Psychological stress in the form of cognitive dissonance.

The only reason the system distinguishes employer from employee is for tax purposes. But really the relationship is a partnership between types of workers, one who is willing to take the necessary risk, to fund both the legal and productive means in order to provide products and services, the other who is willing to help the risk-taker and benefit from the possible dividends.

If the state never meddled in this relationship and profited from it the distinction between the two wouldn’t be so distinct, and one would need the other as much as anyone else in his community. Instead we are left with two competing classes for some reason.

I don’t know how anyone could expect that. Really, only an idiot would think that when he says Jim Jordan is fighting in the house, for example, that he meant Jim was body-slamming Dems on the house floor. Or when he says Rudy is a fighter, Giuliani must be boxing cow carcasses in a walk-in freezer somewhere. Or when Republicans don’t fight, you have to primary the hell out of them? Yet his “fight like hell” remark was somehow literal, and found a home in the Jan 6th show trial as incitement to insurrection. What kind of idiot believes that? Just dupes.

What actual solutions do you have in mind? Didn’t Finland start building a big fence just recently? Why would they do that, I wonder? Why just 200km of fence, and why would it take so long to build?

That's right. But of course the context is different, and that's what's important.

Dupes actually believed Trump meant political violence, and fell for a very simple fallacy as proffered by those who would exploit their gullibility. That’s the important context.

How does it hurt you politically to think of people as individuals?

I don’t get it either. The worst it could do is put in doubt the metaphysics of those who think in crowds.

Biden ended the Trump’s national emergency and the border wall construction on his first day in office. Now he’s dealing with a crisis at the border. Now the crisis is the biggest problem facing America, according to public opinion, costing the tax-payer more than it would have cost to build the wall.

It's trivially true that when a person talks, they talk, and not society, or community etc.

The question is how individual(istic) can a person be, given that they do not live in a vacuum.

It’s only trivially-true until it hurts us politically, then it’s trivially-false.

Any use of "bloodbath", whether literal or metaphorical, implies violent aggression. It's similar to his use of "fight" on Jan 6. You can downplay it as "figurative" all you want, but the implications are clear. And, there is consistency in his way of speaking like that. The 'enemy', is the American political system and the goal is to smash it down.

Then the implications are clear when other politicians, like Biden, use the exact same words.



It was so much of a hoax that Biden resumed doing just that, only it was far too late.

You absolutely did no such thing, in any sense of that word. If this is your conception of a 'right' I'd just say you're wrong and move on.. What you actually did was tell me you would do what you are now claiming you did do, and that was not to 'confer a right'. It was to act according to your moral outlook. That's fine. It is not a right, and you've conferred nothing on me. So, this was predictably lacking in anything establishing a right.

That’s too bad, I did. And though you can refuse it and pretend I didn’t, I’ll still be there granting you the right and defending it.

Start small. Give your neighbor the right to borrow your lawnmower, or something.

Yet, it remains your personal, emotionally-informed opinion. It doesn't do anything but tell me that. I happen to agree on the 'merit' of enforceable rights, too. Says nothing for the disagreement we're having though.

Might makes right. Or was it the best and brightest make rights? I can’t say I’m a big fan of social Darwinism either way, but limiting social power in favor of state power is the going rate, so you’re not entirely in bad company.

That's odd. Almost all modern sets of rights are come to by deliberation among, what are meant to be, the best and brightest of that society.

That is odd. Philosophers have been expounding and conferring rights long before any politician, bureaucrat, or jurist has codified them. Hell, some constitutions weren’t created until the disco era. Perhaps society is just a thief.

I disagree, and see no evidence to the contrary. More than open to it - but I would just be ready for it to be lacking, as this is, in fact, where rights come from presently.

Yet I just granted you the right to free speech, entailing that I temper my own behavior in defense of yours. Should you be met with a censor I will be there defending you and your right to speak, so long as you aren't conflicting with his property rights.

