Should America use a pre-emptive Nuclear strike? — Andrew4Handel

Is non intervention in other peoples misery and death a good thing? — Andrew4Handel

I think there might be some small space between the two, a middle ground. Perhaps preemptive food parcels, or a task force of electricians and plumbers to improve the sanitation and power supply. If we did these things in the places that would welcome them first, and then tried to impose them on paranoid and violent states later, our kindness would be more believable, and our leadership more acceptable.

...they argue that our "love for the unborn unknown stranger" cannot be a reason either for having a child. — Erik Faerber

I agree. It cannot be a reason, because it is unreasonable; it is the passion that reason is and ought to be slave to. There are women that like being pregnant more than they like having children, but in general, the notion of doing anything either for or because of a foetus rather than for the projected stranger seems incoherent.

As for "rational and autonomous", there is no such person, so I depart from Kant there without a backward glance.

Whatever gives you that idea?

Socrates ideals work when people more or less have no choice but to accept them, but doesn't work so well when people have a chance at of creating double standards for their own advantage. — dclements

Mariner on the old forum explained this rather well in religious terms. If goodness was always rewarded and evil always punished, then it would be mere selfishness to be good, and even evil people would be good. It is the business of government to try and arrange things in this way, so that there is less evil in the world, but it is not natural, or God's will. God will not purchase our virtue by bribery, nor compel it with punishment. The law of nature is that the scum always floats to the top, and the precious metals sink to the bottom.

Roke, were there any other alternative reasons you were considering earlier that you think people have children for? — Erik Faerber

I side with Kant on this, that to 'have' children for some reason is immoral, because it is treating them as a means. One is left with having children by accident, having no children, or having love for the unborn unknown stranger.

Read it; it's shit.

It is not a law of the universe that good will prevail. On the contrary, the greedy, the violent, the selfish, generally run rings round the kind, the generous the, peaceable. But this does not make evil good, or vice a virtue.

Indeed. Being is, whereas nothing happens.

Sounds like you are getting all knotted up. — Cavacava

A knot of thought is quite a good description of the cogito and indeed the self, but If there is certainty that is not ontological, how can it be anything but tautological?

What do you mean by "correct", some people think cogito sum is a performative statement which is only 'correct' when it is actually thought. — Cavacava

Wow! So you do't have any problem with 'I am a tautology'?

The performance can be described as I think, 'I think' and 'therefore I am'.
But the implication is that I am identified as being, not the performance, but the thought. As in, I am the thought, 'I think', rather than the performance, I think, 'I think' and 'therefore I am.'

So I program my computer to print out 'I print therefore I am.' every now and then. While I don't doubt the existence of my computer, I am unconvinced that its performance has any great significance. A statement has been made, therefore there is a statement.

What do I mean by 'correct', though? I think I mean that I am right and everyone who disagrees is wrong. No, that just says correct means right. I mean, understanding the implications of the cogito, and the rather sharp limitations of them. I mean more specifically that the existence that is demonstrated by the performance is not much of an existence. It is the existence of the thought of existence and no more.

I keep reading the title as:-

"I think, therefore I am a tautology."

Which I will now defend as the only correct understanding. That I think is a fact about the world, to the extent that I am part of the world. However "I think" is a thought, and by the first anti-magical proposition of unenlightenment, a thought cannot oblige the world to be thus and not so. So that I think 'I think' cannot entail that I am part of the world. But this is exactly what a tautology and only a tautology refrains from - saying anything about the world.

Therefore I am a tautology.

I have not the least idea.

I can't share the experience of seeing blue with a congenitally blind man, but I can convince him that there's something I can't share. — Mongrel

Agreed. But you can share it with me, because we aren't different in that regard. Or perhaps when we discuss the experience further, we will find we are different, after all.
Does the earth move for you,
When you experience blue?

So we 'truly' share experience to the extent we are the same - that is what you are saying. But then all you have to do is find your soulmate, and nothing is private.

The difference indicates privacy. — Mongrel

No it doesn't. One knows the difference by making a comparison. Making a Comparison denies privacy.
We compare our private parts and find out that boys and girls are different; but in comparing them, we make them public.

Indeed. Another example of the aphantasia guy who doesn't have the same experience. And we know that we don't have the same experiences to just that extent that we can share them.The argument is not against difference, but against privacy.

I think Wittgenstein was wrong about the beetle in the box. We can somewhat share our subjective experiences because we have them in common by virtue of being human. — Marchesk

But earlier, you were rejecting this 'somewhat' in favour of a radical separation between subjective and objective.

