they?

I cannot tell you.

That means ∞∞ time has elapsed and the now we find ourselves experiencing is the termination of this particular infinity — Agent Smith

But Parmenides said: "Then the one always both is and becomes older and younger than itself?"

Aristotle was too busy looking at how creatures lived to get stuck in that bottle.

That is an interesting analogy. I read Chalmers as breaking from the Cartesian theater where the duality of a first person being separated from the rest of the movie is the explanation itself.:

With experience, on the other hand, physical explanation of the functions is not in question. The key is instead the conceptual point that the explanation of functions does not suffice for the explanation of experience. This basic conceptual point is not something that further neuroscientific investigation will affect. In a similar way, experience is disanalogous to the élan vital. The vital spirit was put forward as an explanatory posit, in order to explain the relevant functions, and could therefore be discarded when those functions were explained without it. Experience is not an explanatory posit but an explanandum in its own right, and so is not a candidate for this sort of elimination. — Chalmers, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

The question is not whether we are only physical beings but whether the methods to establish what is only physical will explain experience. Chalmers is introducing a duality that is recognized through the exclusion of a phenomena instead of accepting the necessity for an agency beyond phenomena.

To that point, we don't know enough to say what consciousness does to understand how it may relate to the specific event of being a 'first' person. Compare this circumspection to the boldness of Identity Theory where that aspect of the 'physical' self is the first order of business.

I've also argued that there's no such thing as the will of the Ukrainians, or the motive of the Ukrainians. I've argued that no such thing exists because Ukraine (like all other countries) is an arbitrary line drawn by powerful people based on the amount of resources they had the power to control at the time. — Isaac

In other words: "the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion." Fighting people who kill your friends and neighbors may look and feel like a shared purpose but in reality, it is merely the struggle by elites to control people and territory.

It is an interesting theory of social organization. But it does not include a self-evident mechanism for how the coercion is brought to bear. Is there some kind of fear of anarchy as depicted by Hobbes? Repression of instincts ala Freud? Or more like the class struggle discussed by Marx? It certainly rules out a view of 'natural' society put forward by Locke.

Where have I said that? — Isaac

Still don't. There's no such thing as a Ukrainian identity. Ukrainians identify in all sorts of different, occasionally completely incompatible ways. That's why there was a civil war going on before this invasion.

Exactly. The reason why so many in this discussion cannot seem to get their heads around viewing this in any other grouping than by nationality.

Of course Ukraine does not have its own history, language and culture. It's an arbitrary line on a map, it's absurd to think it somehow contains a natural grouping of language, history and culture. — Issac

These are the moves you have repeated for hundreds of pages.

Memories are fleeting, as mortal as we are.

I will give it a shot.

Science, as a practice, developed through a lot of discussion about separating causality from coincidence. Given that we are creatures who base much of our knowledge upon lining up what happened at the same time as evidence of a cause, it was only through suppressing this tendency that we became aware of systems that were not simply extensions of our assumptions. Establishing what is happening and building models for why it did was the beginning of looking for functions rather than accepting we have been shown what there is to know.

After some time of doing this, the method starts to consider what it dismissed at the beginning of its enterprise; The inclusion of observations made isolated from other people.

I understand the folk psychology of “experiences”, but I don’t actually imagine I carry a “set of experiences” with me wherever I go, so I never need to appeal to them. — NOS4A2

You probably remember what you did and what has happened to you in the past. That 'set of experiences' is probably the closest you will get to what your body can report.

How do you experience it? I don't ask that as a trick question. I am not accusing anybody of misrepresenting their experiences.

The element of Chalmers' challenge that I don't see well represented in this thread is that he focused upon how the conflict of methods developed to establish facts beyond personal experience came to be used to explain that phenomena itself. Something deliberately built to avoid a problem was turned upon the potato deemed too hot to pass around. Observing that problem is different than insisting upon the existence of a being beyond what 'science' can establish.

I have yet to understand what “phenomenal consciousness” is, I’m afraid, so I draw a blank upon hearing it. — NOS4A2

I am puzzled by your puzzlement. Your life is different from mine. That comes from you being stuck with your set of experiences instead of mine. It does not take the invention of a 'ghost in the machine' to notice that is an inescapable fact.

It is also surprising to see you object to this quality of privacy after arguing in so many other places that all restrictions upon persons are a violation of their rights. I am not sure if you have thought this all through.

I tried googling the numbers and did not get matching results. What is your preferred database?

Edited to add forgotten not. Apologies.

None of these states have militaries that are on a modern operational level, nor have they taken any steps towards making them so. — Tzeentch

From what sources are you getting this information? Most sources that I have seen do not reflect this view. There has been a long ongoing call from U.S. to have other NATO members fork out more dough. But that gets complicated when reviewing how nations develop defense on their own compared to their commitments to NATO.

He accepted his punishment but did not accept that he was no longer a citizen. He performed the work of being a mid-wife for the birth of thoughts till his last breath. With that in mind, I think Plato was saying that there was no way to get rid of him. The purpose of Phaedo being, in part, something like Auden speaking of the death of W.B. Yeats:

The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
the current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

I was not objecting to your consideration of different motives. What is fallacious is your argument that the diversity of motives proves that the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion. You take the lack of commonality as a premise and act surprised when it appears in your conclusion.
You repeat Putin's thinking verbatim: Ukraine does not exist. The resistance being encountered by Russian forces is not Ukrainian. Therefore.......QED.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend from Baluchistan after the Coalition forces took Kabul. He said:

"I appreciate the U.S. trying to put down the Taliban but I don't think they realize that there are millions of the motherfuckers."

