So, if corporations are people re free speech, again it seems to give them a right to say "no" to free speech absolutism through censorship and create an odd paradox for American free speech advocates. — The Baden

Yeah. Private companies can implement whatever policies they like to control speech by the very same freedom the absolutists want. But an absolutist (and I wouldn't count myself as one) could still make the argument that institutions ought not to use their freedom to constrain speech - that is, they can still make the moral argument about what moral actors ought to do without contradicting themselves about what they would like to see moral actors allowed to do.

And in this I'd agree with them. Twitter ought have the freedom to censor whatever it sees fit, but it ought not abuse that freedom. Where I'd disagree with absolutists is that I think the distinction between things like hate speech, incitement and abuse on the one hand and 'disinformation' on the other is as clear as day and attempts to blur the boundary are disingenuous. Censoring genuinely held beliefs is dangerous. Censoring hateful language is just normal civility. There's no reason at all to confuse the two.

I was referring to unrestricted political donations being protected as a form of free speech in the US. — the Baden

I see. How weird. It's a wonder America needs any other constitutional rights at all then. If political donations are a form of speech, then virtually any other behaviour becomes equally protected.

Should have tried calling abortion a speech act.

Ironically, such corrupt mutual backscratching is excused as an exercise in free speech. — the Baden

In the last two or thee years who would you say has benefited financially from freedom of speech? Of the biggest industries in the world - pharmaceuticals, arms, agrochemicals and tech - what examples do you have where their interests have been served by freedom of speech?

I'm struggling to see why, if the big corporations are benefitting from free speech now, they would be seeking to restrict it. All major moves to restrict free speech recently have been instigated by government, big tech, or media and have almost entirely promoted situations which they've benefitted financially from. Are you suggesting they've grown a conscience and are acting against their interests now?

If you think your call out on twitter will change the judiciary or any other thing, then you are sadly deluded. — unenlightened

A minute ago what's said on Twitter could bring about the end of civilisation, now it doesn't have any effect?

The only answer to corruption is to call it out and end it, only don't bother because it won't work?

Make up your mind.

There is no contradiction in what I say — unenlightened

There's a direct contradiction. You're advocating for both censorship by institutions controlling public discourse and the ability to freely call out, via public discourse, corruption in those institutions. That's a direct contradiction. You clearly cannot have both.

I am still doing my bit to advocate for the truth. — unenlightened

Don't bother. Apparently it has no effect, and anyone thinking it might is just sadly deluded.

The only answer to corruption is to call it out and end it. — unenlightened

But you're arguing in favour of removing the means by which we could call it out. That seems contradictory.

If the answer to corruption is to call it out, then isn't it vitally important we have good means of doing so which are not open to suppression by the very corruption we'd like to call out?

The agencies currently involved in censorship are...

The government.
The media.
Private internet corporations.
Asset management firms.
Intelligence agencies.
The judiciary (if it goes to court).

That's almost exactly the list of people I'd like to be free to call out the corruption of. The same people you're suggesting ought to be able to suppress speech they think is untrue.

to do this is an absolute defence in law of the right to speak the truth, not the right to tell lies. such a defence could apply to wiki-leaks, to any whistle-blower, to cases of libel and slander, and so on. — unenlightened

So explain how this would work. I write "the judiciary are all corrupt and accept bribes" on Twatter and it gets flagged as 'lies', but it's alright because unenlightened's brilliant scheme defends my right to speak the truth. Now. Who's going to check whether what I've said about the corrupt judiciary is true...?

And you are wrong. — unenlightened

So...

Are we having a conversation? — unenlightened

...or are you just mouthing off? Any chance of actually defending your assertions?

there is no problem with you expressing your opinion on any media. — unenlightened

And you're the one claiming to be concerned with truth and here you are deliberately lying for effect. It is just blatantly false that "there is no problem with [me] expressing [my] opinion on any media". You know as well as I do that there are loads of opinions I would not be allowed to express on social media. Loads of opinions have been banned from discussion.

You have lost the truth as even a concept, and been reduced to mere opinion — unenlightened

Is it, or is it not an opinion - the matter of who we trust to provide us with accurate information? It's nothing to do with truth. Who we trust is an opinion.

Unless you personally checked the election results then any discussion on the election is about who we trust (an opinion), not whether the election was rigged (a fact).

you cannot even see the importance. — unenlightened

As I said. If you think the important thing here is whether people can discuss the election and not the fucking CIA having direct control over what is discussed then you've lost all credibility.

So you are saying - that my talking about the importance of truth is irrelevant, because neither side values the truth? — unenlightened

No. I'm saying you talking about truth is irrelevant because the issue - social media censorship - is not about truth. It's opinion that's being censored. The issue is about power, not truth.

You are complaining because I have not chosen which lie I prefer? — unenlightened

How could you possibly chose which lie you prefer? Ignore lies. Your concern is clearly not lies, it's opinions. You mentioned the election. Neither you nor I have access to the raw data (even if it were sufficient to establish the truth). So any discussion you, I, or 99.999% of Twitter users might have about the election has nothing whatsoever to so with truth. It has solely to do with which source of information we trust.

Truth cannot be established, because it has historically not been sufficiently valued, has not been protected, and rewarded, but has been betrayed and actively persecuted. — unenlightened

I agree, I just don't see what it's got to to with social media censorship. You opened with...

I'm surprised that folks are so undiscriminating about speaking truth and speaking falsely. — unenlightened

...and now with...

