Given his ability (or lack thereof) I can’t say Biden is really running the country. He even needs direction on which side he should leave the stage. It would be interesting to know who is really calling the shots here.

My problem is that I can't imagine what direct perception would be. Isn't this part of what we need to recognize here? If nothing could count as direct perception, then the idea that perception is actually indirect doesn't make sense. The problem is the move from "some perception is indirect" to "all perception is indirect".

The “directness” describes the relationship between perceiver and perceived. By “direct” one means there is no causal intermediary between the perceiver and the rest of the world, that we aren’t viewing sense-data, neurons, shadows on a cave wall, but the things themselves.

A state has "whims"? I would think that eliminating whims from the ruling system would be a defining feature of success.

How would you do that?

I would propose that a state is successful wherever it is considered sovereign, while the people who it nominally represent remain dependent and subordinate to its whims. With this it is successful in its most basic function.

The ever-widening goalposts of Biden and his representatives.

Joe Biden and his representatives have repeatedly defended him from criticism related to his relatives, his son in particular, by issuing blanket denials of misconduct and disclaiming contact with their business affairs.

But, in recent months, as congressional Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry and controversies related to Hunter Biden continue to be litigated in the courts and in the public square, a steady trickle of revelations have contradicted the president’s denials.

A POLITICO review of recent congressional testimony and exhibits, along with court filings and media reports, casts doubt on several statements made by Biden and his representatives.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/05/hunter-joe-biden-business-testimony-00125056

There are cases where the objects are not visible at all by bare eye sight. Consider a far away star too dim to be seen with bare eyes in the night sky.

But when you use a telescope (good quality), and see it, it becomes visible. There is a medium (a good quality telescope) between your eyes and the object (the faint star). So, we could say that we don't perceive things directly always?

And when one gets old, hearing gets poor. The folk would use a hearing aid. All the sounds the folk hears would come via the hearing aid. Does the folk then hear the sound directly or indirectly?

I think Austin is wrong to quibble about the terms “direct” and “indirect”, because both succinctly describe the relationship between perceiver and perceived as it pertains to the arguments for and against realism.

For example, we might contrast the man who saw the procession through a periscope with the man who didn’t, and rightly call the one “indirect” and the other “direct” when describing the perceptual relationship between those particular men and that particular procession.

But in terms of realism, “directly” and “indirectly” describe the perceptual relationship between the man and everything he perceives, which includes the periscope, the air, the clouds, etc. It doesn’t describe the relationship between the man and the procession, the tea cup, or whatever the relationship between the subject and the object of a sentence may be.

Of course. They also gave us the "nation-state". Indeed, I would argue it is how the ideas of "nation-state" collide with ideas of "liberalism" "conservatism" and "socialism" that cause many issues of the 19th-21st centuries.

I think you’re right about that. I would go further and say the nation-state is just a repurposing of the Ancien Régime, not a repudiation, and the ideas you mention are built around seeking that power.

Anyways, there is a good little book by Pascal Brukner called The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism that goes deep into your topic from the French perspective. It’s basically a form of narcissism arising from a wing of well-fed socialists upset that, in the end, the proletariat sided with their bogeyman.

The West has also given us fascism, socialism, communism, and whatever the current brand of nanny-statism is.

Saying that one can feel tactile sensations is a bit like saying that one can feel feelings or sense sensations. It’s a kind of question-begging. It appears to be a common move among species of idealisms, for some reason.

It consists in erasing the object (the coffee mug), duplicating the verb or some other aspect of the subject, reifying it, disguising it with equivocation, and placing it into the object position. With this the idealist can avoid the perils of grammar which reveal he never has an object in his predicate.

The problem with the assumption that people are pushed around by “narratives” is that it should be just as easy to push them in the opposite direction through the very same methods. But try to talk them out of what they believe and you’ll see that theory falsified immediately.

