And as I have explained, this is a misguided understanding of causation. I cause the bomb to explode by pushing a button, I cause the machine to turn by telling it to, the fly causes the Venus flytrap to close by moving its hairs.

The relationship between each pair of events isn't merely correlation. It's not an accident or happenstance or coincidence. It's causal.

My sense organs send electrical signals to my brain because they have been stimulated. If they do so for any other reason, e.g entirely caused by internal, biological activity, then that's a sign of an injury.

You’re a determinist. The choice to put yourself as the cause in all these events is completely arbitrary and linear, as any and all anterior states caused you to push the button, and therefor explode the bomb. You have no control or will over anything. Isn’t that so?

Your sense organs send electrical signals to your brain. Nothing else in the universe does that. Nothing else is reading the words you’re reading, thinking the thoughts you’re thinking, sending the impulses you’re sending, moving your body, and responding to words the way you do. While I might be misguided about the philosophy of causation, you’re doing, controlling, determining, governing, creating, catalyzing, producing, generating, evoking those acts, and no one else can do so.

The pundits are saying Israel doesn't have the ability to disarm Iran by itself. They want the US to join in to finish the job. Trump appears to be bored by the notion.

Never doubt the neocons. But Trump had already urged Netanyahu not to attack a day or so before the attack happened, and to end the war in Gaza. And obviously this turn of events ruins the diplomatic talks between US and Iran which were supposed to happen tomorrow, I think. It threatens the Abraham Accords. I imagine Trump is pissed at Netanyahu. Hopefully this episode will further disentangle the US from that government.

They said that Israel used the drone-on-trucks technique, the same thing Ukraine did just a few weeks earlier, both of which took years of planning. Is the common denominator between these two parties the CIA? Mossad?

Israel urges U.S. to join war with Iran to eliminate nuclear program

An Israeli official claimed to Axios that the U.S. might join the operation, and that President Trump even suggested he'd do so if necessary in a recent conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A White House official denied that on Friday. A second U.S. official confirmed on Saturday that Israel has urged the Trump administration to join the war, but said currently the administration is not considering it.

A senior White House official told Axios Saturday that "whatever happens today cannot be prevented," referring to Israel's attacks.

"But we have the ability to negotiate a successful peaceful resolution to this conflict if Iran is willing. The fastest way for Iran to accomplish peace is to give up its nuclear weapons program," the senior official added.

What they're saying: "The entire operation... really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow," Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter told Fox News on Friday.

Israeli officials have raised the idea of U.S. participation to take out Fordow with U.S. counterparts since Israel's operation began.
An Israeli source said the U.S. is considering the request and stressed Israel hopes Trump agrees.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/14/israel-iran-war-us-nuclear-program-trump

Watch, now they’ll want the US to join the Isreali campaign to avoid the cognitive dissonance involved in their narrative.

The military parade is amazing. There should be one every year.

The news also says he was targeting abortion clinics. Not necessarily a hard-left cause. I guess we’ll see his motives from the manifesto he was reportedly carrying.

So you don't accept that the fly's movements cause the Venus flytrap to close its jaws and you don't accept that spoken words can cause a voice-activated machine to lift some weight.

This just isn't the "superstitious imply[ing] a physics of magical thinking that contradicts basic reality" as you accuse it of being. It's the truth, and common sense. And if this is your best defence of free speech absolutism then so much the worse for your position.

I’ve already stated my reasoning. The effects cannot be shown to reach as far as you say they do. The objects, structures, and energies responsible for such movements, responses, and actions are not the same as the ones you claim they are. There is no argument for censorship save for superstition and magical thinking.

I don’t know, man, you might be right. But Personally, I would wait until all is investigated. It could be some disgruntled cop trying to discredit the protests for all we know.

And the fly causes it to close. The two are not mutually exclusive. Exactly like with machines.

I’m not so sure about that.

You're not addressing what I'm saying. I’m saying that even if we have libertarian free will, this could-have-done-otherwise agency does not apply to our heartbeats and does not apply to our sense organs, and so there’s no good reason to say that the behaviour of our sense organs is not causally determined by some stimulus and its source.

The problem is you cannot point to anything else that determines sensing and heart-beating. So I fully dispute and disagree with what you’re saying.

[quote
] Why not? Do you reject the claim that my speech can cause a voice-activated forklift to lift a heavy weight?[/quote]

I utterly reject it and for the same reasons I reject it your other analogies.

Autonomous robot.

Again, all of the have been programmed and built by humans, and therefor are dependent on human input.

