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.

The sound is meaningful because the neurons in the brain react in a certain way to it, differently to how they react to other sounds. As to why the neurons react in this way to these sounds, again this would require an absurdly complex model that cannot be explained in a few words - or even a few pages - and certainly not by me. Even the most knowledgeable neuroscientists in the world probably can’t explain it yet.

So nothing is in the sound wave itself that makes it meaningful. Meaning isn't transferred from one person to another.

They all play a part.

Do they all equally play a part?

The brain reacts differently to different sounds. Loud bangs elicit different responses to soothing music. Meaningful expressions elicit different responses to meaningless noise. The specifics of how and why the brain reacts differently would require an absurdly complex and comprehensive model of the brain’s neurons and their interactions with each other and other peripheral aspects of the central nervous system - including the sense organs and environmental stimuli. Trying to explain and predict the weather is child’s play in comparison.

How can a meaningful expression causally influence you differently than a meaningless expression? What is it in the word itself, and what besides surface-level kinetic energy transfer, causes you to respond differently?

All of it does, given that these things determine the existence and relative placement of the neurons and neural connections that make up my brain.

Is it these things that determine your response, or is it the word?

Who said anything about blame? Enough of the folk psychology. You've made it very clear in the past that you're an eliminative materialist. So commit to it.

We're talking about physics and causality, and it is a fact about physics that the behaviour of one material thing can – and does – have a causal affect on another material thing. It doesn't matter if these material things are organisms or machines or if they're human or plant. And causal influence is not to be understood so reductively as surface-level kinetic energy transfer.

We’re talking about speech. How does speech produce a different causal affect and response than any other sound?

Does none of you, your body, your education, your lexicon, and so on causally influence what you read and write in response?

"Entirely up to me" and "causally influenced by you" are not mutually exclusive. See compatibilism.

It is a proven physical fact that my brain activity is causally affected by what some external stimulus causes to happen to my sense organs. That's what it means to sense things in the environment.

You're playing word games when you interpret "A causally influences B" as only meaning "B is the immediate effect of A's kinetic energy". It's ridiculous.

The fact is you read the words. You scanned your eyes over them, considered them, and formulated your response. You understand the language, know how to type, reply, quote, use the website, turn on the computer. Your education, your lexicon, your intelligence, your aptitude. Your body, your brain, your lungs, your hormones, your heart, your genes. All of this “causally influenced” your response but for some reason you want to blame the words for what you write. It’s bizarre.

Nice post again, Count. You’re an enjoyable read.

The "common sensibles" (shape, size, extension, rest, motion, and number) are viewed as "most real" because they can be validated by many senses, including sight and touch, which have priority in human experience.

At the outset I am inclined to believe that these “sensibles”, too, are not sensible, but the abstractions of a sensible object: “properties”. The referents here invariably reside in the mind. But like you said, this sort of materialism is doomed to waiver between the insensible and the sensible insofar as it is about the measurements of objects considered, in abstracto, where we begin to examine the measurements more so than we do the object.

I have read the entire response and will make further comments. But I am telling you mate, this is the only reasonable answer you have given. That's fine, but it does absolutely nothing for the arguments you've been presented with, regardless of you either not getting htem, or pretending they aren't there.

I thought I’ve addressed most if not all of the arguments but I’ll be happy to address any that if I’ve missed them.

This is equivalent to saying "Preventing crime is violating people's rights to eat fresh Apples from the corner near my house". Utterly preposterous and non sequitur. There is absolutely no connection between criminalizing speech and the (obviously nonsensical, in context) "sacrifice" or "another's" right to "live and survive with others". These are non-arguments.

Preventing crime? I’m speaking about preventing someone’s speech, which I stated was “harmless and relatively innocuous behavior required to live and survive with others”. Is crime “ harmless and relatively innocuous behavior required to live and survive with others” in your book? Your equivalence is utter nonsense. I’ll repeat it for you and anyone else you think are moved like a marionette by your sophistry. “Speech is a harmless and relatively innocuous behavior required to live and survive with others. So criminalizing speech—any speech—is to sacrifice another's right to live and survive with others.”

