:up:

Before addressing this, I just want to emphasize the following exchange to show what the OP represents, if it's not obvious to everyone already:

At the very least, a large majority is likely to be adamantly against foreign occupation. So what about their rights and freedoms? — Echarmion

Those Thais are my enemy — Paul Edwards

Anyway, setting aside for a moment the sheer madness of this fantasy, there are a few things worth knowing about the situation that I've found out just from googling around. I don't know much about Thailand, but it seems to me that the situation is more complicated than you realize:

1. What the OP is referring to is the law against criticizing the king, which has been on the books since 1908 (and I'd guess that a similar law existed in some form prior to that). The law was relaxed a few years ago, only now being brought back to full force in the face of intensifying protests.

2. Protests against the government--which have included calls for the reform of the monarchy, and even criticism of the king--have been going on since earlier this year. Back in August: "Such open criticism of Thailand’s monarch by non-elites at a public place within Thailand with the police simply standing by is the first of its kind in Thai history." (source)

3. Protesters have not, as far as I know, asked for outside help in the form of armed intervention.

This doesn't scratch the surface of recent Thai history, but from what I can tell, it's a country in transition, and the appearance of open criticism of the monarchy must be significant. In this situation, I don't see how armed intervention could be helpful. If you were running the "free world", Paul, I think you'd merely fuck things up for the Thai people, as well as killing lots of them and destabilizing the region.

I noticed that your first topic on this forum invoked the responsibility to protect. Is that your justification in this case? Because it doesn't apply to the curtailment of free speech:

The responsibility to protect embodies a political commitment to end the worst forms of violence and persecution. It seeks to narrow the gap between Member States’ pre-existing obligations under international humanitarian and human rights law and the reality faced by populations at risk of genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. — UN

There's nothing like that going on in Thailand, so how else would you justify such drastic action? There is no principle that I know of that could provide such a justification.

Nobody has a right to intervene militarily in Thailand.

Also, I don't want to indulge in whataboutism but I'm curious as to why you're ignoring China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, and other regimes that curtail freedom of speech. Is it because you want to pick off what you see as the easy targets, thereby enlarging the "free world"?

My arguments are better than yours. I'm telling you. Believe me. If you don't, you're just stupid. — Benkei

S, is that you?

:up:

I like Don Cherry, so I wanted to like that, but I just can't stand whispering.

Hey, Hippyhead, do you have any comments on the substance of my post, revolving around the two quotations, one from the ECFR and one from a professor at West Point? One was about the conceptual basis of the conflict between Russia and the West, and one was claiming that Putin's increasing authoritarianism is a response to perceived threats to his position.

You have to begin contributing here properly. I'll accept what you say about Putin's wealth if it makes you happy, but for the purposes of this discussion I don't really care about it. That Putin is a ruthless opportunistic silovarch (half siloviki, half oligarch) surrounded by others of the same kind is a point I have made myself, but right now I don't see the significance.

So please, just calm down and discuss things like a grown-up. There are other contributors to the thread who I disagree with but whose posts I wouldn't dream of deleting. You're not in that category so far.

I do think Russian bombing in Syria has been de-emphasized here though, which is Putin’s worst crime in the past decade. You can squeeze in a realist interpretation in this too to an extent, but not as much as for Ukraine. So I think the bounds are a bit more than Eastern Europe. — Saphsin

Yes, that occurred to me, good point. Maybe I'll get around to dealing with that.

Nice summary. It's not the way I see it, but right now I don't know how to respond adequately.

Well if that's what is meant by it, fine.

That distinction is not clear to me. I mean sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me.

That's a nice breakdown, but I don't think it works as it stands, because it goes wrong at the start. If perception is indirect, it must mean not just that there are intervening factors (light? electrical impulses?), but that there are intervening objects of perception, that is, the things that are perceived. Nobody thinks that perception is magic.

2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see. — Olivier5

Yes, but this doesn't depend on the philosophical position of indirect realism.

Like, fuck off back to the Dora the Explorer forums or something. — StreetlightX

In this case, I heartily approve of your abusive language. :grin:

Exactly, Russia and China are not in the same ball park at all.

(Much to Putin's frustration, no doubt)

The subject of foreign intervention and territorial expansion by Russia has come up a few times in this thread, with a few of the usual suspects frothing at the mouth about Putin's evil designs, or some such caricature. But it is an interesting topic in relation to the OP, because what we are seeing is a clash between competing visions of how to do foreign policy, with Western liberals and neocons in favour humanitarian intervention and spreading democracy, against Russian realpolitik.

