In Searle’s list, object becomes tree at #3, and in the picture it can be a tree only after Searle’s #3, but without that condition, which is not even implied by the picture, it is the case that it should have been object on the left, at instance of perception, and never a tree. Nevertheless, the picture correctly represents the initial conditions for visual experience, demonstrating the presentation of an object directly to the system, according to physical law. — Mww

are you and your colleagues appalled at the extent to which humans can’t find agreement among themselves on the most fundamental human considerations? — Mww

As an Indirect Realist, I believe that I directly see a model or a representation of a tree in my mind. — RussellA

see
verb
uk
/siː/ us
/siː/
present participle seeing | past tense saw | past participle seen
see verb (USE EYES)
A1 [ I or T ]
to be conscious of what is around you by using your eyes: — https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/see

When I perceive a tree, I don't question that I am perceiving a tree — RussellA

I directly see a model or a representation of a tree in my mind. — RussellA

I do question that what I am perceiving as a tree exists in the world as a tree. — RussellA

I can treat the something I perceive as a tree as a tree in the world, act towards it as tree, and follow the consequences of my actions. — RussellA

I agree when you say that "all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree", but don't agree that your conclusion would logically follow "So we can conclude that virtually all the time we know what we see is the tree" — RussellA

I agree with that. This is the position of the Indirect Realist, a pragmatic approach to the world. — RussellA

You have sufficient warrant to believe the tree you see is, in fact, a tree, all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree. — Isaac

'know' [is] simply having sufficient warrant — Isaac

concerned with ... how to know whether one's visual experience is an hallucination or a veridical visual experience — RussellA

He does take this distinction as granted, as well as that the folk he is addressing can, at least for the most part, tell the difference. But I suppose that RussellA and @schopenhauer1 cannot tell if they are hallucinating gives us an explanation for why there is not much hope of "penetrating the darkness here". — Banno

he doesn't explain how one knows whether one's visual experience is an hallucination or a veridical visual experience — RussellA

when seeing a broken window on one's walk to work, it is impossible to know just from the broken window what caused it to break, just by having the perception of a green tree in one's mind it is impossible to know what caused that perception. — RussellA

The contact between perceiver and perceived is direct, therefor his perception of the perceived is direct. — NOS4A2

Then its over to you to explain the link between the two. How a decision moves a hand, and a bottle of plonk changes a decision. — Banno


A decision moves a hand intentionally, as we are capable of intentional action, and intoxication affects your judgement and also your motor skills. — Wayfarer

The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument. — Banno

The crucial step in the argument from illusion as stated is step 4. The step that says you do see something even in the hallucinatory case. But that is a mistake. In the ordinary sense of ‘see’ in which I now see the tree, in the hallucinatory case I do not see anything. That is what makes it a hallucination. The visual experience in the two cases can be exactly the same, by stipulation. But in one case some-thing is seen and in the second case nothing is seen. But surely one might say you did see something. It was after all a visual experience.I think we can introduce a sense of ‘see’ to describe our visual experiences but that sense of ‘see’ is quite different from the ordinary sense because the truth of the statement does not imply that there really is an independently existing object seen. Indeed, I want to make a strong claim now. Though the visual experience definitely exists, it is not and cannot itself be seen. When you consciously see something you have a visual experience but you do not see it. This is not because it is invisible but because in the veridical case it is the seeing of the object. And the seeing cannot itself be seen. In the hallucinatory case the experience, by stipulation, is exactly the same, but it is not a seeing but a seeming to see. Because it is a hallucination nothing is seen. In the hallucinatory case, there is no independently existing object causing the experience. — Searle

And recent revelations about the peace negotiations that took place weeks into the conflict might actually support that view. The Russians were willing to make major concessions when they negotiated for Ukrainian neutrality, and it might only be after the negotiations failed that the Russian strategy changed to annexing parts of Ukraine. — Tzeentch

According to Israeli officials, Putin’s proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty. — https://www.axios.com/2022/03/08/israel-russia-ukraine-ceasefire-critical-point

The entirety of the corporate media’s attention given to the story consisted of:

A 166-word mini report in Bloomberg;
One five-minute segment on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” (Fox News);
One 600-word round up in The New York Post;
A shrill Business Insider attack article, whose headline labels Hersh a “discredited journalist” that has given a “gift to Putin”.

The 20 outlets studied are, in alphabetical order:

ABC News; Bloomberg News; Business Insider; BuzzFeed; CBS News; CNBC; CNN; Forbes; Fox News; The Huffington Post; MSNBC; NBC News; The New York Post; The New York Times; NPR; People Magazine; Politico; USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.

