All I'm saying is that there need be nothing in the world to which our representations are about. — Manuel

Isn't that the conclusion you drew from the thought experiment? You're now using it as a premise. That doesn't sound like the thought experiment has done anything.

You would just need to stimulate the appropriate are of the brain to recreate an experience which would be indistinguishable from one in ordinary life. — Manuel

I understand this was intended as an example of the sort of conclusion you find useful, so my question is a bit off-topic, but, very briefly, if we could do without the external world, from where is the stimulation to the appropriate area of the brain coming? Whence the electricity to power it, the mechanism to convert it, the materials from which this 'stimulator' is made?

I don't agree. Putnam, for example, suggested the thought experiment of a brain-in-vats as an exercise. Nobody literally believes we are brain in vats, though some believe in the simulation hypothesis. It's still useful to look at what extreme ideas would look like. — Manuel

I thought the BIV was useless too, so that's not a persuasive argument. Perhaps highlight some of the conclusion you find useful?

Which is why I used the term "strong" behaviorism, one which would do away with any innate mechanism. I agree that I doubt any proponent today would hold such a view. — Manuel

Absolutely no one, ever, would hold such a view. There's little point in constructing arguments against views that no one holds is there?

When determining your value as a labourer, your employer — Isaac

...in many cases pays what the market will bear. Period. — tim wood

'The Market'? Where does it get its prices from?

As to which he chooses, he will choose the more attractive to him - if he has a choice. — tim wood

Yes. That's the point I'm making. I've outlined which is the more attractive, it's (on average) the one with the safety net, paid for by taxes.

As to

travel freely to work, freely able to acquire the resources you need (water, food etc). — Isaac

Eh? Freely able? What in the world does that mean? — tim wood

Nothing complex, just without hindrance. As in his water comes out of a tap, not a well 6 miles away.

If you have a cogent point to make, please make it simply. — tim wood

I have tried. If you ask about that which confuses you, I'll try to explain. I can't simply 'make it simply' because I don't know in advance what you'll find too complex.

Under strong behaviorism, how would you know that?

Any movement made by the amoeba can be taken as sign that it is reacting to the poem. — Manuel

How do you think we found anything out about amoebae then? Theories all rely on repeatability. If the amoeba repeatedly responds to a poem in some predictable way (but not to some control, like a random collection of words), then we've got everything we thought about amoebae pretty wrong haven't we?

you need to postulate an innate mechanism that allows human beings to react to poems that amoeba's lack. — Manuel

I think you've misunderstood what behaviourism is. None of its proponents suggest that there is no mechanism, that the brain's just a non-functioning blob.

A human being is reduced to a stimulus-reacting nothing. You wouldn't be able to tell a human from an amoeba under strong behaviorism. So it's not even good science — Manuel

A human being will react to poem, an amoeba won't. What's unscientific about that?

So you have a whole range of X, Y, Z, etc. options. You cannot select the option for no option. Is this just? — schopenhauer1

The entire scenario makes no sense. You've taken;

1.X
2.Y
3.Z

and complained that there's no 'not even have to choose'.

So we replace it with;

1.X
2.Y
3.Z
4.'don't even have to choose'

Now tell me how you go about selecting (4). If you select it, then it must de facto have been one of the choices (otherwise you could not have chosen it), but if it's one of the choices then you open it up to the complaint of not having the choice not to choose.

All you've done here is confused your grammar. One cannot have the choice not to choose, it just doesn't make sense.

What additional expenses does an employer have? — tim wood

Income tax pays for (among other things) health services, environmental protection, unemployment benefit, policing, and utilities.

When determining your value as a labourer, your employer assumes that you'll get better rapidly if ill, that you'll be unlikely to get ill in the first place, that you'll not be beset by social unrest, and, most importantly, that he can fire you when times are tough and then re-hire you (or someone like you) from a pool of ready-to-work potential employees when he wants to grow his business. He also assumes that you're going to be able to travel freely to work, freely able to acquire the resources you need (water, food etc).

