I’m with you. So what is stopping us? Why don’t we just organize, find some like minded people, and implement our philosophy by living it and doing it?

I have a theory. "From the cradle to the grave" was the ambition of the British welfare state. It turns out they weren't speaking about our welfare and security, but rather the length of time citizens have to spend working for the state in order to fund its schemes. That is precisely where the socialism comes in, and it quickly resembles serfdom.

The problem is that in accepting this bargain we have given up our responsibility to members of our own community. Larger and more powerful institutions have promised to do it for us, or at least that’s the bill we’ve been sold. All we need do is give it some of the fruits of our labor and it will provide a host of services for children and those in need. But if the institution takes the earnings of n hours of our labor, it is like taking n hours from our lives because those n hours are spent providing for someone else. This is time and resources we could use toward helping those in need. So, since we have delegated our responsibilities to one another to this institution, and we toil to fund it, our efforts towards each other are already exhausted. Why would someone give resources to children if he already gives resources to the institutions that are meant to serve, educate, and protect the children?

We have three kinds of action: automatic (motions of body that do not require us to be conscious or aware) instinctive (emotional response to stimuli, over which we don't always have control, or have imperfect control) and deliberate ones that proceed from conscious thought. Most evil thoughts are not translated into action, but no evil act is performed without forethought.

If an evil person is someone who acts immorally and wickedly, they need to act immorally and wickedly, and thinking just doesn’t rise to that level as an activity or behavior. If you were to observe someone having evil thoughts versus someone having good thoughts, it would be impossible to determine which one was evil and which one good unless the performed some other act.

Or precipitate a world war in one lifetime. Or nuke 180,000 people in an hour.

What combination of words and letters could force you to push the button?

Words are not even innocent when read by impressionable youth; they're guilty as sin when written as commands and read by obedient drones.

Words are wholly innocent. The blame lies solely on those who act on them.

I don't think so. I think that to believe thoughts can be described as evil is the result of a superstition of language.

I say this because thinking is one of the least consequential and impactful activities human can engage in. If they were to store the kinetic energy produced by any of amount brain activity and release it on the world I wager it wouldn't move a feather, let alone produce any evil. Even when thoughts are reified into a phrase or book, one could observe the words for 10 lifetimes and see nothing come of it. They are completely innocent.

It is true. Not only that but it’s a made up crime that no one has ever been charged with. They have to make up crimes in order to feed their fantasy that the man is a criminal. It’s glorious. No wonder trust in these institutions is falling, and I’m all for it.

I think you’re right about that.

Education is never impartial; it often represents the beliefs and desires of the people and institutions that provide it. Church education, for instance, never forgot to instil a belief in the church and its religion.

As for public education, my opinion is that the state doesn’t want philosophers and people who can think for themselves. It wants dutiful tax-payers, soldiers, state employees, and dependents. Thus the system trains the population into a state of serf-mindedness and compliance. It teaches us to glorify the very institution that provides for their training.

Go drink your soy latte.

I laughed. A mixture of soy and political dopamine fuels the rage. One thing you won’t find is any principle.

Bragg’s current prosecutor, Matthew Colangelo, previously served as acting associate attorney general in Biden’s Justice Department and also led New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil inquiry into Trump. He’s Biden’s hatchet man.

Add this to the fact that the judge’s daughter received millions from the Biden/harris campaign, is it just not possible to find someone in the justice system who is impartial, and not a Biden/obama stooge with a vested interest in Trump’s conviction?

I don’t really care about your fee-fees. So maybe we can dispense with them.

I do not hold a further fact view about identities.

I don’t care whether you’re interested or not. I note only that you have not provide any counter. Your objection, as far as it was legible, I could not understand. Maybe you can clarify.

An agent is something with the capacity to act. I’m not sure what a collection of causes and effects is, nor do I understand what bullet you want me to bite. Not a single ounce of discomfort involved here.

I’ll just reiterate the point to which you replied. So far no determinist has shown that any act or choice was determined by anything else, and until that happens I cannot follow it.

You can give me any example you like. Does anything else in the universe determine an agent’s actions? What prior causes? What causes are you speaking of that go into an agent and determine his actions?

Is there some other cause besides you that raised your arm? As I mentioned, the determinist ought to be able to say what else besides the agent caused his action. If you’re saying the agent who he was 1 second ago caused the action, then so much the better. The anterior state to the agent is still the agent.

It’s not begging the question to accept the reality of a first-person perspective with phenomenal character; it’s the foundation upon which the dispute between naive and indirect realism rests.

Their argument is over whether or not distal objects are constituents of this first-person phenomenal character.

The foundation is the biology, which can be experienced from all perspectives. But from the first-person perspective most of it remains invisible, thus what it is doing and how it works is largely inaccessible. With this in mind the notion that a first-person perspective grants special access seems incoherent.

The “what it’s like” to be so and so lacks more data than it could possibly provide. It’s more “what it seems like”. This is the reason why the foundation is forever “phenomenal”, and never actual. All that could ever be provided from that perspective is belief.

Maybe it’s relevant for indirect realists and dualists of all types, no doubt, but my relevant concern is why they’re begging the question, why they proliferate unobservables into a menagerie of ineffable terms and concepts, and why they’d eschew the 3rd-person perspective in favor of one that cannot even see his own ears, let alone what is occurring in the skull.

So you have no knowledge of qualia that you can illustrate, even though you assert that you are acquainted with qualia. That comes off as quite convenient.

But given that experience is an act involving a practical relationship between oneself and the rest of the world (and never a space located in the body with area and volume), it follows that objects are often participants of that act.

