You can judge someones is in pain without them telling you. — Andrew4Handel

Most of the time, can't you tell if someone is really loving or hating a song, film, painting, or some particular food etc. without them telling you?

I don't think pain is simply an opinion. — Andrew4Handel

"Subjective" refers to it being a mental state. You're not arguing that pain is something other than a mental state, are you?

And there are different contexts under which force can be defined, physical, psychological et — Baden

Psychological force is the same thing as physical force. Mentality is physical.

At any rate, aside from the fact that I was asking you about decisions, you could just explain whatever you believe you need to explain in your answer.

Any value assessments are subjective.

Someone else's suffering is a way they feel about their situation, their experiences.

I don't think that the amount of people that die in a famine or war is subjective. — Andrew4Handel

Weren't we talking about value assessments of facts such as that, including compared to other things? We're not just naming the facts, right?

This seems to be a subjective assessment. — Andrew4Handel

Of course. It can't be anything else.

Anyway, a few examples of positives that I'd not say are not "because of something negative," these are things that I experienced just today:

My wife and I enjoyed breakfast together and enjoyed a movie together while we ate breakfast.

People held the door for others at a store I went to and helped a woman out of the door with her baby stroller.

People were courteous to me and others biking (I was biking), walking, jogging as we all went about our activities, plenty of people smiling and greeting each other, accommodating each other to make travel safe and easy (including vehicular traffic in some areas), etc.

People were helpful re taking pictures of tourists. (I'm in an area with lots of tourists).

So first, do you understand that decisions are not forced?

his only alternative is to demand I agree with his bare assertion, — Baden

I just explained that I was asking you a question. You just answer it honestly.

But you're not being honest here either. That's a regular issue with you; a lack of honesty.

As you can see folks, Terrapin has nothing to teach. — Baden

Rather, you have no interest in learning anything. You're only interested in arguing and being right.

On my negative side I would place the arms industry, poverty and inequality, greed and overpopulation. I would also include historical destructive behaviour like wars and slavery. — Andrew4Handel

I don't just blanketly consider the arms industry or greed negative. Inequality I think is unavoidable and not negative. I wouldn't say the world is overpopulated, either. Re poverty, the problem is simply when people don't have housing, food, etc.

Re positive stuff, there are countless little things that hundreds of millions of people do every day that are positive. That's what most of the world is like most of the time.

You want to try to force me to agree with you even before the lesson begins? — Baden

Either you understand it or you do not. You just answer honestly, and then we go from there.

So first, do you understand that decisions are not forced?

I'm not going to do word play with you. Of you really have something to 'teach', lay out the process of decision making and provide empirical evidence for it. — Baden

If I'm teaching you, you don't get to make demands. You follow the teacher.

Okay, first, do you understand that decisions are not forced?

Ok, Yoda, teach me about what causes decisions to be made. — Baden

Decisions are not forced. They wouldn't be decisions if they were.

Everyone does not have to act badly all the time to give a negative assessment of humans or the human condition. I consider World War two and the Holocaust a huge black mark against humanity that cannot be lessened by acts of kindness. It is hard to find acts of helpful behaviour equivalent to the harmful and destructive behaviour. — Andrew4Handel

Not everything everyone does is great, of course, but I think good things far outweigh bad things.

That’s the mindset at work here, isn’t it? Their actions are determined by prior states of the world and not self-generated. — NOS4A2

Yes, apparently Isaac is a determinist, though for some reason he doesn't seem to want to be very straightforward about that.

At any rate, so what's P for the supposed contradiction?

Yes, you're the only one here who understands philosophy. And who isn't conceited. — Baden

Maybe try learning something for once?

Anyway, carry on as if anyone is falling for any of this. — Baden

I'm not of any delusions that anyone is really understanding what I'm typing, unfortunately, but this is the best I can get--a bunch of really conceited people who work as computer techs, etc. and who don't really understand philosophy very well.

Your "explanation" a) contradicts the above — Baden

What's P in this case (where I'm stating P & ~P)?

Glad you finally got around to admitting you were wrong. — Baden

I already explained that it wasn't at all ontologically necessary for you to write your posts for me to write mine. Didn't you read the explanation?

You don't seem to realize that you'd be claiming that it's ontologically impossible for me to have written my posts the way I did without you writing yours. (Not to mention that you'd be claiming that your posts forced me to write mine as I did (at least as one part of a causal chain, which I shouldn't have to clarify).)

Buy the way, if you're a Laplacean determinist, why wouldn't you be claiming that the subsequent actions are physically forced?

As to it being a physical force, everything that happens in the brain is physical — Isaac

When we're talking about electrons interacting, even, I don't buy that determinism is always involved in the phenomena. We can have a vacuum, with two particles, A and B, where B can be in more than one subsequent state after interacting with A. I already explained this. You must just buy classical Laplacean determinism on faith, despite the fact that it hasn't been standard in the sciences for about 150 years.

In addition, I mentioned multiple times that I'm not a realist on physical laws. I'm a nominalist. I don't buy that there are ANY real abstracts, including physical laws per se.