Rather, it is the fragility of the grand narrative that has led to its repudiation. Those tasked with ordering our lives, with informing us, with protecting our livelihoods and liberties, have all revealed themselves to be incompetent, corrupt, and self-concerned frauds, so much so that a reality TV host can come in for one term and do a better job than someone who has spent his life in politics. And despite the propaganda, people can witness with their own eyes the nonsense that is the current order. Under the current and typical regime it appears we are inching towards total war and economic failure, both of which the reactionary and incompetent experts told us would happen under the Trump regime, but never did. So maybe it isn’t any narrative that pulls us away from our obedience to the old regime, but its own stupidity and corruption.

I just mean we literally don't have them, ontologically speaking, that we are not in fact considering "conscious experience" as such, we are only considering the physical body in a roundabout way. It is my contention that thought experiments such as p-zombies are exercises in dancing around the facts of biology.

The difference between the scenario of vibrations enveloping you and vibrations enveloping a rock are the objects involved. The same difference occurs in the scenario of a human vs a robot, or person vs another person—the objects are different, thus they move differently and respond differently to the vibrations in the air.

And that, to me, is why p-zombies are inconceivable. Given two persons physically and operationally identical, how can one be missing "conscious experience"? It's incoherent and impossible to consider, and only question-begging can push the argument a little further.

I think it is called callousness, and is causing many many problems worldwide.

It's called government. Foreign aid is in the billions of dollars for most Western nations. Whenever the unfortunate ask for a dollar, you tell them the government has already confiscated your dollar for their benefit. Take it up with them.

The state is our collective organ of charity and good will, of peace of mind, and consequently, the source of individual inaction. So long have we relied on it for these purposes that we no longer need to be responsible for each other. There's your safety net; fall into it.

I really don’t know how you mean this. It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t acknowledge them. That they don’t exist. I don’t know much about ontology. It seems there is not agreement on what categories of ontology there are, or even if there are different categories. So I couldn’t argue what species of ontology acts are in. But here we are, talking about them. And, as you’re posting in TPG, I assume you put a lot of thought into these things. I I would think they have some form of existence?

Sorry for the silly jargon. By ontology I mean our beliefs about "the nature of being" or "that which is". It's like a list of that which exists, and accordingly, that which demands consideration.

It’s quite simple, in my mind. The act and that which acts are the exact same thing. So when you observe the act of a punch or a kick, for example, you're observing a particular person moving in such a fashion. Despite our use of two or more nouns which imply that we are considering two or more things, there are not two or more persons, places, or things that we are observing. We can observe only one.

So in my opinion only one deserves a place in the pantheon of being while the rest, like acts, abstract objects, fomrs, qualities, properties, are merely conventions of language.

Music is vibrations in the air, over some period of time. Certainly an action. How do you know under which circumstances actions are nouns?

Things act; acts are not themselves things. We can see this empirically.

Though we treat acts as things in language (and it’s extremely difficult to do otherwise), we ought not to include them in our ontology as existing things because we risk reifying them. So though it may be necessary for linguistic purposes, acts are unnecessary and even confusing for any species of ontology. This applies also to the qualities, properties, characteristics, or attributes of things, which often take the form of adjectives.

so you don't feel like there's anything beyond an act when you see a colour, for example. Look at something vibrantly red or blue or green. It's that summed up entirely in the act of how you respond to it?

I don’t believe there is anything beyond the things or objects involved. For example, I don’t see a color, I see a colorful thing.

Yes.

From what I’ve read he leans towards “property dualism”. I’m not sure what his views are these days.

But yes the language used to abstract the description of things from the things themselves has led to the confusion in philosophy of mind, in my opinion.

Most people have conscious experiences, and so take that as a given. Do you have conscious experiences?

Experience is an act, not a thing. So while people are conscious and do experience, they do not have conscious experiences. There is no need to invoke other things and substances with noun phrases.

Exactly right. The argument makes two assumptions: there is a property of persons called “conscious experience”, and that we can conceive of beings identical in both biology and behavior without this property. Something, whatever that may be in fact, is missing in the p-zombie, which is an odd stretch because both are physically identical.

It seems to me the existence this property must be proven of the former before it can be said to be missing from the latter. But I’ve never seen anyone able to say exactly what it is. Until the fact of conscious experience is proven, p-zombies will remain inconceivable.

in the end it all appears a clever trick to smuggle dualism past the customs.