The philosophy of freedom without qualification which I rather suspect you are still promoting — unenlightened

...so this is not a broad, generalised complaint, it seems directly related to social media censorship somehow. You even say...

if you cannot see the connection with the topic, I cannot think how to explain it to you any clearer. — unenlightened

... But you haven't explained it even once yet.

Social media firms are censoring opinions which do not align with their corporate agendas.

Some people are resisting those attempts.

What has that conflict got to do with the valuation of truth? Neither side value truth. Neither side particularly disvalue it either. Their issues are just issues on which the truth is not really known so they can proselytise to their heart's content about it. They are all about matters of opinion.

If there's any relationship between internet censorship and our lack of concern for truth, it's the abuse of the term for political ends.

Nothing is going to devalue truth faster than everyone acting as if it can be established by a team of Google employees just because they call themselves 'fact checkers'.

As I said earlier, we used to have a system in place for getting as close to the truth as possible - academic training, scientific standards, and peer review. Censorship has chucked all that out the window in favour of cheap labels.

Americans cannot agree about their elections and do not trust the results. Their democracy is not working. Are we in agreement about that? — unenlightened

Yes, we are in agreement about that. What has that got to do with either truth or censorship?

The truth cannot be established here (insufficient data) and censorship is, in any case, completely unrelated to truth but rather is being used to further various political ends.

Both sides (but more the left than the right at the moment) are using 'disinformation' to promote a (largely corporate) agenda. I really can't see any relationship at all with your (legitimate) concerns about actual truth.

No one to my knowledge is even considering censoring speech which is in opposition to actual truth, like promoting flat-earth theories or denying gravity. What's being mooted (or currently censored) is opinion, not truth.

Opinion about the trustworthiness of the FDA/CDC.

Opinion about the trustworthiness of US intelligence and media on Ukraine.

Opinion about the trustworthiness of electoral institutions.

... and so on. This isn't science, not even close. It's politics.

I think we can, and that we need to, find the truth, agree what is true and enforce the truth. — unenlightened

I didn't say we couldn't. I said that internet censorship has nothing to do with such a quest.

we ought to be able to agree that losing an election is not winning the election. and if we cannot, democracy has become unusable. — unenlightened

Really? And this has bothered you for how long?



It's the same political shenanigans, just now they've invented a new cudgel 'disinformation'.

I'm surprised that folks are so undiscriminating about speaking truth and speaking falsely. — unenlightened

People are obviously not undiscriminating about speaking falsely, don't be naive. The things you think are false other people think are true. They disagree with you, astonishing though you may find that.

Freedom of speech has nothing whatsoever to do with actual truth, it has to do with power.

It's about who is going to have the power to declare what is true and what is not. The matter of what actually is true doesn't even get a walk on part.

Currently mooted...

Trust Lab, the company dedicated to creating a safer internet using ML-powered Trust & Safety, today announced its strategic partnership with In-Q-Tel (IQT) for a long-term project that will help identify harmful content and actors in order to safeguard the internet. — Trust Lab website

In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in high-tech companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability. — Wiki

Anyone who cares more about some nutters advocating anti-5g headwear than they do about the CIA policing what is and isn't allowed on social media needs their head examining (or possibly some more powerful anti-5g headwear).

these private owners have always been allowed to dictate terms of service. That's what we accept when we click "agree" to them. They can censor anything they'd like, because they own it. I don't necessarily like that — Mikie

You sound remarkably complacent. If the main platform for discussing global warming were run by fossil fuel companies would you equally shrug with "oh well, they're private companies, so not much we can do..."

There's always something we can do. Protest. Kick up a fuss. Make a noise. Same as always.

I think a lot of people on the left are simply allowing devastating corporate power plays because they thought (with unbelievable naivety) that it'd work for them during covid and Trump.

But there's a really serious problem here where a corporate-government alliance are controlling public discourse to further their private interests. We can't just let that go with a shrug.

So...

they can always remain "a US ally in all but name". — Olivier5

...but...

moves towards NATO membership could possibly trigger a nuclear response. — Olivier5

Russia sure are touchy about names.

The issue is that what is more likely to go viral, get views or clicks is often the most outrageous, inflammatory, and divisive. This isn't suppressed because clicks, shares, and likes is exactly what is being sold. — Mikie

But isn't censorship the issue here? The OP is in response to Elon Musk's removal of censorship from Twitter. This removal is newsworthy because it hasn't been done by other social media corporations.

So the state of affairs we currently have is not as you describe where 'anything goes' so long as it gets clicks. It's one where potential clicks are sacrificed for some other objective.

You don't think RT or Tass reports would gain thousands of 'clicks' if they were allowed (using YouTube as an example here)?

You don't think discussion of Hunter Biden's laptop would have been click-bait heaven for Facebook?

The Wuhan lab leak theory was going viral before it was throttled.

Twitter used its 'obtained without authorization' policy to block the account of an activist group responsible for the “BlueLeaks” on police misconduct. 

I can see the argument that social media algorithms lead to ever more divisive and inflammatory views, but on the subject of censorship, it's the human CEOs and management who are making decisions, and they're making them against what would make good click-bait (though presumably still for monetary gain).

But then what's your argument? It seemed to be that if we allowed a country to use the threat of nuclear weapons to get it's way then all hell would break loose because other countries would follow suit, but that argument seem to hold exactly the same for conventional forces. "If we allow a country to use the threat of massive conventional defence to get its way then all hell would break loose because other countries would follow suit". Why would allowing the threat of nuclear weapons to work cause any more disruption than allowing the threat of massive conventional weapons to work.

