with one you’ll be violating someone’s rights while with the other you won’t.

Sure, all biology is ultimately reducible to molecules bouncing around, but you won't get anywhere trying to describe it in those terms.

I agree with this, big time. Even reducing intentionality or consciousness to brain activity is a step too far. In every single case, Intentionality and consciousness is the activity of the organism as a whole. Physicalism has done itself a disservice by looking for some amorphous locus inside the head.

I think it's interesting to advocate libertarianism from an evolutionary standpoint. If homo sapiens needs governments and enforcers of the law to promote its own welfare, then it's a moot point. In other words, are governments and police forces inevitable from an evolutionary perspective? Is the question incoherent or is there any sense to it?

I don’t think there is anything evolutionary about governments. They’re just there, the technological remnants of predatory men, who have long ago devised the means to exploit the vanquished and protect their interests.

Look at the Islamic State, for instance, which we got to witness form itself not too long ago. No social contract, no sense of community, nothing emerging as if a colony, just pure imposition.

Accordingly, 100 people who contribute to producing something automatically incur a debt to the rest of the world for the value of the resources they have appropriated to themselves, and the damage they have caused to other resources, ie the environment. Thus every fenced off field owes a debt to wilderness, as does every cut down tree, every mine and quarry, and every factory. This unpaid debt is now being called in by way of climate change and environmental degradation.

Every time a bird puts a twig on his nest he is incurring a debt to wilderness.

You probably remember what you did and what has happened to you in the past. That 'set of experiences' is probably the closest you will get to what your body can report.

Most of it I do not remember. Memories are fleeting.

I understand the folk psychology of “experiences”, but I don’t actually imagine I carry a “set of experiences” with me wherever I go, so I never need to appeal to them. All I have is my body. You have one too, I wager.

I object only to postulating something within us that isn’t there. I bestow rights upon what is there, not on what isn’t.

It’s a strange question because wages are decided and agreed upon before the worker makes a single product. These wages are determined by the market, literally by looking at the market place to determine what others are paying their employees, all of which is effected by the law of supply and demand. Pay too much you risk workers costing more than their contribution, resulting in lower profits, even losses. Pay too little you lose any competitive advantage. Even so, the profit should not go towards this or that worker, but towards the business at large, because the business is providing income to everyone involved.

I don’t see it—that’s the problem. I’m aware of the arguments. I’ve just never found them in any way convincing. But I’m hindered from the get-go. I have yet to understand what “phenomenal consciousness” is, I’m afraid, so I draw a blank upon hearing it. Nothing is caused, nothing arises, nothing emerges, that is worthy of the term. And that we can have two distinct accounts of one phenomenon does not suggest to me that there are two distinct phenomenon occurring in there.

... though I think he would have left God out of it.

“ For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue…”

I think you don’t have any evidence and are holding out for some odd reason.

I do not think he was a martyr for his beliefs as much he was a martyr for refusing to hold his tongue. He stood up to censorship, stood by his God-given right to speak, and proved he’d rather die than to submit.

I am willing to change my mind upon further evidence, but there isn’t any. I can only observe and conceive of what it is that you are talking about, and all I can see and all I can conceive of is the biology. I try to find anything else upon which I can pin the phrase “phenomenological consciousness” and come up empty. If you can only pin it on nothing than nothing is what you are talking about. If p-zombies are missing nothing then they are not p-zombies.

How do you know that?

We’ve looked.

Chalmers has a couple of thought experiments that show that the two are logically distinct. One is the p-zombie. This shows that we don't know apriori that the two are equivalent. We need evidence to show that.

Do you find p-zombies convincing? I don’t even find them conceivable. I can’t even think about how such a being could be possible.

And you take this to show that phenomenal consciousness is equivalent to biological states? Could you explain how? Because I'm not seeing it.

For the simple reason that phenomenal consciousness is not equivalent to anything else. There is no other entity in the universe onto which we can affix the label "phenomenal consciousness" but the biology. The biology is speaking about itself, as we can observe and by its own admission. "I'm hurt", "I feel pain", "I'm hungry" says the biology. So we mend the biological state, console the biological state, feed the biological state. At no point need we concern with anything else.

So what would you take to show that they are not equivalent?