Kadri Liik of the ECFR explains this from, I think it's fair to say, a basically EU and NATO perspective:

What Russia truly wants in terms of territory is a sphere of control in its neighbourhood – mainly, the six countries that lie between the EU and Russia and comprise what the EU calls its Eastern neighbourhood: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine. Moscow expects these countries to be sensitive to Moscow’s wishes; it wants to have the ability to manage, arbitrate, and veto their relations with the West, and to prevent the expansion of Western organisations into that part of the world, based on the assumption that any Western actions there should have Russia’s approval. What Moscow wants to avoid is the emergence of direct links and true closeness between the region’s countries and the West: that is why it bent over backwards in 2013 to prevent the association agreements with the EU from being signed.

And this is where the clash between Russia and Europe becomes fundamental and paradigmatic: it is impossible for the West to grant Russia such a sphere of control. The countries either have the right to choose their own arrangements and alliances, or they do not – there is no space in between, and this is not a question that can be managed with a wise compromise.

However, it is rarely understood that this paradigmatic disagreement extends far beyond this territory. What Russia really wants is a new international order, and new global – or at least European – rules of the game. It wants to do away with many of the basic concepts of what has been called the post-cold war liberal order: the emphasis on human rights, the possibility of regime changes and humanitarian interventions.

[...]

Russia’s view of the new world order that it desires is admittedly neither very developed nor sophisticated. But in essence, Moscow wants the West to give up on its vision of liberal international order and to return to conducting international affairs based on realpolitik. And because of this, the West and Russia are again locked in a conceptual standoff, not unlike that of the Cold War – this time, not over domestic models, but over the international order. — Kadri Liik

https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_what_does_russia_want_7297/

I no more approve of Russian realpolitik than I do of what I've been calling "liberal imperialism"--between Russia and the West I haven't taken sides and I don't feel compelled to do so--but I think this basic incompatibility of foreign policy aims is useful as a frame.

I think one also has to keep in mind Russia's habitual and well-known defensiveness, otherwise one will never understand that its actions in Ukraine and Crimea are largely a response to the encroachments of NATO and the provocations of the US. This is not to justify those actions, but to understand them.

Incidentally, there's an interesting paper that posits a domestic defensiveness--wielding the concept of defensive realism in international relations--to explain Putin's increasing authoritarianism at home:

During the 17 years that Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia, the country has become increasingly authoritarian. However, I argue that this rollback of democracy has not been motivated by Putin's blind desire to maximize his political power, as many have assumed. Rather, his anti-democratic policies have responded to perceived specific threats to his control. In applying theories originally developed in the field of international relations to individual leaders, we can understand Putin as a “defensive realist” who balances against threats in order to maintain security rather than maximize power. This is an essential distinction that produces important conclusions about what motives lie behind the increasingly authoritarian character of the Russian state and gives insights into the possible future trajectory of the regime. — Robert Person (Associate Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1879366516300239

Anyway....if all this is generally understood already, somebody should tell me so I don’t butt in where I don’t contribute anything. — Mww

I think it's an excellent clarification.

I may have a look. If you haven't solved the problem once and for all I'll be sorely disappointed.

@fdrake wrote a monster post about all this in our last debate, and I rudely didn't respond. Maybe I'll go back to it, because I don't like the feeling that I'm going around in circles, always finally unable to break out into the Real.

It's a fair point, but note that for Kant, empirical objects are not merely "in the mind".

I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue. — Olivier5

All right, let's look at things in a Kantian way for a few moments. There is no question of a perceiver perceiving noumena directly, because noumena are not the kind of things that are perceived. Any apprehension of the noumena would be an intellectual intuition, not a sensible one, i.e., it wouldn't be perception at all.

Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense. — Kant, B309

So given that the perception of noumena is not even on the cards, indeed hardly even makes sense (it's probably a category mistake), then we are left in the realm of empirical objects. With the posited ideal directness discarded, against what are you opposing the supposed indirectness of perception? If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect?

I like this way of setting out the commitments of naive realism, that I found in the paper I mentioned (PDF):

Naïve realist theories of perception ... come in a variety of different forms, however they commonly embody a commitment to some or all of the following theoretical claims. First, perceptual experiences are essentially relational, in the sense that they are constituted in part by those things in the perceiver’s environment that they are experiences of. Second, the relational nature of perceptual experience cannot be explained in terms of perceptual experiences having representational content that is veridical if the things in the subject’s environment are as they are represented as being, and nonveridical otherwise. Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. Fifth, perceptual experiences are relations to specifically mind-independent objects, properties, and relations: things whose nature and existence are constitutively independent of the psychological responses of perceiving subjects. — Allen

That could be a good place to start a big discussion of naive realism.

