I really don't see how this answers my question, which is specifically how the delay in social distancing has resulting in a measurable loss of life, unless you can show that the treatment received under the current conditions has limited the healthcare received and that limitation can be specifically shown to matter. I get that healthcare workers are stressed and volume is high, and it would make sense that these added pressures might result in poorer outcomes for patients, but you can't make an empirical statement without supporting data (which is precisely the complaint made about Trump and the anti-malaria drugs). Sure, it sucks to not have enough masks and an ongoing worry that there will be insufficient ventilators, and we worry about the stress levels to healthcare workers and how we might be exposing them to risk, but if you're going to say it has cost X number of lives, you need to specify your predicted range of X and you need to offer your support for it.

Keep in mind, this is the same guy that said masks offered no defense against the spread of the virus.. That never made any sense, and we later learn it was politically motivated in the hopes it would allow healthcare providers greater access to masks. I'm just not making sense of these new comments, other than reading it as an expression of a growing rift between him and Trump. Fauci's comment that he got continual pushback from the White House with regard to instituting social distancing earlier is of no relevance from a scientific perspective, but it casts dispersion upon the White House. Maybe he's correct in assertions, and maybe the public has the right to know what sort of leaders we have, but Fauci has now jumped into the political fray with this comment and he needs to provide his basis for his assertions and he needs to explain why he feels it's his role in the middle of the crisis to publicly report on errors of his team.

A Republican and great sage:

https://abcn.ws/2Jz6m6O

As usual, you're one of the few sane voices. — frank

Now that's a slap in the face.

Real question here, not a politically motivated one, but Fauci reports that had the US implemented more social distancing measures earlier, it would have saved lives:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/12/politics/anthony-fauci-pushback-coronavirus-measures-cnntv/index.html

My understanding of the social distancing concept is that it is to level out the curve of infections so as to be sure there is adequate healthcare (especially with regard to there being sufficient ventilators) to treat the curable.

I've not heard however that there have actually been a lack of ventilators and that people are dying who could have been treated. While many thought it would get that bad, it never actually did. What I'm hearing is:

https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/04/08/coronavirus-update-nyc-has-enough-ventilators-to-get-through-the-week-positive-covid-first-responders-returning-to-work/

Social distancing obviously will slow the spread of the disease, but I really don't think we can expect it to reduce the overall occurrence given sufficient time unless you're committed to removing the most vulnerable from the population long enough to find a vaccine (a year?).

The US numbers also don't appear drastically different in infections and deaths per million than what we're seeing in Europe (some nations higher, some lower), so it seems everyone's approach was fairly similar, with similar results (except for the interesting Swedish experiment).

The absurdity of the left/right divide is in not at leart recognizing the disputes are more in the abstract than the practical, with life varying very little day to day under a Republican or Democratic rule, and life in the US versus Europe being largely the same for the average citizen. If people did stage a rebellion over these differences, it would be for little gain other than for those of ideological bent feeling comfort in having like minded people in charge.

You vote for bad people? A joke? A remarkably stupid joke. — tim wood

I said I disagreed with you, so bad to you, good to me.

What do Australians do about bad people? — tim wood

Can't say what the Aussies do, but what I do is disagree with you and then vote for them.

Doesn't this still imply reconfiguring the hedonistic lifestyle? If we want a cleaner world we should consume less...

Or if we want to avoid pandemics we should take a cue from the Japanese and stop hugging, shaking hands and kiss for greetings.

Or we can learn from the South Koreans and be done with privacy. — Benkei

I take hedonism to be the promotion of pleasure as a goal. What you've described appear just to be pragmatic responses to threats of illness. But of course, take whatever bitter medicine you need to survive.

My suggestion is that the primary lesson of this slowed pace of life isn't that we now have been shown that we can reconfigure our world so that remote learning and working, for example, can now become the norm, but it's that we might want to rethink how important the busyness of our lives was to our overall well being in the first place (which I do not describe in simplistic hedonistic terms).

Who retains copyrights to material submitted via article form? — Greylorn Ell

The terms and conditions of this site are described here: https://thephilosophyforum.com/page/terms-of-service

I don't think we can offer you more by way of a legal opinion that you could rely upon.

