Given that one of the central planks of neoliberalism is the atomization of society and the destruction of the 'social', one can only laugh at the idea that it really ought to be called 'neosocialism'. Hayek literally wrote books against the notion of the social, and Thatcher famously declared that 'there is no such thing as society' - neosocialism? Big lols.

I wonder if aionic ducks would taste good in a salad...

Curious minds are not a licence to baseless fiction.

Nobody knows. But this doesn't give you carte blanche to make things up. I could say instead that there were in fact homogenous ducks and their quacking (which made no sound) allowed for 'calculations', and if you tell me that either homogenous ducks and soundless quacking make no sense then I'm going to tell you that you're just relying on the laws of post-big bang physics and too bad for you.

Although frankly aionic ducks are just alot cooler as a speculative cosmogony.

Yes. If you disregard physics, anything is possible.

Color is (for the relevant purposes here) a frequency of light. You're going to need at least some geometry (2 dimensions, at a minimum), and a time vector. Frequency = periodicy (i.e. a time period).

https://nypost.com/2019/12/05/trump-may-send-14000-troops-to-middle-east-as-iran-threat-grows-report/

BuT SyRiA wAs AlL AbOuT SeNdInG tHe TrOoPs HoMe

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/7176/limitations-of-science-and-the-use-of-philosophy

Our first reply :D

Yanis Varoufakis - The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy
Yanis Varoufakis - And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future

It's actually really, really good. It was originally published in 2014 but it's positively prophetic when read in the light of even just 5 years onward, and it really helps make sense of just so much that seems to be happening in the world. Basic idea is that the alliance between democracy and capitalism was only ever a post-war détente, and that since the 70s the two have been prying further and further apart, to the benefit of capitalism - much due to the mechanism of sovereign debt. It's a pretty impressive piece of scholarship.

Wolfgang Streek - Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

It's worth celebrating what small victories are achieved. And frankly, just seeing Ho - a walking, breathing piece of human excrement - lose his seat is worth basking in for whatever moment of pleasure it gives. In any case it totally deprives Lam and her cabinet of their go-to 'silent majority' excuse when talking of the protestors.

Among my favorite bits:

"Some notable names ran in the elections, including pro-Beijing lawmaker Junius Ho, one of the most controversial politicians in the city, who suffered a shock defeat."

"Original Post" - The post that begins a forum thread/discussion.

You might enjoy some Foucault, OP. He does alot of what you say has been neglected. You'll also much in Heidegger on this theme, as Eee said. And a great deal elsewhere, if you seek it out.

The state.

If you (Leo) get the ball rolling on a thread with some discussion from various members, we may at the very least get Prof. Pigliucci to take a read if he has time and possibly respond. No promises of course, but I think it'll be cool if there's an already-ongoing discussion that he can chime into if he'd like.

(1) One of the more famous images associated with the Stoics is their tripartite division of philosophy into ethics, physics, and logic, each represented by parts of an egg (logic being the egg-shell, ethics being the egg-white, and physics being the yolk). I think it's fair to say that while most popular attention has been paid to the egg-shell of Stoic ethics, a lot less has been given to their account of logic and physics. With physics, I have in mind things like their distinction between bodies and incorporeals (to give just one example), and with logic, their substitution of what they called 'assertibles' in place of Aristotelian 'terms' (to give another example). Do you think that these other elements of the Stoic egg have relevance today, and if so, where they might stand with respect to both contemporary physics and logic?

(2) There's been a noticeable uptick in the popularity of Stoic ethics in recent times, no doubt in part due to your very generous engagements and writings on the topic. However, one common criticism I see of Stoicism, in this regard, is that it just so happens to be very nicely tailored to our present-day socioeconomic conditions in which, thanks to a generalized decline in social mobility and opportunity, encourages people to 'accept their lot in life', turning 'inward' in order to steel themselves against harsh realities, rather than attempt to change those realities. In other words, the critique runs that Stoic ethics is an inherently conservative ethics whose popularity is a response to wider social and political incapacities, and which, in turn, feeds a resistance to sociopolitical change. Would this be a fair charge, and if not, what might a Stoic response to it look like?

Hey, can we keep discussions about specific questions in their own threads? (create one if you'd like). I'd prefer that this not be too cluttered so we can easily keep track of questions for Prof. Pigliucci. Thanks.

At a glance: owenership is a legal relation, and all legal relations only make sense when defined and enforced by a state; what self-respecting anarchist would define their own actions by means of a category of the state?