It’s the 250 year anniversary of the US Army and it will be marked by a parade. Many in the press erroneously call it “Trump’s parade”, despite the official name. They have to do this and essentially lie in order to maintain a narrative they spent the better part of decade building. The anti-Trump propagandists have already framed it as a parade in the style of Kim Jung Un, or some other dictator, and not something someone might see on Bastille Day. So I’m kind of hoping the mindless and thoughtless protesters show up to disrupt it, given that every time they put on such a show the rest of us get more-and-more inclined to ignore it.

In the spirit of conformity and catharsis they organized a multi-city protest to coincide with the parade, once again using the “Trump thinks he’s a king” narrative to fuel their live-action roleplay. It’s called the “No Kings” protest, a name about the average length of an anti-Trump activist’s incredulity. Bernie Sanders, donning his tricorn hat and advertising for the event, even made overtures to 1776 in an X post (the fact of which is verboten here). These are the kind of fantasies their politicians exploit for power, donor-dollars, and votes.

Perhaps funnier was the recent political theater put on by a Democrat senator. He disrupted a Kristi Noem press conference and tried to shove himself up to the stage to confront her, but was stopped and eventually pushed out of the event by security, taken down and cuffed. Afterwords, when speaking to the press, he started crying about it, literally. In unison the party pretended this event was an example of authoritarianism, not their own emotional and often violent outbursts, fuelled as they are by their own imaginations. We’ll see if any of this happens today, and I must admit I’m kind of looking forward to it.

It didn’t work, though. The rules of the deal never changed and was still in place.

I'll leave you to guess what happened before 2019 that led to that happening.

Apparently pallets of cash for a whole lot of nothing. There were other signatories. They were foolish for staying in a deal which Iran would eventually break.

According to the UN, Iran basically broke that deal.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291

USAID Official and Three Corporate Executives Plead Guilty to Decade-Long Bribery Scheme Involving Over $550 Million in Contracts; Two Companies Admit Criminal Liability for Bribery Scheme and Securities Fraud

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/usaid-official-and-three-corporate-executives-plead-guilty-decade-long-bribery-scheme

Crazy.

House passes DOGE cuts to USAID, NPR, and PBS. If it passes the senate it looks like the opposition will no longer be able to use tax-payer dollars to fund their propaganda.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-12/house-passes-doge-cuts-to-pbs-npr-aid-in-win-for-musk-trump?srnd=phx-politics

Are you saying that the fly walking inside a Venus flytrap does not cause the Venus flytrap's jaw to close?

If the action potential is in the plant, then yes, the biology of the flytrap causes it to close if and when such a stimulus happens.

So?

That means they are not autonomous.

They can if we build them that way. But also: so?

But the fact that we have to build them, program them, etc negates their autonomy.

But the heart beat is not an application of agent-causal libertarian free will. And neither is the sense organ's response to stimuli. So there is no good reason to claim that the behaviour of the sense organs in response to stimulation is any less determined than the behaviour of a radio receiver in response to stimulation. You can't simply hand-wave this away by saying that in other circumstances the organism does have agency.

I can and will hand wave it until you can show that something else in the universe beats the heart. Until then there is nothing else that can be shown to determine the heart beat.

Taking a step back for a moment, and re-addressing this, do you at least accept that my speech can cause a voice-activated forklift to lift a heavy weight, and so that the above comment of yours is completely misguided?

I do not accept it.

You're equivocating. It is true that the human organism is responsible for its heart beat and digestion but it is not prima facie true that its heart beat and digestion is an example of agent-causal libertarian free will, comparable to the supposedly could-have-done-otherwise decision to either have Chinese or Indian for dinner.

So even if you want to consider humans – but not plants and machines – as being agents, its agency does not prima facie apply to everything the body does.

You need to do more than simply assert that humans are agents to defend the claim that the behaviour of the sense organs is an application of agency and not simply a causal reaction to stimuli.

I never said it was an application of agency. I used “agency” to distinguish between the human being and your analogies. But the fact remains that the heart beat and digestion is caused by this same agent. So it is with the operation and maintenance with everything else occurring in the body.

And the same is true of the Venus flytrap and the remote control car (albeit with machinery in place of biology).

Venus flytraps, yes, but machines no. Machines are designed, built, and operated by human beings. They cannot change their own batteries or plug themselves in.

You the entire planet Earth and all living things. It’s basically what you said.

I thought you wanted social breakdown in the US. Didn't you?

Where do you come up with this stuff?

This is a vacuous answer. You can’t simply assert that because the human organism as a whole can “choose to do otherwise” then the behaviour of its sense organs is not causally influenced by a stimulus and its source.