While I totally accept, and find reasonable this take, it is nothing but your personal opinion of the states of affairs previously seen in the world. The 'right to free speech' isn't absolute, anywhere, really. So, what's the "universal" you're talking about? It doesn't seem to obtain. It appears we, at least, value free speech to the same level, if not for hte same reasons.

It is an opinion derived from argument and evidence, all of which attests to the merits of rights. If you have better arguments and better evidence in favor of, say, censorship or theft or kidnapping, I’m willing to change that opinion. Except no argument has been forthcoming—the fact that there is no free speech is certainly no argument against free speech, just as the fact that there are still slaves is no argument against abolition. The “universal” I’m talking about simply means the right ought to apply to everyone.

I'm somewhat surprised, but I suppose given your position in this thread I shouldn't be. I just didn't take you as this type of thinker. Interesting. I'm fine with you feeling that way, as it goes.
Would you say that someone should have the right to call another person (who, aesthetically fits the description) a "Big, fat gay n***a" as a derogatory term intended to harm the person's psyche? This is not a gotcha, I just wanted an example that the answer to would be a clear commitment one way or the other.

Yes, I’m an absolutist. Everyone should have the right to say what they want. Would you censor him?

A new hoax has arisen. This time our credulity implores us to believe Trump threatened the country with a bloodbath should he lose the election. Out of context a clever propagandist could spin it that upon Trump's loss his supporters will break out the ARs and start murdering political opponents. But in context it was blatantly clear that the bloodbath Trump was speaking about was a figurative one, an economic one.

This sort of lying is the sine qua non of the Biden campaign and his gullible followers. These sorts of distortions and misinformations are all they have. Observe the technique used multiple times in his recent X post.

No, there isn’t a need. The varying interpretations and meanings applied to core concepts furthers creativity, exploration, and growth, whereas consensus would only limit it.

Society dictates rights? I’ve only seen men dictate rights. By “society” I assume you mean men in power. But it isn’t true, in any case, that only some men can confer rights. And if you allow only politicians and lawyers the power to grant rights you make of yourself a slave or serf or some other subordinate, at any rate a sorry figure.

The language faculties are universal. The right to free speech itself has been battle-tested in its own arena, put to the grindstone of trial and error over thousands of years, and has proven itself morally right and socially valuable both in argument and in practice. What more does one need? Yes, anyone who doesn’t confer the right to free speech on others and defend everyone’s right to speak is wrong.

That’s right. For instance, I know human beings need to express themselves, so I confer upon on you the right to free speech. In doing so I do not censor you and defend you when others try to do so.

All rights come from men. Natural rights come from man’s reason in consideration of nature.

Yes, rights come from men, believe it or not. Yes, men can enforce rights. Are you not of the species? The idea that rights can only come from men of authority or officialdom is both ridiculous and obsequious.

I have to say, the use of a theory isn't particularly interesting if it's trying to justify something which on its face, is absurd (on my view). 'natural rights' isn't a coherent concept, so I'm unsure how I'm supposed to get on with theories that begin with something I can't understand how a rational person would involve.

It’s quite simple. You consider human nature and the natural world and derive a set of rights therefrom, for example, rights that would allow one to survive and live a life of dignity and happiness. You confer these rights and defend them in others. Pretty easy stuff.

the only part of this process the subject is directly aware of is the perceptual experience.

How does someone become aware of a perceptual experience if his senses point outward, and he is not seeing, tasting, smelling, or hearing inside his brain?

For instance, Meningioma can grow in the brain undetected for many years. But somehow one can be aware of a perception in the brain almost immediately.

The refusal of Westerners to follow so-called Western values and the hypocrisy that results in their behavior isn't much an argument against the values themselves. It's true: human rights and their universal application are routinely violated by those who express those same values, and this has largely been the case since their conception; but their double-standards and misapplication proves only that they do not believe in such values, not that the values are at fault. The fact that there are slaves, for instance, is no argument against abolition.