America can, and did, flatten a country like Iraq without even touching it's stock of nuclear warheads. It can get any non-nuclear nation to do it's bidding on the strength of conventional forces alone. So why's that not a problem, but Russia doing exactly the same with nuclear weapons would be?

What if, hypothetically, Russia didn't have any nuclear weapons, but had an amazing military, the biggest and best the world has ever seen. They invade Ukraine with it. Would your position then be "that's fine, we can let them get away with that because it's only conventional forces"?

the invasion of Ukraine would be impossible without nuclear weapons, since it would otherwise almost certainly trigger engagement with NATO. — hypericin

Where are you getting this information from?

Concession would mean strategic victory for an aggressor who used nuclear weapons to achieve their aim. Nuclear weapons already have excellent utility as a deterrent; if they are proven useful by Russia as a weapon of aggression, everyone will take note. Nuclear powers will all see new opportunities to settle regional scores, and non-nuclear powers will be further incentivized to join the club. At some point an aggressive nuclear power will have to be confronted. — hypericin

You were arguing about Russia being able to use the mere threat of nuclear weapons to achieve it's ends, no? About a nation, simply by virtue of being a huge nuclear superpower, getting it's way and the dangerous ramifications of this...?

Ringing any bells yet? Anything getting through the soup of propaganda you're clearly drowning in.

Like the fact that the US - a nuclear superpower - the only one to have ever actually used nuclear weapons, has been waging a near constant war across half the world since 1945. Did Iraq avoid getting it's own back on America because it was too far away? Is Afghanistan merely waiting for the SatNav to show them the way? Somalis, Libya, Syria, Kosovo, Serbia, Venezuala, Cuba,... You're seriously suggesting that all the countries America have fucked over haven't even thought about America's massive nuclear arsenal when considering whether they 'let them get away with it'?

It's already happened. It's been happening every single years since the second world war. a nuclear power has been using it's nuclear threat to invade other countries and impose their preferred governments there.

If 3 comes after 2, how is 2 constructed from 3? — hypericin

It isn't.

A governance can be more or less authoritarian. Polity can be more of a cooperative involvement of relatively autonomous people, or a system of coercion executed by less autonomous people. To struggle for that autonomy is not the same as establishing borders. It often involves that dynamic, especially when the coercive authority has no regard for the people they invade.

To view all armed resistance as a fetish ignores the natural revulsion to coercion and degradation. A model of a pragmatic 'modern state' without this being recognized is not very useful. — Paine

It's not ignoring it. It's drawing out the assumptions. The border as national perimeter is irrelevant. You're pointing to the fact that some forms of governance are worse than other and so people might legitimately have (and fight for) preferences. But these judgements (better or worse) are either moral judgements (universal, humanitarian ones), or aesthetic judgements (personal preference). I don't see how they can be any third type.

If the former (humanitarian) then it is possible for the Ukrainians to be wrong, since these values are universal. they may wrongly prefer one government over another, incorrectly assessing the humanitarian gains. Thus the argument that it's morally "up to the Ukrainians" is flawed.

If it's personal preference, then it is indeed "up to the Ukrainians" what they sacrifice for what ends. But under that understanding, it has nothing whatsoever to do with anyone else. We've no moral obligation to help them achieve their preferred style of governance.

So we're back to the question that this whole diversion about national borders was proffered to avoid. Russia's governance of Crimea. What evidence is being presented to show that Russia's eight year occupation of Crimea was a significantly worse governance than Ukraine's would have been?

Phenomenology is simply an investigation into how phenomena are experienced — Janus

If you're to claim "It seems to me that X, therefore X" then there's no investigation. The answer is already fully presented to you. That's the point I'm making.

An 'investigation' requires, by definition, that you accept things might not be as they first seem to you to be.

I’m just philosophizing, from a well-versed platform perhaps, but philosophizing nonetheless. — Mww

Absolutely. It's certainly an interesting take, I'm just not sure I fully follow how you're getting there but...

In the strictest sense of the word, therein is a construct in the physical system, in that one form of energy in the sensory apparatus is transformed into another kind of energy for transfer along the nerves. So too is there a kind of construct in metaphysical apparatus, in that the matter of the perceived object is arranged in accordance with its given external space. The tail of a dog is placed on the butt end and not the nose end, legs point down….and all that. In the case at hand, that it is a word being perceived is familiar because a succession of letters which are the necessary composition of any word, is part and parcel of the perception as a whole, but the unfamiliarity of the word is not given from this arrangement of these letters, for the simple reason there is as yet no conscious awareness of it as such. — Mww

This sounds like exactly what I mean by 'construct' an image in that I'm talking about a set of mental processes, rather than, say, looking at a photo (which would be more presenting an image).

Just as there is no conscious awareness of the information in sensory stimuli traversing the nerves on its way to the brain, there no conscious awareness of phenomena in intuition on its way to understanding. So for the sake of logical consistency it can be said there is a pre-cog construct, but is useless as such to conscious awareness, being necessary, only for the brain, in determining which neural pathway leading to which area of the brain, or similarly, only for metaphysical comprehension, in how the perceived object is to be understood. — Mww

Yep. This sounds like a mirror image of the neurological process (except for one important distinction in that neurologically, what's served up is done sone probabilistically, with data noise, because of the limitations of the wetware. I doubt there's room for probability in this metaphysical process?)

