It all goes to show what Moravec's paradox implies. We can mimic tasks of the mind much easier than other tasks of the body, and as a corollary, tasks of the mind are of lesser value than than other tasks of the body.

When you typed your sentence were you using your brain and nervous system to process your actions? Did you have a reason for typing the sentence, or was it a random sentence? I don't believe you had a free choice in what you wrote, your choice was determined by the specific activation weights and thresholds in your nerve cells as your sensory signals propagate through the system. At every step of the chain reaction the laws of physics determine the outcome. A choice is simply a causal chain reaction in your nervous system that weighs many factors that you are unconscious of. All of this is "coerced", even though you don't feel coerced; the whole process is perfectly natural. The reason you don't feel coerced is because there is nothing outside the laws of physics that can make it feel coerced; it's perfectly natural in that sense.

He is his brain and nervous system, though. So if his choice was determined by the specific activation weights and thresholds in his nerve cells as his sensory signals propagate through the system, then his choice was determined entirely by him.

The debate succumbs to a category error as soon as we start abstracting the self into different ways of being, like the conscious and unconscious, mind/brain and body, and apply selfhood to one aspect and not the other. It results in something so convoluted that it is a strange wonder why anyone even bothers.

If a being is capable of willing then it must be true of the entire being. If a being is not capable of willing then his actions must be determined by something else. Why do we limit the will to a tiny and arbitrary subset of actions but not to all of them, from the most obvious to the most hidden? He wills the blood to move just as much as he wills his arm to move, as he always does and must do, with the entirety of his living being. In any case, refusing to abstract the self in such a schizophrenic way makes the debate much simpler, in my opinion. Whatever action a human being performs is determined, decided, and chosen by that being; and until an action can be shown to be determined by anything else in the universe he has free will. No appeals to “laws of physics” and other metaphors need be invoked.

More often than not “extreme” is used to dismiss a philosophy on the premise that it is too far outside a certain consensus, which is mostly an appeal to tradition or the populace. Any thinker worth a straw ought to be able to entertain a philosophy without accepting it, and do so on its merits rather than its proximity to mainstream opinion. Lastly, philosophies do not have consequences. So philosophy ought to have no boundaries on what position is reached or defended.

Organize so that you can beg for scraps from another organization’s table.

“Organizing”…it’s worked so well up until now.

The only way democracy prevails is if there is no class of governing people. The rule of the people presupposes that the people can govern their own lives. So long as there exists a class of masters democracy is impossible.

In my own case, I imagine attaching one end of a string to a word and the other to the referent. Since a universal or abstract object would not string to any particular object in the world, it is without a referent or is self-referential, and has little bearing on my ontology beyond the marks on paper and the guttural sounds that spell out the universal.

The idea that an abstract object must refer to some concrete object because we can speak about it and treat it with noun-phrases doesn’t suffice for me to accept its reality.

The liquid. Why would it be the condition? A condition doesn't possess any of the qualities that would make up "wet".

But the condition of the water is wet. It possesses a wet condition. The abjective “wet” describes the noun “condition”. The point is, the fact that we use language in a such a manner need not evoke entities such as qualities, conditions, states, or properties in our ontology. It’s just another way of saying the water is wet.

That's why I posit that the liquid itself has "laws" that determine its "states". We merely discover those laws. We don't make them up. If they were entirely mental constructs, then how come when we alter them, the things bound by them don't change behavior accordingly?

It’s simply an empirical point. in learning about water we never come across something called a law and there is nothing law-like about liquid. Liquid doesn’t describe itself. We’ve devised the units of measurement, the languages, the formulas, the metaphors, the laws, the conditions, the experiments, hold it up to nature and make sure it’s an as accurate representation as possible.

Loaded questions, double-barrelled questions, complex questions—all could be considered fallacious.

It’s healthy to hold one’s philosophy to the grindstone of contrary ideas.

No, you cannot change the capabilities of a given liquid by thinking about it. But you can imagine different values in its properties and get a fairly accurate idea of what it will do in that state.

if you were to describe the condition of any given liquid, do you believe the liquid possesses something called a “condition” by virtue of using such possessive language? If so, which is wet? the condition or the liquid?