At any rate, It reads to me that instead of applying universalist values to individuals you are applying universalist values to societies and cultures. Societies, not people, have the right to freedom, speech, conscience, respect, and so on. Societies, not people, are sovereign. Societies, not people, should have rights. We should not impose our values upon the society, but the society has the right to impose its values on other people. As such, these values are a means of power to an end, but only to the end of state power.

If you define "perceiver" in such a way that it includes the entire body and "perceived" in such a way that it includes the body's immediate environment then what you say here is a truism.

But this isn't what indirect realists mean which is why you've misinterpreted (or misrepresented) them.

You might not believe in something like "rational awareness" and "sensory percepts" but the indirect realist does, and their claim is that sensory percepts are the intermediary that exist between rational awareness and distal objects. The colour red is one such sensory percept. A sweet taste is another.

I have no problem understanding the argument, only the entities we’re dealing with. And that the indirect realist cannot point to any of these entities, describe where they begin and end, describe how and what they perceive, nor ascribe to them a single property, is enough for me to conclude that they are not quite sure what they are talking about, and that this causal chain and the entities he puts upon them are rather arbitrary.

Yes, I believe people are perceivers. I can witness them doing so and they can report to me that they are. The same cannot be said of “rational awareness”.

Other metaphysical differences abound. For instance, I’ve never seen something called the color red; I’ve only seen red things. I suppose these and other metaphysical beliefs inform our differing conclusions. At any rate, it makes for an interesting debate.

There is such a thing as visual percepts. It's what the blind (even with functioning eyes) lack. It's what occurs when we dream and hallucinate. They come into existence when the relevant areas of the visual cortex are active. The features of these percepts are not the distal objects (or their properties) that are ordinarily the cause of them. The features of these percepts is the only non-inferential information given to rational thought. The relationship between these percepts and distal objects is in a very literal physical sense indirect; there are a number of physical entities and processes that sit between the distal object and the visual percept in the causal chain.

This is what indirect realism is arguing. It's not arguing anything like "the human body indirectly responds to sensory stimulation by its environment" or "the rods and cones in the eye react to something inside the head" which seems to be your (mis)interpretation of the position.

I don’t think I’ve misinterpreted anything. As I’ve argued we’re just multiplying nouns at this point, and in a question-begging fashion. Now it’s a percept where before it was sense-data, or a sensation.

But again, your position lacks a referent. If there is no thing upon which to place the label, we’ve engaged in the fallacy of reification. I forgive this as a product of natural language, but the play seems to be to insert this thing somewhere on the causal chain as an intermediary.

The everlasting question is: upon what do I put this label? If you put it behind the eyes, or somewhere in the brain, your placing it within or behind the perceiver, not before. If you put it in the light or soundwaves, you’re placing it within or before the perceived, not after. As it stands, no intermediary exists between perceiver and perceived. Perception is direct because there is no intermediary.

"We identified evidence that the president willfully retained classified materials after the end of his vice presidency when he was a private citizen."

The indirect realist doesn’t claim that we see into own own skull. You’re misrepresenting what is meant by seeing something or feeling something. I feel pain, I see mountains in my dream. Nothing about this entails anything like the sense organs “pointing” inwards or anything like that.

I'm not claiming anyone claims such a thing. I'm claiming our senses point outward, not that indirect realists claim they point inward. The point is: if seeing involves the eyes, and eyes point outward, and we know a mountain cannot exist in someone's body, it just isn't the case that you see mountains in your dreams. It would be more accurate to say that you dream of mountains, in my opinion.

In most cases the sense organs play a causal role in seeing and feeling and smelling, but “I see X” doesn’t simply mean “the sense receptors in my eye have been stimulated by some object in the environment.”

But that's what seeing entails, and the eyes are fundamental to the process and biology of sight.

There literally are intermediaries. Light is an intermediary between the table and my eye. My eye is an intermediary between the light and my brain, etc.

Light is of the world. The eye is of the perceiver. It just doesn't make sense to me that the perceiver can be the intermediary for himself. The contact is direct, so much so that light is absorbed by the eye, and utilized in such an intimate fashion that there is no way such a process could be in any way indirect, simply because nothing stands between one and the other.

