The mind is an irreducible substance with the ability to experience, freely decide, and cause. — MoK

Like an invisible jellyfish floating inside the skull?

"In self defense only"? — Moliere

We're a violent species. Political violence is one of the many forms of jungle ape we manifest. Thus, there is no philosophy of political violence. Unless you know of one you'd like to flesh out?

I guess you're a deontologist on this — Baden

I'm a moral nihilist.

And I don't even know if I can agree with myself on the topic, — Baden

:grin:

An AI does not have access to ideas. — MoK

I don't know exactly what ideas are, but I think of them as something we're abstracting out of situations. They don't stand alone. I think some kind of reflexiveness (like turning back to be aware of oneself) is needed.

The assassination of political figures becomes retroactively justified and therefore simply justified depending on how history works out. — Baden

My view, for what it's worth, is that murder is never justifiable. Violence takes place in an amoral realm in which survival is the goal on both sides. The will to survive can't be justified and requires no excuse.

Sometime before we descend into bloody apehood, we have a chance to see if there is some better way to do things, or if we're going to need violence, can we at least coordinate it so that it's not doing more harm than good?

But thank you for not calling me a f***wit for expressing that. We had a mod who would have made any sane discussion of the topic impossible.

Could be

Donald Davidson says rationality requires understanding the concept of truth. I don't see how an AI would do that.

I'm trying to find a route to something rather coldly philosophical.) — Baden

Are you asking when it's appropriate to add violence to your political activism?

The wilderness awaits you, Buck. Flee.

Thanks, I really needed that. It is perfect for this moment in my life. — Athena

I learned that from a guy who was stationed in the Pacific during WW2. Glad to honor Wild Bill. :smile:

Trump is tearing families apart, just as the Civil War tore families apart. — Athena

Though there may be blood and guts and grand purposes all around you, you can just sit and stare at the sky if you want to.

I guess what I'm curious about is what motivates you to look for a moral foundation. Once you have the foundation, then what? What will be different?

The average woke individual wouldn't know how to get a sniper rifle, much less use it. It was either a veteran or a rival rightist.

If one votes he acquiesces to the system, and his own serfdom. — NOS4A2

My coworkers wanted to vote on what food to order, and I was like, I'm not a slave, damn you! They totally got my point.

Not your finest moment there, dude.

God IS ethics. — Constance

Is it?

There are widespread fears that we're heading into dictatorship, so it's normal to think about violent conflict. I think if Malcolm X's threat had become reality it would have been devastating.

I think all we can do is give a thought to the grief that guy's family must be going through and carry on.

Yeah, but you first have say what God is before you say you don't believe in it. It is a slippery term. — Constance

I could talk about what it means all day. Probably be off topic though, wouldn't it?

We should arm conservatives so they can defend themselves.

Put God and all that tradition aside — Constance

Ok. I say you forgive by the grace of God because I don't know any other way to explain it. You can't do it by your own power. I don't believe in God.

Could you offer a brief response in three or four sentences, even if it only gestures toward your own perspective? — Tom Storm

Or take a blow gun and shoot less than three darts in the general direction of what you think?

In fact, forgiveness presupposes judgement — Count Timothy von Icarus

Obviously. Judgment is the foundation of action. To understand, judgment must be suspended, but the need to act is always there. Judgment and understanding go hand in hand.

Wouldn't the very idea that the one can understand best when suspending all evaluative judgements itself presuppose that the truth of human activity and happiness doesn't need to be understood in terms of values and ends? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I don't think so. "Let him who is without sin among you cast the first stone." Compassion comes from suspending judgment long enough to truly see the sinner: to see that it's someone just like you. Jesus was a moral nihilist. The people who can't see that are the ones who need to throw the stone. They lust to see the sinner in pain. These people are locked in a cycle that Jesus encouraged people to find their way out of. The way out is through forgiveness. You do it by the grace of God.

I take it that looking through an amoral lens is exactly what necessitates a foundational morality. — Constance

How so?

But that is not the claim here. Good and evil, these are just analytic terms that emerge out of what is there in the giveness of the world. Put plainly, ouches and yums actually exist, but they're not things "at hand". — Constance

It sounds like you're coming close to saying good is pleasure and evil is pain. You could build a moral system from that. The quest to discover what ethics really is would be completed?

I think there are advantages to occasionally looking at the world through an amoral lens. Judgment and understanding stand in opposition. The more you judge something or someone, the less you understand, because once the judgement is made (that was evil!), there's no reason to look further. Understanding requires putting judgment on the shelf. For instance, if you think about the most aggressive, toxic person in your life, consider that angry, aggressive people usually feel weak and afraid. People who try to manipulate others feel like they have no control. People are contradictory. People who are in pain sometimes lash out to cause others pain. Plus causing pain can be a form of self medication because it feels good to stomp downward. It makes you feel powerful, and a dopamine burst is apt to accompany it, producing a feeling of accomplishment. In other words, the question ethics doesn't spend much time on is: why does the abuse exist? Step away from ethics into nihilism, and you can see how so many people are trapped in a web of grief and rage, most born into that web. Instead of lamenting it, see the way this web shapes identities and grand dramas that play out over generations.