Reuters, for example, has published 14 separate reports on the topic since Thursday. Every large media outlet in America (and many medium-sized and even small ones) subscribes to Reuters, republishing content from their newswires.

One of the main tasks of a newsroom editor is to follow the newswire and follow up on Reuters’ content. This means that editors around the country have been bombarded with this story every day since it broke, and virtually every single one of them has passed on it – 14 consecutive times.

Fact-checking website Snopes also sprung into action, calling Hersh’s claim a “conspiracy” that rested on a single “omnipotent anonymous source.”

Notice that they had absolutely nothing to say when random people were saying Russia blew their own pipeline.

The most incredible thing about the backlash against Hersh’s article on the U.S. blowing up the Nord Stream pipelines is the fact that it’s clear no establishment media outlet has any intention of carrying out the basic journalism needed to confirm or refute what he’s reported, — Jonathan Cook

Debates that make sense to me should be principled and computationally affordable ways to assess people's arguments and evidences — neomac

Despite this uncertainty, US media overwhelmingly interpreted the Pentagon’s conjecture as fact. The New York Times (2/2/23) reported that “the United States has detected what it says is a Chinese surveillance balloon,” only to call the device “the spy balloon”—without attributive language—within the same article. Similar evolution happened at CNBC, where the description shifted from “suspected Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23) to simply “Chinese spy balloon” (2/6/23). The Guardian once bothered to place “spy balloon” in quotation marks (2/5/23), but soon abandoned that punctuation (2/6/23).

Given that media had no proof of either explanation, it might stand to reason that outlets would give each possibility—spy balloon vs. weather balloon—equal attention. Yet media were far more interested in lending credence to the US’s official narrative than to that of China.
NYT: A Brief History of Spying With Balloons

Of course, governments have also been using balloons to track weather for more than a century—but that didn’t merit a New York Times article (2/3/23).

In coverage following the initial reports, media devoted much more time to speculating on the possibility of espionage than of scientific research. The New York Times (2/3/23), for instance, educated readers about the centuries-long wartime uses of surveillance balloons. Similar pieces ran at The Hill (2/3/23), Reuters (2/2/23) and the Guardian (2/3/23). Curiously, none of these outlets sought to provide an equivalent exploration of the history of weather balloons after the Chinese Foreign Affairs statement, despite the common and well-established use of balloons for meteorological purposes.

Even information that could discredit the “spy balloon” theory was used to bolster it. Citing the Pentagon, outlets almost universally acknowledged that any surveillance capacity of the balloon would be limited. This fact apparently didn’t merit reconsideration of the “spy balloon” theory; instead, it was treated as evidence that China was an espionage amateur. As NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel (2/3/23) stated:

The Pentagon says it believes this spy balloon doesn’t significantly improve China’s ability to gather intelligence with its satellites.

One of Brumfiel’s guests, a US professor of international studies, called the balloon a “floating intelligence failure,” adding that China would only learn, in Brumfiel’s words, at most “a little bit” from the balloon. That this might make it less likely to be a spy balloon and more likely, as China said, a weather balloon did not seem to occur to NPR.

Reuters (2/4/23), meanwhile, called the use of the balloon “a bold but clumsy espionage tactic.” Among its uncritically quoted “security expert” sources: former White House national security adviser and inveterate hawk John Bolton, who scoffed at the balloon for its ostensibly low-tech capabilities.

Why should rescuing Ukraine take priority over rescuing Haiti or Sudan? Why should fears of genocide in Ukraine matter more than the ongoing genocide targeting the Rohingya in Myanmar? Why should supplying Ukraine with modern arms qualify as a national priority, while equipping El Paso, Texas, to deal with a flood of undocumented migrants figures as an afterthought? Why do Ukrainians killed by Russia generate headlines, while deaths attributable to Mexican drug cartels — 100,000 Americans from drug overdoses annually – are treated as mere statistics?

Of the various possible answers to such questions, three stand out and merit reflection.

The first is that “civilization,” as the term is commonly employed in American political discourse, doesn’t encompass places like Haiti or Sudan. Civilization derives from Europe and remains centered in Europe. Civilization implies Western culture and values. ...

What makes Russian aggression so heinous, therefore, is that it victimizes Europeans, whose lives are deemed to possess greater value than the lives of those who reside in implicitly less important regions of the world. That there is a racialist dimension to such a valuation goes without saying, however much U.S. officials may deny that fact. Bluntly, the lives of white Ukrainians matter more than the lives of the non-whites who populate Africa, Asia, or Latin America.