Tell me why defamation is acceptable? Repudiating contract? Misleading commercial dealings? Politicians lying about their policies? Police lying on their reports? Judges lying about evidence in their command? Perjury? Trademark violations? You truly think these should not be regulated?
If so, you want communism. Plain and simple.

I don’t think any of them are acceptable. The problem is you’re equivocating between illegal, regulated, and acceptable behavior in a dramatic display of complete casuistry. I say none of it should be criminalized so you repeat the question, moving the goalposts, to where you are now asking if they I think they should be regulated. Or if I believe they’re acceptable. Why ask if you can’t handle the answer?

I don’t think your sophistry is acceptable and I think you should have at least enough respect for yourself to regulate your bad faith, but in any case I would never criminalize your behavior, punish you for it, or seek your sanction. It’s much better to let you express yourself so I and others can know what kind of person we’re dealing with, whether I should take you seriously, and so on. As proven, it appears I don’t need to.

But even reading words can literally cause irresistible chemical urges in the brain and these are known mental conditions.

Reading words! Finally, the reader is causing it. As long as you say the writer didn’t cause it, you’re thinking more clearly.

It is not a coincidence or magical thinking you read my words and respond to them. That’s entirely up to you whether you do or not. It’s magical thinking to believe I cause you to respond.

In any case, I am more interested in your defense of not making things like contractual lies, slander/defamation, trademark violation, perjury etc... illegal rather than 'private speech' as it were (bad wording, but hopefully says what I want). Is there something for you to say here? Why would we want to allow the chips to fall where they may in these areas?

For my own tastes it's because of principle. Namely, I do not think any person nor group of people should have the power to pick and choose what the rest of us can say, write, and think. Far better to let the chips fall as they may than to give anyone that power. I'll outline some other principles below, but there are plenty more.

Speech is a harmless and relatively innocuous behavior required to live and survive with others. So criminalizing speech—any speech—is to sacrifice another's right to live and survive with others.

But worse, the reason's stated as to why a censor might criminalize speech are entirely superstitious. In fact I would argue that the censor's superstitions are the most prevalent, ancient, and at the same time, most disastrous of superstitions of the entirety of human existence.

The evidence of this is in their reasoning, where they invariably waiver between the actual and the figurative when making their claims (this word literally"triggers" that action, where "trigger" in the literal sense means "to fire by pulling a mechanical trigger". They must be figurative because they cannot explain how it actually occurs). One can read historical accounts of censorship (the trial of socrates for example) to see how this is the case. Physically speaking, speech doesn't possess enough kinetic energy required to affect the world that the superstitious often claims it does. Speech, for instance, doesn't possess any more kinetic energy than any other articulated guttural sound. Writing doesn't possess any more energy than any other scratches or ink blots on paper. And so on. So the superstitious imply a physics of magical thinking that contradicts basic reality: that symbols and symbolic sounds, arranged in certain combinations, can affect and move other phases of matter above and beyond the kinetic energy inherent in the physical manifestation of their symbols. So in my view, to choose to censor is to tacitly believe in superstition and sorcery. Personally, I refuse to do so. Far better to let the chips fall as they may.

But also I wish to possess knowledge. Speech, and therefore our knowledge of history, is as fragile as the Herculaneum papyri. If we were able to gather the sum-total of human speech into a vast pile of writings, art, and artifacts, imagine if some censor was allowed to have his superstitious way with it. What works have already been robbed from humankind we'll probably never know, but in this sense censorship is a form of robbery, perhaps of the worst kind. (Think of what was stolen from mankind with the destruction of the Library of Alexandria). Knowledge of human history must also include lies, fabrications, insults, hate speech, and anything else that is speech. So far better to let the chips fall as they may than to engage in robbery of that kind. Far better to possess knowledge than to be ignorant.

I have plenty more arguments and could go on ad nauseam but I'll refrain for now.

I still prefer "How do we use the word real?"