If you don't come with all of those benefits, you're a less valuable asset and so worth less. If you don't pay a portion of your wage in income tax (by law, not by deception), then you don't come with all those benefits. Of course, you might, they might be provided by charity, or they might be something you arrange privately, but then the employer has to take a gamble. a gamble is worth less than a certainty, so you're a less valuable asset.

@NOS4A2 wants to take the value his employer has determined under the assumption he's the former type of asset, but deceive his employer by actually being the latter type. He wants to defraud his employer out of the difference in value between the two, i.e. steal from him.

Longer answer later, I have to go out. Short answer -all the things that income tax currently pays for. Many of them the employer benefits from. If you're not paying for them, they'll have to, so you're less valuable an asset.

I just don’t see how that works. If the income tax is the product of a tax rate times the taxable income, it is impossible for an employer to know what I will be paying in income tax in order to factor it into my hourly wage. — NOS4A2

They don't need to. They only need to know enough to make a fair assessment of their liabilities. Like any pricing or valuation, it's an estimate not a formula. What you do in declaring the whole wage packet your own is lie to your employers about the circumstances they are using to make their estimate. They're expecting a rough proportion to go to the state. That knowledge forms part of their assessment of your value to them. If you lie about that bit, you're deliberately deceiving them as to the circumstances so as to obtain more money. That's theft.

If I miss a day, have less income to tax, and therefor have less tax to pay, should the hourly wage change to reflect that? — NOS4A2

Why would it? Your tax is a rate, averaged over a fixed time period. Your employer could re-negotiate your wage daily, or even hourly, but the cost of doing so would exceed any savings made from a more accurate valuation, so they renegotiate yearly, or per contract. The frequency of renegotiation is irrelevant to the fact that external circumstances affect those negotiations whenever they occur.

If I miss a day, and therefor have less income, should my wage go down as well? — NOS4A2

Your income is your wage, the question doesn't seem to make sense.

Do you hold that an employer includes what I will inevitably owe in income taxes into the wage? I don’t see how that can work. — NOS4A2

Yes. Your taxes pay for services which, if you don't pay for them, the company might become liable for. This changes the economic circumstances in which the valuation of your labour took place and so changes the value.

We'll try another route. Why do you think the employer picks the figure they do for your wage?

I don’t agree that the “agreed upon wage” includes some implicit condition that I pay a percentage of it in taxes. If I refuse to pay taxes I don’t owe the employer a percentage of my wage. The exchange of tax between me and the government has nothing to do with the employer. — NOS4A2

It's no use just repeating what you'd like to be the case, this isn't an opinion poll, it's a discussion site. If you're not going to discuss the issue then there's no point posting.

The amount your employer offered was offered in the full knowledge that a fixed proportion (as counted against your total income), would go to the state. If you renege on those terms you renege on the agreement. There's no opinion to be had on the matter, those are just the facts of the case.

It's no different to inflation, or currency changes, or RPI indexing... the value of money is relative to the circumstances of the country of which it is a currency. A country in which no one pays tax is different to one in which everyone pays tax. So the value of your labour, in whatever currency, will be different in those different circumstances. You are not valued at $2,000 by your employer and then the government takes $400, you are valued at $2,000 because the government take $400. If you change the economic circumstances in which the valuation takes place you'll change the valuation. It's really primary school level economics. Not getting it is not really an option for having a serious adult conversation.

Income tax and deductions come from my gross income, my full earnings according to the agreed-upon wage — NOS4A2

We've just established that what was 'agreed upon' included you paying a portion to tax.

Let's try this. You sign a contract promising to build a bridge. The renumeration is $10,000 of which you must give $1,000 to compensate the landowner. Now the client decides that actually they'll compensate the landowner directly. Are you still entitled to the full $10,000? Who would think that? It's obvious that an expense that was to come from your renumeration after you received it is now coming before you receive it. Either way only $9,000 was ever yours to take home.

It's the same with tax. The arrangement between you, your employer, and the government is that you'll receive $x, 20% of which you'll give to the government. If you don't then give that portion you're breaking the terms of your contract, as understood by both parties at the time of signing it. There's acres of case law on unwritten understandings that underwrite contracts.