Remember the Shakespeare play where everything started off great, everything went well, and then there was a happy ending? There was no such play because it would have put the audience to sleep. The mind seeks out the painful because it's dramatic. The story arc requires pain in order to have something to overcome. Consciousness itself is a story arc. This is Schopenhauer's pessimism.

I'm sure that's true, but the control he presently has isn't so much his doing. People flocked to him with lists of supporters to plant in government jobs, like project 2025? You think I'm overthinking it?

But that pain in my kidney cannot be second guessed — Constance

Sure, but is it good or evil? Or neither? It's the intellect's job to answer that. You can't go wrong spending a little time with analytic philosophy, especially if your mind has a tendency to take flight like a bird. AP is slow and humble.

The whole thing is political theater. — Relativist

I agree. I'm just trying to see the point. Trump says crime is out of control in DC when the statistics say the opposite. He then sends in the National Guard. Whether this is the point or not, it gets people used to the idea that a military body is rightly used for domestic issues.

What do you think the goal is?

Streams are discrete, meaning that they aren't all experiencing one another at the same time. They have a subjective point of view, hence they have an identity. At one point I was an atom, experiencing the world as an atom, and then I was merged with other atoms to form a nervous system. — Dogbert

Sounds like you have boundary issues. :smile:

There are possible worlds where my stream of consciousness remained at the level of commonplace matter. — Dogbert

What unique properties do you have such that it makes sense to distinguish you from the rest of the universe? In other words, what makes it your stream of consciousness?

Being human is an essential property of you. There aren't any possible worlds in which you're something else, so you had a 100% chance of being human.

I don't see it. Put plainly, when you have an ethical issue, the ground for this takes one away from structure and into the value dimension of the world. The prima facie prohibition against stealing something dear to you is the fact that it is dear, and this dearness is not a structure of anything, Saying what it IS has a structure, but the bare phenomenality has none of this; and yet, if this phenomenality were to be absent, the ethicality would be absent as well. Thus, what it means for something to be ethical defers to the manifestation of what is important, and importance here is a nonformal (non structural) actuality. Ethics has its determinative ground here. — Constance

I think dearness as a concept only exists relative to its opposite: worthlessness. I've already talked about some of the ethical structures we've inherited: progress, health, and covenant-based. It's clear to me that structure is primary, so I guess we'll agree to disagree here.

See the issue: ask me what a dog or a cat or an interstellar mass IS, and language is forthcoming; and ask what this explanatory language IS, and more language is forthcoming; and this circularity has no end. But what of the "presence" of what is there? This is "apprehended" IN language, yet stands entirely apart from it. — Constance

And yet what you've said here is a manifestation of the structure of human thought: that a signifier implies something signified. You're giving voice to structure. Is it the structure of the mind? Is it the structure of the world? Is it both? You don't have any vantage point from which to answer that. Whereof one cannot speak..

To establish what ethics IS, we do not look to good this and that, for this begs the foundational question: what is the nature of something being good...at all? This is the determinate question amid the prevailing indeterminacy of purposes and uses in which the good is embedded. — Constance

You want an answer as to what goodness is beyond the uses the word is put to. That's why you're ending up needing a transcendental basis. I think you're begging the question.

Not structuralism. — Constance

Why not structuralism? It's a candidate for answering what ethics is.

his is a hard question. To say what happiness is IN a context of relations, uses and purposes is one things, but then, what about "out" of these contextual indices? — Constance

The ancient Persian answer is that goodness is the direction we're reaching out toward. Evil is what we're pushing away from, so a good person is in motion, or progressing. In this view, it doesn't matter what your present condition is, if you're progressing, you're good. If you're stationary, you're evil.

The ancient Jewish answer is that goodness is clear for all to see in your health and well-being because obviously God is blessing you. A similar outlook is Roman stoicism, which aligns goodness with Nature. It's in a tree's nature to grow toward the light, if it fails to do this, it becomes sick. Sickness and evil are basically the same thing: a failure to abide by your nature. I like the the Roman view because it's efficient.

If you notice, both these views allow flexibility in what actually counts as good. We may discover through experience what really constitutes progress or health. On the other hand, they conflict in whether goodness shows up on the surface, or if it can be hidden. Our present worldview is a fusion of ancient views.

And he keeps trying to use the military for domestic crime issues. I wonder if that will feel normal in 2028.

We basically won't have a CDC in 2028. Aaaaaaaah!

I agree, excluding the occasional nuclear war. — MoK

People absolutely have to provoke one another to see if nuclear warheads will show up. They can't just sit there and act like they have some sense.

I'm not confident that I will be dead before things spiral out of control, and I'm an old man. — BC

Have you ever known a time when things weren't on the verge of spiralling out of control?

I think the US will contract into a Western Hemisphere alliance (including Greenland) and leave the rest of the world to themselves except for the occasional nuclear war.

We are in dire need of good leaders in this "West". I see danger all over and escalating. Let's hope it doesn't spiral out of control. — Manuel

It will eventually, but probably not in our lifetime.

I don't see why we should believe that discourse of the "West" (whatever that means) can no longer be given. — Manuel

I think the conventional wisdom among political scientists is that the US is in decline, so therefore China will continue to grow out of regional power status into super power status.

As for liberalism, everybody is capitalist. Everybody has fairly centralized authority. So the scene will be primitive social dominance, gorillas in the jungle.