In the US, your Turkish citizenship provides you with a 20% discount on all turkey products, which is especially useful around Thanksgiving.

I'm not sure that's right, so maybe double check with the consulate.

So now the predictions for US deaths from the coronavirus are around 60,000. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/politics/what-matters-april-8/index.html This is a drop from a prediction of around 240,000, which is a quarter of what we were first told.

We could say it's because of the strict social distancing that has occurred in the US (despite the ridicule heaped upon the US and Trump in particular for not taking this seriously and doing too little too late), or we can just say it's another load of bullshit we've been asked to endure through this whole crisis in order to achieve some agenda we've yet to decipher.

I grieve every death like the rest of you guys, but I think anyone who believes in the accuracy of the reporting or the various agencies without considering political motives here is terribly naive. This crisis has obliterated the credibility of the scientific community for those who were already skeptical, especially to the extent that scientists are used to form public policy.

. A lot of what people've been doing are completely unnecessary - you don't need to go to a school for an education, you don't need to go to the stadium to watch a game and enjoy it, you don't need to go out so often, you don't need to be in an office to do some jobs, you don't need to shake hands or kiss to greet someone, etc.; the mobile phone, the internet, and TV are true marvels of the modern age. Notice that in every case, an essence has been extracted and retained while the merely accessory has been discarded. This is essentialism philosophy blooming in all its glory.

If one is to believe the news, there's less air pollution, rivers and oceans have become cleaner, etc. Does this not, in its own way, prove that much of the damage humans are doing to the environment comes from non-essential activity?

How long will this hiatus in human hyperactivity last? Will we come out on the other side changed for the better or will we return to our old ways and forget the lesson of essentialism this pandemic is teaching us? — TheMadFool

From my perspective, you've learned the wrong lesson, which isn't that we ought to reconfigure the way we maintain our hedonistic lifestyle, but instead to recognize there are higher goods than hedonism.

Using slang for a woman’s body part to mean “coward“ very much implies that cowardice is a womanly quality. — Pfhorrest

If you call a man a dick does that mean being an asshole is a male quality to the extent that being an asshole means being a bastard to the extent being a bastard is like being a dick?

It's not impossible to determine, what makes something a hallucination, IS, the fact that it's not veridical, which is why some people call NDEs hallucinations. How do you think psychiatrists determine what is, and what is not a hallucination? — Sam26

I presume the psychiatrist draws conclusions based upon what he perceives, which is what I do, yet all that begs the question of whether the psychiatrist or that I am hallucinating. If you've posited that there are certain perceivers whose perceptions cannot be trusted (i.e. those that are hallucinating), you can't then just declare that you're not one of them or that certain others are exempt. You can rely on pragmatism to get through this and then go about living your life as if this objection does not matter on a practical level, but you can't make the larger philosophical claim you've asserted, which is that some claims are veridical (that is, they comport to external reality) based upon the support of other perceivers.

Nice how you've decorated the place. You should move that picture a little higher so that it's flush with the ceiling..

The question we should ask first, is, what is a hallucination? Hallucinations are sensory perceptions that a person experiences without external stimulus. In other words, the experience is purely subjective and only exists in their mind, as opposed to objectively verified experiences. Hallucinations can occur in any sensory modality (hearing, seeing, taste, tactile, or smell). Hallucinations are not veridical, which is why they are called hallucinations. They are distortions of reality, and they are usually associated with illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. — Sam26

Whether a hallucination is veridical is impossible to determine. Reliance upon others' confirmations offers nothing by way of proof as that too could be part of the hallucination. It just seems you're making a metaphysical claim about the nature of reality suggesting that it is not intimately linked to and defined by perception.

So basically you could double the numbers and get a rough number of the actual deaths. — ssu

I think you have to decide how you are intending to use the data (and for the record, I am talking about data, not the deceased human beings represented the data). If you're objective is it to compare this to other types of death, you have to assume the same type of error might exist with other deaths. That is, there have probably been a good number of people who owe their death to the typical flu who have their cause of death listed as pneumonia, which means if you're going to compare the two, the error rates might be the same.

