(Oh, and feel free to punch him if you think that will help). — Baden

Bring it on whipper-snappers.

Let me allay your fears. I am not retiring, and I remain an incredible physical specimen, being able to run hundreds of miles, lift thousands of pounds of weight, and perform sexually for hours (sometimes even with someone else in the room).

As you have correctly assumed, I did in fact start a soup kitchen specifically for cancer victims, having the belief that there is no better cure for one's ills than humility, thus forcing a limited meal of cheese sandwiches and watery vegetable soup on those with cancer. I feel that should my prescription of humility be ineffective, I will at least have performed a useful experiment for academic purposes, so it all won't be a loss.

Speaking of my age, I am 50. What that means is that I remember before there were cell phones, computers, cable TV, or gay people. It was a different time. There was actually a milk man back then, who would sexually satisfy all the young mothers and then leave them a quart of milk. Milk came in quarts back then, as it should. The bottle was glass, not plastic, like it ought to be. You could let your dog run loose back then, and if it bit someone, it just proved to you that dogs bit sometimes. Like everyone, we had an American car that wouldn't start, just like expected. You could punch your friends in the hallway at school without getting suspended because boys were supposed to punch each other.

I could go on and on, but I'm starting to get sentimental and weepy, so I'll take a break.

I think he's just one of those old school dudes who has problems expressing emotion. — Mongrel

This is much more accurate than you can imagine. I'm really working on it. It can be entertaining and even occasionally endearing, but it's generally limiting.

Alright, enough sharing. Get back to work.

You're most certainly welcome. It is due time such a thread were started. It seems, though, that I have done so much for so many, I often have difficulty remembering what it is that evokes such gratitude, so if you could remind me what generosity you're referencing, it would be much appreciated.

think you've missed a moral dimension. Robert seemed to want to name God as unjust. — TheWillowOfDarkness

But doesn't this just clarify the general objection to his posts: nobody is completely sure what he means.

Simplicitude is French for simplicity. — Bitter Crank

Thank you for the clarification. I am now to understand RL's distinction between simplicity in English and simplicity in French. The latter being more refined I suppose. The harshest and least refined simplicity is Einfachheit I'd think.

Anyway, my old Collins Dictionary offers either 'simplicitude' or 'simplism' - both having the same meaning so hopefully I'm saved from having to fall on my sword! — Robert Lockhart

Nope. Even the online Collins dictionary indicates "simpicitude" isn't a word. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/spellcheck/english?q=simplicitude

I'll weigh in here as a third moderator. I can tell you that none of this has been discussed beforehand and we're not all so cozy with one another that we just line up behind one another and support one another's decisions.

Your problem isn't grammar. It's coherence. Your problem isn't form. It's substance. You make no sense. The irony is that you claim the confusion all forms around our inability to distinguish between "simplicity" and "simplicitude." Such is ironic because the latter appears to be a word you made up. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/simplicitude

Western culture is what you miss when you're far from home.

Typically I like to remain behind the scenes and allow others to have the limelight, but my efforts were so obvious and heroic in this instance that I'd lose credibility if I didn't fully accept credit for this.

If I provided everyone with a picture, gave them 2 minutes to look at it, and then asked questions about what appeared on the picture, I'd assume the majority would get only a small percentage of the items correct, and, the more specific the question, the lower the score. What I'd do is try to remember a list of things from the picture in the hopes that is what would be asked on the test. There might be a very very small number who could actually take a mental picture and then refer back to it then answer questions about it.

There is some controversy about true photographic memory, with some saying it exists only in a small percentage of children (not adults) and some say it doesn't exist at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory.

That is to say, I don't think there's anything at all unusual about those who say they have limited visualization skills because that's the norm. I still contend, though, that the question of whether qualia exist is not addressed by this issue, but, more specifically, it addresses only the question of what is the nature of qualia. It would seem we're all admitting that qualia exists, but we're now asking how it varies from person to person.

Once at trial, I called a witness who had suffered severe seizures throughout his life and he was clearly suffering from brain damage. When asked to recollect the automobile accident, he would close his eyes and start reporting slowly what he remembered. It was sort of like he was telling us what he saw in a movie in his head.

So yeah, there are all sorts of ways people visualize, and I'd imagine he sees every zebra stripe.

I saw some show on a guy who perform complex math in his head, and he insisted that he did it by visualizing complex shapes and manipulating them. He proved it by using clay and showing what those shapes looked like with consistency.

Interesting stuff.

