So, the part I agree with you about is that describing consciousness from a third-person, scientific perspective--maybe some sort of physico-chemico-biological perspective, is never going to be as useful for most purposes as more abstract, "folk"/psychological terms about experiences, desires, concepts, etc.

For similar reasons, describing music, or visual art, or anything like that from a physico-chemical perspective is never going to be as useful as the "folk" terms we commonly use for that stuff, either.

No one is under the illusion that music or visual art isn't physical/material stuff. It's just that talking about it in those terms isn't nearly as useful for most purposes as talking about it with the more abstract "folk" terms.

Physical descriptions don't actually hinge on talking about sensory experiences. A lot of stuff in physics, for example, isn't something you could sense. For example, you can't sense a neutrino. You can't even sense meteorological pressure systems really. We just sense things like temperature differences, humidity, wind, etc.

And I don't agree with "as an experience in the world consciousness presents to each individual as an immaterial phenomenon." I can't even make sense out of the idea of something "immaterial." So I couldn't say that my consciousness seems immaterial to me.

I can't be the first person you've run into where that doesn't work. It would probably be a good idea to learn how to let that go if it's causing you frustration.

I think it's good to learn how to accept difference.

Well, for me, I almost can't help but want to reason with people in situations like that. I find it hard to move on. That's partly why banning me from the forum would be a good thing. — S

i suppose it's some sort of psychological thing where you figure you can always get folks to come around to your thinking if you just try hard enough?

They end in failure because they start with the charitable assumption that the other person can be reasoned with, but fail because the other person can't be. — S

When that's one's assessment, why wouldn't one simply move on and not bother with the person in question? Wouldn't that be a simple solution that wouldn't cause one so much apparent strife?

Well, it's always going to be at least partially a matter of how people semantically interpret what's said, and people have some degree of control over that. The control of it isn't necessarily easy, but it's possible. For example, if you don't want to be offended, or if you don't want to see other people with different personalities, different behavior than your ideal to be a problem that torments you, there are ways to parse things so that you don't have to be offended, you don't have to see difference as a problem.

Re the quotations, by the way, so then the answer is no, no one has suggested the complex/compound versus simple/atomic categorization you're suggesting? (Because the quotes you pasted sure don't suggest anything like that)

What, the measurement? I've never seen one. All that's in the world outside of mind is (if anything at all) a sea of heterogeneous stuff. All objects, measurements, laws, and concepts are constructions of the human mind. — Isaac

So when you use a device like this:


(And here's some info about it, including links to how it works)
http://www.johnsonlevel.com/News/LaserDistanceMeasure55

You think that device is just in your mind? Or the readings on the display are just in your mind?

Or are you now devolving to conflating concepts, terms, etc. with what they're about?

Yes, hence my reluctance to go back over the several thousand experimental results firming the history of psychological research in order to demonstrate that this has already been considered. — Isaac

First off, there's been absolutely nothing to even suggest that anyone is forwarding a categorization of complex/compound versus simple/atomic moral stances. Has any of the research you're appealing to forwarded that?

Where is it then? — Isaac

The world outside of minds, obviously.

We can't make objective measurements. — Isaac

The measurement isn't in your mind.

Also, you're missing the whole point, which is that when you have recalcitrant data, you don't just insist that the data has to be wrong. You have to consider the possibility that other things have gone wrong, including the theory.

This is the whole point to Duhem-Quine--that falsificationism often doesn't work well in practice, because people have a tendency to excuse away recalcitrant data, because they want to hold on to their theories.

So you have to figure out what's going on when you come across recalcitrant data. The issue when you're studying something subjective is that you have to rely on reports from the subject in question. It's not as if we can just observationally check it directly.

How is "I measured the earth and found it to be flat" not a subjective report? — Isaac

That might be, but we don't go by subjective reports for this. We make objective measurements.

We can't do that when what we're studying is subjective phenomena. Again, this is the whole point of noting that the only way to link third-person observational stuff like brain imaging to mental phenomena is via first-person reports from the subjects in question.

OK, so how do we go about holding any theory at all by that standard? We have a theory that the earth is round but Bill says he measured it and it came out flat. Do we have to re-think our theory, or just dismiss Bill's results as probably an error? — Isaac

"The earth is round" isn't about individual's subjective experiences. It's about the objective shape of the Earth.