So we'll go with molecules as being our unit. All molecules have mass and occupy space. Is "arrangement" as you use the term simply the location descriptor of the molecule? Since my unit is molecules, do I tell you I have a particular group of molecules with mass X in the form of a pawn located at e4 should I want to describe what is going on on my chessboard? It would seem my description of "in the form of a pawn" is reducible to a variety of geometric spatial measurements. That is, they are just descriptions of location.

If "arrangement" is just a way of describing location, how does that respond to the question of this thread, which is to determine what are immaterial minds? The fact that we cannot describe matter without reference to spatial coordinates is a definitional truth, but I don't see how we can then say that somehow explains how my brain makes me conscious of external events.

I agree that it's incoherent to speak of matter without reference to it being in space and it having location, but what you seem to be urging here (if I'm following) is that since location cannot be defined without reference to some physical object, that location itself is an emergent property of matter. And since we've now identified this particular emergent property, we can now bootstrap a more complex emergence theory as it pertains to phenomenological states and say they arise from brain states.

Is this a correct understanding?

If it is, my objection is as noted, which is that location isn't as much an emergent property as it is definitional because, among other things, it is not possible to even conceive of an object occurring in the absence of location.

I'm sorry, that looks like a word salad. For a first step, can you give me maybe an example of a non actual perception of something? My understanding has always been that the whole business of speaking of phenomena and perceptions is to bracket off 'actuality' as something problematic. As in an oasis-perception that might be of an actual oasis or of a mirage, but is always an 'actual' perception that is separate from the oasis in the sense that there might not be an oasis. A 'phenomenological state' is also problematic, but in a more vague way ... a state of phenomena? A state that consists of phenomena - — unenlightened

I'd submit that I've not presented a word salad, but that you're simply requesting a better definition of the word "actual" as I've used it, perhaps suggesting it was superfluous within the sentence. Your example of a mirage presents a question not of whether a phenomenological state is actual, but whether a physical state is actual, as opposed to imagined. So, yes, all phenomenological states are actual in that the exist in some capacity, regardless of whether there is a corresponding physical entity causing the mental state.

If you are experiencing a duck, you are in the phenomenological state of having that experience. That's how I use the term. I just use the term to describe the experience your are having while you're having it.

You see, when I get my ducks in a row, or my pawns if you like, I don't have to talk about phenomena or perceptions or brains, I don't see these things, I see a row of ducks. I think you are confusing yourself with all this terminology - you're certainly confusing me. I say my seeing a duck involves me and a duck. — unenlightened

Sure, and when I talk about ducks, I don't talk about their molecular construction or their cellular structure, or whether the color of the duck is something my brain imposes on the duck, or whether it has other inherent qualities, nor do I discuss what is matter, unless the conversation somehow deals with that, and then I do.

This is also a very confusing thing to suggest. I thought that was where the pawns were. A row of squares and a row of pawns - eight pawns in a row, not eight pawns and a row

The row is not located because it is the location - of the pawns. Why do philosophers do this shit all the time - whenever the cat is on the mat, some philosopher will get all agitated looking for 'on'. How can the cat be on the mat unless there is an on? Where is it? — unenlightened

I don't know the limits of this holism you're presenting. If the entity we're speaking of is "eight pawns in a row," such that we cannot say there is a definable separately existing row, then I'm not following how we can say there are separately existing pawns either, as the "pawn" is simply a description of the arrangement of the molecules. Where is the row? It's nowhere because it's an arrangement. Where is the pawn? It's nowhere because it's an arrangement. Where are the eight pawns in a row? It's nowhere because it's an arrangement. Have I missed something?

Hopefully that will put an end to the conspiracy theory that the virus is still raging over there. — Baden

Maybe. Do you think the Chinese government is above killing its citizens to protect its image?

I'm not saying that's happened, but I have 0 trust in their motives. I'm not sure why you think otherwise.

When you say "phenomenological state" it sounds like a thing, but it isn't a thing, — unenlightened

I would actually argue it's not a thing either, but that's because I'm probably more sympathetic to the classic substance dualist approach than most, which would hold that mental states are not "things" to the extent they are non-physical. That's not your position I understand, though.