Charles Pierce claimed that the term “real” was invented by scholastic philosophers to signify “that which is not a figment”, in order to close the debate around the problem of universals. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I thought it was neat. Before then the word “real” already had its use in “real property”, something like “immovable property”, which we know today as real estate.

So how would that work in anarchy if hierarchies are not allowed and everyone has as much as a say as everyone else?

When I was younger I used visit a remote beach to surf with some squatters, some of whom were old homesteaders and anarchists. They had a little community there. It was small, but there were disputes, and they were settled all by deliberation. Not a single incident of violence in the decades they stayed there, at least until the government came in, forcibly evicted them, and burned down their homes.

A minor setback. There are plenty ways around it.

Hey, I don't know what's wrong with the rest of the world but reading old translations of 150 year old political theory is :fire: -- keeps me up all night.

There are some good writers who tend towards anarchism. Less philosophical, systematic, more poetic, but enjoyable to read at least. Oscar Wilde, Percy Shelly, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and Albert Jay Nock come to mind.

In fact, Tolstoy’s “On Anarchy” fits nicely into this thread topic. He is more of an individualist anarchist, where the revolution occurs within the individual, offering a different path for the aspiring anarchist than the Marxist and the violent anarchists of his own day.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/leo-tolstoy-on-anarchy

5,000 years of recorded human history where wars are waged and the stronger or larger force takes and destroys from the weaker or smaller force is an "assumption?"

Like, it's just something I randomly made up one day? Are you serious? :rofl:

Bruh. Nah. Just nah. Come on, you're not that dense.

You don’t mention that these forces were more often than not managed, armed, and employed by states. Political scientist Rudolph Rummel estimated that around 300 million people were killed by governments in the last century alone. He coined the term “democide”.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide

That’s another distinction between the statist and the anarchist: they’re assumptions of human nature. Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes rings true or false depending on one’s degree of statism.

That’s why I fear the statist more, because they believe humans require authority and absolutism to keep their wildest impulses in check. Presumably, this includes themselves as well. So if authority and absolutism were to collapse, we know who to look out for.

It would be very fitting if instead of reducing the issue to bathrooms, we talked about whether the women were right. Was the UK Supreme Court right? Were women's rights endangered by substituting transgender women for biological women?

The issues become much clearer and easier to settle in one’s mind when one abandons the concept of gender entirely, or at least relegate it to a grammatical concept, a relic of language, rather than a statement about biology. It ends the cognitive dissonance required to support and think about these ideas clearly.

If you look at the dispute between Marx and Bakunin, both of whom admired the Paris Commune, the schism was about the trust in and usefulness of authority. Marx foresaw a dictatorship, a transitional state, while Bakunin wanted no such thing. Historically speaking and in practice, the communist parties have a deep desire for authority.

The FBI is reopening up an investigation into the cocaine found in the whitehouse a year or two back, the pipe bomb on Jan 6th, and the leakers of the Supreme Court decision. Knowing now that Hunter Biden and other long time allies to dear old dad were effectively acting as the US president during Biden’s reign, this could get interesting.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/27/fbi-white-house-cocaine-supreme-court-leak-investigations

Your metaphorical slogan about killing the Boers turned into a real killing of a farmer, by the admission of the killer.

The convicted murderer of a Vryheid farmer told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Pietermaritzburg on Thursday that his crime was influenced by the "kill the Boer, kill the farmer" slogan he heard at African National Congress rallies. Ntuthuko Chuene, 28, is serving a life sentence for the murder of Godfrey Frederick Lanz Heuer on August 22, 1992. He also stole a Rossi Special firearm, ammunition and a suitcase containing about R1000 in cash, a pocket calculator and books. He said he stole the guns to defend his community from the Inkatha Freedom Party. Chuene said his accomplice in the killing, Piet Nkosi, was later shot and killed by the police. He said he was forced by circumstances in the area where he lived, Mondlo, to commit the crimes. The killing was not directed at Heuer, as he just happened to be a white farmer at the wrong time. "I could have killed any other white man I came across at that time. My frustrations were directed to white men because they had what we did not have," Chuene said. "I am sorry, I look back now and regret." Heuer's wife Amy said she did not believe Chuene killed her husband because of politically motivated reasons. "I do not want him to be granted amnesty. I watched my husband die in front of me and could not help him," she said.

https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/media/1999/9910/p991014a.htm

Look what you’re forcing yourself to defend.

