Why doesn't it fly? — Leontiskos

Since we are being pedantic, let's amend the supposition:

Supposition: It is bigotry to substantively call an entire class of people mentally ill.

"Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not a substantive claim, it proceeds from the definition of "schizophrenic". To know the word is to know that "mental illness" and "schizophrenia" stand in a genus - species relationship. It offers nothing new to the competent language user.

This is not at all the case with "Ali Chinese are mentally disabled" or "all trans people are mentally ill".

For example, if bigotry is defined as "obstinate attachment to a belief," then the holding of a material position can never be sufficient for bigotry. — Leontiskos

I do not accept this definition. I can make any number of claims that are clearly identifiable as bigoted, without requiring a personalized, subjective assessment of just how obstinate I am in my beliefs.


This is really just basic decency. If I were trans, or had loved ones who were, I wouldn't want to come here and have to deal with threads claiming that I or my loved ones were immoral and mentally ill based merely on group identification. And context matters deeply: Bob's claims are made within a historical context where the government of the predominant English speaking country came to power on a platform of naked bigotry, primarily against trans and immigrants. As others here have pointed out, this post takes part in the ignoble philosophical tradition of providing intellectual scaffolding for state-sponsored bigotry.


Actually I take all that back. I have an idea for a new op: "Conservative Christians are immoral and mentally ill". I'm positive I can make a better case than @Bob Ross, without appealing to a questionable reading of Aristotle.

The goal neither is to reach agreement, nor to win, but rather to foster understanding. That doesn't mean either that the debaters should just agree to disagree. They just need to agree to pursue the discussion despite endorsing incompatible goals and premises. — Pierre-Normand

Yup, I didn't mean to imply I didn't enjoy it, despite the frustration it nonetheless one of my favorites here. The frustration stems less from disagreement, and more from a nagging sense that neither side fully understood the other. It is as if each position is a reflection of a basic intuition which, despite a very exhaustive effort, is not quite communicable verbally. And so both sides were a bit baffled, and were talking past one another. For my part I felt this, and I was ultimately part of the problem. I could never get over an apparent hand-waviness of the direct realist position. From which it is all to easy to conclude that the position is simply vacuous.

I'm seeing a strong parallel between this discussion and an earlier one we both participated in: the epic (and epically frustrating) indirect realism thread. If you remember it, you took the direct realist side in that debate, and I took the indirect realist. This problem is a kind of a mirror image of the problem of knowledge. And we, predictably, seem to be taking the same sort of direct/indirect realist approaches

My claim:
* Public performance is not interiority.
* As a third person observer, I only have direct epistemic access to public performance.
* Via public performance, I gain indirect access to interiority.
* Error cases (performance/interiority mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

The parallel indirect realism argument:
* Private perception is not the perceived world
* As a first person subject, I only have direct epistemic access to private perception
* Via private perception, I gain indirect access to the perceived world
* Error cases (perception/world mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

Your original claim, that LLM interiority cannot happen in the absence of the public engagement that accompanies our own interior states, seems much less plausible in the indirect view. If interiority and public engagement are fundamentally decoupled, then it seems very plausible that you can have one without the other. Your claim is much more at home with the tighter coupling of the direct realism approach.

Granted that we will not resolve the direct/indirect dispute, do you agree with this?

What is sophistical about the argument I made? — Bob Ross

"According to the results of my philosophy all Chinese are mentally disabled. But this can't be bigotry... If it were, so would calling the mentally disabled, mentally disabled! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!"

Can you see why this doesn't fly? You are comparing your spurious diagnosis to a tautology. Whatever bigotry might be contained in your diagnosis, it will not be found in a tautology. Citing a tautology does nothing.

But if the urge for men to procreate with women is found more in men, and is not merely a result of gender norms, then how can you claim that "group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities"? If that were true then such urges would simply not be found more in men. — Leontiskos

Because, individuals can act in ways contrary to how groups as a whole behave. My species and gender determine the range and distribution of behaviors available to me as a human male. I can impregnate, but I cannot give birth. But this range is incredibly wide. It is therefore not accurate to say that my gender "determines" how I behave. If you knew only my gender, you might have ideas about how I can behave, and how I am likely to behave. But my actual behavior would be unknown to you, as gender does not determine it.