The arrangement of ducks is a physical thing to the extent we are discussing the ducks' location. Location in space and time is part of what it means to be physical. The white pawns on a chess board are in the starting position a2, b2, c2... h2 (if you're familiar with chess notation). The row is located at a2 through h2. Their location in space and their relationship to one another strikes me as a physical attribute no different from other physical attributes. The duck similarly is a duck because its molecules are ordered in such a way as to make it a duck. The duck, according to you, is a thing and it's in the lake, despite the fact that the duck is nothing more than an arrangement of molecules. But I ask: how do you draw a distinction between ducks and rows in terms of the former being a thing and the other being an arrangement? Under analysis, it appears that if rows are simply non-thing/arrangements, then ducks would be that as well, considering the word "duck" simply describes how certain molecules are arranged in relation to other ones.

A phenomenological state, on the other hand, is an actual perception of something that is separate from the duck and it's separate from the brain. It's not just a row inside the brain, but if it is, show me where it is. Why can you point to rows and ducks but not phenomenological states if they are just different examples of the same thing?

So, last week I got a picture on a group text from my local rabbi performing a funeral of a member of the synagogue by himself because no family or friends could attend. I then recently learned his father contracted the virus and then died. He was a rabbi in the Hasidic community in NY. I suspect he too was buried at a funeral that no one attended. And now the good rabbi, hundreds of miles away, in his outpost in Atlanta, away from family and friends, sits shiva alone.

Yeah, I was wrong. This should be treated more seriously by me than it has been. If we're not here to occasionally change our minds, then why do we visit here?

My thesis is that this is a foolish question Of course I exist and rows exist and arrangements exist. But these arrangements are arranged stuff not more stuff or immaterial stuff. I exist, I am an arrangement, or a complex relationship analogous to a whirlpool. Is a whirlpool material? does a whirlpool exist? Nobody needs to ask. But folks want to get bogged down in complex physics and psychology as if that is easier to understand. Get your ducks in a row first. — unenlightened

I don't follow how an arrangement of physical matter is at all like a phenomenological state. The former is an empirically identifiable description of physical objects located in clearly defined time and space. The latter is unidentifiable empirically and the subjective experience is to some degree ineffable. It's not even fully clear where it exists in space.

The solution isn't just about defining the self in terms of it being a descriptor of the various arrangements (as you say) of the mental activity going on inside the mind, but in explaining what the mental states ( whether arranged or not) are ( i.e. can they be meaningfully defined with physical descriptors).

No, I wouldn't. The implication of my answer is that you do whatever you can to keep below that critical level, including shutting down the economy — Baden

You're not responding still. Option A - No quarantining, the respirator capacity is overwhelmed by 1 and one person dies. Option B - Quarantining, shutting down the economy, plenty of respirators, no deaths.

A or B? No other options. No buiilding more respirators etc. Assume under Option A we built as many respirators as humanly possible but one man didn't get one.

, yes, it's impossible to save everyone, but I would say you are obliged to try to maintain numbers low enough that give you a fighting chance of at least being able to treat everyone. Some level of economic shutdown is required for that. — Baden

But this avoids the question. If quarantining saved only 1 life and it required the economy be shut down 3 months, would you do it?

Well, right now it's the argument between NOS4A2 and @NOS4A2 on whether he wants more or less infections. Go figure it out, and then come back and argue for whichever you decide on. — Baden

I could be wrong (no shit), but don't we end up with the same number eventually infected whether we isolate or not? Isolating spreads out the infection over time, allowing health providers better opportunity to care for the patients, but the herd gets immune more quickly without isolation.

The better question is whether you want more preventable deaths or not. Would you shut down the economy like we've done to save a single person? Probably not. 1m people? Probably so. Now we just need to figure out the specific number we can let die. It's somewhere between 1 and 1m, but it is a number. Do you acknowledge we agree in principle that there is such a number and our only quibble is what that actual number is?

Much of your analysis relies upon the complexity involved in using a mask. Assuming Americans really can't figure out the chess puzzle that masks impose, surely the Dutch or the Swedes could figure them out because everyone knows they're smart.

But anyway, they're now advocating mask use and there's been no change in the West's know how. We should therefore expect people to be putting them on their nuts or however else they might misuse therm.

it would be just silly to disregard expert opinions and data altogether because of this. Just apply critical thinking. Trump's position changes with the direction of his farts. You can't rely on that for anything. — Baden

Critical thinking is generally suspended when one is required to appeal to authority. But since we're all limited in our expertise, we must defer in certain matters. How do we decide who to defer to? We are forced to assess credibility, which requires us not only to look to credentials, but to look at bias, ulterior motive, political agenda, prior acts of honesty or dishonesty, etc. So, based on this, I reject what they say for now on. Fool me once...