This may be, but you'd need to provide evidence for it. It's not a logical truth.

Take a look. That which is giving its first-person account is the exact same being to which we give a biological account.

The biological reality and the first person reality are one and the same thing. All we need do is answer the easy problems in order to answer the hard problem.

There are. It’s easy to describe someone as happy simply by looking at them. But how does one describe happiness, when we are no longer describing anything else?

It's best to untangle the language first, at least to figure out what we're trying to talk about.

The word is an obvious nominalization, as evident by the suffix "-ness". Nominalizing adjectives and verbs is a natural and sometimes perilous part of language. So we'll have to look at the root word to gain any understanding here.

The word “conscious” (or "unconscious") has typically been applied to describe organisms, the body, the "physical correlates". In fact, there is little else on Earth the word can be applied to without raising serious absurdities. But, for whatever reason, the word has been nominalized along the way.

Knowing that "conscious-ness" is a nominalization, and "conscious" invariably describes conscious things, it follows that what we're speaking about is any number of conscious things considered in abstracto, that is, removed of every other physical properties for the purposes of analysis.

Unfortunately, having mentally excised the physical properties we're left with nothing to think about or even to apply the term. When the language turns a description of an object into its own "quality" or "essence", it makes it its own object, worthy of its own descriptions and so on. The problem is, the moment we look around, there isn't any extant object or substance or event or place upon which we can pin the word. So the "hard problem" is so difficult because you're trying to explain essentially nothing.

And spending never slows…

It looks like Biden stole some classified documents from the American people while Vice President. Hopefully there are no nuclear secrets in there. I wonder if he got raided by the FBI?

Classified documents from Biden's time as VP discovered in private office

Defense is more acceptable than any other expenditure, and is arguably one of the few jobs of government worth paying for. Anything else would be much worse, in my opinion.

Here in Canada the government is raising taxes all the time. We’re getting a beer tax here in April, for heavens sake. Meanwhile the government sends vast sums of cash to other governments. It just sent Ukraine $115 million so the country can fix its electrical grid, while here the government services such as healthcare and policing are struggling to do their most basic tasks.

The ease with which a government can squeeze money from the citizen’s wealth is profound. You just tack it on and you’re 1 trillion yen richer.

I always thought the materialist ought to take a stand, here. For so long philosophers and people in general have reduced the self to near nothing: to a soul, an essence, an element, a homunculus, an organ, a narrative—a reductionism of the worst type—and the value of the rest has diminished in proportion. But weighing these species of selves on any scale will invariably reveal it to be little or nothing at all. Perhaps the proliferation of these kinds of stories has led to your own disillusion.

The ever-changing nature of the human being ought not to dissuade one from applying "selfhood" to it. Selves grow, change, and eventually fall apart; that much is obvious. But that it occupies the same unique time and place throughout its entire existence accounts for something. That it has a boundary that separates itself from the rest of the universe accounts for something. That we can point to it, observe it, and measure it from the moment it becomes its own until the moment it settles into dust, accounts for something, too. The "material", so much as that word means anything, is the sine qua non of the self, and consequently, what philosophers of self have routinely discarded. At any rate, from the beginning of the self until the end of it, the materialist has much more to work with when it comes to selfhood, and thus are better equipped to rescue the self from misuse.

True, but this problem can be circumvented by giving parametric conditions or assigning parametric properties to the quality of "good".

“Goodness” is itself a property, according to Moore. Excuse my stupidity, but how is it possible to give a property properties without first considering goodness to be an an object in itself?

The difficulty with “good”, I think, is that it describes someone desiring certain qualities or properties in another thing, but is not itself a quality or property, and so is unavailable for any analysis that excludes good objects and the people who say they are good.

I don’t understand his open question argument, though, because it looks like he assumes the subject and predicate are conceptually identical, rather than the predicate serving to modify the subject, which the grammar entails. The sentence “Bananas are yellow” does not entail bananas are identical to yellow, for instance, yellow is bananas. Can anyone clear this up for me?

If you punch someone back after they punch you? Are you any better than them?

The primary justification for retribution is that someone deserves it. On these grounds, if the initial punch was an act of cruelty or bullying or random act of violence, and your retribution was proportional rather than cruel, yes you are better than them. You are just; your attacker is unjust. You don’t deserve to get punched; your attacker does.

