those "phantom things" are not what we see, taste and touch; they are what our seeing, tasting and touching, at least in part, consists in. — Banno

So then we have a dualism. What we see/taste/touch, and what those consist in, for us.

As physical objects, we bounce around the world as well as any other. But as conscious beings, all we have direct access to is what our seeing/tasting/touching consists in. Anything more must be acquired by reasoning. This is the barrier of the op, and what is on the other side may as well be called things-in-themselves.

imposing a wall of "representation" or "illusion" which you assume precludes us from intelligent interaction — Ciceronianus

No, I am assuming nothing. Perception is an illusion, in that the sensory phenomena that appears to inhere to the world, the experiences of the 5 senses, are in fact phantasmal mental products. And yet, sensation is the projection of real environmental inputs onto the imaginary plane of qualia. This projection is information preserving, and so we can make intelligent decisions on the basis of these illusions. If we couldn't, we wouldn't have them.

Better, surely, to think of the plane as an individual, and your seeing it as something you might do, rather than as an individual. — Banno

Perception is an activity, not a thing. But, this activity consists in the construction of phantom things in the mind. These phantoms look, smell, taste, feel, sound certain ways. Naive realism says that this is so because things really do look, smell, taste, feel, sound this way.

In truth, everything we actually know about things, we know indirectly, through inference. Everything we experience directly is in fact illusion, constructions of the mind. Illusion because the presentation of these experiences is as if they are of the world itself.

You seem to be fascinated by your perception of me as a lawyer, or perhaps of lawyers in general. I suggest this unhealthy, as you say you believe it isn't real. — Ciceronianus

Lawyers are real, perceptions of lawyers are also real. While causally connected, they are not the same thing.

Not least because, the perception is not a thing at all. It is an event.

But not the naive variety.

QED, except that no one is arguing there is no plane.
The point is that blips, "plane"s, and planes are three distinct things. Therefore, when you see a blip and "plane", you are not seeing a plane.

But all that is irrelevant. — Banno

True.

Indeed. But the relevant point here is that they have made a claim about the plane. — Banno

You are missing the point. The fact that they can make any claim about the plane at all is because of the correlation between dot and plane. Were the dot to start blinking (unless the blinking signifies something else about the plane), that correlation would obviously have broken down. Therefore to make a claim about the plane's cycling existence and non-existence on the basis of the blinking is crazy.

Air traffic controllers do talk about the blip as the plane, and they are not wrong. — Banno

If the dot moves north and the atc says the plane is moving north, this is because they have a justified belief in the correspondence between the dot's movement and the plane's. But if the dot started blinking and the atc said the plane has begun popping in and out of existence, they would either be joking or insane.

How many worlds do you live in? — Ciceronianus

One world, with many different aspects which can be colloquially referred to as "worlds". You are being lawyerly, I guess.

There's nothing real in that mental world to begin with, apparently. — Ciceronianus

Words are real, perceptions are real. Both are removed from the realities they refer to. We can look up from books, we cannot look up from our perceptions.

Our heads are so crowded, then, — Ciceronianus

They are indeed crowded. But perceptions are more mental events rather than objects filling the brain with clutter. The bandwidth of these events is quite limited.

You must refer to your perception of a lawyer, — Ciceronianus

No, I refer to lawyers in the abstract. But this reference is, necessarily, mediated by words, and comprehension of these words is mediated by perceptual events, our perceptions of the virtual ink blots I made on our screens.

Nothing is direct in the mental world, everything is abstract and mediated. Do lawyers reside in these ink blots? No more does reality reside in perceptions.

There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

"A sound" might be a perception (experience, qualia), or a physical event. The former is in your head.

Why should I know anything, if what you say is correct? — Ciceronianus

You can know many things without direct access to them. You must agree, or you would never read, and presumably make a terrible lawyer.

Books bear a correspondence to the reality they describe, and you can learn much from them. And yet, books are not that reality, they are ink blots, perfectly arbitrary ones.

Perceptions are the same way. They correspond to reality, and yet they are composed of arbitrary symbols. Unlike the example of books, they are all we have. Because of this, naive realists confuse these symbols with reality itself.

We began to insert (as it were) something between us and the "external world" some centuries ago, for reasons I find difficult to understand — Ciceronianus

It should not be so difficult to understand. The abolishment of naive realism ("naive", because that is how we start out in life, prior to philosophical sophistication) is one of the few definite results of philosophy. You should know it.

