I will give it a shot.

Science, as a practice, developed through a lot of discussion about separating causality from coincidence. Given that we are creatures who base much of our knowledge upon lining up what happened at the same time as evidence of a cause, it was only through suppressing this tendency that we became aware of systems that were not simply extensions of our assumptions. Establishing what is happening and building models for why it did was the beginning of looking for functions rather than accepting we have been shown what there is to know.

After some time of doing this, the method starts to consider what it dismissed at the beginning of its enterprise; The inclusion of observations made isolated from other people.

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. — NOS4A2

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.

How do you experience it? I don't ask that as a trick question. I am not accusing anybody of misrepresenting their experiences.

The element of Chalmers' challenge that I don't see well represented in this thread is that he focused upon how the conflict of methods developed to establish facts beyond personal experience came to be used to explain that phenomena itself. Something deliberately built to avoid a problem was turned upon the potato deemed too hot to pass around. Observing that problem is different than insisting upon the existence of a being beyond what 'science' can establish.

I have yet to understand what “phenomenal consciousness” is, I’m afraid, so I draw a blank upon hearing it. — NOS4A2

I am puzzled by your puzzlement. Your life is different from mine. That comes from you being stuck with your set of experiences instead of mine. It does not take the invention of a 'ghost in the machine' to notice that is an inescapable fact.

It is also surprising to see you object to this quality of privacy after arguing in so many other places that all restrictions upon persons are a violation of their rights. I am not sure if you have thought this all through.

I tried googling the numbers and did not get matching results. What is your preferred database?

Edited to add forgotten not. Apologies.

None of these states have militaries that are on a modern operational level, nor have they taken any steps towards making them so. — Tzeentch

From what sources are you getting this information? Most sources that I have seen do not reflect this view. There has been a long ongoing call from U.S. to have other NATO members fork out more dough. But that gets complicated when reviewing how nations develop defense on their own compared to their commitments to NATO.

He accepted his punishment but did not accept that he was no longer a citizen. He performed the work of being a mid-wife for the birth of thoughts till his last breath. With that in mind, I think Plato was saying that there was no way to get rid of him. The purpose of Phaedo being, in part, something like Auden speaking of the death of W.B. Yeats:

The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
the current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.

I was not objecting to your consideration of different motives. What is fallacious is your argument that the diversity of motives proves that the willingness to fight a common enemy is merely an illusion. You take the lack of commonality as a premise and act surprised when it appears in your conclusion.
You repeat Putin's thinking verbatim: Ukraine does not exist. The resistance being encountered by Russian forces is not Ukrainian. Therefore.......QED.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my friend from Baluchistan after the Coalition forces took Kabul. He said:

"I appreciate the U.S. trying to put down the Taliban but I don't think they realize that there are millions of the motherfuckers."

In regard to mutual respect, how do you see that in the context of Nietzsche's attempting to undermine Christianity, as such? Or the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.?

To put it most broadly, the arguments did not assume mutual respect was the order of the day. Even if some of the arguments were relatively civil in comparison to the alternatives.

The U.K. recognizes that pandering to Russian Oligarchs was not double plus good.

My personal experience has been only learning the virtues of the dispassionate after losing my cool over and over again. The lessons keep coming.

It may be germane to point out how the matter of contentious arguments were the bread and butter of Classical Greek culture. One of the central themes in the Republic is how the rude and abusive challenge by Thrasymachus was transformed into the well-reasoned debate of later chapters. A number of Plato's dialogues were brawls peppered liberally with personal insult. That element was recognized as part of the "dialectic" even when criticized as inferior.

Another influence for me on the subject is Nietzsche saying that one has to be careful about who one bothers to oppose because the effort is also a recognition of their importance. That suggests that there is a balancing point where expressions of contempt cancel the object of defeating an idea.

Otherwise, all contentions between ideas are a spasm of opportunistic sophistry.

I, too, will miss Olivier5.

The idea that 'Ukrainians' are all fighting for the same reason is, again, patent nonsense.