Alcohol is a link to Eros. It is a component of culture, spirituality, celebration, and general merrymaking. So though it could be used to deny reality, I suppose, it often serves to introduce happiness, fellowship, and beauty to it.

Speaking your language.

Thanks for taking the time to explain.

Myself, I do not think there are any insurmountable problems regarding the body, the self, and personhood. I say this because thought experiments such as the Ship of Theseus paradox and philosophical zombies are seemingly inapplicable to human beings given the evidence revealed by biology.

Take death, for instance. When someone dies, the only thing that can be said to change from one moment to the next is the body’s movements, its “processes” as you call them. It ceases working in the way it usually does, and the almost immediate consequence is its self-destruction. So though the person is deceased, what’s left of him after death is still him, until, like all living things, he decays into baser elements.

It does come down to simple structure because the structure is what moves, maintaining life. The structures change and regenerate, but their movements are for the better part maintained throughout. However, it cannot be said the person is this movement, the “processes”, for the simple reason that movement is not a thing. The person is the structure, that which moves and changes in magnificent ways: the body.

I think retribution is an appropriate act where injustice is concerned, because only then can justice be maintained.

The problems occur invariably whenever the collectivist mindset seeps in to the equation. It introduces a host of fallacy and bias, like guilt by association, and it isn’t long before vengeance is sought on those who are innocent.

So I don’t agree that revenge is something we ought not to do. We ought to do it in the service of justice, and refrain from being unjust while doing so. We cannot let people get away with tyranny and injustice if we are to survive as a species.

The idea that we exist beyond the surface of our body is absurd, so I was hoping you might expand on this point. We can explain how technology allows us to do more than our ancestors without imagine ourselves as being one with the technology.

It’s not surprising that you’d blame Trump for someone else’s crime, but that’s only because it’s obvious your sense of justice has been perverted a long time ago.

Most say Biden has acted either illegally or unethically in his son’s business dealings

Most adults say President Biden has at the very least acted unethically in his handling of the international business dealings of his son Hunter, including about a third who say he did something illegal. Only 30% of the public think Biden has done nothing wrong regarding Hunter’s business dealings.

The idea of impeaching the corrupt Joe Biden is wrong, in my opinion. It isn't up to congress to decide who should or should not be president, especially when the "high crimes and misdemeanors" under discussion occurred when he is not in his current position of power. It's enough that most adults believe that he is unethical and corrupt.

You can't disparage a prosecutor in the United States of America, I guess. The mistake is to think that Trump's words, and not their own actions, "implicitly encourage violence against public servants". If they're worried about their own security maybe they should quit being petty tyrants.

They're building weapons to fund the war effort. I'm not asking whether they "deserve it", but rather "is it immoral to bomb munition factory workers?" If you are fighting a war, and you can end the war by destroying the enemy's war-making industries, don't you have a moral obligation to your own people to do so?

I’m not answering whether they deserve it or not. I’m saying they do not deserve it, therefor it is immoral to bomb them. It is not moral to bomb people just in case it ends the war because such a decision is based on prophecy. You’re referring to your own predictions, your own assumptions, without once considering actual people involved.

Why is it immoral to bomb workers in armaments factories?

They have done nothing to deserve it. Since they have done nothing to deserve it, any conscience or sense of justice disappears and is superseded by motives of self-concern, which is the sine qua non of consequentialism. What I mean is, any reasoning involved in deciding whether to incinerate workers in fire and shrapnel is invariably premised on one’s own thoughts and emotions and imaginings. We can see this in post hoc justifications, for example, wherever a counterfactual is offered as proof that bombing was the right thing to do. Or that they are “helping the war effort”.

I think he knew it was wrong, morally speaking. But I think he believed it was right on utilitarian grounds. Only a utilitarian could eradicate lives in order to save lives. The sense of self-preservation when allied to the promise of a greater good outweighed any moral sense and conscience that may have arisen.