Uh huh, and you keep those on twenty four hours a day, seven days a week until there's no more infected people in the world? — Metaphysician Undercover

Just while in public.

Yet it's the Chinese and the Dems' fault he couldn't figure out that COVID was a threat — Baden

The Chinese government is to blame for the pandemic. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devastating-lies/

Sounds like the Republican governor of Georgia, who just discovered a few days ago that COVID is infectious before symptoms show and finally issued a stay at home order on that basis. Feckless, intellectually lazy, self-serving parasites. — Baden

It's all bullshit from top to bottom. The CDC announces today you should wear a cloth over your face when you go to the grocery store because they just realized (1) any sort of mask helps and (2) they didn't realize how the disease could spread among the asymptomatic until now. Total bullshit. They just wanted to save masks for doctors and their secret is out, so they about face in this.

And this isn't just an American thing. No European country wears masks and WHO said they did no good.

At the end of this this, we'll realize that a box of masks and a pair of goggles was all we ever needed. You can't get it any way except through your eyes, mouth, and nose. Incompetence from the CDC to WHO from the US to all of Europe.

My takeaway isn't greater reliance on government, but outright distrust either due to their arrogance, incompetence, or malice, but whatever their motive, total distrust. I actually trust Trump's hunches and wild accusations more than the calm deliberative bullshit I hear from the "experts."

Out-of-context analogizing (German measles; Spanish flu) ignores the pointed niceties of the current climate. In the US, Calling Rubella the German Measles is harmless - in the sense that Germans are never denigrated or Cassandraed-about as the chief enemy of the United States, and anti-German racist sentiment is close to absent here. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I can respect that it is offensive to some to call it a Chinese virus, so I don't do that. Where there is a disconnect with me here is that I don't sense in my community an anti-Chinese sentiment that goes beyond negativity towards their oppressive government. I truly don't feel any more negativity toward the average Chinese person than I do the average German person, but it's interesting to hear there is a growing prejudice against the Chinese in the US. I generally do have my finger on the pulse of American sentiment, and I've really not heard any Chinese person bashing, although the government is thought to be very dishonest and corrupt here. Of course, my bubble of interaction is limited, so maybe I'm not seeing something that Chinese Americans are experiencing often.

I am intensely aware of how painfully difficult it is for me to participate in male dominated forum — Athena

I read your post and wondered what you did to get yourself banned in those other forums and wondered what excitement we might now have in store.

I see two questions here: (1) Do men and women think differently, and (2) can men and women get along even if they do think differently. I think the answer to #1 is more difficult to answer because it requires a break down of how the different sexes think and it necessarily requires some degree of stereotyping, as if all men think one way and all women think another. I think #2 is clearly that they can, largely because they do in very many contexts, including our humble abode.

I posted a thread about why Israel sends their children to concentration camps at such a young age, and whether it is ethical to do so. — Shawn

I started a thread asking why young students from Israel go to holocaust camps as an educational experience, at such a young age.

It got deleted, and was wondering why, — Shawn

This is actually sort of funny if you so poorly worded a question that it was understood as asking why Israelis systematically murdered their children when what you meant to ask was why Israelis educated their children about the horrors of the holocaust.

The idea is that through education we can be sure such a thing never happens again, and part of educating anyone is in telling them what actually happened. How detailed that discussion might be is probably something that is approached with sensitivity based upon the age of the child, which means I suspect that the educational program provided at the concentration camp would differ according to age. I would imagine it's also like here in the US. If I didn't want my kid to go to the holocaust museum on a class field trip, I'm sure I could opt out.

In Thailand, you get fined if you don't wear a mask. That's the way to go. — Baden

Speaking of about faces, WHO and the CDC said masks weren't effective, which was the apparent lie told because they feared doctors wouldn't have enough if the average citizen did. The net result of a lie is distrust, which isn't what you need when you're trying to get the public to do as you ask because you lack the means of meaningful enforcement otherwise.