Even the interactionist dualist accepts that some of the body’s behaviour is not “agent-caused”, e.g our heartbeats and digestive systems.

I’m not a dualist. The behavior of the sense organs, the brain, the nervous system etc. is the behavior of the whole. I reiterate this because pretending one and then the other are discreet units outside of the scope and control of the whole is abstract nonsense.

If not the agent, then what causes the heart beat and digestion? Is the Sinoatrial node a foreign parasite or something? Like I said, abstract nonsense.

And how do you maintain this whilst endorsing eliminative materialism? Agents are physical systems and agency is a physical process and like every other physical system and physical process in the universe its behaviour can be and is causally influenced by physical systems and physical processes external to itself, whether that be deterministic causation or probabilistic causation (e.g quantum indeterminacy).

In the case of human sensing, the transduction of one form of energy to another, as in the conversion of outside stimulus to internal chemical and electrical signals, is performed by the human organism. No external system involved in the event of listening performs such an action. And when I look at what changes the force of a soundwave can possibly cause inside the human body the effects are exactly the ones I said the were and no more. Past the transduction, that force is simply no longer present and therefor neither is its “influence”. There is no soundwave or words banging around in there like billiard balls.

All subsequent movements occur due to the potential energy stored in the system itself, in this case the body, as determined by the internal process by which your body expends energy and burns calories. The energy and ability to move, or do the work involved in listening, or speaking, or any activity, is converted, stored, and used by the body and no other system. It determines any and all activity involved, and in fact is physically identical to that activity.

What does it mean to “move on their own accord”? Does the Venus flytrap closing its jaws “move on its own accord”? Does the robot left to its own devices to navigate a maze “move on its own accord”?

It just means autonomy: the energy and force required to move is provided by that which is moving, generated by itself, and wholly determined by the biology, not by external forces.

Why is that relevant? Matter is matter. All physical systems operate according to the same physical laws.

You are engaging in special pleading when you assert that “the entity takes over” applies to human organisms but not machines (and not plants?).

Physical systems vary in properties and behavior. Why would that be irrelevant?

Firstly, are you arguing against determinism and in favour of libertarian free will? If so, how do you maintain this whilst also endorsing eliminative materialism?

I don’t need to believe in non-physical substances to believe objects can move on their own accord.

Which are you endorsing? If the latter then we’re still dealing with causal influence, albeit probabilistic causation.

I’m inclined towards sourcehood arguments and agent-causation of libertarian free will.

Secondly, where does decision-making occur? In the inner ear? Or later in the “higher-level” brain activity? If the latter then you must at least accept that the causal power of stimuli extends beyond the immediate interaction with the sense organs, being causally responsible for the signals sent to the brain and the behaviour of “lower-level” neurons.

I consider the body to be one holistic system. It is only this system in its entirety that decides, or can decide.

The same is true of the machine with a radio receiver. But it’s still the case that if I send it the appropriate radio signal, e.g telling it to self destruct, then I am causally influencing its behaviour.

The fact that the human body and sense organs are organic matter and not metal is of no relevance.

But you set up the receiver and bomb. You programmed it to self destruct. It didn’t grow organically and learn to deal with the environment and others through years of experience and learning. It cannot choose to do otherwise should it desire to do so. You have no such influence over human beings as you would over a radio receiver.

The "protests" are spreading to other cities. It looks like Americans are in for another “summer of love”, just like in 2020.

The question is “why”? Why do Americans have to suffer yet again the destruction of their cities, the people in their roadways, the curfews, the violence and looting, the waving of foreign flags on American streets?

It’s not like there hasn’t been mass deportations before. Over 3 million individuals were removed from the country during the Obama administration. In 2013 alone over 83% were expelled without due process. Where were the activist judges? Where were the highly-televised protests and riots then?

Not only that, but around 1500 “No Kings” protests are planned across the country on June 14th, coinciding with the Army’s 250th birthday and the military parade. Why? I suspect the anti-Trump imagination sees in its soy-colored narrative the military parades of Russia or China, soldiers goose-stepping about, and assume Trump was inspired with his dictatorial aspirations. But the inspiration came from watching France's popular Bastille Day parade.

And of course, like everything, Trump is to blame. The great demiurge has entered the brains of rioters and now moves them like marionettes to inflict violence upon their countrymen. It's going to be an eventful summer!

This whole foray in LA is amazing in its effects. Anti-Trumpism has reduced them to defending illegals, MS-13 members, mobs waving foreign flags, riots, law breaking, and routine violence.

I am saying that NOS4A2's claim that speech has no causal power beyond the immediate transfer of kinetic energy in the inner ear is a complete misunderstanding of causation.