The naive realist believes perception reveals the world as it is. This is simply not so. Any perception is necessarily a co-creation of both the perceived and the perceiver. It cannot be any other way.

For something to be consciously perceived, it must be mapped onto a perceptual plane. This perceptual plane is contingent, and has everything to do with the perceiver, nothing to do with the perceived.

When you hear a pure 440hz tone, it sounds a certain way to you. But that sound in your head has nothing to do with the vibration in the air. Rather, it is a mapping from that vibration to your auditory perceptual plane. Which happens over many complex steps and signal transformations, from the vibration of your eardrum to the conscious event.

Others might perceive pure 440hz tones differently. Other species certainly do. None of these perceptions are privileged, none hear the tone as it really is. "Hearing it as it really is" is a contradiction in terms. "The world as it is" may be conceptualized, but it is perceptually inaccessible, due to the nature of perception itself.

We live immersed in a world of perceptual symbols, from which there is no escaping. It is like living your life in a library. You read words all day, every day. These words point to your understanding of the words, and as you read this understanding grows, as does your understanding of the world. But it's all book knowledge. You can't get out into the world itself, ever, the doors to the library are locked.

Please try to read more carefully. I was contrasting "loner", whose condition is voluntary, with an "outcast" whose isn't.

But I take your point, by definition no loners are in any pathological state — tim wood

I hope to avoid ever making such a ridiculous claim. Loners prefer to be alone, that is really all there is to it.

And you attribute to me a characterizations I did not and do not make. It being not mine, the "contempt," & etc. must be yours. — tim wood

These are my takes on the connotations of the word. I think most would agree, at least in my (American South) culture. It is quite hard to believe someone hasn't internalized these connotations who makes the the whopper of a claim that:

I do not think there is any such thing as a "successful" loner. To be a loner is already to have failed at life in perhaps the most significant ways — tim wood

Guess I'm just being defensive.

From this I infer - no doubt incorrectly - that you're something of a loner, and a bit afraid of it, certainly defensive. — tim wood

I happily claim to be something of a loner, though I go through phases. There were times people might have called me one behind my back (it is not something you say to someone's face, unless you intend to denigrate).

I do insist on such a definition. A loner voluntarily prefers solitude, for reasons you might consider healthy, unhealthy, and every gradation between. Where involuntary, "outcast" is more apt.

This is the denotation. Alongside this, there is a negative connotation of disapproval, distrust, and contempt. To call someone a loner is not to make a psychological diagnosis as you seem to believe. Rather, the word, beyond its denotation, is an act of social judgement. So far from understanding this distinction, you uncritically accept the social attitude as a given, reifying it as merely a reflection of the loner's failure and unhealth.

It is one of the roles of philosophy to disentangle these false "givens" from what is neutrally there. It is the role of junk philosophy to accept and bolster social consensus with half assed references to Aristotle and "Rogerian self actualization"

No.

And the distinction is moot, since I was clearly talking about loners, not merely the state of being alone.

A loner, by choice or otherwise, spends less time with other people than the norm. You, the self appointed arbiter of human merit, deems them to be failures. Good on you. I think you are a self important blowhard, but we each have our opinions.

A loner is someone who prefers being alone. Do you have a more substantive point?

Great OP.

To "true" in "false" I would not add "unknown", but rather the entire spectrum of degrees of truth and falsity in between. Not one of the oppositions you cite sits exactly on one end of that spectrum or the other. Every domain posses independent reality of some sort or another, and every one is apprehended by a subjective being that necessarily perceives, and/or constructs, everything from its own perspective. Objectivity is a concept that cannot be instantiated in a mind.

It is simply too easy to dress up ideas that are at best half baked with difficult language. Much easier than actually coming up with novel ideas and expressing them in language. It would therefore be surprising if it didn't happen in philosophy.

And it obviously, obviously does. Not every difficult work is dishonest, obviously. Ideas can be very difficult, and so can expressing them clearly. But the rampant abuse of difficult language, in contemporary writing especially, has caused a suspicion of all difficult writing.