So why do you keep presenting the fact that speech does not exhaustively and consistently cause certain behaviours as if it were an argument. — Isaac

Speech doesn't force the behavior in question. You just agreed to that. No one is arguing about whether speech alone forces the behavior in question. It's not part of any set of phenomena that FORCE the actions in question.

Well then you've confused necessary and sufficient causes. — Isaac

I'm not confusing anything. I'm telling you how I'm using the word "cause."

Nowhere did I say anything at all resembling "a cause has to be a single thing."

But a cause has to involve force. If causes are multiple things, then it's multiple things forcing something to happen. That can happen two ways, plus a combo way: (1) as a temporal causal chain: A forces B which forces C which forces D. (2) Multiple things, A, B and C,simultaneously force D, or (3) there's a combo of a temporal chain (1) with multiple causes (2) at at least some steps of the chain.

No matter what we're talking about, causality still involves FORCE. A necessary cause of D means that D can't happen unless some particular antecedent, B, for example happens. B is a necessary cause of D in that case. That has to involve force of course. A sufficient cause of D means that B alone, for example, can make D happen, though other causes can be involved, too--those other causes need not be necessary, but if B is necessary, D can't happen if B doesn't happen, otherwise B isn't a necessary cause. Sufficient causes can never exclude necessary causes (as otherwise the cause in question wouldn't be necessary; it would be possible for D to obtain with it).

Sufficient causes that aren't necessary can be the case if, say, either A or B can cause D just as well. Then A or B would be sufficient, but not necessary, for D. (So that if A causes D, B wasn't necessary, and if B caused D, A wasn't necessary.)

Regardless, all causes have to involve FORCE, or we're not talking about causes, per how I'm using the term. Also, A isn't a cause of D unless A was part of at least some chain of events that resulted in D forcibly happening, where each step of the chain with A in the antecedent grouping involved forcible occurrences.

Sticking dogmatically to arbitrary ideologies regardless of the harm they may cause — Isaac

When A doesn't force B, where B is what we have a problem with, where B is the harm we're concerned with, then A didn't cause B. That's just the point. In that case it's ontologically incorrect to say that A caused B. So it's flawed to talk about A causing some harm, B, in that case.

Your awareness of an idea is as irrelevant to its life, as it is to my own. — Shamshir

Why would you figure that there are ideas no one is aware of?

No one throughout this entire discussion has used the word 'forced' nor any term like it to describe the effect speech acts have on others, — Isaac

Okay, but (a) that's what I'm referring to by "cause"--if we're not talking about force, we're not talking about causes in my view, and (b) that's the only thing that I think is morally/legally problematic. If you're not forcing someone to do something, it's their choice to do whatever it is. I wouldn't make ANY influence, manipulation, etc. illegal, period.

It should have been more than clear that that's the only sense of "cause" that I use, by the way.

So his speech forces them to talk about what they do?

ut I’ll state that you will gladly think of a blue elephant if someone told you to. — NOS4A2

If you're focused on what they're saying, you're in a compliant mood, etc., sure. It doesn't force you to think of a blue elephant of course.

What would you count as evidence for and against misanthropy? — Andrew4Handel

The only thing I'd count as evidence for misanthropy is someone expressing dislike, contempt, or hatred for humankind in general.

Maybe you mean "justification for misanthropy"? Maybe if everyone acted like a complete asshole all the time. But they don't, thankfully.

I don't think you need confirmation of that from Brian, either, unless you have no knowledge of physiology. ;-)

What about ideas that do not possess electrochemical properties?
What about ideas: not felt, not imagined, not pondered, not spoken, not heard; lone, floating somewhere, somehow? — Shamshir

Huh? There are no such things. Brain states have electrochemical properties. Ideas are something people are aware of insofar as they occur. They're not "floating alone somewhere."

Are you ever going to answer what I was asking you in the hate speech thread, by the way?

So the same as attributes of brain states. They're organic, they have electrochemical properties, etc. Which should have been obvious by noting that they're subsets of brain states.

They're subsets of brain states.

based on the idea of benefit vs harm, i.e. flourishing vs languishing. — Janus

I wouldn't say that "benefit" is the same thing as "flourishing."

A benefit of x is anything that S (some subject) desires that's provided by or that's an upshot of x.

Flourishing has a connotation of a sustained desired state.

Things that S considers a benefit might not actually be things that would lead to a sustained desired stste for S. S might even desire things that would be harmful in S's view if sustained.

Infinity is an idea, not a physical thing. Just like seven is an idea, not a physical thing — Pattern-chaser

Of course I'd counter that ideas are physical things.

So you don't believe that teaching a dog to raise its paw in response to "Sieg Heil" is at all correlated with violence.

That's a bit of a relief, I suppose.

Because both those expressions make it more likely that people will think violent actions against those groups or in favour of those causes are acceptable than would be the case had they not been said/done. — Isaac

C'mon. That couldn't be more ridiculous. I thought you were at least talking about explicit exhortations to commit violence. You can't possibly believe that teaching a dog to raise its paw in response to "Sieg Heil" is at all correlated with violence.