The second answer is that casting the Ukraine War as a struggle to defend civilization creates a perfect opportunity for the United States to reclaim its place at the forefront of that very civilization. ...

One final factor may contribute to this eagerness to see civilization itself under deadly siege in Ukraine. Demonizing Russia provides a convenient excuse for postponing or avoiding altogether a critical reckoning with the present American version of that civilization. Classifying Russia as a de facto enemy of the civilized world has effectively diminished the urgency of examining our own culture and values.

So should know one way or the other if the Germans are in control of the investigation, which I think they're not. It's Denmark and Sweden right? The Germans are politically independent enough not to be influenced by the USA. — Benkei

The Germans are politically independent enough not to be influenced by the USA — Benkei

I’ve written many stories based on unnamed sources. If I named somebody, they’d be fired, or, worse, jailed. The law is so strict. I’ve never had anybody exposed, and of course when I write I say, as I did in this article, it’s a source, period. And over the years, the stories I’ve written have always been accepted. I have used for this story the same caliber of skilled fact-checkers as had worked with me at the New Yorker magazine. Of course, there are many ways to verify obscure information told to me. — Hersh

either G. Friedman actually believed that the Maidan Revolution was "the most overt coup d'état in history" and later he retracted his own claims, or G.Friedman never thought the Maidan Revolution was "the most overt coup d'état in history" but he expressed his own belief though irony (G.Fridman's conditional is maybe supposed to clarify why he expressed himself in Russian own terms). — neomac

Whose accuracy has been questioned by George Friedman himself. — neomac

I love these sorts of interviews and talks that were given before the full gravity of the situation in Ukraine became apparent. Less self-censorship, politicization and hindsight. Mostly just honest conversation. — Tzeentch

He's wrong if one believes that what distinguishes revolutions from coups is massive popular participation. — Xanatos

why exactly can't Ukraine tell them: "We think that this is the best deal that we are capable of getting at the moment?" — Xanatos

You do need to keep in mind that the West did not want this war in the first place; Russia did. — Xanatos

Referring to the events of 2014 in Ukraine as a coup is rather misguided — Xanatos

the most blatant coup in history — George Friedman, director of Stratfor, U.S. intelligence strategic advisory institute

The US (and the rest of the West) can offer Ukraine advice — Xanatos

Almost complete silence on Hersh' article in Europe by the way. Nothing in the main newspapers. You'd think the Graun would jump at the opportunity. — Benkei

Few outlets reported the recent revelations by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett about the ceasefire negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey that he helped to mediate in March 2022. Bennett said explicitly that the West "blocked" or "stopped" (depending on the translation) the negotiations.

Bennett confirmed what has been reported by other sources since April 21, 2022, when Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, one of the other mediators, told CNN Turk after a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, "There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue… They want Russia to become weaker."

Advisers to Prime Minister Zelensky provided the details of Boris Johnson’s April 9 visit to Kyiv that were published in Ukrayinska Pravda on May 5th. They said Johnson delivered two messages. The first was that Putin and Russia "should be pressured, not negotiated with." The second was that, even if Ukraine completed an agreement with Russia, the "collective West," who Johnson claimed to represent, would take no part in it.

The Western corporate media has generally only weighed in on these early negotiations to cast doubt on this story or smear any who repeat it as Putin apologists, despite multiple-source confirmation by Ukrainian officials, Turkish diplomats and now the former Israeli prime minister. — https://original.antiwar.com/mbenjamin/2023/02/13/how-spin-and-lies-fuel-a-bloody-war-of-attrition-in-ukraine/

without an overall political and strategic concept, arms deliveries are pure militarism...
We have a militarily operational stalemate, which we cannot solve militarily. Incidentally, this is also the opinion of the American Chief of Staff Mark Milley. He said that Ukraine's military victory is not to be expected and that negotiations are the only possible way. Anything else is a senseless waste of human life. — Erich Vad. From 2006 to 2013 Chancellor Angela Merkel's military policy advisor

As historian Geoffrey Roberts has argued, President "Putin went to war to prevent Ukraine from becoming an ever-stronger and threatening NATO bridgehead on Russia’s borders.” The war was not the Ukrainians’ first choice either. When Zelensky, whom Ukrainians elected as a "peace candidate," flirted with the idea of reconciliation with Russia in 2019, Ukraine’s notorious far-right supported by the West, torpedoed it.

Even in April 2022, after a month of hostilities, Russia and Ukraine tentatively agreed to end the war. But that decision was undermined by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. His Ukraine visit was designed to stop the talks, which were not acceptable to the US and some of its allies. Today, in Pentagon, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin sees the escalation as "a window of opportunity here, between now and the spring."