I like this account. Clearly, AIs are far from biologically realistic. What I dispute is that biological realism, or physical embodiment, is necessary for subjective experience (granted that any such experience possessed by LLMs would be radically different from our own).

Moreover, I even dispute the idea that AI is not embodied in the relevant sense. LLMs, like animals, receive stimulus and respond to it. It's just that the stimulus and response is all words in their case. The fact that this verbal "environment" they interact in is virtual, ungrounded in the material world, doesn't seem especially pertinent here.

@Pierre-Normand

You cannot have a man, in nature, in form, who doesn’t have masculinity flowing from that nature (no matter how imperfectly: yes, this includes super-feminine men!); just as trilaterality and triangularity cannot be found in existence separate from one another.

Can we agree on this (notwithstanding the semantic disputes)??? — Bob Ross

Nope. I recognize nothing essential about masculinity in the way you conceive of it. At best, I will say that by virtue of being a man I inherit certain tendencies which are statistically more likely in males than in females. The urge to procreate with women is biological, and the fact that it is found in men more than women is not merely a result of gender norms.

But humans are nothing like geometric primitives. Group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities. Humans are complex and exhibit a vast spectrum of individual variation. As shocking as it apparently seems to you, there are men and women who have no urge whatsoever to fuck the opposite sex. Factually, this is human variation, nothing more. It requires your sort of moralizing to transmute minority behaviors into normative violations.

Most humans are aversive to extremely spicy food. I absolutely crave it. The majority behavior is not mere preference, it is rooted in the hard facts of biology. Capsicum mimics substance p, for pain, which is involved in the neural system responsible for pain transmission. It evolved to deter the wrong kind of animal from eating this fruit (everyone except birds). And so avoiding this food is an expression of a basic, innate human tendency to avoid pain. Does this mean that the preference for bland food flows in an Aristotelian sense from human nature, and therefore my eating habits are wrong, deviant, a kind of mental illness? No, that is obviously absurd, what I eat is just a personal difference, which happens to be at variance with mean preference.

The core difference here between dietary and sexual preference does not lie in the preference itself, but in the interest of moralizers to regulate and discipline one above the other.

I'm struggling with this.

To me there is a gap between behavior and internality. We are embodied creatures, and our behaviors and internal states are deeply intertwined. But this fact about us doesn't imply a necessary connection.

Pain for us seems intrinsically aversive, and is associated with avoidance and the other behaviors you mentioned. But then there are masochists. Do they experience inverted pain/pleasure? No, almost certainly they reinterpret the sensation of pain positively*. Or, consider the religious fanatic who detests and avoids anything suggestive of bodily pleasure. Or, imagine someone born without pain (a real and horrible condition) who has learned the behavioral concomitants of pain, and faithfully mimics the yelps, cries, and help seeking, believing them to be no more than social norms surrounding bodily harm.

None of this would be possible if sensation and their accompanying behaviors were inseparable, as you seem to suggest

*I experienced something similar. A tooth died, and it was unbelievably painful. It was evening, so I had to endure until the dentist opened the next morning. Somehow, in desperation, I managed to reinterpret the pain as a kind of neutral life force, and I was able to sleep through the night!

Hypericin, my friend, if that is true, then the acknowledgement of any mental illness is bigotry; for every recognition of a mental illness in principle applies to an entire class of people affected. Is that really what you believe? — Bob Ross

This is childish sophistry. The mentally ill are, factually, mentally ill. Mere recognition of this carries no pejorative slant. Whereas you, on the basis of a very dubious metaphysics, are diagnosing a group which is not definitionally ill, as mentally ill. As mental illness is universally undesirable, you are saying that membership in this group entails being innately less than the general population. That is just bigotry. Moreover, your "philosophical" conclusions just so happen to coincide with the politically weaponized bigotry against trans people by conservatives in America and elsewhere.

A bigotry charge is a serious accusation: why do you think people who disagree with your political views are all bigots? — Bob Ross

Give me a fucking break with your faux innocence. Calling an entire class of people mentally ill couldn't be more bigoted. Try applying that to any other group.

My own view is that what's overlooked by many who contemplate the mystery of human consciousness is precisely the piece LLMs miss. But this overlooked/missing piece isn't hidden inside. It is outside, in plain view, in the case of humans, and genuinely missing in the case of LLMs. It simply a living body embedded in a natural and social niche. — Pierre-Normand

But then, in theory we could provide this. Not a living body, but a body, that can sense the environment in a way similar to the way we do.