You might be right; I do have issues with causation. But you furtively leave out the body as much as you can. You don’t mention that it is the body that does the listening. In fact, the body does all the work: produces all the components required, converts all the energy, guides the impulses to their destination, directs each and every subsequent bodily movement long after the sound wave has had any impression. Sound waves do none of that stuff.

To get back on point, no government should regulate whatever I am saying now and whatever you said or might say in response to me.

But if you and I were conspiring to commit murder, just flinging murderous thoughts and plans at each other, and one of us takes one affirmative step according to those plans, like buying guns or something, then both of us could be charged with conspiracy to commit murder and potentially jailed, not for buying the guns, but for the words we shared as the reason for buying the guns.

That would be government regulating speech but because of its consequences, not because of its content.

What consequence? You haven’t murdered anyone. It’s true, you definitely could be charged with conspiracy to commit murder, even though your crime is moving your mouth and breath in certain ways as to form sounds called words, which harmed exactly nothing; but that’s indicative of how superstitious man is.

Descriptors can come from any angle, from any mouth, and can vary in degree from similar to opposite according to whomever describes it. Therefor it is necessarily distorted by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations.

It is enough that the work itself is objective, and anyone can view it and come to their own conclusions. In that sense, that a work is objective is itself an objective quality, and probably the only one that matters.

Can you not do otherwise?

Butting in here, but isn't you responding to FO proving their point to a degree? They post, you respond. Obviously as adults we are responsible to how we react to things, but it is also clearly possible to say things that will get people to react in semi-predictable ways. I believe this means there can be some gray areas. An example that comes to mind is how "fighting words" are not legal, as they encourage other people to fight.

NOS4A2, post something, anything, anywhere on TPF.

You are my slave now.

The rooster crows, the sun rises. Therefor the rooster causes the sun to rise.

Like I said earlier, post hoc ergo propter hoc. I respond if and when I want to. Sometimes I do not respond at all, or even read a post for that matter. A series of words, written or spoken, have no special force over and above their mediums, which are themselves not words. So how can you move a human being with words?

It’s obvious to me that my words cause others to take specific actions and so I can be held responsible for the outcome of the acts of others because they listened to my words.

Repeatedly talking about motor cortex’s is having no affect on the arguments. Motor cortex’s are how. They are not why. You are not talking politics and the question of free speech is a political one.

Then let’s try it. Use your words and cause me to take specific actions.

What's the relevant difference between a radio receiver and a sense organ such that I can be said to be the cause of what happens after the radio receiver converts radio waves into electrical signals but cannot be said to be the cause of what happens after a sense organ converts sound waves into electrical signals?

Human beings are organic, living, beings that have the capacity to move, think, and act, among many other activities. Radio receivers cannot do any of the above and have no such capacities. Humans use their environment to sense while radio receivers cannot.

You bring up the term “agent”, but what does that mean? If I say that the drought caused the famine am I putting the drought in the role of “agent”?

An agent is a general term in philosophy of mind denoting “a being with the capacity to act and influence the environment”.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/agency

Your language reeks of folk psychology, which I thought you were against? We should only be addressing the physics of the matter, so commit to it. And when addressing the physics of the matter there is no good reason to believe that the human body’s response to sound waves is any different in principle to a bomb’s response to radio waves.

And on the example of the drought causing the famine, this once again shows that causal influence ought not be understood so reductively as only the immediate transfer of kinetic energy, as you try to do when misinterpreting what it means for speech to influence behaviour.

You should just accept that this approach you're taking to defend free speech is entirely misguided. You'd be better served arguing in favour of interactionist dualism and libertarian free will, or if that is a step too far then just that the causal influence speech has does not warrant legal restrictions.

No, it appears I don’t need to concede to anything you say because nothing you’ve said has been convincing. All you can do is use agency in your analogies, then remove it when it comes to your physics, or when it’s otherwise convenient.

Sorry, I thought you asked why I was posting here.

The point of a constitution is to define the founding principles of a state.

Do you think you can be responsible for the actions of others?

No. No one cannot control another’s motor cortex with words.

Trust me, don’t yell “fire!” in a crowded room. Some people might hold you responsible for what other people do, that they will say was based on what you yelled.

As I wrote to you earlier in the thread, the “fire in a crowded theater” phrase was just an analogy, never a binding law. The ruling in which this analogy was used was overturned nearly 60 years ago. The constitution of the US does not forbid it yelling fire in a crowded theater.

Watch Christopher Hitchens dispel this myth at the outset of his delightful speech on free speech.