All of this is mostly intuitive, but the implications of no one standing up to evil and cruelty are quite dire indeed. Retribution might not only deter evil, but helps it understand the pains and sufferings it causes, so much so that evil might change its ways.

I think it's the personal pronoun. Names only identify from the outside. Pronouns identify from inside as well as in relationships.

A pronoun is a word that is used in place of another noun. They serve grammatical functions, mainly, something like pointing to an object in the environment or conversation, or to avoid repetition. So I don’t think they can serve well as identities whenever we want to identify the antecedent.

Why does the patient have the right to self ownership to do aa he wishes, but the doctor doesn't have the right to self-ownerhip to do as he wants as long as there is mutual consent?

The doctor has the right to perform Vaginoplasty just as he does Rhinoplasty, only that the procedure ought to come at the customer’s expense like most other medically unnecessary procedures.

So you're in favor of facial feminization, breast implants, buttock implants, and liposuction, but hold your single objection to modifications to the penis?

I don’t object to anyone getting cosmetic procedures. They could sew their hands to their feet and call themselves a circle, for all I care. I just don’t think others should pay for it.

1. Who are you?

The symbol that has served us the greatest as an identity is the personal name. It has a referent that is found in nature, and is the object upon which all other identities are pinned. Any other identity is without a referent, and therefor only serves to describe rather than identify.

And therefore refusal to believe it trumps their right to act on it? Again, on what grounds?

My belief that that man is a man ought not to prohibit his right to try to look like a woman, because I also believe that that man ought to decide what he should do to himself. It’s not my body and not my decision. So it trumps no right.

Claim: Every imaginable proposition is true ... in some possible world.

It sounds like an impossible world. Are impossible worlds also possible worlds?

So, if a man wishes his penis removed, should he be granted that right, and, if so, should the same right be afforded the man who no longer wants his right arm?

He should granted the right on the grounds of self-ownership alone, but self-surgery is dangerous. So should he be provided with a professional to do it for him, and a setting in which to do it? I don’t think so.

It isn’t clear whether these kinds of surgeries are life-saving or cosmetic. The symptoms are often centered around beliefs and desires. The desire to have a vagina or no arm is just that, a desire. The belief that a man is a woman is just that, a belief. Worse, such surgeries hinder proper bodily function, and as such arguably make one worse off. This is why such surgeries should be relegated to the cosmetic type where access depends on whether you can find it in the market.

Full disclosure: I would welcome such a collapse.

1) guns and ammunition. When the monopoly on violence collapses it is in one’s best interest to see that it never arises again. These tools alone serve to quell most of the adverse effects of such a collapse.

2) partners. Human enterprise will continue without government and regulations, as it always has.

Anything to do with motherhood ought to be cherished and celebrated as activity befitting of a woman.

Relations are actual. For example, my relation to my identity card is that I do not have one. Your relation to my identity card is blithe assumption that there is such a thing. Knowing is itself relational between knower and known.

Tell us about this actual personal identity that does not relate to the world. Of course it is impossible, because to speak at all is to relate to the public world. A private identity is nothing other than the way a fragmented consciousness relates to itself - a mere beetle in a box.

The fact a man can relate to the “public world” says something about his identity, sure, but not much. Man can do many things, like digest food, but it ought not imply that his identity is gastrointestinal. The actions one performs, his beliefs, his proximity to the rest of the world are secondary to, and indeed contingent upon, the thing that performs them.

It is similar with other senses of “relation” which we seem to be equivocating between here. The fact you do not have an identity card doesn’t tell us much about who or what does not have an identity card.

Identity is relational. I am exactly like you in my uniqueness. You are one of us, unless you are one of them. There is always a mutuality of connection or disconnection. Your behaviour and feeling are identified in relation to my behaviour and feeling. Identity is irrevocably social, except to the extent that it is ineffable. Even Crusoe only becomes significant in relation to firstly his origins, and secondly his relation to the deprivation of the social, and thirdly to his 'other' as Friday. The desert island trope is the exemplar of the social nature of identity - the limit of individuality. Crusoe is the absolute monarch of nowhere.