In regard to mutual respect, how do you see that in the context of Nietzsche's attempting to undermine Christianity, as such? Or the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.?

To put it most broadly, the arguments did not assume mutual respect was the order of the day. Even if some of the arguments were relatively civil in comparison to the alternatives.

The U.K. recognizes that pandering to Russian Oligarchs was not double plus good.

My personal experience has been only learning the virtues of the dispassionate after losing my cool over and over again. The lessons keep coming.

It may be germane to point out how the matter of contentious arguments were the bread and butter of Classical Greek culture. One of the central themes in the Republic is how the rude and abusive challenge by Thrasymachus was transformed into the well-reasoned debate of later chapters. A number of Plato's dialogues were brawls peppered liberally with personal insult. That element was recognized as part of the "dialectic" even when criticized as inferior.

Another influence for me on the subject is Nietzsche saying that one has to be careful about who one bothers to oppose because the effort is also a recognition of their importance. That suggests that there is a balancing point where expressions of contempt cancel the object of defeating an idea.

Otherwise, all contentions between ideas are a spasm of opportunistic sophistry.

I, too, will miss Olivier5.

The idea that 'Ukrainians' are all fighting for the same reason is, again, patent nonsense.

As such, we cannot possibly 'take into account' their agency — Isaac

The matter of agency is whether the common response to being invaded has been to fight back. The issue has come up here in the context of those saying that such a response is insignificant because the people fighting are only ciphers in a proxy war. Your observation about personal reasons is an equivocation between different ideas. If there had been no willingness to fight back, siding with Ukraine would have been merely a feeling of regret rather than a life-or-death attempt to repel invaders.

Your argument is similar to boethius in the way the invasion itself plays no part in how the participants in the struggle are seen to have responded to it. Your willingness to take note of all the different motivations leads to an odd inverse assessment of their relevance.

What distinguishes your account of irrelevance from Putin saying Ukraine does not exist outside of Russia?

I am not convinced that a 'valid' proposition excludes the possibility of error. That suggests an environment where arguments would be true if made clean of attempts to make them look better than they actually are. One can make a valid argument, free of sophistical persuasion, and still be wrong.

I agree with that call for courtesy. I have to admit I just used the reply function to add them to the conversation and I still haven't practiced the @ at method yet.

This is an improvement from when you did not see any kind of Ukrainian identity as being germane to what is happening. It takes Ukrainians for them to do bad things to each other.

The compulsion to serve is an important issue. It has been a deal breaker in many wars. The way you present it as an elective is odd. That would be more a reflection of intent if Ukraine was trying to invade Russia.

I see the resemblance. Part of my bringing it up was to separate the issue from a 'ghost in the machine' matter that you have been charged with introducing.

I think you can argue for a general resemblance between Chalmer's argument and the earlier Cogito arguments of both Descartes and Augustine. — Wayfarer

I think there are important differences between Chalmer's approach and these two philosophers. The experience of being oneself is given as a necessity that must be accepted before attending to what else exists in the Cartesian mode. Chalmers starts from a different direction:

Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

The explanatory gap Chalmers discusses is not an impassable barrier by definition. This is not a polemic against attempts to use reduction to find causes for events. The need to introduce complexity is a stepping back from assuming the 'first person' is synonymous with 'consciousness':

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function.

Given that all Ukrainians share the same motivation? — Manuel

I referred to the ones who are fighting and the ones who support those people. There are a lot of them. I won't bother posting more evidence for that as it is dismissed as propaganda. Nobody has yet to post evidence to the contrary unless you count the polls conducted by Russia.

Obviously, there is more than one perspective. The politics before the invasion has been interrupted by an attack upon the whole country. The willingness of Russia to kill civilians seems, in part, to divide those who want to fight. Please report when you hear of that happening.

Your observations do not support the little regard you have for Ukrainian motivations.

They do show why you view their agency to be unimportant.

I want the conflict to end now. I am not the one fighting it, however.

Once again, you would have the Ukrainians merely be pieces on a board game.

Yes, neither you nor I are fighting. But you are willing to explain to the one's fighting why they are dying. To leave their view out of the picture comes from standing above them.

The people in Ukraine who are fighting Russians are fighting because they were attacked by Russians. Whatever arrangements could have been made before that are not germane any longer. To only view the unfolding of events that might have been is to ignore what is happening now.

As far as smug self-righteousness goes, it is difficult to surpass its glory when you dismiss the will to defend oneself as a slavish pursuit of an ideology.

If I understand your report of what Withey is saying, he is comparing different kinds of persuasion rather than presenting a self-evident truth revealed by our experience. Taken by themselves, the emotions are not an argument unless they are made one. I have to write a story to pit them against another narrative.

I was thinking more along the lines that it would be good to stop the party sooner than later.

I respect your decision.

Well, I have to say the banning looks kind of fun.
I shuffle around the set like Mr. Rogers.
Chances are low that I will get banned for my sweaters being improperly buttoned.