In this case it’s the liquid at any given point and under any given conditions, what it looks like, what it’s doing, how cold it is, etc.

We’re not talking about any particular liquid here so it’s entirely a product of the mind.

Very cool.

An “indirect realist” I suppose, at least according to the philosophy of mind and perception. I myself am a “direct realist”. It’s fascinating that these ancient philosophical quandaries will forever reappear.

Do you identify yourself as the brain, or some other internal locus? I ask because I can see such a belief orientating a person towards a belief in the reality of abstract objects, universals, representations and the like.

I think you’re right and I like your take. I know in my own case that my politics is the inevitable conclusion of my metaphysics. I cannot put any value into abstract objects and universals when I cannot believe in them. But I disagree with Dugin that these valuations will lead us to a post-human world, where we will abandon the notions of “humanity” itself. And I doubt that nominalism is a prevalent as he claims.

Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, friend.

Yeah I think abstract objects and universals are inescapable features of speech.

There is a Russian political philosopher known as “Putin’s brain”, Alexander Dugin, who claims that the advent of nominalism is the precursor to liberalism, and thus represents the inherent danger of The West. He claims that it serves to destroy notions such as community and family and has led to the worst kind of individualism. So I wonder if nominalism has had such an effect on the one hand, and if it is indeed a strictly western notion in the other.

Sam Harris argues that in the chain of causation the buck does not stop and our "free will" cannot interrupt the determinist chain. There is no free will at any particular point. What do people think?

If every state is determined by its anterior state, It seems to me that a determinist “chain of causation” could not exist since there is no anterior state to determine the initial state in the chain. Either the chain is infinite or there was a first cause.

To avoid this and other troubling notions, such as discrete states of the universe, we can say that the “anterior state” is merely a retroactive description of the one state, namely, the universe, and as such has no deterministic powers upon any other state.

I'm sure you realize stones don't have any weight in outer space. By your account, the nominalist is pretty confused.

How is he confused? He hasn't evoked "weight", so no property called "weight" has suddenly vanished. The stone has not changed. Instead the nominalist can focus on what has changed and come closer to accuracy in describing states of affairs.

When the nominalist weighs a stone he understands he’s measuring the stone, not something called “weight”. This can be observed: he is indeed putting the stone on the scale. Nothing called “weight” even needs to be postulated.

The realist, on the other hand, implies that the stone possesses something called “weight”. So now we have two substances, the stone and weight. Yet there is only stone on the scale.

So why must we evoke two or more substances when there appears only one?

If so, replace A with "boiling point" and B with "the temperature at which something boils" and you get "the boiling point (a property) exists"

The liquid exists, the atmospheric conditions exist, but the boiling point is just a value produced by a human mind, as is temperature. You’re just describing the state of the liquid.

That light being within a certin range

That light exists, yes, and it appears red, sure, but red is just a description of the light.

States of affairs are truth-makers. So a proposition in your sense is not a state of affairs. Yes, I don’t want to wade into these things, personally.

The fact that I use an object pronoun ought not to suggest I believe “us” exists as an object.

It would probably bring clarity if you explained what you think a proposition is.

It depends on the sense in which you use it. If it is a “state of affairs”, then it is a statement. Do you mean it in another sense?

A proposition is a state of affairs. Propositions transcend time and space by definition. It's easy to demonstrate that they can't be the product of any particular mind, and if they're products of mind at all, it would be in a Kantian sense. An individual human may give expression to a proposition by uttering a sentence, but in that act, the only thing with spacial and temporal extension is the marks or sounds of the utterance.

But even if you reject the above and opt for some sort of hard behaviorism, you've still given an abstract foundation to descriptions: us.

Propositions do not transcend space and time. I’ve quoted your propositions right here, the product of a particular mind. If it’s easy to demonstrate that a proposition transcends space and time perhaps you might entertain us by doing so.

If so, then what is the explanation for all of us largely attributing redness to the same things? It sounds as though there is something in common between all the things we describe with the adjective "red" or to which we attribute "redness". What is that thing in common?