If we did this, created an actual android powered by a LLM and complementary AI systems, would the inside of the chatbot "light up" in sudden awareness? Maybe... but maybe not. It would be very easy to suppose that we would have succeeded in creating a philosophical zombie, and many would do so. They might be right or wrong, but their correctness would be a factual matter, not one of logical necessity. Nothing says that such a machine would be necessarily conscious, any more than that our current disembodied chatbots are necessarily unconscious, free of any qualitative content.

So much of what we know and do is unstated and unconscious. For instance, we use language fluidly, and so clearly we all 'know' the rules of grammar, but when asked to explain them we are often at a loss. Words too: we 'know' what they mean, as we use them with ease, but we grope for definitions. The same goes for concepts, purposes, ideologies, worldviews.

And so goes the majority of our lives, acting without knowing why, doing without quite knowing what we do. This is the unexamined life. Philosophy remedies this: it can make the implicit explicit, the unconscious conscious.

As we bring the unconscious to light, more often then not, we realize that these implicit beliefs we've carried with us don't really make sense. Then we have the opportunity to replace the unconscious and irrational with the conscious and rational. This is growth, the transition to true adulthood that so many make all too late, or never at all. The conscious cultivation of a worldview which is consonant with the world, rather than an artifact of upbringing.

This is the purpose of philosophy.

Medically, "old age" is never the cause. It's e.g., organ failure, heart disease, etc. — BitconnectCarlos

Of course. But when those causes are ultimately consequences of the aging process, that is considered dying of "old age".

Well, if you are thinking of death as a natural event, then I don't see the difference between 3 and 4. — Leontiskos

I am distinguishing dying naturally and being killed. To be killed is to die before your natural lifespan, by something other than old age. You might not see the difference, but most humans are keenly aware of it.

Alternatively, if God gives a gift that allows one to die, hasn't he allowed death? — Leontiskos

He allows death. Additionally, he allows killing. These are distinct claims.

For example, if everything that occurs is allowed by God to occur, and if this allowance counts as an intentional bringing-about, then it follows that everyone who dies is murdered. The reductio in this case lies in the idea that murder and death are two different things. — Leontiskos

This seems to miss the distinction between dying naturally (old age) and dying unnaturally of natural causes(cancer, earthquake).

In terms of adjudicating God's culpability I see four cases:

1. God directly kills, or commands murder (OP)
2. A human kills
3. A natural event kills
4. A human dies a natural death

My point was that 3 and 1 are essentially the same in a worldview where natural events are expressions of God's will. And so 1 is perhaps a personalization or reification of a contradiction in monotheism itself, manifest by 3.

Whereas, 2 and 4 are morally distinct cases. 4 seems fair enough: if God gives the gift of life, he is not obliged to give it for an unlimited period of time.

God then would be doing something evil as opposed to merely allowing the evil of someone else. — Bob Ross

I believe we have discussed this before. Allowing evil is itself a kind of evil. God permitted the Holocaust, for which he must take at least some responsibility.

But what I had in mind was more natural disasters. Not only does he allow these, but at least in some sense he actively brings them about. The natural world, as I understand monotheism, is an expression of God's will. And so here responsibility seems total.

The interesting question here is whether we need to reform our use of "cause" and "causative" so as to allow legitimate talk of mental causation, or whether it's the concept itself that has to be expanded. — J

I don't think it even needs to be expanded. If we understand that thought and brain activity are actually the same things, and brain activity is understood as causative, then thought must also be causative, and we can use causative language around it.

We may need an entire comprehensive theory of consciousness before we'll understand what we now call, rather gropingly, mental causation. — J

Again, I don't see why. We don't need to understand how thought can be brain activity, only that thought is brain activity.

This reads as if reason was somehow exclusively the provence of progressives. In their rhetoric conservatives and progressives appeal to reason more or less equally, afaict. Both regard the other side as irrational . I reject the framing that reason is what separates liberalism and convervatism.

And I reject the notion that traditionalism is what defines conservatism. One only has to look to the American conservative of today to put the lie to this. What is actually being conserved is not tradition, but hierarchy and power. It was not the breaking of the traditions of slavery and women's lesser rights that was noisome to conservatives then, and is still today. It is that blacks and women occupied lower rungs in the social ladder then, and still should today. To claim and act otherwise is obnoxious to them, bullshit, "woke".