But what does a behaviorist mean when when they say that dropping a rock on your toe "hurts"? If they mean you hop up and down and yell, then that's not consciousness. That's simply behavior. It they mean certain nerves are firing resulting in that behavior, it is again not consciousness, it's neurological activity. — Marchesk

This latter is what W is arguing against; the radical separation of experience and behaviour, of inner and outer. Not that he is defending behaviourism either, of course. One has never finished the tale of associations and responses to red, and so there is never a complete understanding of each other's experience, sharing is 'somewhat', and open to discovery of ends to sharing as differences.

If someone is blind, then we know they do not have the visual experiences we talk about, so perhaps they will not understand our visual talk. Their experience is different, and we know that well enough, as do they. Aphantasia is a more subtle deficit, that is hard to notice on either side.

It reminds me of the way the west thought for ages there were only 4 tastes - sweet, salt, sour, and bitter. And then someone invented umami... Now what was the private subjective experience of umami doing before we started talking about it? Presumably it was disguising itself as an aroma? And was that a different experience or the same experience?

How is it that these three people aren't sharing their "unsharable" experience of red, when they use language to share their experiences of red? If it were "unsharable", then we shouldn't even be able to communicate it, much less have listeners understand it. — Harry Hindu

It's a problem isn't it? One has to say that they are sharing associations, responses (behaviours) but not the quale. Because that is what the quale is supposed to consist of - the unsharable aspect of experience. But strip away all the associations and responses that we clearly can talk about because we just did, and there seems to me at least, to be nothing left that is the quale itself. The box turns out not to have much of a beetle after all.

There is a connection. I intend consequences. So one can judge both the intended consequences and the actual consequences on the same moral basis. But one can also judge whether the intended consequences are 'reasonable'. Although one intended to help, in the op's example, one should reasonably know that harmful consequences will ensue from cheating. If one could not reasonably know of the harmful consequences, we would say it was an innocent mistake, but it ought to be obvious in this case, as in drunk driving. Reckless intent is thus roughly equivalent to mal-intent but to the extent that actual consequences are unforeseeable, they do not engender guilt.

consciousness means subjectivity — Marchesk

It's easier to see this is not the case if we avoid the word consciousness and stick with qualia and behavior.

It's clear that when speaking of qualia we are not talking about behavior, and vice versa. A behaviorist would deny the existence of qualia, not say that qualia is actually behavior, because that makes no sense. — Marchesk

There is definitely a private, unshareable aspect to our being. — Marchesk

When you call it an aspect, that seems less troubling; but when it is isolated linguistically as 'the quale of red', it has become a veritable beetle in a box, whereof one cannot speak. There's been a shortage of beetle talk in this otherwise excellent thread.

If we try to compare our private unsharable experience of red, one might say, 'it reminds me of the peace and comfort of the womb, I have my bedroom painted red, because it is relaxing', and the other might say, 'I find it stimulating and exciting, I also have my bedroom painted red, but for quite different reasons', and another might not like red at all, and find it provokes anxiety and stress.

We share the particularity of our different associations and responses to red, but we fail to quite touch the beetle in the box, because the beetle has been defined to be the purified essence of privacy. We have talked of individuality, of subjectivity, in relation to our response to red, but you want to say that this is not the experience of red: the quale always escapes - by definition. But if you strip out every association, every response, is there in fact anything left, some other, unsharable secret?

Never click on a blue unenlightened. You might just tip him over the edge.

I was reminded of A Case of Conscience at first, but on reflection, a better guide is the dystopian Brave New World, and by contrast, Huxley's utopian Island.

But if you don't have time for science fiction much, simply consider that a game you can't lose isn't much of a game, and I'll leave it at that.

I'd be dreaming, just as if I were hallucinating, I'd be hallucinating. I wouldn't be aware, though. — Harry Hindu

Something, though, must make the dream or the hallucination 'yours'. I'm certainly not aware of your dreams, but I am aware of mine, otherwise I could not recount them or call them 'mine', could I? If I'm not aware of the mirage, I won't be walking towards it.

How ever much detail I give you (like Temple Grandin's clever lengthy descriptions) can you really imagine what I experienced? — Andrew4Handel

Well perhaps I have hyper-imaginative empathic syndrome, and find myself taking on other people's psyche whenever they post about it. Or perhaps not. ;) But it certainly seems to me that I get a better picture - oh that phrase again - of your condition from the story of your life than from the list of symptoms that I find on a social anxiety site.

I was at a boarding school in the days when being called 'queer' was the worst insult possible, and was confirmed as true by a failure to immediately start a fight. In such a world, social anxiety is a necessity for a gay (or a wimp like me) rather than an illness, and when the home environment gives no respite either...

Here's something to consider; that dread is a sane response to a hostile social environment. And when one finds a supportive environment, one's dread is diminished. Have you ever considered the thesis that it's not you, it's them? David Smail wrote about the social nature of personal distress, and is worth a read. In particular, he talks about how the world affects us through things that are 'beyond our event horizon'.He gives an example of someone who is made redundant and falls into a depression and has feelings of inadequacy because he cannot really see that it is the implacable forces of the global economy rather than his own psyche that are operating. So you might have symptoms of social anxiety because in the straight world, homophobia is endemic. But it is hard to see that you are suffering from their 'illness'.