So…because I am not consciously aware of the phenomena in my metaphysical system, I do not consider it a construct insofar as I have no knowledge or thought of it at all. In fact, I can say “I” haven’t yet constructed anything. That there is an unconscious part of my metaphysical system that does stuff for which the conscious part is entirely oblivious, is exactly the same as the physical system doing things for the brain with which neural networking has no part. — Mww

You're saying here that the entity, or prompt, you end up with isn't a 'construct' because it's been constructed by sub-conscious (sub-cognitive?) processes? Is that right?

In the physical system, the brain must direct the information along certain pathways determinable by the conditions of the information itself. In a metaphysical system, the understanding must conjoin the phenomenon with a conception, determinable by the conditions of the phenomenon itself. In each case a relation is formed: in the brain a mental event occurs; in a metaphysical system, a cognition occurs. — Mww

Sounds a fair enough analogy. Again, I'd say that the stochastic nature of mental processes is the main standout as a difference here.

Now comes the time of unfamiliarity, manifesting as the understanding that the letter arrangement does not permit a conception to be conjoined to it. In the brain, the information does not enable a suitable pathway. No sense can be made of the letters, hence the word is uncognizable; no pathway is enabled, no chemical reaction occurs. — Mww

And I think here is where that probabilistic nature may cause us to diverge in methodologies. There's no such stopping point in neological events, it's a continual process of prediction, data-harvesting (or manipulation of external states), re-prediction... It's all about a constant stream of best guesses with those 'best guesses' directing behaviour aimed at improving the match between that guess and the external state it's guessing. Your system seems to have understanding as almost binomial (is there a link or isn't there). Is that a fair summary?

So you'd have no objection to France taking over the UK? That would make trains run better alright.... — Olivier5

None whatsoever. And if I did (was the sort of person who cared what flag flew over my parliament) I would be a monster to expect thousands of people to die bringing my personal preferences as to flag colour about.

people do control geography to a degree, by building infrastructure or destroying them. Think of how a dam affects the landscape. BTW, humans share that property with many other species, like beavers. — Olivier5

The subject was people acting as a mass (an electorate, or a nation) these make changes via instructing people. The government does not simply will a dam into being. They instruct people to make one.

You seem to be against the idea of a modern nation state. Fine with me but what's the alternative? — Olivier5

I have no objection to the modern nation state. I think it's an excellent, pragmatic way to organise governance. I object to the ludicrous notion that it has some moral value. It has none. If moving a border saves lives, move the border. Hell, if moving a border makes the trains run better, move the border. It's a nothing, a trivial bit of bureaucracy. It's absolute insanity to reify it to something worth dying in the thousands for.

I don't agree with this because that assumes anyone was arguing for complete control of the media by a regulatory body. — Hanover

I don't follow. It seems the strength of regulation isn't at issue so much as the content. If one regulates, say, incitement to violence, one can do so extremely proactively and yet not touch political propaganda. It's possible to allow people to lie their heads off about the economy but insist on only peer reviewed multiply corroborated facts on health - for example.

As noted in the OP, there was a time when there were relatively few mass media outlets, who, by agreement, regulated the press based upon some ethical rules they agreed upon. We were operating at that time under a strict regulatory scheme, but no one sees it that way because we refuse to view it as censorship because it was by private enterprise.

And really that's precisely the only control we have right now to runaway offensive speech. Kanye can't engage in anti-Semitic talk not because the US government can stop him, but because Adidas executives won't allow it. — Hanover

But this contradicts itself. You say institutions (newspapers) used to have an ethical code, but then conflate this with Adidas's corporate PR management. The two are not necessarily the same. I'm not saying they aren't, but the case is not made by simply pointing both out and assuming. It's possible the cantankerous old farts such as myself are actually right and society has actually changed. It's possible that journalists used to think of themselves as arbiters of truth and now think of themselves as financial assets. Cultures do change, after all and not always for the better.

Sort of because Twitter is new and the cost of entry is very low, as compared to how difficult it was when I was younger to get my letter to the editor published about whatever nonsense bothered me at the time. — Hanover

Yes, but the cost of entry isn't low is it (or wasn't - that's the problem), taking social media in general (I don't take part in any social media at all, so they're all a bit of a blur to me).

The sitting president was unable to enter, for example, to talk about political matters.

Being a practising medical professor was not sufficient to debate the issue of masks during Covid.

Being aligned to the Russian state bars entry.

On multiple occasions being qualified, well-respected, peer supported and at the forefront of one's field was insufficient entry requirement to say what one wanted to say on various social media platforms.

If you're repeating one the approved narratives, you could be a chimpanzee and they'd let you on, but those who would prefer to voice alternative opinions find the bar set very high indeed. No qualification short of god seems to be enough.

It was Trump who was posting, which means it was the government doing the posting complaining about the non-government regulating him, and also claiming the government lacked the right to regulate the government, if you follow that confusing road. — Hanover

It seems difficult to believe, given the significant links between politicians and social media entities that this was free of politics. When Trump supporters went to Parler, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeded furiously that Google and Apple should remove the app from their stores. Within days they did. A few days later Amazon closed their servers. within a week the enterprise had crumbled completely. You're not going to tell me that wasn't political.

If you're going to blur the distinction between private and government, then you're going to impose a duty on private outlets (like Twitter and I guess this site) to publish everything and eliminate moderation. — Hanover

The line is already blurred. Twitter and Facebook have both admitted to having direct links to the government of the US where the allowed content and direction of their censorship is discussed. Facebook have testified that they were directly instructed, for example, to suppress talk of the Hunter Biden laptop (since found to be almost certainly genuine). As if lobbying power wasn't already enough to blur the lines. It's not me doing the blurring.