"S has mental content M" is about subjective experiences. There's no way for anyone to observe the subjective experience per se aside from the subject reporting it to someone else.

Recalcitrant data for the Earth being round is a different objective measurement. Not someone's subjective report.

There can be recalcitrant objective data. I just mentioned this above re why we posit "dark matter."

yet, is it not true that death instantiates the import of the framing condition in a self-referential manner to set the proposition as sensible? — Wallows

I don't understand that clause, starting with not being able to figure out what "instantiating the import(ance) . . . " might amount to.

We can't insist that "there really was a beetle in the box that time, too--it must have just been invisible" — Terrapin Station

By the way, this is unfortunately what we more or less literally have done when it comes to positing something like dark matter. We realize that our equations aren't working for what we're observing, so rather than thinking, "Crap--maybe we've got this theory, these equations wrong for at least some circumstances," we say, "there must be far more matter there, it's just effectively invisible."

In other words, the only way to link third-person observational stuff like brain imaging to mental phenomena is via first-person reports from the subjects in question.

Well, if we do that and we develop a theory linking certain observables with certain mental phenomena, but then we come across a subject who shows the observables in question but who does NOT report the same mental phenomena, that doesn't suggest that the subject is wrong and really has the mental phenomena in question (but just isn't aware of it or some nonsense like that).

It rather suggests that something is off with the mapping or with the theory. What we thought were observables for the mental phenomena in question weren't really--maybe they're correlated in some way, usually, at least, but they're not the same thing as the mental phenomena in question, and there's not always a correlation.

Imagine that we had a bunch of lights that can flash, and then we have (to invoke Wittgenstein a bit) a black box that we can open and check whether there's a beetle inside. We don't know beforehand just how the lights, the box and the beetle are connected. We notice that whenever the lights go off in certain pattern, there's a beetle in the box after we check. But then on one occasion, the lights go off in that pattern and there's no beetle in the box. We can't insist that "there really was a beetle in the box that time, too--it must have just been invisible" or something like that. We have to consider that the lights in that pattern aren't actually a guarantee that there's a beetle in the box. There might be some connection, but it at least wouldn't be the same thing, and there's not necessarily a connection. We'd have to do a lot more research to figure out what's going on.

The problem with the mental version of this is that we can't actually third-person check for the beetle in the box. We have to rely on someone else telling us whether there is. Which not only means that they can tell us that there isn't a beetle in the box when there is (if they're not being honest, for example), but the opposite, too--they can tell us that there's a beetle in the box when there isn't, and that can be exacerbated by priming or pumping them, maybe in ways that aren't obvious.

So, the main thing you'd need to explain to counter this theory, is what the prefrontal cortex is doing when making complex moral choices, if they are just intuited. — Isaac

The problem is rather that:

(a) if S is making what's being classified as a "complex moral choice,"
and
(b) S reports that he's making the choice simply intuitively, with no other (moral) stances behind it
and
(c) the prefrontal cortex shows activity A via imaging during this process

then

What grounds do we have for saying that something additional is going on mentally with respect to (moral) stances, despite S's report?

That would be a classic example of disregarding recalcitrant data in the guise of theory-worshipping.

First, I only have a moral objection to force (when it's nonconsensually applied, and then only with particular criteria).

I don't believe that speech forces any psychological states. And we certainly can't show that it does, even if it were the case that it does.

With something like someone getting offended by something someone says, I think that the person with a problem is the person getting offended (well, at least if they'd rather not be offended). That's what needs to be worked on in that situation. They need to learn to not be offendable--which is possible to do in my view.

I've mentioned this before, and I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it here. I think sometimes that people thinking I'm joking about stuff like that, but I'm not. I'm serious. People who get offended are the problem when that happens, not the person who offended them.

No, my speech doesn't affect your psychological state any ways so it doesn't make you wonder or think in any case. — Benkei

Your speech doesn't force my psychological states.

At any rate, if you don't want to be straightforward about what you think the thought experiment shows, that's fine with me. It would just have the practical implication that it must not be very important to you to talk about it with me in any depth. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, whatever should that be showing? Maybe think about it before replying. — Benkei

Well, or just be straightforward and say what you think it's supposed to be showing.

Here's a thought experiment:

99 persons say punching someone in the face should be allowed.
1 Terrapin Station says it shouldn't.