Right, you’ve gained knowledge of qualia through your non-judgemental acquaintance of it rather than by gaining knowledge of it through a description of it being so-and-so. I, on the other hand, have no acquaintance with qualia. So what, if anything, can you say of the experiential evidence you’ve gathered in regards to qualia?

Direct awareness as knowledge, as contrasted with descriptive knowledge, sure. I’m just asking if you can afford me some of that knowledge that you have derived from your acquaintance.

You’re acquainted with qualia but do not know about qualia. This troubles me. I’m just trying to figure how one can agree with the first premise.

So which is it?

Is a quale a property of experience or of mental objects?

If you are you ought be able to describe a property or two of each.

I’m just saying that you’re not acquainted with mental phenomena. We’re so unacquainted with mental phenomena that we cannot even describe one. If we were acquainted with mental phenomena this whole issue wouldn’t be such a struggle.

You treat them and speak about them like they are objects. If you are acquainted with an object it can be explained further.

You can name them.

P1. We are acquainted with the phenomenal character of experience.

We experience experience. We are aware of awareness. We are conscious of consciousness.

Yet we are unable to describe a single quale, or any of the mediums upon which they supposedly appear.

It’s a source-hood argument. If his action is not determined by anything else, how is it compatible with determinism?

I actually question the notion that Libertarian Free Will (LFW) entails the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) - the notion that LFW implies there's true contingency to our choices. Even under LFW, we are guided by our impulses, knowledge, assumptions, etc. Given some series of deliberative thoughts, how could there be a different outcome? We have followed some chain of reasoning, and are subject to the same impulses.

My own test is simple: if the action originates in the agent he is responsible for it. He willed it. It cannot be otherwise. Given that we are our impulses, knowledge, and assumptions, the responsibility for the act remains on the agent whose impulses, knowledge, and assumptions they are. Unless someone else or some other force is moving the agent’s body, his acts are determined by him and by nothing else, and the responsibility lies there.

So far no determinist has shown that any act or choice was determined by anything else, and until that happens I cannot follow it.

I showed you a connection between the very wealthy and the political class, and you bring up Trump. That’s something Biden would do.

Do you always deflect from challenges by not answering questions?

What challenge?

Does you always speak in questions?

It relates to the very wealthy and the political class, a connection you’re now trying to disguise.

I’ve spoken about the influence of dark money on the previous 2 federal elections, and it seems to favor one particular side. You might want to looks into it instead of becoming the end product.

I am surprised at how common this view is, albeit expressed in degrees of subtlety. That is, that those who have settled against free-will are doing so out of a psychological desire to be "free" of responsibility.

I don't believe that to be the case. To me the question is more about the nature/structure of human Mind/metaphysics than morality. I.e., the moral implications follow my judgment about whether or not we have free will, rather than informing it.

But I do find it interesting.

I don’t believe it to be the case either. The metaphysical judgement sets the grounds for the moral judgement. That’s why I said it sets the grounds for it.

But that crucial point is oddly missing from what you quoted. Did your past state determine that your present state would exclude that line?

I don’t think it entails nihilism and fatalism, but it does set the grounds for them. Though I’m sure many people are content with the implications of determinism, that they have zero responsibility, and their actions have somehow began outside of them.

No matter his politics and affinities, his mere presence among the effete political class is enough to expose the scam. Look at them go.

Anarchists, who are not well educated in politics, or moral and social philosophy in general, are the modern day libertarians.

The only thing an educated person can do politically is glorify and aggrandize the state, or disguise their statism as social and political philosophy, which is the direct consequence of their state education.

In any case, I’d love to see an educated refutation of any one of the aforementioned political stances, morally and socially, if you care to try.

At best we're describing the activity of the body from the perspective of the body, an organism who is forever peering outward, towards the world, and never inside towards what is actually occurring in there. The best introspection and subjectivity can provide is a partial or blind view of oneself, wholly limited by our own lack of a sensual field.

But because our senses point outwards towards the world, we can come to understand much more about what goes on out there, simply because it provides us with more information. Dreams, on the other hand, occur while we're asleep. The senses aren't as fully integrated into cognitive processing as they would while we're awake, and with our eyes open. So not only are our faculties hindered during during dreams and hallucinations, accounts of what are actually going on are severely limited in both scope and data. This is more than enough for me to say, no, they are not of a common kind.

I very much agree with the first sentence.

So you are content to sit on the side-lines watching what goes on, paying your share of the price for letting it all happen and telling those people how undeserving they are - and, no doubt, generously helping those you consider deserving.

I confess that I get increasingly annoyed at the widespread acceptance of the view that welfare is somehow equivalent to charity. It isn't. It is enlightened self-interest. See Wikipedia - Enlightened self-interest (But I don't think, as Wikipedia seems to think, that this is a complete ethical theory.)

I am content being just and moral, and yes, helping those who I think need and want help.

Welfare certainly isn't equivalent to charity. Welfare is simply the means through which people can absolve themselves of their responsibility to members of their own community, and worse, to delegate that responsibility to a some cold bureaucracy. The most a welfarist can say he's done to help others is pay a little taxes. Charity at least involves some sacrifice and effort.

You are already paying a price by not preventing them from continuing in their life of crime. Passing laws, buying alarms and locks, and funding the police hasn't worked. Try investing in something else, more effective.

It would be effective to kill them, but effectiveness can often be immoral and unjust. So utility is not any kind of goal for me.

Metaphysically, yes, downstream from that which is not physiologically conditioned; scientifically, yes, downstream from nerve endings.

And what lies downstream?