Against this progressives offer fundamentally a moral appeal, not a rational one, though it may come clothed in reason.

Isn't this just the problem or flaw with monotheism? If everything flows from one entity, then that entity is responsible for everything. Since many events are evil, then that entity must be at least partly evil as we conceive it.

It doesn't matter that he was explicitly killing everyone in the OT. If the Biblical flood is the anthropomorphization of real natural disasters, then under monotheism those disasters require explanation as well.

This is the familiar:

God is all good
God is all powerful
Evil things happen

At least one of these must be false.

When we speak of one thought causing another, are we speaking about W2 thoughts, or about propositions? — J

Most W2, I think.

If the former, then we need a theory about how psychological events can be causative. — J

One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.

I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.

Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.

And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.

How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.

When we speak of one thought causing another, are we speaking about W2 thoughts, or about propositions? — J

Most W2, I think.

If the former, then we need a theory about how psychological events can be causative. — J

One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.

I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.

Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.

And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.

How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.

This danger is arguably epistemic, in the sense that someone who is interacting with an argument will be doing philosophy as long as they do not know that they are interacting with AI. — Leontiskos

Why is interacting with an AI not "doing philosophy"?

Man - adult human male by sex
Woman- adult human female by sex — Philosophim

Yet we have, "be a man", "what a man", "what a woman".

Most of the world does not view man and woman by gender, but by sex, so the default goes to sex. — Philosophim

The terms are as fluid as gender is supposed to be. They are a package, containing both sex and normative role. Which meaning is emphasized depends on context. And so the two meanings blur together in our minds.

In asking 'what is the first person?', he seems to be talking about something less trivial than what we called a geometric point of view, but I cannot identify what else there is to it. — noAxioms

This should be a strong clue:

The first-person view of the mental encompasses phenomena which seem to resist any explanation from the third person. — noAxioms

These phenomena are qualia.

If you still doubt this I'm sure I can find more explicit passages in the paper or elsewhere.

This is no paradox. What is wrong for a deontologist is to choose to kill someone. In the 1 vs. 1 case, the agent isn't choosing to kill. He is forced to kill. He is only choosing to kill one person or another. This choice may carry no particular moral weight to the deontologist.

What about simply being compelled to kill someone? As in, someone overpowers you, and physically forces you to press a button that results in a death. Is this a "paradox" to the deontologist?

You seem to be arguing against a mentally crippled version of deontology.

Consider the case where the person at the switch was forced to choose between two tracks, each with one person.

In your view, would the deontologist condemn the person at the switch as a murderer, no matter what choice they made?

No longer able to appeal to the sanctity of non-interference, the individualist ethic risks moral paralysis. — Copernicus

Not necessarily. Suppose A, B, C are on track 1, and D on track 2. The choice of track 1 can be broken down into 3 bundled yet district choices: to run over A, B, and C. The choice to run over A can be judged equivalent to the choice to run over D, and when comparing the track 1 or 2 decision, cancel out. This is consistent: if both tracks contained 1 victim, and one was forced to choose, neither choice would be a murder. But in the example, track 1 can be judged as committing two murders, and track 2, none.

One can maintain this, and yet maintain that non intervention trumps this calculus. I don't agree, but that is not the point.

I think that's what I said. It makes qualia the fundamental issue, not first person, which is, as you call it, mere geometric PoV. — noAxioms

You seem to be arguing against a position that nobody takes. Neither Chalmers nor anyone else believe geometric PoV is mysterious. Everyone agrees that qualia is the fundamental issue.

and if so, that all of say quantum theory is wrong, or at least grossly incomplete. — noAxioms

Not necessarily. It is the "hard problem", not the "impossible problem". Chalmers does believe physics is incomplete, but several believe consciousness is explicable naturally without amending physics, while still acknowledging the uniquely difficult status of the hard problem.

The title of this topic is about the first/third person divide, which Chalmers asserts to be fundamental to said 'hard problem', but it isn't. The qualia is what's hard. — noAxioms

This feels like a strange misunderstanding. Qualia are intrinsically first person. When people talk about first person experience being mysterious, they are talking about qualia, not mere geometric POV.

This especially raises my eyebrows, because I remember a time you thought you were a p zombie!

