:fire:

Confusion doesn’t explain how a past action can impose on a future person.

Ok. So, for example, which past persons and which situations imposes on you?

I just don’t understand how one can impose on someone in the future. Which past people or situation imposes on you?

How does someone impose on a future person without having to travel through time?

Good explanation.

Of course this all depends on your theory of selfhood (what is 'me'?) but that's probably a whole 'nother can of worms we don't want to open here.

That’s an important point.

If one expands “the network doing the inference” to include the sensorimotor systems, what happens to the hidden state?

It troubles me because every single “network doing the inference” appears to be the organism itself. By their own admission, and our own, organisms infer.

Maybe this is partly a problem of systems theory in biology, the idea that this or that group of organs can be considered its own system, while other parts and other systems remain outside of it, different nodes so to speak. While this may be a decent abstract model of biological function, empirically this isn’t the case because whenever such a system is isolated, or otherwise taken out of the system, it no longer performs the functions it is supposed to and is known for. A brain sitting on a chair, for example, could not be said to be thinking. It’s only function as a system at this point is to rot.

So can an activity that only organisms can be shown to perform—experiencing, thinking, inferring, believing, seeing—be isolated to a single part of it?

You wouldn’t care if they were doing crack and hookers. That’s mighty lenient of you.

I’m all for it. What I’m against is the two-tiered justice system. If this was anyone else, for instance the son of the last president, the media coverage and persecution would be legendary.

I thought you of all people would be reporting on the criminal behavior of the first family of the Uniter States.

Oh, it’s just obvious. Very convincing.

The first son.

I honestly feel bad for the guy, and for many in this dysfunctional family, but the fact this man has avoided jail is the height of privilege.

I can’t find it in their cases, though. No such cases arose from the Mueller report, either.

Any witness tampering cases to show?

Teflon don. Keep trying.

And zero trials or convictions for what you claim are crimes. The patterns of the false accusations, though, are never-ending.

“After our last hearing. President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee, said on Tuesday.

“That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice,” she added.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/12/jan-6-committee-notifies-doj-that-trump-tried-tampering-with-one-of-its-witnesses-cheney-says.html

Witness intimidation is a crime.

Phoning someone isn’t.

He allegedly phoned someone who never answered. Bmbshell!

The consistency here lies in wanting to deter the killing of human life. Punishment, capital or otherwise, is one such deterrent.

Not necessarily lies, I apologize. I left out other possibilities.
"Dissent" from universal expert consensus, i.e. climate deniers (are you one?), is either lies, or Dunning-Kreuger idiocy. Of course there is always the theoretical possibility of "Maverick Genius", but for our purposes we can ignore that one.

However, you have taken it one step further. I say, "Let X be true...", and you immediately raise your finger and say "I dissent! This contradicts my experiences and intuitions!". I don't know what to say, other than you must have been a joy to teach.

There is no evidence or compelling argument for the existence of p-zombies in your scenario. Unfortunately the assertion that something is true is not enough to convince me or many others. If you had some evidence or reasonable arguments it would be a different story.

The phrase “pro-life” pertains only to the abortion debate, not to other matters. It’s the same same with “pro-choice”. If pro-choicere were to oppose populations from choosing to enact anti-abortion laws, it doesn’t mean they harbor hidden reasons for defending a woman’s right to choose to kill her baby.

Simply banning abortions is not going to prevent all abortions. If you actually care about fetuses, then you should support the development of technology that will make it less likely that a women will choose to have one. But nobody in the pro-life movement supports this, because they don't actually care about fetuses - they care about keeping women controlled. They don't want women to be relieved of this crucial weakness. They want women to be vulnerable to becoming pregnant and make up a bunch of bullshit about the rights of fetuses to obscure it.

Every anti-abortion argument I’ve heard has to do with the termination of human life, so I’m not sure that’s accurate or a fair interpretation of what they care about or want.

Who knows? Maybe they would support artificial wombs had they known about them. I see little to no evidence that they wouldn’t.

In my imaginary scenario I have the power to stipulate whatever I wish. But please, "dissent" away. Is that you I see with the tin foil hat and cardboard sign?