That doesn’t make it right to. We know that people with certain brain disorders are blind even though they have functioning eyes, so clearly whatever vision is it sits somewhere behind the eyes, either in the visual cortex or in some supervenient mental phenomenon.

Yes, more than just eyes are involved in vision. I would argue it requires the whole body, give or take. A functional internal carotid artery, for instance, which supplies blood to the head, is required for sight, as are the orbital bones and the muscles of the face. Sight requires a spine, metabolism, digestion, water, and so on. Because of this, I believe, the entity "perceiver" must extend to the entirety of the body. In any case, I cannot say it can be reduced to some point behind the eyes.

What does this mean?

The senses point outward and interact with the mediums found in the rest of the world. Since they point outward, you cannot see into your own skull, for instance. One cannot sense what is actually going on in there. It’s one of the main reasons why a bodily state of feelings cannot be reconciled with a bodily state of affairs, and the first-person perspective of oneself is always one of grasping and guesswork.

The indirect realist recognises that in most cases the causal chain of perception is:

distal object → proximal stimulus → sense receptor → sensation → rational awareness

The indirect realist also recognises that the qualities of the sensation are not properties of the distal object (although in some accounts the so-called "primary qualities" of the sensation, such as visual geometry, "resemble" the relevant properties of the distal object).

So in what sense is the relationship between rational awareness (or even sensation) and the distal object direct?

And given that I see things when I dream and hallucinate, sometimes the casual chain is just:

sensation → rational awareness

What is the direct object of perception in these cases? Why would the involvement of some distal object, proximal stimulus, and sense receptor prior to the sensation change this?

The direct object of perception is the environment. It can never be just one object, so I take issue that. It’s myriad objects, mediums, interacting with myriad senses. I’m not only aware of the object, but what it sits on, is beside it, in front of it, the relative distance between us, of the light, the oxygen, the ground, and so on. If I doubt any of this I can get closer and examine it, pick it up, and can confirm with others the accuracy of what I’m perceiving.

It’s direct because at no point in your chain is there any intermediary. I would distill it as such:

Perceived → Perceiver.

There isn’t anything in between me and what I’m aware of. I’m just given a bunch of nouns-without-a-referent. No perceiver I’ve met is a “rational awareness”, as far as I can tell. Or when I point to a sensation I point to my body. This is largely why I take issue with the indirect realist account.

Would be nice if everyone wrote down what they thought a a perceptual intermediary was and why it matters!

Questions arise regarding all the nouns of indirect realism, what places and things the indirect realist believes he is interacting with when it comes to perception: who or what perceives, what he is perceiving, where he is perceiving it, and what are the mechanisms and structures through which he is able to do so.

As to the question of "what perceives", a common-sense approach would be to point to an animal, for instance a human being, and say "there is a perceiver". He has the biology of a perceiver and acts like a perceiver, and he can confirm that he perceives if I were to ask him. Since most of his senses point outward one would assume he mostly perceives in an outward direction, and his perceptual relationship is with the objects and mediums his senses interact with.

But indirect realism undermines this relationship. It claims that even though the senses point outward, and interact directly with the rest of the world, his perception remains inward.

Rather than the rest of the world, Indirect realism proposes that the perceiver perceives something else, a “perceptual intermediary”. Nominally, the perceptual relationship is with some noun-without-a-referent, like “sense-data”, "qualia", "experience", "phenomena", "representation", "consciousness". The problem is, if we were to tie a string from any of these words to what in the world they may correspond to, it's difficult to ascertain where we might affix the other end of the string.

One might suppose the string would return to the body, perhaps somewhere behind the eyes, in the nose, or at some point in the nervous system, but this would be to affix the string to the perceiver. Could the perceiver and the perceived be one and the same? The answer is not easy to come by, because instead of “body”, and affixing to the biology therein, other spaces and other entities are proffered and maintained in argument. "Experience", for example, is treated as if it was a space within which events occur, and it is also treated as its own thing. A menagerie of objects "arise" in this and other spaces, as if the sun in the morning sky. These include "sensations", "perceptions", "images", and so on.