We're all excited about placing the corpses on the shoulders on someone, so to any public health official that has suggested anyone not wear a mask, how about them taking a visit to those suffering in the hospitals due to their not wearing a mask.

And this anti-malaria drug, it appears to be showing more promise every day. What are the chances it'd be getting this much attention had Trump not decided to make it his cause.

You might be interested in this, frank. I think we discussed South Korea before. — Baden

Sunshine,

I actually listened to the first part of that video, and he made a really interesting point, which was that masks work and that a critical difference between the West's response and the East's response (and their clearly different results) was that the East wore masks. What this means is that the answer is as much in mass producing masks as it is in all the other much more difficult things we're doing. The doctor felt the reason masks were not being touted as effective was because there was a shortage for doctors and they didn't want average citizens to wear one, which prompted his next comment of why would doctors need them if they were ineffective.

You would think that at least one European nation would have tried the mask idea.

I found this mask online that I'm now wearing. I feel like it provides just the perfect mix of protection and sass.

So for the 101 student, what are people looking for to prove God's existence? — 3017amen

I think the concept of faith has changed dramatically from the way it was presented in ancient texts from the way we consider it now. We consider faith to be that unshakable belief that comes to us without any sort of empirical proof, arising out of a sense of wonder, the impossibility of offering other explanations, and hope, emotion, or whatever. Someone who believes in God because he saw God is not a man of great faith any more than someone who believes in trees because he saw a tree. You can't prove God by reference to empirical evidence because if you did, you would be misunderstanding the epistemological method for believing in God, which is through faith alone.

Kierkegaard wrote that he found Abraham's acceptance of God's request that he sacrifice Isaac to be the ultimate act of faith. Abraham didn't question, but he just went up the mountain to kill his son that he loved so dearly. I found that act not one of faith at all, though, not at least as we currently understand faith to be. The text shows that Abraham spoke directly to God, that God told him that his wife Sarah would bear a child at the age of 90, and then she did. If God told me my 90 year old wife was going to get pregnant and then she did, I would believe in God because of that, not because of any great faith.

My point being that when you say "God," and I think of the God of the Old Testament, I think you prove his existence in ancient times by seeing such things as his speaking the universe into existence, his warning of and then bringing a great flood, his having manna fall from heaven, his splitting of the red sea, and many other miracles. If that all happened back then, you didn't need faith. Today, you just gotta believe. Which means you don't prove God exists now, you try to offer people the advantages of belief, which is why converting someone to a religion is such a different process than convincing someone their house is on fire.

I think I'm on to a winner here. — Baden

I've got one! Make _____ matter again, and you can fill in the name of any European country.

It'll be pure luck with about 27% chance of him being right. — Benkei

I'm not sure where the 27% came from, but let's assume it valid. If we can screen the patients and only provide it to those who will likely not have negative reactions, why wouldn't we give it to them? I don't see where there's much to lose, and what you're suggesting is that there is a 27% chance we might be sitting on a cure. Can you really wait for controlled testing so that you can tell everyone a year later after they're through burying their loved ones that it would have worked had we just used it, but we didn't want to get ahead of ourselves?

Fine, but let's use Boris Johnson as the guinea pig then rather than people who are worth caring about. — Baden

The problem with wishing death upon your opponents is that it creates future credibility problems when you attempt to claim you've objectively rejected some of their positions.

For example, let's say you wish upon Joey a diminished lung capacity, so much so that he begins to suffocate, and then you further hope he reaches such a desperate state that he attempts a medication that then kills him slowly and miserably. Let's then say that despite your best wishes for his failure and death, he survives and advocates for lower taxation. You then take a stand against his position and claim that your position is well reasoned, which maybe it will be, yet there might be some detractors who will understandably suggest that your position is simply one of being contrary to Joey, so much so that you actually wished and continue to wish he'd die.

I'm just saying I might not take your future criticisms of Boris Johnson seriously because the statement "Oh yeah, I hate the fucker, wish he'd die, and he's not worth a piece of shit, but I actually find him well reasoned" is not a common sort of way people talk. Yep, your credibility is forever ruined. Totally hate it for you.

The FDA just approved hydroxychloroquine for emergency care of infected patients at Trump's insistence. We'll see if he's right. It'll be sumpin if he is.