My concern is about bad psychology abusing or neglecting the mentally ill. Especially with this idea that you can be an expert in someone else's mind and thus override what they are telling you (hetero-phenomenology)

If someone says to you "I am depressed" you don't know anything about it. I advocate a very detailed phenomenology. But that is not my experience of psychiatrists. If a psychiatrist fully comprehended what happened to me as a child they would recognise the depth of my problems. But only someone who has either had similar situations or a very sympathetic/empathetic person can fully appreciate the situation. People often minimise or misrepresent other peoples problems because they use weak words and weak analogies.

So if you seriously want to "know" someone else's mind you should be prepared to talk to them for hours in a very open minded but probing way. — Andrew4Handel

I generally agree with you. The state of psychiatry is very close to the state of science in the era of witchcraft - i.e. nowhere. That 'we' normals are in any position to pathologise 'you' rarities as 'ill' is one patent nonsense amongst many. Clearly we are as a species insane, and drive each other more insane on a regular basis.

When I mentioned social anxiety you said "I'm chronically shy and misanthropic; Have I got it?" That sounded derogatory and poor attempt to imagine social anxiety and this is what people with mental health are up against. IT is a mixture of prejudice and a failure of imagination. — Andrew4Handel

I'm sorry. If I hurt your feelings it was unintended. But I am rather against the current fashion for categorising distress into syndromes and then reifying them into things that people have 'got'. But people find some comfort in it, as it allows one to dissociate from the distress, and I should have been more careful about it.

On the question of language, though, having a name, 'social anxiety' allows one to talk about and recognise something in oneself, that is otherwise an amorphous sense of 'being different'. I think Blake Ross described rather well the excitement of discovering the concept of Aphantasia, and how it enabled a new understanding of himself and others. So that was really my question; there are these old-fashioned terms like 'shy', but one says 'I am shy', rather than 'I've got shyness disorder'. And we could say of Blake, that he lacks a visual imagination, instead of that he has this rare mental illness.

So here is a really radical idea for you. The dissociation that language enables is itself the foundation of not only mental illness but of the entire mental world. Even for me to say I am shy is to step out of myself in order to name the condition I am in. And this division, while it seems to promise some relief from that condition, actually perpetuates it. Thus psychiatry itself is an addictive process that seems to offer relief for the distress it subtly creates. So the question arises, is there another way of understanding oneself and the other that does not divide the mind?

you can't deny that you're self-reflecting while in the act of doing it. — Pneumenon

As in, "I don't think" is a performative contradiction.

When you broaden your worldview, all you see are vicious idiots everywhere. It is not religion that is the problem. It is humanity. We are cancer. — TimeLine

If you have dealings with real idiots, or whatever politically correct designation one gives to the less intellectual amongst us, they tend to be less vicious and more loving. It's the intelligent that are vicious.

We're back to counting corpses again, to see who is the gooder thinker. If the insight is clear, the parasite is transformed into a symbiote. This is the magic of thought, that where biology must laboriously evolve, thought can change instantly.

Ok, Harry, I'm done, here. You find the appropriate word to express your relation to your dreams.

I came across this on another thread, and thought of you.

It seems that it is you that is "making shit up". If not, then please explain how the sentence, "If I hallucinate pink elephants in the garden, then I am aware of pink elephants in the garden even if they are not there." makes any sense. How is it that you can be aware of something that isn't there? That, by definition, is what is called, "making shit up". — Harry Hindu

Yes, a hallucination is making shit up, and if one is unconscious of any shit, made up or real, one is not hallucinating. I cannot hallucinate X without being aware of X, because not to be aware of X is not to experience X, whether X is made up or real. To have an hallucination, or a dream, or a veridical experience is to be aware of something.

Yes but the problem is that some experiences are public (have an external referent) and some are private so that the words referring to our mental states are not open for comparison. — Andrew4Handel

Well I disagree. I have tried to indicate why. Words for things that are not open for comparison fail to have content.

Temple Grandin has talked about thinking in Images and I know it is not how I think. She needs to imagine pictures to have concepts such as seeing different cars in her mind to capture the general concept "car" or seeing red in different images for that concept. — Andrew4Handel

Ok, let's go into that a bit, though it seems like a non-issue to me. Suppose Temple or you or anyone is walking down the street and meets a friend, George. How does one know it is George, unless either he has a name badge, or one has an image of George in mind? And conversely, how does one know that it is George unless one has the word "George" in one's mind? Come to that, how does one even know it is a street or that one is walking, unless one has both the word and some kind of image, or visceral schema with which the word is associated?