As such, we cannot possibly 'take into account' their agency — Isaac

The matter of agency is whether the common response to being invaded has been to fight back. The issue has come up here in the context of those saying that such a response is insignificant because the people fighting are only ciphers in a proxy war. Your observation about personal reasons is an equivocation between different ideas. If there had been no willingness to fight back, siding with Ukraine would have been merely a feeling of regret rather than a life-or-death attempt to repel invaders.

Your argument is similar to boethius in the way the invasion itself plays no part in how the participants in the struggle are seen to have responded to it. Your willingness to take note of all the different motivations leads to an odd inverse assessment of their relevance.

What distinguishes your account of irrelevance from Putin saying Ukraine does not exist outside of Russia?

I am not convinced that a 'valid' proposition excludes the possibility of error. That suggests an environment where arguments would be true if made clean of attempts to make them look better than they actually are. One can make a valid argument, free of sophistical persuasion, and still be wrong.

I agree with that call for courtesy. I have to admit I just used the reply function to add them to the conversation and I still haven't practiced the @ at method yet.

This is an improvement from when you did not see any kind of Ukrainian identity as being germane to what is happening. It takes Ukrainians for them to do bad things to each other.

The compulsion to serve is an important issue. It has been a deal breaker in many wars. The way you present it as an elective is odd. That would be more a reflection of intent if Ukraine was trying to invade Russia.

I see the resemblance. Part of my bringing it up was to separate the issue from a 'ghost in the machine' matter that you have been charged with introducing.

I think you can argue for a general resemblance between Chalmer's argument and the earlier Cogito arguments of both Descartes and Augustine. — Wayfarer

I think there are important differences between Chalmer's approach and these two philosophers. The experience of being oneself is given as a necessity that must be accepted before attending to what else exists in the Cartesian mode. Chalmers starts from a different direction:

Why is the performance of these functions accompanied by experience? A simple explanation of the functions leaves this question open.

The explanatory gap Chalmers discusses is not an impassable barrier by definition. This is not a polemic against attempts to use reduction to find causes for events. The need to introduce complexity is a stepping back from assuming the 'first person' is synonymous with 'consciousness':

This is not to say that experience has no function. Perhaps it will turn out to play an important cognitive role. But for any role it might play, there will be more to the explanation of experience than a simple explanation of the function.

Given that all Ukrainians share the same motivation? — Manuel

I referred to the ones who are fighting and the ones who support those people. There are a lot of them. I won't bother posting more evidence for that as it is dismissed as propaganda. Nobody has yet to post evidence to the contrary unless you count the polls conducted by Russia.

Obviously, there is more than one perspective. The politics before the invasion has been interrupted by an attack upon the whole country. The willingness of Russia to kill civilians seems, in part, to divide those who want to fight. Please report when you hear of that happening.

Your observations do not support the little regard you have for Ukrainian motivations.

They do show why you view their agency to be unimportant.

I want the conflict to end now. I am not the one fighting it, however.

Once again, you would have the Ukrainians merely be pieces on a board game.

Yes, neither you nor I are fighting. But you are willing to explain to the one's fighting why they are dying. To leave their view out of the picture comes from standing above them.

The people in Ukraine who are fighting Russians are fighting because they were attacked by Russians. Whatever arrangements could have been made before that are not germane any longer. To only view the unfolding of events that might have been is to ignore what is happening now.

As far as smug self-righteousness goes, it is difficult to surpass its glory when you dismiss the will to defend oneself as a slavish pursuit of an ideology.

If I understand your report of what Withey is saying, he is comparing different kinds of persuasion rather than presenting a self-evident truth revealed by our experience. Taken by themselves, the emotions are not an argument unless they are made one. I have to write a story to pit them against another narrative.

I was thinking more along the lines that it would be good to stop the party sooner than later.

I respect your decision.

Well, I have to say the banning looks kind of fun.
I shuffle around the set like Mr. Rogers.
Chances are low that I will get banned for my sweaters being improperly buttoned.

But this is all besides the point, which is that once a religion accepts certain writings as scripture, then the writings cannot be repudiated. — Art48

The writings themselves have been understood in many conflicting ways. Unfortunately, many violent struggles have been involved with such differences.
In addition, many writings do not agree with each other in an accepted tradition. There have been convergences through dogma. There have been many divergences as well.