If you want a without-tax wage, you need to tell your employer that you don't intend to pay tax. Your employer may then want to renegotiate your wage under these new terms because they know they'll have additional expenses arising from your failure to pay said taxes.

To say you'll keep the full wage you're changing the terms under which the contract was negotiated. Essentially you're being deceitful, because your keeping renumeration negotiated under one set of circumstances despite knowing that key elements of those circumstances have changed. Does that sound like honorable behaviour?

Things like this can be little nudges or sudden paradigm shifts. — Kenosha Kid

Fair point. I suppose, though, I'd argue that a sudden paradigm shift still falls into the category of a long-term project, just on account of its rarity. Whether you're slowly filling a reservoir with ten years worth of dew, or doing a rain dance in the hopes of a once per couple of decades deluge, your reservoir filling project (most likely) takes about ten years. The second option has the advantage that it might happen the very next day, but that's the kind of wild optimism about timescales that we usual only reserve for grant-funded research projects!

My gut feeling is that whether society changes by slow attrition or by rare paradigm shift we need to be prepared for either taking more than a generation to happen.

So then you believe immune people provide no protective effect to the herd? — Roger Gregoire

No, they just don't provide better protection than spreading everybody out six foot apart, which would be far and away the quickest way of killing the virus population off.

Is being surrounded by immune people (rather than no people) safer tor the vulnerable person? — Roger Gregoire

No, of course not. Surrounded by immune people the person's environment is being replenished with live viruses (albeit at a slow rate), surrounded by no one their environment will be devoid of live viruses within a matter of hours.

So you don't believe in "herd immunity"? ...in other words, so you don't believe there is protective effect to the vulnerable by integrating immune people within the herd? — Roger Gregoire

I just said, being surrounded by immune people is better than being surrounded by non-immune people. Are you having trouble reading?

And also - 'herd immunity' isn't "protective effect to the vulnerable by integrating immune people within the herd" it is explained here https://vk.ovg.ox.ac.uk/vk/herd-immunity . It's about reducing the wider population of the virus by limiting it's ability to reach new hosts before it's current host kills the population in their own body.

Less safe, obviously. The main source of viruses for the vulnerable person is other people. If there are no other people around her the viruses in the environment will rapidly be inactivated and she'll be completely safe from infection.

To be abundantly clear -

Being isolated is best, within a few hours they'll be no more viruses at all for you to pick up

Being surrounded by immune people is second best as they'll be replenishing the surrounding air and surfaces, but not by much.

Being surrounded by asymptomatic people is next best as asymptomatic people shed fewer viruses.

Being surrounded by symptomatic people is worst as they will be replenishing the environmental population, possibly even faster than it is being inactivated.

Removal of virus particles from the environment via breathing them in is completely irrelevant. The rate at which a person breathes in viruses and then inactives them with their own immune system is considerably slower than the rate at which they're inactivated anyway by UV and dehydration.

Force and confiscation aren’t legitimate forms of acquiring property for me, so reiterating that the state claims a right, therefor it has the right, to the fruits of my labor isn’t good enough for me. — NOS4A2

So we need to first establish what is your 'property' and what is the 'fruits of your labour'. As we've now been through several times, your pre-tax wage isn't either of those things by any measure you've yet suggested.

Put it like this. If the government changed the income tax laws tomorrow so that instead of you paying from your return, your employer paid the government directly. Your employer would drop your take home wage accordingly, right? You wouldn't expect him to pay you the same as before plus your taxes?

Now your revolution finally comes, government is abolished and your employer no longer has to pay your taxes. They're not going to put your wages up by the exact amount they used to pay in tax are they? Why would they, they know they can secure workers for the cost of your take home pay, so it'd be madness to offer more. The money was never yours, it was just the tax due.They'll now need that money for all the investment and infrastructure they're going to have to pay for themselves that the government used to pay for.

So in what sense could you possibly say the money was yours before this?