Well, have a look at that book on direct perception and you might see that the concept is consistent with your view (aside from the Kantian issue).

The difficulty in trying to put MP in one or other realist camp, either direct or indirect, naive or non-naive, is that his approach, which we see from Gibson too, is quite different:

For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. — Merleau-Ponty, The structure of behavior

Consider him a non-naïve realist. — Olivier5

I think it's not so easy to decide this one way or the other. It could make for an interesting discussion. It's unfortunate that my copy of PoP is a thousand kolimetres away and under lockdown.

But I just found a paper online called "Merleau-Ponty and Naïve Realism" by Keith Allen. Might be interesting.

Incidentally, I got to know Gibson's theory of direct perception by reading this book, available online as a PDF: Direct Perception, Claire F Michaels, Claudia Carello. It's very clear, and has a nice chapter on the philosophical implications.

Cool, I'm into MP too.

traveling beyond the absurd — Hippyhead

I like it. If I could do that, maybe I wouldn't be here.

The failure of so many members of this philosophy forum to grasp the overwhelmingly obvious difference between such good guys and bad guys is truly pathetic. It makes me embarrassed to have invested so much time in such a juvenile operation. — Hippyhead

You couldn't stay away though, could you? :rofl:

But you managed it for a week, which is more than I can do, so well done. Now see if you can manage a month, or even a year! I for one will be praying for your success, and I'm not even religious.

Ciao, and good luck!

I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it. — Olivier5

I'm back. Yes, I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances.

Sorry, this debate is making me feel nauseous, so I'm gonna duck out. Nothing personal.

In the final analysis, we cannot understand perception by throwing away the perceived and/or the perceiver. So whether you call us people or brains or minds makes no significant difference to the problem. — Olivier5

I think it makes a big difference, but if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me.

Because of the menagerie of fantastic creatures that populates this site, and that must come from some old medieval treatise on exotic beasts with two heads and one leg or something... I mean, you could mean zombies, or automatons, or winged rabbits — Olivier5

...or brains in vats, or rational animals, or vehicles for genes, or eternal souls...

Yeh, it makes you dizzy.

If you say to me "this block of wood is solid", and i cut it open to find a hollow in the centre, I'd be liable to say "no, this is not solid". When the scientist 'cuts open' the wood even smaller and find no less of a hollow you want to deny him recourse to the same language to describe his findings. — Isaac

You appear to be under the impression that scientists claim that what we call solid objects are not actually solid. This isn't true. Ever heard of the states of matter, or solid-state physics?

Same for neuroscientists.

But if you just mean that they should be allowed to say, speaking loosely, "tables are not really solid", and "we don't really see apples", then I guess it's a way of getting their point across. It seems far too misleading to me, and I've only seen it from bad popularizations.

People, I suppose. Why do you ask?

By this token, eyes don't see, because eyes don't have eyes — Olivier5

According to the most relevant sense of "see", I agree that our eyes don't see, that it's better here to say that we see by means of our eyes. We can use words in different ways, and in philosophy we have to be careful not to use two senses of a word without realizing it.

Why not? — Banno

Maybe it's just me that disagrees then. Minds don't see, not least because minds don't have eyes.

I don't really see the problem, at least as you've described it. Physicists have no problem using "solid", and it's consistent with one of the main ways we use it in everyday life. Tables and walls and rocks are solid, and the scientist explains what a solid is down at the atomic level etc.

One of the challenges to direct perception is that if the object appears differently in some ways to us than it is, then we're directly aware of a mental object, and only indirectly the physical cause. — Marchesk

So...when I'm looking at the the moon I can cover it with my hand, but the moon is too big to be covered by my hand, therefore I'm not seeing the moon, but just a mental object. Is that about right?

It being mostly empty space held together by electromagnetic bonds would have blown their minds. — Marchesk

It would have blown their minds that this is what solidity is, yes. Turns out, for a neutrino, the table doesn't feel anything like the same as it does for us.

I think they're only spooked when people claim that minds, rather than people or animals, see apples--and other such confusions. But I'll leave it to Banno to respond.

I think our disagreement, as ever, comes down to this:

You think that our scientific investigations have revealed that apples are not actually red.

I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples.

we have direct access via perceptual sensations? — Marchesk

I think that's true.

seeing color is what makes us visually aware of objects? — Marchesk

Well, seeing things normally involves seeing their colour, of course, but one can see (be visually aware of) things without seeing their colour.

I don't know what we're talking about here.