TS is welcome to his opinion but is punched in the face nevertheless. — Benkei

What is that thought experiment supposed to be showing?

Re relevance, everything is relevant to some things and not relevant to others, depending on the interpretational framing one is doing. That's why I didn't address that part.

We are disagreeing on facts — Benkei

What fact would you say we're disagreeing on?

So your free speech absolutism cannot work because it assumes conditions that don't exist. — Benkei

That's not the case. We're not disagreeing on any facts. We're disagreeing on whether those facts are acceptable.

In other words, I'm fine saying for the sake of argument, "Speech causes psychological harm."

I think that psychological harm is acceptable. You do not.

Right... so numerous neuroscientists and psychologists have established the link between abusive language and behavioural issues with children. — Benkei

So one, I have issues with the methodology of lots of those sorts of claims. We could get into that, but it would be a big, detailed diversion to get into. I think it would be a good diversion to get into, because we'd be digging into some epistemological issues we normally avoid on this board, and that's presumably the sort of thing we'd be doing on a philosophy board, but no one ever wants to bother, and there's a weird tendency here to want to defer to people that one considers experts in various fields. (Meanwhile, we have people here who have the qualifications necessary for "expertise" in philosophy, where that includes concentrations such as philosophy of science and epistemology, but there's no similar deference to them. It turns out to be deference to "experts saying things I agree with/experts saying things I want them to say.")

You are just pretending it doesn't exist by claiming only a specific type of causality exists. — Benkei

So putting aside the epistemological issues for a moment, what I said, and I shouldn't have to repeat this, is that I brought up force because per my dispositions, my intuitive moral feelings, that's the only thing that I find morally objectionable. So if we're not claiming force in those situations, I don't find it morally objectionable, whatever other things, exactly, we're claiming.

It's not as if any particular moral stance follows from any particular set of facts. That's definitely NOT the case. That would be an example of an ought following from an is, but oughts don't follow from "ises."

Offering up such a persuasive definition is just semantics and ignores the work in the field of psychology. — Benkei

I'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything. I'm telling you what my disposition is. You asked me my opinion. That's my opinion. It doesn't have to be your opinion, and I'm not attempting to make it your opinion by persuading you of anything. I'm just reporting to you what I'm like.

Those consequences have been documented and scientifically proved. — Benkei

Science methodology 101: we don't prove empirical claims.

You could be using "prove" in a loose sense--giving what we consider to be evidence for something, but the whole nut behind falsification re a demarcation criterion for science is that any positive claim whatsoever could be wrong, and is thus open to revision in principle.

Your disagreement with facts is noted but can be ignored as inconsequential. — Benkei

Definitely you are not required to care about, be interested in, my opinion. The smart thing to do in that case would be to just not respond to me.

And all those people working in advertisement and speech writers are really not influencing anything. — Benkei

If only that had something to do with whether all thought is linguistic, whether meaning is linguistic, etc.

By the way, I don't know if you saw me mention this, but for some weird reason, I often do not receive notifications for posts you respond to. It happens occasionally with other posters, too, but it seems like more often than not your responses don't show up in my "Mentions 'feed.'" So if sometimes I don't respond to you, that might be why.

At any rate . . . so among other things, we'd have to examine (a) just how they're defining some of those terms, (b) just how they're reaching the empirical conclusions that they're reaching.

It's not clear just from that text that they're claiming something akin to "Moral stances of type x (that is, of a certain complexity and/or specificity) must be based on moral stances of type y (of less complexity/specificity), even if moral stances of type y are unconscious," which is what you were claiming.

Part of examining just how they're defining terms would be looking at whether they'd "define away" someone intuiting moral stance M, where it's not consciously based on any other moral stance, despite being of type x (a certain complexity and/or specificity), as "not being morality" because it's not meeting some requirement or other--such as not being what they'd consider deliberative processes that interact with social environments and cultural exposure. I have no idea if that would be the case without looking at how they're defining "deliberative processes" as well as "deliberative processes that interact with social environments and cultural exposure.

Alternately, if they're claiming that M is based on unconscious moral stances of type y, we'd need to examine just how they're supposedly gaining empirical evidence of there being an unconscious moral stance of type y.

Yeah, not immoral to me.