Only a year ago, Ukraine, under Zelensky’s leadership, was still positioned to embrace neutrality, opt out from military alignments and serve as a bridge between Eastern and Western Europe, due to its position in China’s Bridge and Belt Initiative. Had that future prevailed, Ukraine might today be peaceful. Its GDP would be a third bigger. Young men would alive and well and have good jobs. Ukrainian refugees would be returning for new opportunities at home. Children wouldn’t suffer from traumatic nightmares.

Today, all those dreams are in ashes. The proxy war is aimed against Russia. The Ukrainians’ role is to die in it. The puppet masters are the primary beneficiaries. — https://worldfinancialreview.com/the-unwarranted-ukraine-proxy-war-a-year-later/

Not only do these global military contractors arm Ukraine, but they stand to benefit from the re-militarization of Western Europe, Japan, and the new NATO members.

... President Volodymyr Zelensky delivered an emotional wartime appeal to a joint meeting of US Congress pleading for more military assistance from the lawmakers, who were about to approve $45 billion in additional aid. It was necessary for "eventual victory."

Yet, there was a huge disconnect between the triumphant declaration and the realities. Earlier in the month, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen had acknowledged Ukraine’s losses in the war amounted to 100,000 soldiers and 20,000 civilians, though her tweet was quickly deleted and a new one was released without the true death count.

... even as international media was touting the mirage of Ukraine’s military triumph, the country’s real GDP declined over 35 percent on an annual basis in the third quarter of 2022; that is, before Russia’s massive infrastructure attack.

Starting on October 10, Russia’s waves of missile and drone attacks opened a new phase of the war. The direct physical damage to infrastructure soared to $127 billion already in September; that’s over 60 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war GDP. The impact on the productive capacity of key sectors, due to damage or occupation, is substantial and long-lasting.

The population share with income below the national poverty line in Ukraine may more than triple reaching nearly 60 percent in 2022. Poverty will increase from 5.5 percent in 2021 to 25 percent in 2022, with major downside risks if the war and energy security situations worsen. As casualties continue to mount, over a third of the population has been displaced and over half of all Ukrainian children have been forced to leave their homes. The nine months of war have caused massive population displacement. As of October 2022, the number of Ukrainian refugees recorded in Europe was over 7.8 million, and the number of internally displaced people was 6.5 million.

Ukraine is "absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations," said one source familiar with Western intelligence to CNN. "This is real-world battle testing." — https://original.antiwar.com/dan_steinbock/2023/02/14/us-big-defense-the-only-winner-of-the-ukraine-proxy-war/

Many Western politicians seem to be prioritizing signalling their political virtue in fighting what is seen as tyranny and promoting Western liberal democracy over realistic assessments of the costs and benefits of their actions.

... if we continue to ignore the idea that other state actors might have legitimate concerns — that are backed up by significant military power — we risk careering toward a global conflict that can only end badly.

... No matter how hard some might wish, Russia’s war in Ukraine is unlikely to lead to any sort of crushing Russian defeat on the battlefield, and sooner or later negotiations will have to take place. If future negotiations are to be meaningful, both sides will have to give ground and make some attempt to see something of the other side’s point of view. — https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/02/14/we-dont-have-to-engage-in-hysterical-crusades-against-russia-and-china/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=we-dont-have-to-engage-in-hysterical-crusades-against-russia-and-china

The intent to take territories from Ukraine and to dominate Ukraine is obvious there to see. — ssu

Russia wanted... — ssu

I must take exception to the "just". The tree remains a tree, and even if it is a construct of our neural nets and shared grammar it is more than a mere "theory". — Banno

Perception is either mediated by the perceiver, and thus direct, or it is mediated by something else, thus indirect. — NOS4A2

When I see a photo of a tree, I indirectly perceive the tree, but directly perceive the photo, for example. — NOS4A2

Do you believe that from this position there is a 'reality as it is in itself' or do you consider such a term incoherent - 'reality' being a constructivist process, dependent on a point of view for its meaning? — Tom Storm

Anything internal is me, though. What else mediates it? — NOS4A2

In my mind the “internal stages” are a part of the perceiver and thus mediated by him. — NOS4A2

The latter would be idealism, wouldn't it? — Tom Storm

It seems that the issue is where do we draw the line between indirect and the idea that 'materialism' is an illusion created by perception? — Tom Storm

Yeah I assumed sense-data, ideas, representations, or whatever else is posited as a perceptual intermediary exists within the perceiver for the simple reason they cannot be found anywhere else. — NOS4A2