You did stipulate what you wished, and it ended up implying dissent is lies and consensus is truth. I would wear a tinfoil hat and cardboard sign if it meant I didn’t have to agree with such absurdities.

It’s it doesn’t follow that because one opposes the evisceration of a human fetus he ought to support the production of artificial wombs. It’s like saying that because one opposes the evisceration of an adult human he ought to support life support technology.

That doesn’t make it true, either. Your stipulation is just that, a stipulation, like they stipulated phlogiston or a pantheon of gods. A dissenting view isn’t a lie. You ought to have had an option for dissenting from the prevailing view.

It’s not a lie to dissent. I would defer to dissent from the prevailing view because the claim that one is not conscious but they still perform the activity of conscious people betrays my intuition and experience.

I would retain my relationships in the belief that greater minds will supersede these views with their own.

That's just your poor interpretation. The golden rule considers all stakeholders on an equal and balanced basis.

That’s the problem to begin with. Tastes, manners, proclivities, beliefs, desires, etc. are pluralistic.

Not much of a rule, then.

It could be as simple as a handshake. No need to pretend we’re speaking about cannibalism.

Not much of a rule, then.

Still, assumptions are made, behavior is premised on them. Worse still, it’s self-cantered. You consider yourself before considering anyone else.

Well, other people might not want to be treated the exact same way you want to be treated. That’s why the golden rule fails, in my opinion. Better to find out how they want to be treated first of all instead of assuming that everyone wants the same treatment as yourself.

The problem with religion, as far as I can tell, as that it has placed value on unworldly objects, whether the supernatural, the soul, the afterlife, God, and so on. Essentially, and in practice, it places value on ideas instead of objects. These ideas can be myths, stories, narratives, characters, but all are products of the mind, never visible or reachable by any method other than turning into oneself.

We’ll have to dig our way out of that. One way I’ve come to value a person is to recognize her originality. Nothing like her has ever existed, nor ever will, because she’s original, one-of-a-kind, and in that sense effectively priceless.

I’m not an economist, so perhaps it’s for the best.

I don’t know why you would tell a person his lot in life is well deserved because his skin color is a certain shade. But you’re thinking with race here. That’s the problem to begin with. If you look at a crowd and divide it into races you will get disparities that you cannot explain without resorting to racism.

I haven’t contradicted anything. A state might be more or less wealthy for a variety of reasons, like the nationalization of industry, higher taxes, less wasteful spending, debt, and so on.

The labor theory of value has largely been abandoned and widely criticized. I’m not sure it applies.

It’s theft on a grand scale.

So should we let the chips fall where they may, how do we explain to racial groups that go dramatically under-represented in some fields that the cause is pure fairness?

Tell them the race of those involved has no bearing on anything in the entire process.

Now, why do states back such things? What's going on between states? Which state is richer? And how did it become richer?

In short, it accrues to its power and benefit. The state has no real mechanism to earn wealth of its own so it must take it from those who are productive.

Representationalism is odd in that it always assumes an image or “representation” (“a pixelated appearance”) of what is seen, but can never show us this image, upon what medium it appears, and can never point to the being whom is observing it. It is odd that it is present in both materialism and idealism, as if one conceded something to the other.

Your instincts are correct here. It’s morally wrong. As the case proves, any race-based inclusion leads to race-based exclusion. When you make an effort to advance some groups you impede others. This is why we ought not to favor some races, and for the same reasons we ought not to disfavor other races.

It is also demeaning both to the favored and unfavored groups insofar as it paints the candidates as requiring special considerations based on superficial phenotypes, none of which factor in to education.

It’s unjust. It doesn’t rectify any past injustice because it doesn’t even consider them. It doesn’t distinguish between the deserving and undeserving. That it is premised on fuzzy taxonomies makes it all the more threadbare.

A case for affirmative action could be made to flesh-and-blood human beings who have actually been excluded from such institutions because of their race. That sort of injustice could be rectified by giving them the full benefit of proper consideration as they give everyone else. Beyond that it should not go.