And no, I wouldn't, and haven't been, arguing for an elimination of moderation. What I'm arguing is that normal moderation has been around for centuries and worked perfectly well. We don't allow hate speech, incitement, defamation, and (depending on the platform) uninformed opinion. What's changed recently is not a sudden need to re-look at these normal acts of moderation. What's changed recently is one power group wanting to use moderation to impose a political narrative and another wanted to resist that (and I suppose a third jumping on that bandwagon to have the free-for-all they've always wanted but never had). I've no time at all for this third camp, but support the second.

People also speak without knowing what they're talking about all the time. I assume that's always been the case. — Hanover

As I've demonstrated above. This is no longer the case. One could be barely out of short trousers and speak endlessly with zero qualification about, for example, how brilliant vaccines are, but a tenured professor with 25 years experience in medicine cannot even hint at any problems with vaccines on exactly the same platform. Qualification is not the issue. The correct narrative is.

Are you aware of a different system? — Hanover

Yes. Suitable qualification to speak on the subject.

Before I get into the substance of what you've replied here, I need to clarify something at the outset. Are you here posting what you conclude must take place (logically, rationally, whatever), or are you describing what you sense takes place (interoception, self-awareness, etc)? In other words, is this the result of the investigation or the data for it? I can't quite make out which and it obviously makes quite a difference in how to understand what you're putting forward.

if the premise is true, that doesn’t logically prove the definition. — neomac

Nope. Indeed it doesn't.

that premise is compatible with other arguably more plausible definitions like “Ukrainian is a person with Ukrainian passport”, incompatible with the definition you provided: indeed not all persons under the rule of the government of Ukraine are Ukrainians, likely the non-Ukrainian foreign professional, tourists or residents located in Ukraine. — neomac

It is, yes.

the claim “Ukrainians will always be controlled by Ukraine” doesn’t logically follow from your definition of “Ukrainian” unless “Ukraine” in your conclusion is understood NOT as a territorial entity but as the government of Ukraine. — neomac

That's right..

Other irrelevant facts about my post are that it contained 114 words and doesn't once use the letter 'j'... if you're starting a collection.

if Olivier5’s claim has to do with control of territorial entity (Ukraine) by a group of people (the Ukrainians), as it seems to me, then your argument is irrelevant, because your argument deals with the control of a government (the government of Ukraine) over a group of people (the Ukrainians). — neomac

The argument is that control over the people of Ukraine is in the hands of the Ukrainian government.

The idea of a group of people literally controlling a 'territory' is absurd (what are they going to to do control it's geography?). What is controlled is people not land, and the way people control people is primarily via a government making laws. So the only matter in consideration is what government controls which people, and by what means.

The argument is that there's no 'natural unit' of people who all have some single homogeneous set of needs so the grouping used has no bearing on the life of any given member.

Each individual ukrainian might be better off sharing their control over their government with other Ukrainians, or New Yorkers, or Parisians. There's nothing about the border of Ukraine which makes the people within it better off sharing control with each other than with people outside that border.

nowhere is clarified what “morally 'correct' unit of government” is supposed to mean — neomac

Your comment here makes no sense at all. Nowhere is the word 'clarified' clarified., nor what you mean by 'supposed to mean'. In fact your whole post is just garbage. What do you mean by "make any sense" in the first sentence. You've not provided any measure of what 'making sense' would constitute, nor a method for how we'd judge it. And "play any other role" is ambiguous. What is a 'role' here, how do we determine whether something is or is not 'playing a role', your argument is just nonsensical unless you can define these terms and how we'd measure them. Then there's "arguably more plausible". How are we going to judge if something is, in fact, arguable? Or plausible? Without these things defined first we can't possibly make any sense at all of what you've written. "Likely". How likley? You've got to be specific here otherwise we can't judge. Is 80% enough? Baysian or frequentist likelihood? How will we measure it?

It seems you've got a ton of work to do before anyone can make any sense whatsoever of your post. Alternatively, we could act like reasonably intelligent adults and accept that although some terms have fuzzy definitions we need not clarify every single one in advance of making any point.

But then it seems absent of asking for definitions, you've nothing to say.

Russia may have blundered themselves into a position where their terrorist threats of nuclear war is the only reason they should get to keep Crimea and the Donbass. How to put that genie back in the bottle? There are no easy answers, but submitting to the threat would set a deadly precedent. — hypericin

I may, but only 'deadly' in the sense that further expansion may lead to more war. Since the ;deadly' we'd be avoiding by concession is also war, I can't see much in it either way. at least war later can be mitigated, war now is killing people right away.

no state can afford to let the seizure of their territory go uncontested. — hypericin

Why not?

The epoché is simply the bracketing of the question about the reality of the external world, so as to focus on the phenomena as they seem to present themselves to us, so Banno's comment seems oddly inapt. — Janus

But what could possibly constitute such a 'focus'? Things appear to us as they appear to us. If you look harder you don't get to some 'more real' version because you've got no external reference against which to measure this quality.

How things seem to you might be a starting point of an investigation, but one can gain nothing more than other ways things seem to you without bringing in external referents.

Plus...

how can one do a "systematic analysis of this correlation between subjectivity and world" without words. And if words are included, in what way is the experience "bracketed" from other things? — Banno

... seems to cover the same complaint I was raising with 'experience of red'. You don't somehow 'find it in yourself' to have had an 'experience of red' you wouldn't even know what 'experiences' or 'red' were unless you were embedded in an external world of language users and that external world of language use imports all the real-world matter of wavelengths, brains, objects, neurons... You can't bracket them out, but the keep the words they are connected to. The words then become unmoored from anything.