Would also be relevant to mention the genealogy of the idea of self-ownership, which was derived from Roman law and more specifically, the right to own slaves: "When Medieval political theorists spoke of "liberty," they were normally referring to a lord's right to do whatever he wanted within his own domains - his dominium. This was, again, usually assumed to be not something originally established by agreement, but a mere fact of conquest ... This is a tradition that assumes that liberty is essentially the right to do what one likes with one's own property. In fact, not only does it make property a right, it treats rights themselves as a form of property.

...If freedom is basically our right to own things, or to treat things as if we own them, then what would it mean to "own" a freedom — wouldn't it have to mean that our right to own property is itself a form of property? That does seem unnecessarily convoluted. What possible reason would one have to want to define it this way? Historically, there is a simple — if somewhat disturbing — answer to this. Those who have argued that we are the natural owners of our rights and liberties have been mainly interested in asserting that we should be free to give them away, or even to sell them. ... And this is exactly what natural-rights theorists came to assert. In fact, over the next centuries, these ideas came to be developed above all in Antwerp and Lisbon, cities at the very center of the emerging slave trade."


https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/openeconomy/two-notions-of-liberty-revisited-or-how-to-disentangle-liberty-and-slavery/

:up:

You don’t have much to say about it because we’re - roughly speaking - on the same page, and/or because you don’t think it’s worth going down that road — I like sushi

The latter.

Well, unfortunately, you are interpreting the standard realist position wrongly. — PessimisticIdealism

If, in your reading, the 'standard realist position' turns upon nothing other than the contradictory dicate to both know and not know X at the same time, it's far more likely that you've simply vulgarized the 'standard realist position' beyond all sensible recognition.

The basic mistake of objections like yours is to think, mistakenly, that a claim about the mind-indepedence of things is about things, and not a claim about the mind. It's an easy enough mistake to make insofar the grammar of a statement like 'X is indepedent of the mind' puts 'X', the 'thing', in the position of the grammatical subject of the proposition. But such a claim is equally, if not entirely, about the 'mind' and not things.

You can bring this out if you swap subject and object: "Mind is entirely irrelevant to the being of things" (incidentally, the null hypothesis, the onus of which it is the idealist's to disprove). This is just as much the realist's claim, and it doesn't require one jump though the concocted logical hoops of the OP which simply builds contradiction into the premises in order to smuggle it into the conclusion.

I interpret it as I read it.

But the kind of realism that the OP is criticizing doesn't see it that way at all. — Wayfarer

It is literally his second proposition:

P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”

I mean, honestly, no one with an elementary sense of logic - let alone realism - would accede to this. It effectively says: one must X and not-X. This becomes super clear when you swap the words around: 'when X is not being known, one must know X'. It's absurd.

To put my objection another way: the realist position doesn't hinge on finding something out about the world (about X and what we don't/know of it); it hinges on finding something out about ourselves. Not (yet another) piece of positive knowledge, but about the status of knowledge as such (as a 'faculty', as some might put it). Or again: the realist looks 'inward' and not 'out', to secure their realism.

If the situation in Hong Kong were so miserable that there was really nothing to lose, resistance out of sheer desperation could be permissible. The Uighurs in Xinjiang may be in such a position, but the people of Hong Kong are not that bad off. They have more civil liberties than mainland Chinese and materially they are far from desperate. — Congau

Nonsense. As if one ought to wait for concentration camps before raising hell. And your blithe dismissal of the 5 demands says more about you than about the protestors. If they are such 'dry formalities', then they should be implemented, post haste.

I'm challenging the idea that a realist would agree with the OP's presentation of their position. So yeah, you're right, but only to the degree that what the OP is criticising is something of a strawman.

I don't have much to say about this.

This is fine as far as it goes but it doesn't address my main objection: that it's not something about X which we must know ("know X when X is not being known"), but something about knowledge. So a realist - on my reading anyway - wouldn't say that

"In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.”

They would instead say something like:

"In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must "know the limits and scope of knowledge".

The problem is the assumption that it is something about X that must be known in order to secure its being-independant. But this is not the case. 'What one must know' lies on the side of knowledge, not on the side of the thing.

They simply want more independence from the mainland – a wish that is completely unrealistic. — Congau

Actually this is what they want:

1. Full withdrawal of the extradition bill
2. An independent commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality
3. Retracting the classification of protesters as “rioters”
4. Amnesty for arrested protesters
5. Dual universal suffrage, meaning for both the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive

And they are doing it because fuck the Chinese government and their bootlicker supporters

P2) In order to know whether or not "the being of X is independent of its being known," one must “know X when X is not being known.” — PessimisticIdealism

This seems contentious. It seems to me that the realist claim would turn upon the limits of knowledge as such, and not knowledge about some thing or another (even when construed negatively). That is, I don't need to 'know X when X is not being known'; I simply need to know that knowledge is always finite in some manner.