I'm someone who wants people to express themselves as they feel like expressing themselves, and who thinks that we need to not put too much weight on things that people say/we need to be at least a bit skeptical of things that people say. In expressing themselves, some people might be odd, might enjoy joking around, might have odd senses of humor, etc.

This doesn't imply that I'm going to enjoy every way that people express themselves--as I said earlier, I'm not going to spend a lot of time with people who are regularly "mean," or who regularly complain, who are often negatively judgmental, but I don't feel it's immoral for people to express whatever they want to express, even if it's dishonest, manipulative, etc.--again, be at least a bit skeptical of what people say.

If one thinks in moral terms, and calls someone 'mean' I can't really imagine how that person has not acted from that meanness and thus been immoral in what ever that person's moral system is. It can't just be nasty thoughts. And even something like meanspirited...it seems to me there would be actions. I could imagine saying 'that guy feels mean or hateful or something. But to call someone mean, I think, needs to be coupled to prior acts. — Coben

It could just be speech, for example. I don't consider any speech immoral.

Uhm. Why must it be forced (whatever that means) and why not "caused"? — Benkei

I'd say it must be "caused," but contiguous, etc. physical force is how I'm using the term "cause" there. So I'm substituting "force" for that to make that clear. (There was an issue with that earlier.)

It must be forced because dispositionally/in terms of intuitive feeling, etc. that's the only thing I find morally objectionable. (And again, just a subset of that.)

If you shoot someone, you were applying physical forces to them, for which we can detail the causal (forced) chain. They might not die, of course, but when they do, there's a causal (forced) chain we can trace. (And of course there are causal chains we can trace when they don't die but the shooting causes other sorts of physical damage, too.)

All thought is caused by speech that we learned from others. — Benkei

Not a claim that I agree with in the slightest.

For one, I don't agree that all thought is linguistic, and I don't think that meaning is linguistic, either.

For one, I don't consider any psychological states to be forced by environmental factors such as speech, and I only have an ethical problem with nonconsensual force. (And only a subset of nonconsensual force at that, but there's no need to get into the details of that in this context.)

You don't see an ethical issue with removing any protection children would have against psychological abuse from their parents? — Benkei

Correct.

Good warriors and true have tried the sword of reason to evict the resident Troll from his cave, and, alas, all have failed. :rofl: — Janus

I take trolling to require a lack of sincerity. I don't believe that Bartricks isn't sincere.

Yes, wishful thinking isn't addressing the point. I don't think there's much to talk about if you don't believe protecting children from psychological abuse is more important than parents' rights to abuse their children. — Benkei

I can tell you the laws I'm in favor of, I can tell you what the laws presently are (if you're incapable of looking that up for some reason), I can tell you what other persons' opinions are when I'm aware of them.

I'm not in favor of any laws against "psychological harms" as things are. I don't know how to make that any more plain.

Plenty of other people are in favor of laws against "psychological harms" obviously. And we have laws about it now. But I'm not in favor of them. I don't feel the same way about that as those other people.

No, I'm asking you, given the reality that psychological child abuse exists what you're going to do about that sort of abuse if your position is that the speech acts of the parents, which cause such harm, is entirely legal because it cannot be limited in any way. It seems you're not going to do anything about it and just accept child abuse, because you're ok with it. — Benkei

Right. I'm not in favor of any laws about "psychological harms." Why hasn't that been clear from what I've said?

So basically what you seem to be saying is that "if the world worked totally differently I'd be in favour of free speech absolutism". — Benkei

That's not at all what I'm saying, by the way. I'm in favor of free speech absolutism now.

When I say, "If I were king blah blah blah" it's another way of saying, "This isn't how things presently are, but this is what I'm in favor of." One reason I say that is that whenever I wouldn't say it in past discussions (not necessarily here--I've been talking about this stuff with people online since 1994, and since the early 80s if you go back to BBSs), I'd get people responding telling me what the present laws were, as if my intention was to report what the present laws were for some reason (as if people couldn't simply look that up if they're curious).

What is your definition of a mean person or someone being mean? — schopenhauer1

Being an asshole, a bitch, a dick, etc.

I wouldn't say it's a "moral flaw," no, although I suppose often enough it leads to behavior that I'd classify as immoral. For example, an asshole might be more likely to hire someone to do work for them and basically wind up ripping them off a bit--maybe they'd short them a bit, or push them to do something outside of the context of what they hired them for without additional compensation or something like that, for example.