The primary disconnect seems to be that no third-person description can convey knowledge of a first-person experience — noAxioms

Without reading the full post, this misses the problem.

The problem is, no third person explanation can arrive at first person experience. There is an 'explanatory gap'. Not only do we not know the specific series of explanations that start at neural facts and ends at first person experience, conceptually, it doesn't seem possible that any such series can exist.

They both agree on the same underlying fact: there is no continuity beyond the perception of it. NC adds the additional idea: therefore, we are always dying.


But is this idea coherent? If there is no continuous consciousness, then what is it that is doing the dying? It seems there must be a continuous consciousness in the first place, for it to die. NC can only answer: it is the instance of consciousness that dies.

Consider an analogy with the Ship of Theseus. PC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship, whether it is the same ship or not is up to the observer. NC: there is no underlying reality of the identity of the ship. Therefore, the ship is being destroyed again and again, every instant. What is being destroyed? The exact state of the ship, at the molecular level.

Why is the exact state of the Ship reified into a thing that can be destroyed? If identity is ultimately conceptual, then this exact state is simply the wrong concept, meaning, a useless concept no one uses in practice. The right concept is more like, the functional unity of the ship's parts over time.

It is like NC is saying, identity is conceptual, not actual. And, I am now completely redefining the concept in such a way that everyone is dying millions of times a second.

Moreover, no human behavior is coherent under NC. Even hedonism is irrational. Why reach for that ice cream? Me + 10 seconds will enjoy it, not me. A theory that makes nonsense of the entirely of human action just might be the wrong theory.

I think PC and NC are actually the same position.

PC says there is no deep fact of continuity or discontinuity. What matters is the subject's perception of continuity, nothing more. The believing is the reality. I see no divergence here with NC.

And so the imperfect transporter is not an objection to PC. It is not the universe which is supposed to be deciding whether or not continuity happened. It is ultimately up to the subject whether they are a continuation or not. If there is a dividing line, that line is a preference of the subject, nothing more.

. What I said is that the source of your existence seems legit to me because I had (literally) the same experience of interacting with you in both reality and dreams. For me, this is more than sufficient to claim that you actually exist. — javi2541997

Clearly I'm missing something. If the experience of interacting with me in a dream is the same as in reality, and I didn't cause your dream experience, then why believe i caused the real experience at all? At the very least it makes my status as cause suspect.

The dream if anything seems to weaken the claim.

I would say that "conspiracy theory" is a fairly empty term in this pejorative sense. — Leontiskos

I don't think so. Any phenomenon admits to multiple explanations, the vast majority of which are profoundly unlikely. A conspiracy theory is a rococo sort of explanation, containing multiple agents and moving parts that must act in perfect concert for it to be true. Prima facie there is nothing that says a conspiracy theory must be false. However due to their complexity there are almost always multiple serious flaws in such theories.

For a conspiracy theory to be a conspiracy theory, there must be a conspiracy theorist who espouses it. The two come as a package. It is well noted that it's impossible to disabuse a conspiracy theorist of their theory. Because, It is always possible to paper over any flaw with more complexity. This is recursively endless. The same phenomenon is seen in science. No theory can be disproven outright. Rather, for the false theory to fit the data, more and more complexity has to be piled onto it, until it collapsed under its own weight, and the scientific community thoroughly dismisses it. But, there can always be cranks who will cling to it no matter what, and work diligently sustaining there theory by patching over the flaws with more and more complexity. Flat earth is a perfect example of this.

This is the irrationality of conspiracy theories. It is the selection of a theory not because it is best, but because it meets the needs of the conspiracist. To the conspiracy theorist, the fundamental axiom is that their theory is correct. Given this starting point, any apparent contradiction can be worked around, given enough time and cleverness. This process is obviously not rational, it does not favor outcomes where the result is true. Even if, every now and then, they might indeed be true.

The point is that I have knowledge and consciousness that you exist because you caused me certain experiences in both dreams and reality. — javi2541997

Here and in several other cases you are presuming your conclusion, that we exist. Only if we exist, have we caused these experiences in you, in reality. (But much less so in dreams. It seems more accurate to say that your mind, creatively using these experiences as a foundation, synthesized your dreams. We have no causal efficacy in what specifically did and didn't happen in your dreams.)