For apples and other fruits it’s Anthocyanins. For blood it’s Heme. The color is similar because the light bouncing off of these compounds is similar and our biology is similar. They appear red, they can be described as red, but there isn’t something called “red” in Anthocyanins and Heme. We’ve looked.

Yes we can, what?

Redness is the property of reflecting light of wavelengths around 625-740nm and absorbing other frequencies. That's something in the world is it not?

Forget universals. Do you believe properties exist? Do things have properties?

No, things do not possess other things called “properties”. Properties are basically values we put into formulas. The boiling point, for instance, is the temperature at which something boils. There is something about the liquid that causes it to boil at a certain temperature, but there is nothing called “boiling point” in liquid.

I believe abstract concepts and universals are necessary for language. I just can’t find them outside of it.

Using a suffix to turn an adjective such as “red” into the noun “redness” is purely an exercise of the mind, not an observation of something in the world. It allows you to equivocate between using an adjective on one hand, and a noun on the other, but they both nonetheless serve to describe the same thing: the apple. We cannot point to or quantify something called “redness”; we can only point to or quantify things that are red, or at least appear red.

A description is an abstract object, since it's made of propositions, so you're confirming the existence of at least one independent abstract object.

It’s not independent, though. You said yourself it’s made of propositions. We make propositions, descriptions, abstract objects, universals, and so they are forever dependent on the human mind. They might manifest as words but they will never manifest anywhere else.

Instead of defending abstract ideas not being real, how would you attack abstract ideas being real? What issues arise if we consider abstract ideas to be real?

They are without a referent, or at the most co-referential. Wherever they appear they can only prove to exist as products of the mind. How can a realist overcome such a deficit?

The above description of spin and electrons is full of universals and abstract objects. If you deny the existence of those properties, you have no real terms with which to explain what an electron is. "Electron" becomes a blank.

Descriptions are full of abstract objects and universals, certainly, but the contention for the nominalist is that abstract objects and universals do not exist independently of descriptions. And their inability to exist independent of the descriptions does not limit their usefulness in describing things that do. So the electron can be described in countless fashions, in abstract and concrete terms, never blank.

I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. I’m only saying that we’re speaking about electrons when defining their movements in mathematical terms, such as with “spin”.

But we already describe what an electron is. We’re speaking about an electron when defining its movements in mathematical terms. So I do not see what you mean.

My mistake. How is it, then, that if you rule out the existence of the properties of an object, you'll soon find that you have no words at all to describe reality?

Debates usually involve two or more competing ideas, not a series of questions and answers. So if you believe in the existence of properties then surely there is a reason why.

To rule out the existence of the properties of an object is not to rule out the utility of the words. I can still use the words to describe what’s real, in this case the electron.

I’m afraid it is not real in the way you say it is. Do you think the spin is real?

An electron spins. The spin needn't be abstracted into its own entity.

No, I would speak of the electron as real (assuming there is a referent) and spin as a predicate.

But can you really escape universals and abstract objects? When you separate the universe down to its tiniest parts, what do you call those parts?

They are useful for linguistic purposes, so one need not escape them. But in terms of metaphysics and ontology they are neither extant nor useful. I would not separate a universe down to it’s tiniest parts, for instance, because it presupposes a universe is it’s own particular. Particulars have parts but universals do not.

Platonic realism or any realism in regards to abstract ideas and universals.

Nominalism addresses the concept of existence better than realism does.

To see from where an ethical behavior arises we can just follow it backwards to its beginning. Much of it is visceral, I believe, biological. After all, every human action begins and ends there. In this case the conscience, born latent but forever developed, has the final word.

In this way the history of ethics is about recording the pangs and stresses of human interaction and prescribing a means to soothe them. For reasons of health a man must account for his passions as he navigates his inevitable and awkward proximity to others. How do I justify sentencing to death one man in order to save five men? The right behavior is that which invariably allows him to live with himself.

Not everyone is a friend or family member, though. Treating someone as a means to an end is just as perilous in business as it is in any social context, and one can form friendly relationships and treat people morally in business as they can anywhere else.