I like people to be honest/to honestly express themselves/to be existentially authentic. So if being an asshole or a bitch is how they authentically feel, I think they should express that. I'm just not going to be hanging out with them if it's a way they regularly are.

First off, I explicitly asked you to reply given the nature of reality where you're not king. I again get a reply "I'm telling you what I'd do" but that's just made-up nonsense if it's not grounded in reality. You keep on doing this and are effectively not answering my questions at all as a result. — Benkei

So if you're not asking me what my view is--what I think should be legal/illegal, what I think is moral/immoral, etc., what exactly are you asking me? Are you asking me what other people think or something?

Really? The FACT that they made no effort to hide it means we have a LOT of evidence. — ZhouBoTong

Yeah, but you're saying that most Americans were racist.

Are you comfortable admitting that Jefferson and Washington were racist? — ZhouBoTong

If I had enough info about things they said where I considered some of those things racist, sure. I don't know enough about either for that, really, though. (This is also not saying that they weren't racist. I'd need far more info about them than I have (or remember) to make a claim either way. I don't like making claims about stuff like that without a lot of info about it. I'm not a fan of being quick to judgment, pro or con, and I think that people being way too quick to judgment is a big problem in general. Many people rapidly make up their minds about stuff, in a highly judgmental way, based on very little info.)

Surely, owning slaves (based on race) counts as evidence of their racism? — ZhouBoTong

In my opinion that's too simplistic. Racism hinges on their beliefs, and the mere fact of owning slaves in that historical context I don't think is sufficient to tell us what their beliefs were regarding "race." After all, it's not as if slave ownership was primarily motivated by racist beliefs. It was primarily motivated by economic desires--slaves were a source of relatively cheap labor, and they made it possible for a lot of people to make far more money than they could have made without a source of such cheap labor--in many cases, people would not have been able to be in business for themselves period without that cheap labor source. It's much like folks who hire illegal aliens in the U.S. now. That's not motivated by racism. It's motivated by wanting to capitalize on a cheap labor force. That doesn't imply that no one who hires illegal aliens (or own slaves) is racist--surely some are. But I don't think that the mere fact of owning slaves would be sufficient to imply that someone is racist. I think it's more complicated than that.

Is it really debatable that "prior to the Civil War" at least 51% of Americans were racist? — ZhouBoTong

Definitely that's debatable in my opinion, yes. Even if you were to take slave ownership as evidence of racism--which I think is too simplistic, as I mention above, nowhere near 51% of Americans owned slaves. It wasn't even 51% of Americans in the South who owned slaves.

However, it is fairly (entirely?) consistent through history that the lower classes are more racist (and the racist representatives they voted for represent their racism). — ZhouBoTong

Also, voting for someone isn't at all indicative of agreeing with all or even most of the policies they support. I always vote. Many people I know always vote. I doubt I've ever voted for someone where I agreed with most of their positions. I always have to vote for the "least crappy" viable candidate, and that's not at all an uncommon sentiment.

The paper is basically a summary of the state of psychological and neuroscienetific thinking on the matter. If you're not going to trust the expert judgement (which I've already outlined), then there's nothing much in that paper to go on. This is the problem with your attitude that any expert position can be critically examined. There have been literally thousands of experiments done in this field. You cannot possibly examine them all, nor would you have the background knowledge to do so. Experts in the field examine some of them, other experts collate the conclusions of those experts, other experts summarise all that in conclusions like the one I quoted. Could they all be wrong? Absolutely. Have we got a chance in hell of reasonably demonstrating that they are? No.

If you want to critically examine the experiments which have lead to the conclusions I cited, be my guest. There are 95 citations in that paper alone, and many of those are citing other summaries which themselves have scores of experimental results cited. I'll find a link to the paper, when you've read through the several thousand experiments it collectively cites, I'd love to hear your thoughts on their conclusions. — Isaac

So in other words, you're not really going to go through a critical examination of anything with me.

Part of what we'd be critically examining, by the way, is if a claim is even being made to the effect of the claim you're making.

Don't you think that a philosophy background is relevant, especially with focuses on philosophy of science, epistemology and ontology?

Here's an escrow company I've used:

http://smprtitle.com/services/escrow-services/

Is that okay with you?

We need to go over the terms/devise the questions, of course.

A minute ago you didn't have $10k