I could glean more of your identity from your ID card than I could by having any relations with you. Personal identity is not relational; it’s actual. Whatever “connections” we imagine exist between each other hold as much information about our identity as they do mass, which is to say none. His proximity to others, his social interactions, the number of friends he has, do not tell us what he is. To use them as grounds to an identity is to misidentify.

A being who cannot see his own ears has less of an ability to determine his own identity, I’m afraid, than someone else. His vantage point and periphery is minuscule in comparison. Another person could do a lap around him, address what stands before his eyes, and give a more accurate description of what he feels, smells, sees etc. than one could have done of himself.

A personal identity ought to be challenged on these grounds, not to disrespect someone’s account of themselves, but to better inform him of how he appears from beyond his limited periphery.

Can he make his blood stop circulating just by his will? Can he decide to be sleepy now, or thirsty? Can he feel happy or sad at will? There is a lot that is involuntary in the body, and it seems that those things need to be working before any voluntary action can develop. The majority of what we call 'self' is not under the control of the part of our mind that makes conscious decisions. It is a very small subset of the whole 'self'. There are many other lower smaller selves inside every self. It's selves all the way down, and all the way up like nested Russian dolls.

It’s difficult to think of these questions in the context of two or more abstractions, for instance the voluntary and involuntary, the conscious and unconscious, many selves, because it invariably pits them against each other when in fact they are highly integrated into one whole. Personally I try to think without them, supposing it is possible to do so.

What I mean by “self” is the extent of one’s being as it can be observed by others, a person or human in common terms, an organism in biological jargon—whatever you want to call it. It appears to us as one thing, not many. Every action the self performs, from doing a backflip to digesting food to pumping blood, not only is the self, but is controlled by the self by the observable fact that it doesn’t appear to be, or be controlled by, anything else. I am both the heart beating and the cause of the beating heart, both controller and controlled, so to speak.

The reason I refrain from limiting the act of “willing” to some subset of biology, whether conscious or subconscious, is because the act of “willing” appears to involve the entire organism. It isn’t helpful to look at it this way for something like biology or medicine, but for acts like willing, thinking, reasoning, and so on, I think it is appropriate. For what is willing without metabolizing or circulation or breathing?

While it is true I cannot stop my heart by thinking about it or furrowing my brow (by virtue of there being no way to perform the task in this manner), there is a wide variety of willful steps one can take to stop his heart, or become tired, thirsty, and sad. One can take a series of willful and conscious actions to see it accomplished—fasting, ingest medication, closing an electrical circuit with one’s hands, and so on.

Anyways…

NOS4A2 appears to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, that of the speaker and that of the listener, roughly the second response I described in my first reply here: "the meaning is some subjective response in their own mind". Nos says "meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding", but what is happening is that the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things. We don't have two distict uses, and a change in meaning, but just two differing uses. This should help dissipate the nonsense of "meaning never breaches the skull" and so on; no mysterious private mental substance that can't leak out of your ears - just what we do with words.

I seem to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, but you seem to think there are two different uses of a given expression. Apparently “the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things”, “just two different uses”, except that the listener is not using any utterance. He is not doing anything with words. He’s listening to articulated guttural sounds, and no matter their use or context, he is supplying this activity with his own meaning, derived from his own understanding of the language and how it is used.

You give us an example. I have never said “there are two different meanings to a given expression”, and in fact said meaning is generated “every time it is expressed or understood”, which implies two separate acts. Two separate acts generates two separate accounts of what the meaning is, by virtue of there being two people involved. So it’s no surprise that, despite the lack of usage on the one hand and the contradictory use on the other, you came to believe I thought along the same lines as your bad faith usage of my utterances permitted. You devised your meaning first, then twisted the usage to fit it—the usage is in the meaning.

Isn't it true that meaning persists over time and everything else that happens in the meantime is separate and distinct from what language itself has to convey?

I would argue it is false. Meaning does not persist over time. Meaning is generated, so to speak, in an act of language, every time it is expressed or understood. The discrepancy in meaning between speaker and listener occurs because the meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding. But meaning never breaches the skull; it doesn’t persist in the symbols; and it is gone the moment the effort to generate it is over.