Isaac, so are you saying that the lady would be 'safer' if she were all alone (socially isolated/distanced), within this contaminated room? — Roger Gregoire

That's correct, yes. The numbers of virus particles in that room is smaller than the population in the vast majority of even asymptomatic carriers and, more importantly, they'll all be inactivated within a few hours anyway. The main risk to the woman in your scenario is if someone continually replenishes the environmental population from their own.

Isaac, does this include healthy people with strong immune systems that have been vaccinated — Roger Gregoire

Yes.

From what I've read, the amount of viral replication within the body is dependent on one's immune system. In other words, those with weak immune systems will replicate more than one with a marginal immune system, and those with strong healthy immune systems will have little to no replication. — Roger Gregoire

Correct. All of which are still much much larger than the quantities they remove from any environment (which, don't forget, were going to become inactivated anyway within hours).

I already did. It was the agreed-upon wage for the labor I provide. — NOS4A2

Yes, and we agreed that your employer was aware of the proportion he expected to go to the government. Are we just going to do all this again?

Your employer agrees to pay £100 to you in the knowledge that you'll keep £80 and give £20 to the government. So in what way is the whole £100 your property? Your employer did not intend you to have it, no law determines you should have it, no one involved in the entire transaction bargained from the assumption that you'd keep it. So on what grounds is it your property?

On what grounds is it the state’s property? — NOS4A2

The law by which property is determined. Contract law (both parties were expecting such a payment when they entered into the contract), and, if you like, natural law - you used government services in earning that money so they're entitled to renumeration.

the more people that share the same viral load within a given environment, the lower the proportional risk is to any individual within that environment. — Roger Gregoire

this young man is maskless he is breathing in these viral particles, thereby reducing the total number of viral particles within the room. The longer he stays, the less contaminated the room, and the safer the lady becomes. — Roger Gregoire

Both show the same fundamental misunderstanding of his viruses work which you were told the last time you posted this crap.

The viruses in the environment are ephemeral and so of trivial importance in long term public health policy. Viruses multiply rapidly in people. So the only population we're remotely concerned about in your scenario is that inside the woman and inside the man. The population outside either is tiny by comparison and will all become inactive soon anyway.

So the woman is at greater risk because the unmasked man has exposed her to his population in addition to that which is in the environment. The amount he removes from this environmental population is trivially small compared to the amount he sheds.

did answer the thread. I said No to the living wage/ handouts. — Book273

It wasn't a fucking Gallup poll. It's supposed to be a discussion, you support your opinion with reasons. "Me no like poor" is not a reason.

You suggested that those who did no work should get no renumeration, I agreed. You then said that the unemployed should get no renumeration despite the fact that they do, in fact, do some work. I pointed out the inconsistency. That's where we got to.

If you want to argue that only certain types of work deserve renumeration, then you'll have to make that case. So far nada.

As to your hamfisted attempt to avoid making an argument with this whataboutism...

If everyone stops working where does the money come from for your handout supply? — Book273

Why would everyone stop work? It's only you who envies the life of luxury the unemployed apparently enjoy. The rest of us want houses and cars and holidays etc.

I have an issue with the poor having a nicer cell phone than I have, better medical coverage, a nicer apartment, and larger tv, despite not actually working. Meanwhile I scrimp and save and my taxes pay for the stuff they have that I can't afford. Homeless people have better dental and pharmacy coverage than I do, and all of us have the same level of medical coverage. The street-walking crack addicted prostitute has better medical coverage than the nurse that treats her in the hospital. — Book273

Then quit work. Idiot.

As opposed to your "everyone gets a free ride" approach, wherein the main qualifier is the ability to breathe, with or without assistance. Apparently in your world no one ever has to actually think about where the money comes from, it just magically shows up, and will never result in decreased purchase power or any other economic side effects. — Book273

God knows where you're getting all that from. I haven't even hinted at 'my world', all I've done is shown yours to be inconsistent, a matter which you clumsily attempt to dodge by means of this wild speculation about the potential pitfalls of whatever your fevered imagination conjured up as being 'my world'.