The situation is dynamic. Whatever sentiments were prevalent before the 2014 annexation of Crimea, the Russians have been busy. There is the departure of Ukrainians and the theft of their property as noted here:

Since 2014, Russia has been employing traditional Soviet resettlement practices and forcibly changing the demographic composition of the population in Crimea (see EDM, May 30, 2019 and August 6, 2019). The imposition of Russian Federation citizenship on residents of Crimea (nearly all residents of the peninsula had Russian citizenship less than a year after the annexation), forced deportations, the unlawful conscription of local men into the Russian military, persecutions and imprisonments of pro-Ukrainian activists who stand against the occupation, repressions against the Ukrainian Church, as well as closures of Ukrainian schools triggered a mass departure of Ukrainians (including Crimean Tatars) from Crimea. According to the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, almost 48,000 people left the peninsula for Ukraine during the last seven years (Krymr.com, January 6, 2021). The number of those who moved to other countries may be higher. — Alla Hurska

The same article notes the influx of population into Crimea:

Since illegally annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, Russia has been forcibly shifting the region’s demographic composition and trying to replace the native Crimean population with its own loyal citizens. Moreover, these transformative migration flows enable the occupying authorities to create a Trojan Horse against any future efforts by Kyiv to return the peninsula to its control. The saturation of Crimea with siloviki and military personnel is also done intentionally, helping further militarize the region and populate Crimea with trusted armed people. According to Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Article 8(2)(b)(viii) of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by the Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies” is completely prohibited and considered a war crime (Crimeahrg.org, January 6). — ibid

Before the 2022 invasion, the problem of Internally Displaced Population in Ukraine was still a major issue years after the annexation and the establishment of the Independent Republics. It is difficult to find exact numbers of IDP's and refugees who have fled the country since 2/2022.

According to the 2001 census, the breakdown of ethnic identity in Kherson was:

Ukrainians - 961.6 (82.0%)
Russians - 165.2 (14.1%)
Belarusians - 8.1 (0.7%)
Tatars - 5.3 (0.5%)
Armenians - 4.5 (0.4%)
Moldavians - 4.1 (0.4%)

Gosh, that can't be right. When Russia annexed it recently, they had a vote where over 90% of the population approved. That is a lot of heart and mind to win over in just 20 years.

If Kant was astute, he would in my opinion have regarded his phenomena/noumena distinction as being a practical distinction made for the purposes of epistemology, as opposed to a metaphysical distinction, for obvious reasons pertaining to the creation of philosophical pseudo-problems. — sime

To some extent, was not part of Kant's project to meet Hume's challenge regarding the pursuit of causes? The idea being that we could pursue them as significant agents worth the effort rather than dismissing them as stories we tell ourselves that accidentally get confirmed by experiences.

You mean like this;

Well, I am not a very good representative to give an account of the matter since the majority of my interests fall outside the common terms of discourse here but I have noticed that many of the banned only got to that place after attempting to dominate all other conversations in a discussion.

Are you sure about that?
Perhaps we should call it Pandora's Box.

As Bowie said:
"Don't hold your breath but the pretty things are going to hell"

Maybe Shoutbox 2 can become a kind of TPF Bible? — Baden

And lo, there was a thing. But nobody could agree what it was or tasted like.

That does sound fun.
Just got my first test saying my cholesterol is too high.

"Battle cries and champagne just in time for sunrise."

That's interesting. Can you tell me a bit more? Is this to do with identities of work or etc? — Baden

It does have something to do with work. My life in the trades has been an interaction with stuff and learning or not learning how to be better at shaping it. That has happened in the context of production as exchange that you refer to but there is a personal element where the good and bad decisions pile up for me to notice for myself rather than only being a value translatable to a social currency.

On a more general level, there is a way we are stuck with ourselves that is not fully represented by mapping the roles we play. I am not suggesting the opposite approach of viewing experience only as an isolated event. I don't know what sufficient reason addresses the difference. I view the difference to be self-evident.

What I gathered from Chalmer's argument is that no amount of science can approach why consciousness is possible as whatever it is. The assumption that such a possibility can be directly associated with our experience assumes that they must be connected. And that assumption is what Chalmers is directly challenging.