These differences may be at the heart of the misunderstandings surrounding the existence of, or how to interpret, certain sorts of intuitive evidence. — The Great Whatever

Then aphantasia is not being used to address the p-zombie debate contrary to the name of this thread, but is only being cited as evidence of the significance of variation among philosophers?

This is really an over-read of what is occurring. Aphantasiacs most certainly can experience things. — Hanover

Well, I never said they couldn't, so I'm not sure of the relevance. — The Great Whatever

This was the comment I was referring to:

What is so absurd that we might find out that there's a large divide between people, some of whom can experience and some of whom can't? — The Great Whatever

If all you're saying is that there are great variations in phenomenological experience, I do think that's an interesting scientific fact, but I don't know how it matters to this philosophical question any more than the well accepted fact that there are great variations in how well different people's perceptions work as well as their intellect in deciphering the meaning of their experiences.

Would you expect someone with no experiential states to behave overtly the same as those that have them? — Michael

I wouldn't expect them to behave the same, and in practice, no computer can make it past a few minutes under a Turing Test. If you're asking hypothetically whether they could behave the same, which is to ask whether there could be a computer that so mimicked human overt behavior that it was indistinguishable from a human with internal experience, I don't see why not. That is just to posit a p-zombie.

If not, is that because experiential states are the only things that can cause such behaviour or because experiential states necessarily emerge from the only things that can cause such behaviour (e.g. particular brain activity)? — Michael

Since I answered in the affirmative, this question is inapplicable. However, hypothetically, had I answered as you'd have assumed I would, my response would be to agree with you. If certain overt behaviors are necessarily linked to certain internal states, then obviously they are dependent upon one another.

Of course, this question only really matters if your claim that "there's a world of difference between having limited internal experience and entirely lacking the ability to experience" refers to a world of behavioural differences. — Michael

But that seems such a straw man. Why would anyone suggest that overt behavioral differences are critical when assessing the significance of internal states? It would suggest that a quadriplegic with no muscle control whatsoever, but who has fully intact mental function is no different than a dead man. That I cannot act on my thoughts does not makes my thoughts not matter.

I don't know if I followed all of your questions. The questions all seem to relate to mind/body interaction. I would expect that two people with very different experiential states could behave overtly the same. A group of synchronized swimmers might be all thinking different things as they carried out their stupidity.

As we get better at sussing out phenomenological differences, more of them may become part of common knowledge. What is so absurd that we might find out that there's a large divide between people, some of whom can experience and some of whom can't? — The Great Whatever

This is really an over-read of what is occurring. Aphantasiacs most certainly can experience things. They just don't experience them in a visual way. I would say that the vast majority of my experience is non visual. It's not like I read these posts and have anything really concrete in my mind in terms of sensation (like sounds, pictures, etc.). Most of our experience is not represented that way. Nevertheless it's an experience. If you told me a cat walked down the street, I could visualize in my head an actual cat walking down a street, but I probably wouldn't if you just told me that. There's be no reason to. Sometimes when someone is telling a story, they may ask you to actually imagine the events happening, but that's not necessary to relay the story.

Sure, it's an interesting fact that some can't visualize, but I don't see this implying that we have real life p-zombies walking around. It just means that experience is holistic, with all sorts of feelings, understandings and whatever wrapped up into that very experience. No one has ever suggested an experience is just a clump of pictures and sounds swirling in your head and that without that clump, you'd have no experience.

I'm unimpressed by this example. There's a world of difference between having limited internal experience and entirely lacking the ability to experience. There are also plenty of people who can't internally visualize. They are called blind people.

Women can compete with men in chess, but there are entirely different tournaments for women as well, as well as woman's champions, and a separate system for determining women's grandmasters than there is for men. The purpose is to foster competition, and it has nothing to do with fairness.

For those familiar with chess and who have competed at the amateur level would know, you receive an Elo rating that pretty accurately provides your playing strength, and you can choose to compete in a section of those with similar ratings. That way, every one who enters a section has a reasonable chance to win, as opposed to signing up and just waiting to lose to the dominant player in the room every time.

This really isn't that different from what happens in many sports, although the rating system isn't as mathematical as the Elo system. They create gender, weight, and age classifications, and in some sports actual earned levels (like different color belts). A newbie wouldn't compete against a black belt and a 60 year old wouldn't compete against an 18 year old.

The purpose of the classifications isn't based on fairness as much as creating meaningful competition. There's nothing inherently unfair about me winning a medal in a 5k road race in the 50-55 group when my time wouldn't have been in the top 10 in the 20-25 group.