That Irigary quote... The fact that it can exist at all, and the author not laughed out of academia, but rather be taught and celebrated, speaks to a deep corruption and dishonesty in academic humanities.. Which ruins the discipline for everyone, and deserves all the hate it gets.

also plausible. Then the minimum claim is, "Mary learns a way to experience red".

that's fine, I have no problem accepting that. Maybe perception is uniform across people, maybe spectrum s can be inverted or swapped around, maybe humanity is split into dozens of gene lines, each with color perceptions incomparable and inconceivable to the others.

But at minimum, Mary learns what it's like for her to experience red.

I do not think there is any such thing as a "successful" loner. To be a loner is already to have failed at life in perhaps the most significant ways - — tim wood

So is a loner who finds deep meaning and pleasure in creation, in nature, in their own thoughts, inherently a failure, compared to one who spends all their time around others, buffeted by this and that person's moods and needs, who feels their own emptiness keenly when alone, and had no identity outside their reflection in the mirror of another's eyes?

Whether or not you accept that red is 750nm light (I think it is true, in a sense), Mary learns what it is like to experience red. Just as you can learn different words that mean 0.

Is it not that simple?

Both perspectives are absurd on their own, only a synthesis of the two can arrive at a humane ethics.

Consequentialism is absurd because consequences are in principle unknowable before action. And, terrible actions may fortuitously have good consequences.

Deontology is absurd because it attempts a moral bureaucracy, subordinating human ends to arbitrary rules.

The best you can do is a consequentialist deontology: what are the consequences of these moral rules, versus those? You cannot know this at the outset, so you need to adjust with observation, and with changing circumstances.

This is what legal systems in their best form attempt.

There are high level aspects of brains and computer that are analogus. For instance they might be the only general information processing machines in the universe. But to pretend that the brain is running Java is just nonsense.

My point is that it is not inexplicable for a being to create something lesser than itself.

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" C.S Lewis

But aside from parents, anyone who creates, creates things that are less perfect, or at least lesser, than themselves.

There actually is an answer to this: Gaiasm. The one true, real life, utterly neglected religion. The only one where there is no need to resort to pernicious anthropomorphism, reification and false mythology.

Gaism fulfills everything a religion needs to.

Gaia created us as a species, and individually gave each of us life. We all live our lives under Her purview. When we die we return to Her.

Gaia is so far beyond our ability to understand that She is, relative to our puny minds (which are after all merely tiny, gnarled bits of Her), effectively transcendent, and infinite

We are blaspheming terribly against this living god, by desecrating her body. In consequence, we are literally descending into hell.

The only way we can escape this fate is to regain our relationship and respect of the real deity.

If there is anything that can still save us, it is mass adoption of the actual, non fairy tale religion.

What I say is a reframing of a materialist worldview, rather than woo. I have little interest in woo.

"reasonable people presenting well-supported dissenting opinion"

Never mistake what is doing as a reasonable exchange of ideas in search of the truth. His role is to be an apologist for the indefensible, giving it the veneer of legitimacy. This is an easy distinction to miss, and it deserves much more attention than it gets.

His arguments are paper thin, but that is beside the point. Tear one down, the goalposts shift, and two more take their place. Argue with a flat earther, a 9/11 truther, a holocaust denier, a climate skeptic, and you will have the same experience.

Find any atrocity in history, any massacre, any genocide, and you will find "intellectuals" fulfilling this function of providing "reasonable, intelligent" cover for the indefensible.

And make no mistake, this is an atrocity: thanks in large part to the grotesque and intentional mishandling of the pandemic, and the outrageous politicization of masks and now the vaccine, the number of dead in the US will in a few days exceed that from the Civil War. The Issacs of the country provided cover for Trump's death cult then, and over 300 9/11's worth of casualties later, they continue to do so now.

This kind of rhetoric is seriously at risk of killing thousands more and prolonging the crisis, by making remaining unvaccinated into a moral proscription. — Isaac

Oh really, Issac? Its my kind of rhetoric that is doing this?

The suspicion is now going to fall more heavily on things like polio, MMR, hepatitis... All of which save millions of lives. — Isaac

After spending untold hours manning the forums sowing doubt about the vaccines, he piously bemoans the public's declining trust in vaccines.

Amazing.

It's an unbelievable misjudgment of human nature to think you can persuade anyone to take a vaccine by saying "shut up — Isaac

I don't care if you take it or not. Just shut up.