It's simply special pleading to claim that my biology "governs, controls, and thereby determines" transduction but that a bomb's machinery doesn't. Flesh, blood, and bone is in principle no different to metal.

So, once again, I can cause a bomb to explode by flicking a switch and I can cause someone to turn their head by shouting their name. All your talk about transduction and the kinetic energy of speech is utterly irrelevant. Whether man or machine, I can and do causally influence another entity's behaviour, as can other men and machines causally influence mine.

The reason you won’t make the bomb the agent of causation and put it in the subject position in your event is because it’s absurd. The switch touching your finger does not “causally influence” your behavior any more than any other switch touching your finger.

It’s the same with words. The agent who reads or listens or flips switches has certain capacities that neither soundwaves, scribbles on paper, nor switches have. The words you’re reading don’t causally influence you to read them anymore than they cause you to stop reading them.

Then what is the point of a constitution or a law? About anything? Such as “free speech?”

On another (but now related) topic, why are you bothering to post here?

I enjoy posting here. I enjoy thinking and arguing about such topics.

Sounds like folk psychology to me.

What's the relevant difference between a radio receiver and a sense organ such that I can be said to be the cause of what happens after the radio receiver converts radio waves into electrical signals but cannot be said to be the cause of what happens after a sense organ converts sound waves into electrical signals?

I’ve stated this before but each one of your analogies invariably put the human being in the subject position as the agent of causation. Man does something to computer; man flicks a switch; man blows people up. That is until it comes to the topic of discussion, where it is words do something to man, soundwaves do something to man. Why do keep pulling this switch?

Bombs do not have the capacity to govern, control, and thereby determine their behavior. That’s why it is a false analogy.

And the bomb only explodes if it was built a certain way and contains the necessary catalyst, and so on. It's still the case that I caused it to explode by flicking the switch.

Unless you want to argue that human organisms are special in some way that allows them to defy the natural laws of cause and effect that govern every other physical object and system in the universe you're still engaging in non sequiturs.

You don’t believe a sensory receptor causes the transduction of the mechanical energy of a soundwave into electrical impulses? Then what converts the mechanical energy of a soundwave into electrical impulses?

Well, you set the bomb, put it in a place that would kill people, wired the whole thing up, flicked the switch, and so on. You didn’t just flick a switch. The way it is framed is misleading, as these false analogies often are.

To be clear, I have never denied that the light from writing or the sound waves from spoken words do not “causally influence” the body.

But no, no one has made the case how a spoken word can “causally influence” a human being any differently than any other articulated, guttural sound. No one has made the case how the written word can "causally influence" a human being differently than any other mark on paper. The sound-waves of the spoken word, and light bouncing off the ink, do not possess any special properties, different energies, so it must be assumed that they have similar effects as other similar sounds, similar marks on paper, and with very little variation.

The only thing that can explain the variation in behavior, why one person might be “incited” by a word and another will not, is the person himself. This necessarily includes his biology, but also his history, his education, and so on. For example, he must have first acquired language. He must understand what he is hearing. It’s the person, not the word, that fully determines, governs, and causes the response.

If I flick a switch on a radio detonator causing a distant bomb to explode and kill people then I caused a distant bomb to explode and caused people to die; I didn't just cause a switch to change position.

There is more to "A causes B" than just "B is the immediate effect of A's kinetic energy". I don't know why you insist on persisting with this absurdity.

Because I think you’re wrong. And your false analogies with machines and computers only illustrate the lengths you will go to continue it. Bombs don’t require language acquisition, education, and communal living to develop language in the first place, let alone to let it affect them. All of this history and growth has much more to do with the response to a word than the shape of a sound wave.

Correct.

Rather, sound waves cause my ears to send signals to the brain which causes certain neurons to fire in certain ways, and this just is what it means to hear and understand a word. And this in turn causes other neurons to fire in other ways, sending signals to the muscles causing them to contract or relax.

I just don’t see it. Even if I assume your description, I don't see how we can get from this to "words causally influence behavior", or "words incite my action", or any sort of conclusion that words produce any effects beyond causing my ears to send signals.

We have to mention that the sound wave hitting your eardrum is the sole interaction it has with your body, and is therefor the only movement determined by it. That's the only "causal influence" it can have. The rest is all produced, structured, controlled, directed, moved, by the body.

The rest is fully determined by the body of the listener. This is even more evident with acts of reading.

I have no idea how we'd measure the relative degree to which they are involved. The best we can do is ask the question "would I have responded this way had X not happened?", perhaps leading us into the counterfactual theory of causation.

We could sum up the amount of interactions or “causal influences” on your behavior produced by either the word and the body and find out who had more or less influence on result.