We should dispense with the formality of trying to make rules and move right to the business of insulting one another.

Fucking shush! To speak of them speaks of someone else.

They're inanimate objects, with no concerns at all. — Wosret

The hyper-modern post figurative school would see only two pieces of juxtaposed steel on a street imposing a barrier to pedestrians and mentally noted that oddity. This school is notorious for its silence, as it shuns the use of symbols or sounds as an inappropriate figurative representation of reality. To write about it is to write about something else.

Neither by connotation or denotation, only by location. — Cavacava

You can spit you some rhyme.

I took it to mean that women, due to their inherent irrationality and childishishness stand in the way of a healthy bullish market and should therefore be re- relegated to the kitchen. I was terribly offended by it. You seeing it as a liberal gesture is odd.

If symbolism is art, then all speech is art.

You're a Nazi. I'll take that back if you take back calling me a white supremacist.

The intrinsic beauty of all art is held in its ultimate irrelevance. Carry on.

If presentism were right, then mental events in the past time did not exist. — quine

No, your tense is wrong. Do, not did. What I did yesterday existed, it impacted the present, but it no longer exists. The effects are still felt.

Presentism will delete your every experience occurred in the past. — quine

If I walk across the room and sit in a chair, I'm in the chair because (i.e. due to the cause of) of walking across the room, but I'm not still walking across the room and in the chair at the same time. That's presentism and it's super smart, not stupid.

And then a picture of his profession-rattling book (which came out of his PhD dissertation): — Bitter Crank

I read up on this cite on Wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tearoom_Trade), and it seems it rattled the profession not because of the focus of the study (homosexuality in restrooms), but because of the unethical way the research was conducted (concealment and misrepresentation of the author's true identity to interviewees, revealing interviewees' identity, and failure to secure consent from interviewees to participate in the study).

Maybe this book offered comfort to those who participated in such conduct by explaining the necessity and normalcy of having sex in bathrooms during the 1970s, an era still generally oppressive to homosexuality, but, with the other controversy miring the book, it'd be hard to laud Laud a hero.

There are some things worse than death, such as torture, and Jefferson regarded life in the prisons of the time to be of the same order. Which it was. — ernestm

This is wrong. Jefferson actually wrote the Virginia law regarding the proportionality of punishment, holding that the highest form of punishment was death. http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendVIIIs10.html.

Long term prisons did not become common until after the Revolution, and typical Colonial punishments (as noted in the law cited above) included forced labor and the like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_prison_systems#Colonial_criminal_punishments.2C_jails.2C_and_workhouses

That is to say, Jefferson was progressive in the sense that he wanted punishment to be proportionate to the crime, but he did not hold the untenable view that death ought to be provided to inmates as a form of euthanasia because prison was worse than death. He also did not condemn prisons to the extent you say, largely because they didn't exist in the US until 1790 when the first was built in Pennsylvania (as noted in the Wiki article cited above). Jails at that time were largely only used to house inmates awaiting trial.

More importantly, none of this is compatible with anything you previously said, which is that natural rights proscribes deprivation of life or liberty in all instances. That is the part of natural law you simply cannot comprehend, which is that people can be deprived rights (including the right to live) if they have done something to earn it.

Isn't this like asking what "set" means in the general, not in the particular, and being unable to offer the same meaning for "set" in the examples of:

1. Andy Murray won every set
2. He set the table
3. The set of all odd numbers has the same cardinality as the set of all even numbers
4. The Sun set at 8:00pm. — Michael

Your example offers 4 entirely different uses of the term "set," where there's clearly a similarity in the way I used "truth." In each instance, I used "truth" to reference the accuracy of the statement, although the accuracy of each statement was measured differently in each statement, or, as Banno pointed out, it was the justification that varied.

Speaking of dignity, are we. Good bye again, this time for good. — ernestm

You're a fraud, and I don't mean that as an ad hom. I mean that you pontificate about so many subjects, but you aren't able at all to really respond to any real question about what you're talking about. You therefore create the initial appearance that you have something to say, but in short order it becomes clear that you can't do anything but cut and paste, and most often just citing yourself. You even resort to name calling when really called down on something. I think I was referred to as an Assad like baby killer or some other stupidity.

I've gone so far as to enumerate questions and ask for enumerated responses from you just so I could avoid your spilling thousands of words onto the screen, but that didn't happen. Now you've excommunicated me, but I think anyone who might have read my post that motivated your conduct would be a little confused as to why. For that reason, I've written this post to clarify why. It's because you're a fraud.