Next time you might just ask. Better still, address the actual thread of the argument, then ask.

his real dad is trying to make an anti-vax conspiracy theorist out of him. — Kenosha Kid

Oh dear...

Neither, with love, pleading, threats or bribes, can be compelled to not leave every light in the house on all day. — Kenosha Kid

Ha! Mine were the opposite when they were at home. "Do you really need that light on!". I may have overdone the indoctrination a bit... My eldest now works with criminals and psychopaths... not sure what that says about my parenting skills.

I don't think that:

Step-parent or adopt two kids and then bring them up to be Gandhi and MLK. — Isaac


is in the offing, but who knows? — Kenosha Kid

Don't rule out a mid-life epiphany...

Being serious for a moment (just for a moment), hoping to breed an army of social justice warriors is a casino approach: sure, I may be more likely than Nos to raise a kid who's conscientious, but I'm still more likely to produce yet another mindless consumer because it's me versus pretty much everything else in the world (including their other parent). — Kenosha Kid

Yeah, I do see where you're coming from. I think it's different for people in different circumstances. I was lucky enough to bring my kids up in quite some isolation (rural, home-educated), most of their friends were the kids of fairly like-minded parents. Obviously one might accuse me of looking at the problem through this extremely privileged lens, but I think my (semi-serious) complaint against the OP is the moralising. General policy might be to not have kids, or adopt, and that might well be a good idea, but a moral duty (or preclusion) is supposed to be treated as if they were universal. If the reasons why it's bad rely on specific circumstances, it doesn't matter if 99.999% of the population are in those circumstances, we can't even pretend it applies universally. The moral bit, I suppose, would be to have some very high thresholds that need to be met before considering bringing children into the world. I'd be very much on board with that. But for those lucky enough to be able to meet those thresholds, I think having kids is a reasonable thing to do.

I think a more responsible approach is for our generations to forge the superstructures that future generations will in part adhere to and in part improve upon, to set the laws, morals and social conventions -- the hereditary socialisations -- that will anchor them. — Kenosha Kid

Agreed. Do you think we can get this done within the lifespan if a single generation though, seems like a big project?

you're dealing with a person who voted for Donald Trump.

Donald Trump. This is the level of intellect here. So don't be disappointed if you get exactly no where. — Xtrix

Yeah, I've actually had this exact conversation with @NOS4A2 before. we reached...https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/509272...then Nos walked away unable to defend his position.

It just fascinates me what might be going through the minds of people who, after utterly failing to defend their position in one thread nonetheless just re-iterate it in another as if it were unassailable epiphany. The motive, I'm sure, is to do with declaring opinions as 'membership badges' for particular social groups and I see no reason to assume otherwise here, but the mechanisms are the interesting bit, I imagine I'm looking at the cogs whirring whilst they're contorting sets of beliefs into a sufficiently grotesque edifice to sound like a counter-argument. It's a truly engaging hobby, no?

You are imposing this burden on your "hip and cool" kids. For whom the problem may well be irredeemable by the time they are adults. — hypericin

Yep. I assumed they would want to. Does that seem like an odd assumption to you? Did you grow up wanting to be one of the Orcs in Lord of the Rings?

What are you doing now to address the problem, while there, maybe, is a sliver of time left to perhaps avoid the worst of it? If nothing, it is nonsense to expect your "hip and cool" kids to contribute any more. — hypericin

Seems like a really odd question to ask. Given that I'm hip and cool, I'm obviously doing hip and cool things, no? You don't think I just gave myself that appellation do you?

The “appropriate proportion” is defined by the state, and is added to the cost at the expense of the consumer, in other words, people like myself. — NOS4A2

So?

It’s not like the employer is giving the state their own money back. It’s taken from the tax-payer at every point. — NOS4A2

You've still not provided any grounds on which the money is the property of the tax-payer. I'll ask again, on what grounds is the pre-tax wage your property?

My point was that my position does not correlate with my social identity — Hanover

I believe it does. You're just confusing social identity with political affiliation. They're not the same thing.