In any case, until the intermediary can be pinpointed, the string invariably strings from the noun-phrase to another word or series of words.

Good musings.

On an empirical analysis, from what I’ve gathered the only direct perceptual relationship one can have with the world is with himself. Man perceives himself, ie. his pain or his tastes, not so much any outside factors which might cause them.

Grammatically speaking, this throws the subject/object relationship out the window. The indirect realist position says that subject perceives subject, or subject is both the subject and the object of perception at the same time. This is where it all gets weird for the direct realist.

Rather than an indirect relationship with the rest of the world, the indirect realist’s approach appears more of a closed loop because it is left unsaid how the object of perception, himself, gathers information from outside himself in order to hand it off it to himself, presumably somewhere inside himself. The subject of perception, himself, perceives the object of perception, himself, but the object of perception, himself, does not possess similar abilities.

But this is circular. To avoid this, the object of perception, himself, is presented as a sort of mirror through which he passively redirects, repackages, and redistributes information from the outer world to the subject of perception, himself. The only way out of this quagmire, I think, is to posit that the object of perception is something supernatural.

No, they have not been ignored; if anything, they have been taken for granted, on account of taking for granted that people do not exist in a vacuum and that communication is not a solipsistic enterprise.

Various theories of communication assume that communicators have a shared cultural and linguistic foundation, and that they have a concept of this shared foundation.

You, on the other hand, appear to be interested in an (hyper)individualistic theory of communication in which no such assumption as above is made.

It’s more of a pluralist or nominalist account of communication, and in my mind possesses less self-interest and solipsism than your own theory because your universals and general ideas cannot be found anywhere else on earth beyond the factory that is your own imagination.

That these acts can be reduced to the very people who perform them does not suggest some hyper-individualism, whatever that means, but a consideration of all parties involved in communication, including those who aren’t even speaking. Unlike the concern for the “social”, or “communities of communicators”, and other things forever trapped in the body of he who thinks about them, we can actually look outside ourselves for once and point to an individual person.

So, humoncular regress concerns aside, I think there is a more general concern that the "indirect" term is smuggling dualism in.

Absolutely, and idealism in general. Maybe it is inappropriate to question motives, but the question-begging character of each entity, substance, and space, warrants it, in my opinion. Why posit this stuff, really?

We’ve read of various mental areas—the mind, experience (phenomenal, conscious), consciousness—in which reside a menagerie of entities and substances —qualia, sense-data, representations, images etc.—but in the end we’re left with a series of nouns without any referent.

But whenever we look where these places and things are purported to exist, whether through operation or dissection or imaging, we can never find them and examine them.

These are (in my opinion) the biological accounts of a being who cannot even see his own ears, let alone the vast majority of his body. It’s the philosophy of searching inward while forever looking out, the account of a being who sees what is occurring behind the eyes rather than what is in front of them. So I think the label “naive” is misplaced.

When you think outside the box long enough you'll see it's the same thing. Why did states arise? The same reasons Hamilton beat Jefferson. It makes things easier for most people. Offers protection, for the people. It arose from the same roots. Against whom? The former elites, the Barbarians. Against my kind of people. Hence the relevance of BGE 257...

I would argue that states arise out of conquest, confiscation, expropriation, and the introduction of a slave economy. The Genealogy of Morality would be relevant on the topic of Nietzsche’s theory of state formation, though I don’t remember which aphorism.

Consciousness doesn’t extend beyond the body, so objects outside the body are not present in my consciousness.

That suffices as indirect realism for me.

We can take any adjective describing human bodies and apply the suffix “-ness” to it and create a quality out of thin air. But because a human can be silly or happy or sad does not imply a substance or domain called silliness, happiness, or sadness. It’s the same with consciousness.

So objects are neither present in your body, nor in some domain called “consciousness”, and for the same reasons—“Conscious” is a description of a state of the body, therefor “consciousness” is an abstraction of the body. This suffices to eliminate indirect realism for me.