Our assessment of what seems to be going on is not flawed, and what, outside the context of neural activity, which we simply don't experience, could "what is really going on" even mean? — Janus

I've just got through demonstrating how it is, indeed flawed. You've not addressed that argument, just gainsaid it. As to "what is really going on", I refer back to @Mww's (forgive the paraphrasing) "whatever you like so long as you don't contradict yourself".

You don't need to afford empirical science an special place, but simply by accepting it (the evidence of the lab) you have a contradiction to resolve between models. your folk model and the empirical model don't knit together. You could have one or the other, but not both.

And yet.. 3 comes after 2. — hypericin

Yes. I'm not sure where you're going with this. Both 2 and 3 are constructed. The fact the 3 comes after 2 doesn't seem to prevent either from being constructed.

What about Ukraine being under the control of Ukrainians? Is that totally out of question? — Olivier5

Doesn't make any sense. Since 'Ukrainian' is not a natural kind, it's not a subspecies, or a genetic type, Ukrainians will always be controlled by Ukraine since the definition of 'Ukrainian' is 'person under the rule of the government of Ukraine'.

There's no difference between a citizen of Donetsk having to accept power sharing with a citizen of Lvov, than that same citizen having to accept power sharing with a citizen of Rostov, or New York, or Paris. They're all miles away. No magic connects Lvov and Donetsk more than New York and Donetsk that somehow magically renders the former a morally 'correct' unit of government, but the latter not.

The Nazis were better known for Goebbels and the use of the media for propoganda. Why do you prefer the free exercise of propoganda by government actors and supporters over its regulation?

Why is one poison preferable over the other? — Hanover

The problem is that if I cannot communicate to others in a democracy, that is an absolute. I cannot do it. Propaganda is not an absolute. One person's propaganda is another's truth. So whilst both might be poisons, one is readily identifiable, the other not. There's the problem of censorship.

It's the assignation of power to an institution to determine what is discussed in the public sphere.

So, given that there's clear advantages to placing limits on free speech too (hate speech, incitement to violence, propagation of potentially dangerous lies...) the question is how we achieve that with as little of the disadvantages as possible.

Unsurprisingly (given we've been around as civilisations for thousands of years) we've already come up with a reasonable compromise. We have a system of separate arenas of discourse which have objective criteria for entry (as objective as possible, anyway).

Intellectual debate took place in journals and required qualification in the subject matter (plus peer review in some cases).

Political debate took place in our houses of government and required election to membership of those houses.

Public debate took place wherever and required only the bare minimum rules of polite society.

The problem with free speech these days (Twitter, etc) has nothing to do with struggling to find a system to regulate untruth. We had one of those already. It has to do with governments and corporations wanting to undermine the one we had because it didn't suit their purposes, and a public backlash against that move.

During Covid, Ukraine, the whole 'trans' thing we've seen actual qualified experts in their field banned from speaking in certain areana by nerds in social media companies. We've seen politicians banned from making political statements by their opposition. It's the government's attempts to ban those who are 'off message' that's brought about this faux searching around for how to manage 'disinformation'. How to manage 'disinformation' is bloody obvious. If you're qualified to speak in that arena, speak. If not, don't. It's worked reasonably well for hundreds of years. It only stopped working because the government and their corporate sponsors wanted to push a particular message and they didn't want any inconvenient experts disagreeing with them.

Basically, we already had a system in place. We don't need to 'find' one. We need to stop interfering with the existing one for political and corporate gain.

I find it correct to conceptualize the issue in the following manner: certain neural networks form connections to other neural networks - while, concurrently, certain aspects of awareness which supervene on the first grouping of neural networks will form connections to other aspects of awareness that supervene on the second grouping of neural networks.

All this in the context of first-person awareness associating words to concepts. — javra

I think this seems similar to...

If I seem to be having an experience then I am having an experience: I can only see absurdity in trying to deny that; in saying "I don't really have an experience". — Janus

But I don't see how either are more than...

The epoché is not a falsifiable notion, so it could not be in conflict with any empirical evidence. The epoché is more like a prayer. — Banno

---

If I claim "I seem to have a memory of my childhood house" it doesn't then follow that I do, in fact, have a memory of my childhood house. Someone might take me there and show me how the details are wrong. I have a memory of something, but it's not my childhood house. I cannot claim both the memory and my current perception to be of the same thing, there's a contradiction there. That which it seems to me is happening in my mental processes, turns out to be wrong, not on empirical grounds, but on grounds of contradiction. I cannot be right both about my description of my memory and my description of my perception.

So this notion that if it 'seems to you' your mental processing follows some method, then it does (and simply must therefore merely supervene on any neural activity underscoring it), seems flawed from the outset. A modicum of lived experience tells us that we're frequently wrong in our assessments of what's going on in our mental processes and it doesn't require neuroscience, nor empirical investigation of any sort.

The mere recognition that many of our assessments are contradictory should be sufficient to tell us in no uncertain terms that our ability to determine our mental processes by introspection is rubbish. Far from resisting evidence from neuroscience as to what those processes might be, we should be fully expecting them to contradict what we thought was the case, knowing that our ability to divine our mental systems by introspection is crap.