I think the will to destroy other human beings was paramount, not only because they knew such a thing would happen (they ran the tests), but because they knew it would give them an edge in their campaign. They knew it would destroy innocent people, most of whom I assume had never killed any American soldiers. The choice to drop the bomb was no doubt an immoral one.

Public opinion is awash with bad takes, so much so that it risks translating into violence beyond the shores of the present conflict. The inevitable curse of collectivism swirls around the bowl in times like these, especially there, in the cradle of collectivism. War, terrorism, apartheid, and genocide are its ultimate expressions, the same distorted logic and fallacy applied to politics and violence.

There are no sides. There are only particular perpetrators of violent acts and tyranny, and particular victims of it. This brute fact almost goes unnoticed, however.

To avoid using the same logic as the perpetrators of these crimes, and justifying the same acts, and in a sense becoming like them, a return to the principle of justice should give observers enough of an idea of who to side with, or who to condemn, whatever the case may be. Break up the typical demarcations and one will not fall prey to guilt by association. Afford rights and dignity to the flesh-and-blood human beings before their classifications. Make new demarcations; side only with the innocent and condemn only the guilty.

It is a curious thought and I admit my own shortcomings when reasoning with such vast sets of particulars in mind, but what is one way one might engage in collective and cooperative effort at a global scale? All I can picture is someone following a crowd to some unknown location to take part in some unknown activity.

Collective and cooperative efforts on a global scale are impossible. One cannot coordinate and cooperate with 100 people at once, let alone 9 billion. So I’m not sure about the reasonableness of that.

Given this, we can discover the practical implications hidden beneath the rhetoric. So by “collective” we mean some vanguard in charge of vast populations of human beings, and by “cooperative” we mean involuntary cooperation, governing by force.

At any rate, reasonable and optimum futures on such a scale and with such methods are invariably immoral futures. The amount of force and theft and meddling involved to coordinate such activity, let alone to execute it, would become worse than the initial problems themselves.

Society and government are two different concepts, representing two different sets of actors, and formed in two different ways: the former social, the latter anti-social.

Society emerges as the basic social activity within any given space where human beings reside. Government persists as it began, as an institution of war and plunder, the monopoly on violence and crime, and a system meant to exploit one class of people in order to advance the interests of another.

So though it may be true that human males may be better suited to government (which is doubtful, since the history of it shows women can be just as exploitative as men), it cannot be said that they are better suited for society, which I think is proven by anthropology and experience. At any rate, men and women are found to be equally necessary components of one but not the other.

The problem of determinism is that nothing else in the universe can be found to determine a person’s acts. If nothing else determines or wills a person’s acts, then given the evidence one has to conclude the person determines them. Even appeals to “antecedent states” point to the person in a sort of post hoc analysis. In my opinion the will is radically free.

One of the worst judgements of humankind is that humans are not objects, that they are something other than, something over and above the thing itself. I wager that no other idea has given a greater motive toward the destruction of these objects.

One ought to consider the reason why one might be dismayed about the implications that humans might in fact be objects only, nothing besides, and that he cannot muster any other reason beyond superstition to value human beings qua human beings. Without some angel in the shell we are nothing but meaty robots, or an animal not much different than all others—just an object, like a stone.

[How is what you refer to as "Color-blindness" different from ignorance?

It demands more effort and knowledge in regards to learning about and understanding the world. One cannot understand anything about a person by referring to his phenotypes, and so one cannot be just or moral or right by continually basing his judgements upon it.

How is racism and race consciousness different from ignorance?

There would be a blindness to the statistics. Rightfully so, in my opinion. Race statistics are fruitless because the distinctions are arbitrary. It’s like talking about crime statistics regarding tall or short people, or the crime rates of blonde and redheads, phenotypes which have nothing to do with proclivities toward crime. There is no need for a middle way because with abandoning race you abandon the arbitrary distinctions. So one will just have to seek out new statistics.

I’m complaining about it because there was a chance to build it years and years ago, long before the crisis got to the point we see today, but Biden ended any progress in his first day of office. Now it’s too late and everyone is floundering, dying, losing vast sums of taxpayer dollars, and generally paying in one way or another for Biden’s mistakes.