It's like saying: 'in order to know that I can't see the back of this screen, I must know that I'm not looking at the back of this screen. But I can only know that if I know what it looks like. Therefore, I must be able to see the back of this screen in order to say that I can't see it'. Which is plainly ridiculous of course. The reason, of course, is that I understand not something about the object ('what it looks like'), but something about the nature of sight - it is perspectival. Mutatis mutandis, the same goes for your argument: I don't need to know X when X is not being known, I simply need to 'know' the limits of knowledge itself. Or to put it one last way: it's not 'knowledge about X' that's necessary, it's 'knowledge about (the limits of) knowledge)'.

Yeah, nah.

Which gives logic and math a kind of atemporal, aspatial quality. Which is odd, given that we inhabit temporal, spatial universe of change. — Marchesk

My takeaway is rather different: not that math and logic are atemporal and aspatial, but rather, that they are normative practises, techniques, employed and tailored for certain purposes, outside of which certain questions simply no longer make sense. Consider the OPs example: the idea that a definiendum no longer entails its definiens. If someone were to say this, the only possible response to make is that he or she does not understand what either or definiendum or a definiens is. That he or she does not understand how language is used in these cases.

Or else: if a 'circle is no longer round' - what could this mean? Either, on the side of 'language', that people no longer call what they used to call circles, circles (they call them 'kirkles' now). Or, on the side of 'things', that everything circular has changed shape (to decagons, say). But these two options exhaust the space of manoeuvre: circles just are round - not because of some deep, metaphysical necessity, but because that is how we use language. If someone says: 'but circles might not be round tomorrow' - the only response is: 'you don't understand what circles are'.

A chaotic (inconsistent) world in which the definiendum no longer entails the definiens and vice versa? — Pippen

Perhaps the first thing to point out is that it's not at all clear what this could possibly mean: if a definiendum no longer entails its definiens, in what sense could the one count as a definiendum, and the other, its definiens? What could it mean to say that tomorrow, bachelors might no longer be unmarried men? Does it mean that they will all be married (by forced decree, perhaps?): but this would be an 'empirical' change. So it can't be that. But if not that, then what? But that's what Hume was concerned with: experience. But if not experience, then - it's not clear what it could even mean to extend the problem of induction to logic and math.

In a way you're right - one of the implications is a kind of short-circuiting of the whole debate: perception, as a matter of interaction, is neither realist nor anti-realist, but something else altogether. Of course, one could simply tack on, as you have done, a rather vulgar reading of the whole thing in terms of experience. But this says more about those who like to do such tacking on, than anything about the experiment.

...To demonstrate that a vision-inversion experiment is easily assimilated to an experience-centric dialect and metaphysics. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Sure, if you beg the question, anything is possible.

You've assumed your conclusion — ZzzoneiroCosm

Says the post that shunts everything into the artificially constructed vocabulary of 'experience' from the get-go.

As Banno noted, this exact thing - wearing inverted glasses over a prolonged period of time - has been a well known scientific experiment, and there's been alot written about the results. The first most striking result is that after a while, one simply gets used to it - your perception of the world - after interacting with it (this is important) - simply rights itself eventually, and you see just like you did without the glasses. Moreover, once you take the glasses off, your vision has to once again readjust - it has to 'correct' itself once again.

The second striking result is the phenomenology of it: wearing the inverted glasses doesn't simply flip the world up-side down, at first. Rather, it disrupts sight altogether - it leads to a kind of initial experiential blindness. Quoting one of the studies: "During visual fixations, every movement of my head gives rise to the most unexpected and peculiar transformations of objects in the visual field. The most familiar forms dissolve and reintegrate in ways never before seen. At time, parts of figures run together the spaces disappearing from view: at other times, they run apart, as if intent on deceiving the viewer." Or as Alva Noe puts it, the result is not (initially) simply seeing differently, but failing to see.

This eventually changes, as the glasses wearer interacts with the world around themselves, and quite literally learns to see again. As Noe reports, there are three stages to this: the first stage is a confusing one: things on the left look as though they are on the right, even though things feel as though they are on the left. Next, things on the left still look as thought they are on the right, but now they also feel that they are on the right. Last, everything aligns: what's on the left both looks like it's on the left, and feels like it's on the left. 'Normal' vision is restored. Importantly all this happens only if one interacts with the world around themselves, moving, holding, touching, reaching out, etc.

The biggest takeway from all this is that visual perception is bodily and interactive in the extreme: sight is not just a question of 'images' but of literally interacting with a world which gives rise to sight. Perception is a 'complex', a conjunction between what is seen, what is felt, how one interacts with the world, and not just 'what' one sees. In short - anti-realism is a bunch of bullshit, and any elementary study of perception will confirm this.