Insofar as the contribution from empirical sciences to mental events like 'experiences' it's simply that the brain doesn't seem to have the component systems in the right order to reflect what we might say is going on. Having established that our introspected assessment of what's going on is frequently flawed anyway, I can't think of a single reason why anyone would be so resistant to updating their model... until something better comes along, of course.

I have immediately understood the image from perception will not correspond to any image whatsoever I already have, insofar as otherwise, it wouldn’t have been unfamiliar in the first place. — Mww

But it's not really about correspondence with an image you already have because it's the same spelling no matter what font it's written in. It's simply that when building the parts of the image (book, page writing) you don't know how the writing should look because you don't know how to spell it. You can't make an accurate prediction.

No, I wouldn’t admit doing any of that. Those are not the things with which I am unfamiliar. I know them so I need not think about them. Peripherals make no impression on me when I’m presented with something I don’t know. — Mww

This is interesting. Topic for another thread though perhaps...

The recollected image will remain unspelt, yes. Or, which is the same thing, the initially perceived image in sensation and the recalled image in mind will not correspond to each other. But again, not because I’m constructing it as I go, but because I cannot construct it at all. — Mww

But you must have been able to construct it to some extent, otherwise you wouldn't have two images to compare?

I wouldn’t cease recalling the word at that point, although I might if I have no further interest, but rather, assuming there is an interest, I would continue by then focusing on its components. If the object of the operation is attaining the word, I have no choice but to recall the letters which comprise it, and furthermore, to recall the proper arrangement of them. The fewer components comprising the word, then, by their consequently becoming the focus, wouldn’t be blurry, but still does not address their relative arrangement with each other. — Mww

That's it. That's basically how perception works neurologically too. You focus increasingly on salient parts of the external sate which you guess are going to give you the best information to predict the rest. The interesting part of this (for me anyway) is that those guesses, far from being random, follow almost exactly the guesses that would be made by someone carrying out Bayesian model selection.

Thanks for the interesting experiment. — Mww

Thanks for an interesting answer.

constructed from words and the concepts they define. — Isaac


Sure sounds like:

3. (if necessary) - abstraction of 'red', 'ball' and 'threw' from that experience (2) according to the social rules around identifying those components — Isaac — hypericin

Yep.

Why ought Russia have the right to take it from a sovereign state, whose territories it has accepted on several occasions? — ssu

It didn't ought. I don't think the question of who governs what territory is a moral one, any more than what hat I ought wear today is a moral question.

Why ought violence, aggression and straightforward imperialism justified? — ssu

I didn't. No one is justifying it.

for you it doesn't matter if Putin is control of Ukraine or the Ukrainians are in control of Ukraine, hence this conversation has utterly no meaning. — ssu

The question was meaningful enough. Your continual dodging of it is telling. Why ought Ukraine have control over that territory? It doesn't matter if I disagree, you should still be able to provide me with an answer.

Pretty much. Talking here about narratives, or propositional models, not neural nets. But that doesn't mean it doesn't apply to neural nets... — Banno

Yeah, could do. We talk about neural nets as having likelihoods of leading to certain reported mental events (or behaviours) because they're so prone to noise and stochastic fluctuations. That might make it difficult to pin down, but one might still be able to say that the statistically averaged sum of x collection of neural network functions across a time period represented some external state accurately.

Interesting line of thought.

It is absolutely fascinating, that it seems as though I myself….the entire sum of entitlement…. think in images, when in fact, there couldn’t really be any. I’m prepared to swear to a figurative High Heaven my brain presents both from and to itself a relative diorama of this or that, but in seeking for the substance or the means for all those images, it shall be found the substance of the brain contains not a single image much less a compendium of them, and the means by which the material brain functions, contradicts their very possibility.

Yet….there they are. I swear. — Mww

Yeah. Try testing them yourself. This might be difficult with one as well-educated as your good self, but a little trick one can try to demonstrate the phenomena is to look at a complicated word, one you don't know how to spell, then shut the book and try to bring to mind the image of the word as it was written (typeface, page colour, book edges - the lot). You'll find (or at least you should - let me know if you don't) that your 'mental image' contains something of a blur around the specific letters that you don't know the correct order of. It won't 'fix' them in the image. Theoretically, this is because how to spell a word is semantic memory, not episodic. You don't actually 'recall to mind' the image you just saw of it written down, but you'll think that's exactly what you're doing (if the experiment works), you'll 'see' the page, the book colour, perhaps the desk it was on...but the word will remain stubbornly un-spelt, because you're actually constructing the 'image' as you go, not recalling it as a complete image, and you just don't know where those letters go.

*Of course, explaining the experiment does give us confounding factors. Don't try too hard to recall the spelling deliberately, that'll engage word-recognition parts of your brain which might hold it in short term memory long enough to be called on in reconstructing the image.

That is where nuclear weapons work: deterrence. If this would be a non-nuclear armed country attacking Ukraine, it is likely that a no-fly zone would have been enforced.

And it works both ways: Russia doesn't dare to attack the countries supplying arms to Ukraine or training Ukrainian troops. — ssu

So now Russia aren't a threat to the West, and Putin is a master strategist who doesn't make massive blunders? I wish you guys would get your story straight.

it should be looked just how likely this would be. — ssu

It has been looked at just how likely it is. By experts in their field (as cited previously) and by, for example, @boethius above.

They reach different conclusions to you.

This is the problem with centrists like you. To dodge the moral evaluation of your position you need to argue that alternatives are actually impossible ("I'm as cut up about it as you, but we've just got to avoid taxing the rich, it's economics, I'm afraid"). Your attempts to do so are sounding more and more messianic.