That is still an open question. Perhaps property dualism is correct and sensory experience, like consciousness in general, is a non-physical phenomenon that supervenes on brain activity.

We’ve looked in all the objects involved and have found no thing nor substance worthy of the noun-phrase. So perhaps it’s all a fiction after all.

In any case, it cannot be shown that there is any such intermediary standing between the perceiver and the perceived, there simply is no evidence to support any dualism of any kind.

But notice that nothing about phenylthiocarbamide has changed. Its existence and its properties are 'fixed'. So how can it be that a chemical with a fixed existence and fixed properties is sometimes bitter and sometimes not?

It must be that "is bitter" doesn't refer to phenylthiocarbamide at all. It's a pragmatic fiction; a naive projection of sensory experience.

Right, the variation probably has something to do with the senses of the perceiver, perhaps his tongue. But the 70% of people with those tongues know that when they touch it to that chemical, it is, or tastes bitter. Therefor something about that chemical induces their body to make that judgement.

But what is “sensory experience”? As a noun, It is without a referent. It doesn’t refer to anything. It doesn’t refer to either perceiver (a person), or perceived (the chemical), nor to the relationship or interactions between both. It is a fiction. Likewise there is no such projection.

No, precisely because "this is bitter" doesn't mean "this contains phenylthiocarbamide", much like "this is green" doesn't mean "this emits photons with a wavelength of 500nm.

Perhaps not in a strict, analytic sense. But it can and does to those who need not sift through their sentence for veracity.

So is phenylthiocarbamide bitter?

70% of the time, sure. 30% of the time, not so much.

Do bitter representations or sense-data have phenylthiocarbamide in them?

Yeah, any statement would be just fine in my view.

Would you say something of the object makes it appear green, or makes you perceive it as being green, or makes it reflect that wavelength, for instance chlorophyll?

So why, when you look at an object that has reflected a wavelength of 500nm, do you say that the object is green?

I would. You can contrast the object with other objects of similar or dissimilar colors. So it’s clear to me that something of that object makes it green. What makes it not green, in your view?

Now I’m not too sure. I’ll defer to your judgement. At any rate, rather than litigate sentences how about we examine the evidence regarding green objects. Would you say an object that appears green is not green?

Well sure, one implies a little more certainty than the other. A little more examination ought to suffice and relieve any doubts. What is it about the object that says otherwise?

I don’t think so.

However, for the Indirect Realist, what is indirect is the relation between the object that exists in the world and the observer's perception of it.

As I see it, the Direct Realist is proposing that we know the world as it really is, in that if we perceive an object to be green then we know that the object is green.

I don't think that this is a case of semantics for the Direct Realist, in that if we perceive an object to be green then by definition the object is green. I think that the Direct Realist is saying that the object "is" ontologically in fact green.

The Indirect Realist is proposing that we don't know the world as it really is, but only know a representation of it, in that our perception of the colour green is only a representation of the object..

The question for the Direct Realist is, how can they know that the object is really green if their only knowledge of the object has come second-hand through the process of a chain of events, albeit a direct chain of events.

Yes, the term “green” describes the object. We know the object is green because that’s what it looks like. I can point to green objects as opposed to red objects. I can also touch, smell, or taste green objects. I can destroy them if I wanted to, and see what lies behind the surface. I can even find out what makes them green. I can name each one of them, categorize them, and apply a label to them. And I can confer with others who possess similar abilities and compare our findings.

These acts allows us to discern information about that particular object and make inferences about similar objects. This is first-hand, not second hand knowledge.

One cannot perform any similar acts with a representation. One cannot see, touch, smell, or taste them. This is because the term “Representation” lacks any real-world referent. There is neither type nor token. He cannot find one. He cannot point one out. The indirect realist does in fact not know anything about representations.

The question for the indirect realist is, how can he know the object is not really green given that his knowledge is limited to and familiar with representations, and not green objects?