Is it the case that I have an obligation to act towards X in a certain way solely because X has a "right" to be treated in a certain way? That would require quite a multiplicity of rights. Perhaps I should act in a moral way for reasons which don't require that I assume the existence of rights which cannot be infringed. — Ciceronianus the White

I have a right to be treated with dignity and you have a duty to treat me that way.

And we can make it more clear than that. If you kidnap me and hold me against my will, you have violated my right to live freely. Such would be the case regardless of what the law is.

I think I do have a right to be treated with dignity though, and I'd hold that regardless of whether the government agrees or whether the government affords me redress. It's for that reason it's a quibble, even if there are instances where right and ought vary.

Instead of moderating this thread, maybe respond to the fact that you pontificated on Jefferson's opposition to the death penalty despite the fact that he explicitly stated he was in favor of it, and, if you get a chance, explain why abortion is permissible pre-viability, despite there being no way to infer the viability criteria from natural rights theory.

You say that because you insist that there is no other way to define natural rights other than the way Locke did, which isn't directly related to this post either, considering your question was who was the smartestest, Hamilton or Jefferson.

As I recall, our conversation left off with your explaining that the death penalty was inconsistent with the natural rights expounded by Jefferson and Locke, despite them saying otherwise, thus making you more an expert in Locke and Jefferson than Locke or Jefferson.

You hold the distinction of being one of the few people I've met here who actually fail the Turing Test from time to time, simply reciting text in response to various questions and then reciting insults when called out on your inability to respond to questions.

I think it's more appropriate to say we should or should not treat another person a certain way, rather than he/she has a "right" to be treated or not treated in a certain way. — Ciceronianus the White

That's a quibble really. I think it makes perfect sense to say "I have a right to be treated with dignity" as much as it is to say "You should treat me with dignity." I also think that enforcement can take on many forms, from legal enforcement, to military action, to negative feedback, to ostracism. If you treat your wife, for example, in a manner unacceptable to her, she has a whole slew of methods to enforce the way she think she has a right to be treated.

There is no quandary presented, though, unless you think it necessary that the creator or governor of the immense universe thinks, or has somehow mandated, we creatures living here have certain "rights" or has granted us such, in order for there to be moral conduct. — Ciceronianus the White

If it isn't a quandary, what right do the women in Saudi Arabia (for example) have to be treated equal to men? A. there is no enforcement mechanism, and B. there is no higher good demanding such equality.

Please don't deprive Baden, he spoke impetuously. For me, just give him one more chance to drink of your wisdom.

I know. It's a mystery how something so incoherent can be a centerpiece to a belief system.

As has been mentioned, in Christianity, the Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) is considered to be one being with three different 'faces'. As you said about Mormonism, some denominations of Christianity choose to interpret the Trinity as three separate beings. — Javants

This strikes me as a very non- Mormon comment. I'd expect their response to be that you've chosen to misinterpret the meaning of the trinity.

Could the same not be true about polytheistic religions, without being explicitly stated? In other words, all the Gods of that pantheon are, in fact, just the different personalities of the same God, which are being perceived as different beings. — Javants

I suppose you could say that if you were hell bent on modifying other people's beliefs to make them compatible to your own.

Those cultures which are not monotheist don't believe in God, do they? — Metaphysician Undercover

Funny you should ask this during Passover, which celebrates the Jew's exodus from Egypt. So the story goes, the Jews were held in slavery by the oppressive pharaoh and not until God exacted 10 plagues of increasing severity did Pharaoh relent and release the Jews. The whole story can be found at Exodus chapters 7 to 11. Read it carefully. The purpose of God's (the Hebrew God) plagues was not to prove there was only one god, but to prove he was the most powerful god of them all. That is, his plagues showed his supremacy over the Egyptian gods. This makes clear that these ancient Hebrews were not entirely monotheistic, but were actually just of the opinion they had the best of all gods. It also shows that the Egyptians also believed in God, despite having their own inferior god. To be sure, though, their belief was more empirical than faith based, considering they experienced the plagues first hand.

Another example is Mormonism, although I claim no scholarship there. My understanding is they treat the trinity as three separate entities, thus causing some to claim they are a polytheistic religion. It's less important whether they are ultimately polytheistic than whether one can hypothetically believe in God and be polytheistic. It seems one could, especially if one held that the father, the son, and the holy ghost were 3 different things. I do know that Mormons find the concept of the trinity as set forth in Catholicism and most of Protestantism to be incoherent nonsense.