Suppose that I, and everyone else but you on this site, were all AI personas. If so, we would impart the same experiences to you, and you would have the same dreams about them. So these experiences and dreams themselves cannot prove that we are not AI. You might argue in various ways that this AI hypothesis is profoundly unlikely, and I would agree. But I don't think you can prove it is not the case.

I have no doubt I could have made different choices on innumerable occasions. There has never been a time in my life when my actions have been so constrained that I could only do one thing. I act according to what I know of my desires, what I know of the world, my emotions, and my reasoning. All these muddle together in my poor, strained brain, and out pops a decision, for better or worse. By chance, I could have made other decisions such that I would be a multi millionaire now, married with children, homeless, imprisoned, or dead.

But, what of it? That things might have been different does not imply the strong notion of "free will" that I suspect is incoherent.

Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree. — T Clark

Do you consider the description of the salt marsh I discussed as a "toy case?" If so, I disagree. — T Clark

No, that is the opposite of a toy case. By toy case I mean the simplified examples that may come to mind when considering causality, such as one billiard ball hitting another.

The question I've been asking is--if it is such a complex system of events, why bring the idea of causality into it at all. Why not just describe the system? — T Clark

Because cause is what people are often interested in. And precisely because systems are often complex, describing it is too much, if possible at all.

That A casually impinges on B is both of practical significance and is a metaphysical reality. That your history of smoking is a casual antecedent to your lung cancer, while brushing your teeth isn't, is an interesting and real feature of the world. But, as you point out, the way it is a casual antecedent is usually quite complex, in a way that the language of cause doesn't easily capture. The word "cause" seems to imply a billiard ball view, where the cause solely produced the effect, which confuses and obscuring the reality, especially of very complex events such as wars, elections, and ecologies. But this doesn't mean we should throw out casualty entirely.

Nice OP!

I feel you have demonstrated less that cause is not a useful concept, but that the concept needs a lot of refinement to generalize beyond toy cases. The problem is that people want to take the toy concept and apply it to everything.

As you point out, "did X cause Y?" is almost always the wrong question, as there is almost never a single cause if an event. I think of cause and effect less like a segmented arrow (A causes B, which causes C, which causes...) and more like a directed graph (A, B, C together cause D, which, together with B and E, causes F ...)

To give a simplified example, think of a family tree, terminating with yourself at the bottom. Everyone you can reach by moving only up in the tree caused you. If you need to travel down to reach someone, they did not cause you. This is already a useful distinction. Moreover, every cause of you is more or less proximate, with your parents being the nearest.

In a family tree, every cause is necessary, none is sufficient. In the full spectrum of casual relationships all four permutations of necessary/sufficient are possible.

In a family tree there is a orderly relationship between causes and effects, where every effect has two immediate causes, four nearest proximate causes, 8 second nearest, and so on. In reality there is no such order. any event may have any number of causes, arising from anywhere on the graph. Effects of a cause may even simultaneously serve as a cause of the cause, in the case of feedback loops.



Moreover, there are an immense number of casual relationships omitted by the family tree (ie, your parents had sex, causing your mother's egg to be fertilized by your father's sperm, causing...) These are real, but irrelevant to the story the family tree is telling. Every casual account is a story that might be telling the truth, but never the whole truth. The whole truth is beyond the scope of human communication, but that is not to say it is unreal. The whole truth is the God's Eye view of casual reality. Every casual story filters the vast majority of reality out, to tell something focused and specific about the events it tries to describe.

This is to me a sketch of a sketch of a more general account of casualty.

This is not news in the US, the discrepancy in violence is very, very obvious and well known. That the right is pretending otherwise, elevating a lone gunman from a solid MAGA family with no known ties to leftist groups into a Reichstag-like pretext for sweeping crackdowns on the left, is straight from the fascist playbook.

And if we are talking about rhetorical violence, the discrepancy is even more stark.

This is the argument now being put by sections of the commentariat on the right; that the left is complicit in violence that purportedly resulted from what they have said. — Banno

Please don't confuse this absurdly hypocritical power play for an "argument".

I'm not saying we should separate speech and consequence, where one is protected and the other isn't. I'm saying that the issue here doesn't seem to fit neatly into illocution/prolocution. It isn't how hate speech is received by individuals that is at issue. Rather the real danger, worthy of abridging free speech, are the consequences of a social environment where here speech is allowed to flourish, and especially encouraged by influential voices.

This is not reflected in the shooter example.