You're doing some torturous disservice to the phrase "lifestyle choice" if you're now using it to describe an adherence to evidence based science. — Hanover

How so? Is rejection of societal norms not a lifestyle choice? Beatniks, anarchists, Protestants...all seem to be lifestyle choices. Rejecting the authority of the state, the church, the establishment, 'da man'...are all lifestyle choices, but rejecting the authority of medical sciences is not? Why not?

But sure, if you mean some choose to be irrational and some not — Hanover

What's a 'rational' decision about who to trust? What's the logical algorithm we put in place here, whereby we can say "you ought to trust X, it's the rational thing to do". Or are you seriously suggesting that people have no grounds at all to not trust governments, government agencies and the pharmaceutical industry?

People not getting vaccines puts us on the brink of another shut down and another requirement to wear masks. — Hanover

Again, you'd need to present some evidence for this, I've not seen any.

Sure, if 95 people are needed to put out a raging fire and there are 100 in the room, you can sit it out and wait for everyone else to throw water on it and claim you're just as good as all those who helped out. — Hanover

That's not what's happening here at all. The fire actually needs 95 people to throw water on it, but 5 people don't agree, they think throwing water on it will make it worse. That's OK because only 95 people need to throw water on it. Public policy doesn't need to do anything to compel those 5 to act against their sincere beliefs, moralising flag waivers don't need to either.

What goes wrong here is that the situation is changing rapidly as new data gets analysed. There's been genuine uncertainty among the vaccine experts about who should and should not have the vaccine. There's still disagreement about the under 12 age group, there's disagreement about intervals, about boosters... the one thing that makes it difficult to enact public policy in that environment is not the handful of malcontents who aren't going to follow anyway (we factored them in from the start, they're a known quantity) it's people treating interim guidance as if it were the 11th commandment. It makes changes much harder to implement and sets up strongly polarized groups which are then hard to reach out to even if they might otherwise have been responsive to new developments.

I don't quite understand what's the argument here. — Manuel

Moralising the following of current policy in all cases is damaging to the need for dynamic, responsive and data informed response management. — Isaac

There is no alternative to present. — NOS4A2

Build your own road and use that.

No, of course he is aware. — NOS4A2

Then he didn't give it to you with the expectation that you'll keep it did he? He gave it to you with the expectation that the appropriate proportion would be given to the government in taxes. So once more, on what grounds is it your property?

Right. That always works. What need of law? What need of anything compulsory — tim wood

The need for law will be part of the policy decision. Something on which 100% compliance is required and advisable might be best made law.

And of course such people know "exactly" who they are, by the numbers.

Do you yourself know such things? How do you know them? — tim wood

The claim isn't that people know exactly their personal circumstances and how they might impact a broad policy, it's that policymakers don't know this, nor assume to.

t was given to me on the assumption that I get to keep it. — NOS4A2

Are you saying your employer is unaware of the taxation system?

Not only should my money be stolen for the construction of roads, but I should refrain from using them? That sounds like a double loss. — NOS4A2

Obviously if you don't like the system you need to present the alternative.

How exactly do you suppose that prevalence is kept low? — tim wood

Hopefully the successful enaction of said policy among exactly the number of people the policymakers are relying on. Policymakers make policies which apply to the average (or sometimes broad categories). The success of those policies depends on whether they're right about the science, obviously, but also in whether they're right about the average. None of this has any bearing on whether the success of the policy in in any way dependant on the compliance of the non-average. That is a factor that can only be determined on a case-by-case basis. It's not unreasonable even, in some cases, to assume that the compliance of the non-average with a broad policy actually hampers the objective. Policy-makers will, for example, often not specify each and every at-risk group, but will instead rely on those groups knowing who they are and seeking advice accordingly.

Those responsible for public health policy are mostly united in saying that one of the main lessons learnt from the response to covid is to separate promotion of current policy from the discussion of future policy. Moralising the following of current policy in all cases is damaging to the need for dynamic, responsive and data informed response management.