You've still not answered the very basic moral question. Why ought Ukraine have control over Crimea/Donbas? There's no god-given right to any piece of land, there's no racial-biological link to Ukraine, there's no harm-reduction principle... There's no grounds at all been offered as to why they ought have that land. Without such grounds there's no reason we ought take even a 0.000001% risk of nuclear war to help them get it back.

What is your opinion on the validity, and/or manifestation, of mental imagery? — Mww

You mean like 'pictures in the mind'?

It's complicated (isn't it always?). I certainly seems as though the parts of the brain involved in creating mental images are the same ones as involved in interpreting visual stimuli from external states, so no less 'real' in that sense. Where I'd diverge from some folk interpretations though is that there's a tendency to think the brain 'produces' an image (say of the cup in front of me). I don't think the evidence justifies such a model. We might later recount having seen, or imagined, a cup, but interrogation of such an image often reveals gaps which we wouldn't have reported being there. Plus, recall, or recounting mental images seems to involve parts of the brain uninvolved in visual representation. we have routes through areas associated with semantic memory and language (obviously), but less involvement of episodic memory.

So seemingly we're more making it up on the spot "Had I imagined a cup, this is what it would have been like", than recalling something which happened "I imagined a cup, this is what it was like".

What I'm suggesting is that the duck-rabbit is resolved in that we can talk of it being either a duck or a rabbit; we are not limited to one description. We have three: duck, rabbit and duck-rabbit.

But someone might come along and show us that it is also a sailing ship, that there is yet another description that we had so far missed. It's not that seeing the sailing ship is ineffable, since we now can talk about it. There was more that can be said. — Banno

I like this. If I understand correctly, you're expressing a multiple-model interpretation as being a synthesis of all possible models (an exclusion of all impossible ones) such that there is a unitary truth of what is the case - that being it is the case that all these models are right, but these models are not. A kind of meta-model?

So you have moved from "experience is a social construct" to "the conceptualization and verbalization of experience is a social construct"? (Which we all knew.) — hypericin

No.

Do you now agree that the sensory experiences of 2 are ineffable, and are only communicable at all to those who have had the same experience? — hypericin

No. The sensory experience at (2) is constructed from words and the concepts they define.

Aren't all variations of memory (e.g. short term memory and long term memory) the storage (however imperfect it may be) of what occurs in the present awareness of the organism? If not entertaining philosophical zombie scenarios, this is the only possibility I can currently think of. I for example don't find that we as humans can recall memories of events which we were never consciously aware of in some former present time. — javra

That's just episodic memory, not semantic memory, and it's still how we'd talk (or internally recreate) the event. It's not what triggers such an account.

Let's say, hypothetically, I see a post box. My experience is of seeing a red post box, but in my brain there might be clusters firing which are commonly associated with red, and pillar-shapes, and posing, and letters, and nostalgia...When I recall the experience, I re-fire those clusters. Now I see a red car. Clusters fire relating to red, speed, driving, fear, Tom Cruise,... Recalling the experience re-fires those clusters. In both cases, clusters associated with red fire, so recalling them re-fires those clusters. In neither case have I experienced 'red'. I experienced a red post box or a red car. It's never the case that the only neural activity my experience is trying to explain is the firing of one cluster of neurons in V4. So the idea of 'red' must be abstracted from the full experiences, not the component parts. We never have conscious awareness of an isolated component part.

But, more importantly, even if that ever happened, we'd still interpret it (using the definition of 'red') because all it is is a few neurons firing, nothing more. And it's not even the same neurons. There's a lot of involvement in the superior parietal lobule and precuneus in colour recognition which is simply not a one-to-one correlate to wavelengths hitting the retina. There's no direct link there for us to be dealing with internally. We cluster together a set of different neural activity under the term 'red'. How do we learn which to bring into that cluster? The social experience of the the use of the word 'red'.

My view is that no animal, humans included, forms connections between word-sounds and certain neural networks. — javra

This seems to be directly contradicted by the evidence. Am I misunderstanding your claim, or are you just saying that evidence from cognitive science is all wrong?

The animal would instead hold conscious awareness of the word-sound "treat" and would consciously associate it to, in my view, a category it is also in some way consciously aware of - most likely intuitively. And all of these activities that take place within the conscious awareness of the organism are then concurrently also manifesting in the workings of organism's neural networks. — javra

There's no evidence that I know of which links either hippocampal activity or long-term potentiation with consciousness. Studies of both sleep and anaesthesia seem to both confirm that conscious awareness isn't necessary.

it seems to me that all lesser-animal predators will be aware of red, for it is the color of blood, which prey evidences when injured or eaten. — javra

They might be aware of blood. Why need they be aware of 'red'? There's a scene in a comedy film whose name I can't recall, where a prince is murdered. His blood is blue (the royalty joke). We don't all think "hey, what's that?", we think "blue blood".

I mention this because, of course, lesser animals do not make use of language (when understood as word use) to have experiences of red. — javra

Again, they only need have experiences (if they have experiences at all) of red things. There's no need for an experience of 'red' other than to make proper use of the word 'red'.

The experience consists in the sensations, feelings and images of the body-mind. They don't all have to be conscious, or reflexively conscious, let alone reported. — Janus

If that's the definition of experience you prefer, then we definitely don't have experiences of 'red'. We just have some neurons fire. Else, which of them are the sub-conscious experience of 'red'? The V4 cluster? BA7? Parietal lobe? Which bits would be 'red'?