Now some folks are quite astounding in the way that they can recognise faces and put names to them having met them only once. I on the other hand regularly walk past people I know quite well and cannot recall either the face or the name. I have learned to bluff in such situations because people can get upset when you don't know them and they think you ought to. " Oh high there, how are you (total stranger), how's the family?" My wife, on the other hand, regularly stops someone on the street to remind them that they were in primary school together 40 years ago having not seen them since. I can neither recognise nor name anyone I was at school with.

So we think differently. And the difference is apparent in our behaviour. If there was no difference in behaviour, then there would be no difference we could talk about. Anyway, the main point is that words alone can have no meaning unless they are associated with experiences in some way, and experiences can have no meaning unless they are grouped under concepts in some way, so there is no real issue, but one of emphasis. Personally, where my thinking functions best is in abstract relations - neither words nor pictures as such, but what one might call schematics. Individual facts are difficult, but ordered relations are easy. So physics rather than chemistry, political theory rather than politics.

One can see that autistic people think differently. So their thinking is not private. If it was private one could not see it. You can see that I think differently... Do have a read of Wittgenstein, he is quite helpful in getting out of the private world and into the shared world, or rather, realising one was never in a private world after all.

I confess sport interests me very little, and my list was the result of a 30 second google search. But it served as an answer to your rhetorical question, and brought forth a line by line repudiation which rather exposes the agenda.

I also wondered why men in gymnastics don't use the balance beam, and google gave me this.

A cynic like me tends to think that men don't compete in areas where they are weaker than women, but instead suggest that these are "not sports". And then it is "undeniable" that men are better at all sports.

Which professional female athlete of which sport can compete with professional male athletes in the same sport? — VagabondSpectre

the current world record for the greatest depth reached in free diving is held by a woman.
In 1967 Beryl Burton cycled further in 12 hours than the men's record (which was set in the same event). Ronaldo's wife Milene, holds the World football keepee uppee record.
Lynn Hill of rockclimbing. She was the first to free climb the Nose, a long and difficult route on El Capitan previously considered all but impossible. Also, very long distance running and swimming.

Exactly. It's called pure reason, and it has limitations. That's what it means for a proposition to be analytic, that it says nothing about the world. And that is why the number of beers in the fridge, or rabbits in the hutch is synthetic, whereas that 6 - 3 = 3 is analytic. The price of necessity is vacuity.

Where philosophers start to use both together is where they can say interesting and meaningful things.

You are only aware of this after the fact — Harry Hindu

How can you be aware after the fact without having been aware of the fact? Stop making shit up. If I hallucinate pink elephants in the garden, then I am aware of pink elephants in the garden even if they are not there. How the hell can I hallucinate pink elephants without being aware of anything? I hallucinate pink elephants, therefore I am.

But is it accurate to say that you are "aware" in your sleep. You aren't aware of anything going on outside of your body and you aren't even aware that you are dreaming. Dreams could just be hallucinations as we know that sensory deprivation for an extended period can cause hallucinations. Or, it could be similar to day-dreaming (or letting our imagination run away), but without the being aware of the rest of the world, which can make the dream more convincing and explains why we don't know that we are dreaming - like we do when we are awake. — Harry Hindu

One must be aware of a hallucination or a day or night dream in order to have it, no?

No. Even if there are no blue dogs, no blue things and no dogs, still all the blue dogs are blue dogs, just as all unicorns are unicorns.

... a description of the symptoms I shared. [...] The words pull together strands of experience into a recognisable entity. — Andrew4Handel

Well I was hoping for some of the actual words. But still, the point can be made, I think. What you get is some words that describe a feeling that leads to described symptoms. All these words must be shared words, in order to be understandable.

The feelings that accompany social anxiety include anxiety, high levels of fear, nervousness, automatic negative emotional cycles, racing heart, blushing, excessive sweating, dry throat and mouth, trembling, and muscle twitches. In severe situations, people can develop a dysmorphia concerning part of their body (usually the face) in which they perceive themselves irrationally and negatively.
Constant, intense anxiety (fear) is the most common symptom.

http://socialphobia.org/social-anxiety-disorder-definition-symptoms-treatment-therapy-medications-insight-prognosis

So the feelings are described as physical reactions, very generalised feeling words like 'fear', 'nervousness', and forms of thought. These things are not private and inaccessible, and that is why one can recognise them in oneself. And the context in which these feelings are aroused distinguish social anxiety from arachnophobia or OCD.

http://www.philosophyonline.co.uk/oldsite/pom/pom_behaviourism_wittgenstein.htm

I see this as a perversion of philosophy and Wittgenstein. As if rules were needed prior to the use of reason and ethics. — Question

So the first rule is that philosophy club shall be anarchic or perverse?

I would give my vote to

1. Play nice.