And so long as they are anti-wherever-I'm-at-at-any-given-moment

Yes. So vaccination is one way of reducing transmission. I'm not sure who you think is denying that. — Isaac

As for transmission - as I've said, we've no evidence yet for a reduction in transmission compared to other strategies so it's unknown. — Isaac

And pray tell, what are these other strategies? Endless lockdowns? Wearing masks the rest of our lives? Keep in mind that the same mouth breathers screaming about their "freedom" to infect others via not vaccinating are the ones screaming about their "freedom" to infect others via not wearing masks and fully reopening no matter what.

Or is your idea to let the virus run its course and infect everyone? Sorry, I absolutely do not accept this reckless endangerment of my or my loved ones well being in service of politically motivated pseudoscience.

True again. So the vaccine is one way to reduce ICU admission too. Again I can't see where you might be getting the impression that anyone's denying that. — Isaac

I'm not seeing any relevance to the claim that the unvaccinated infectious are clogging up hospitals.... — Isaac

Of course you completely ignored the actual argument.. — Isaac

Is this ignorant "argument" really worth addressing? Obesity and skydiving are not transmissible diseases. Nor are they pushing hospitals to the brink of collapse.

Yes. Not everyone needs to be vaccinated to avoid that — Isaac

Says who? Because Martin "herd immunity" Kulldorff does not. Rather, for him letting the virus run rampant, causing unknowable lives lost, or ruined by long covid, is somehow acceptable. Preventing this does not rise to the level of "need".

So rather than have everyone vaccinated, you must prefer the current state of affairs. Where, driven by massive disinformation (an effort you seem eager to make your little contribution to), people are refusing the vaccine in droves, making us suffer through yet another nightmare surge.

I've just quoted a professor in medicine at Harvard Medical School (one of the top medical schools in the world). I've previously cited papers from immunologists and epidemiologists from the world's top medical journals in support of my position. — Isaac

Please. Who cares? You can cherry pick fringe "experts" all day. This is mere appeal to second-rate authority. Who will you cite next, Scott Atlas?

So your contention is that by having a voice in a democratically managed company, you somehow achieve *less* autonomy than you would in a traditional, top-down, hierarchical corporation.

By what strange alchemy does this happen?

Infection is morally irrelevant without transmission (which you already account for in the second term). The two morally relevant factors are need for health services (not the same as infection, clearly) and transmission — Isaac

Yes, but without infection transmission is impossible. If the vaccine reduced infection and transmission each by 50%, overall likelihood of the subject transmitting the virus is reduced to 25% versus baseline. Even if the protective effect was merely 30% in each of these, this would equate to roughly 50% less transmission, which given its exponential can vastly change outcomes of a pandemic. Even given some of the somewhat disheartening recent data, this condition is met:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-study-moderna-vaccine-far-better-than-pfizer-at-preventing-delta-infection/

This does not even touch on transmission rates.

Protection against ICU admission is a separate issue, and demonstrably robust with the vaccine:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/10/us/covid-breakthrough-infections-vaccines.html


Do you really believe that a tremendous amount of death, suffering, and economic loss would not be prevented if everyone was vaccinated?

If you do, you can only be cherry picking data to satisfy some ulterior agenda.

If you don't, then how is that an insufficient moral imperative? What exactly is your aim?

So people keep saying. No one has yet explained how that gem of statistical understanding everyone is so proud of is relevant to a claim about the rarity of the vaccinated infectious. — Isaac

Well if the whole country was vaccinated, 100% of those infected would be vaccinated. Further, children, who are ineligible, and young adults, who get vaccinated in lower numbers, make up a significant part of the unvaccinated population. Their natural immunity partially removes them from the pool of potential viral hosts. Whereas the older demographic groups, with the weakest immune systems, also have the highest vaccination rates. https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/811B/production/_119915033_934ed1dc-65ea-4439-9d4c-b82dd0fe28e0.png

ndeed. So evidence of a significant difference in transmission rate between strategies (vaccination vs other non-pharmaceutical methods vs both) is what we'd need to establish a moral imperative for a person to choose one over another. Do you have such evidence? — Isaac

Delta makes this complicated, especially since published numbers are all over the place. But I was wrong, what really matters is (difference in infection rate) x (difference in transmission rate). So even modest protection in both factors can multiply to make a significant difference.

I was quoting @Fishfry here. This is from a country with a high vaccination rate. What really matters though is the transmission rate.