A couple from Pietermaritzburg in KwaZulu-Natal were severely assaulted on their farm while their attackers shouted, “Kill the Boer, kill the Farmer”. Four attackers forced their way into the farmhouse of Tim Platt and his wife, Amanda, during the early morning hours of 17 August. The attackers gained entry to the house by breaking down the front door and security gate, as well as a window and burglar bars.

Amanda was beaten with a bolt cutter and lead pipes, and eventually stabbed with a spear. While her husband was still trying to fight off the attackers, she managed to escape and returned armed to save her husband. Upon her return, the attackers had already fled.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230922163307/https://afriforum.co.za/en/attackers-chant-kill-the-boer-kill-the-farmer-before-stabbing-female-victim-with-spear/

Good read, Count, thank you for that.

I’m reading Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism by Paul Forster, but I imagine the themes are exactly the same, how Peirce saw the threat of a new paradigm and wished to provide a realist alternative for philosophy and science. I’ll try to find a copy of Olesky’s book.

I’m still unsure whether nominalism was in fact any sort of paradigm. I also believe it’s a sort of fallacy to see the impact of the musings of philosophers in the general culture without knowing the extent to which those philosophers are actually read.

Nope. Looks like he’s calling out your anti-American team on Memorial Day. I love that kind of stuff.

A socialist and race-nationalist party in the SA government chants “Kill the boer! Kill the farmer” and those who question the racism and the possibility that it might be related to the brutal torture and murders of farmers, are racists, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, or far-right. How is this possible?

While it is probably true that racists and the dreaded far-right have adopted the issue due to the purported colors of the skins of those involved, it should not mean all the racists on the left of them must drop the issue or otherwise impugn anyone who talks of it. This can only further racialize and muddy the issue.

Trump bringing it to light only exasperates it further. His loose use of the word “genocide” sends the symbolic mind on a quibbling rampage. When Trump thought the images of crosses were graves, not realizing it was a monument, the media took him to task for this small discrepancy without mentioning that each cross represented the grave of a murdered and possibly tortured person. The ages of the victims ranged from two to eighty-seven, but anti-Trumpism forces people to use even the most heartbreaking of imagery as a ghoulish cudgel against their folk devil.

Conspiracy theory or not, there are people who live in fear and feel racially persecuted, as is evident by the stories. Large political parties are chanting for their murder. Cases are rarely solved. Police are slow or are otherwise under-funded. One of the advocacy groups for these farmers argue that many of the attacks are particularly brutal, involving rape and torture, suggesting a level of hatred or barbarism beyond just the petty crime it is often claimed to be. The memoir of a friend to the current president wrote that Ramiphosa said the ANC’s 25-year pan for dealing with the whites “would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly”. There are discrepancies between what people report, the data is old or missing or insufficient, and the government is corrupt or dysfunctional, leaving the “check the data” crowd looking really silly. All of this fosters fear, loss of trust, and propagates even more conspiracy theory.

On top of that crimes against members of other ethnicities across the country are met with even far less concern. Conditions for farm workers are often abysmal. Everyone, regardless of ethnicity, must fear crime and violence both in the cities and in rural areas, and any private owner of land is at risk having it expropriated for “the public interest”, or in other words, due to the whim of politicians.

All of these leads to only one conclusion, namely, the absolute failure of racist and collectivist governments in Africa, apartheid and beyond. Why they are defended is anyone’s guess.

https://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/safrica2/Safarms7.htm

https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/08/23/south-africa-farmworkers-dismal-dangerous-lives

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/africa/southern-africa/south-africa/report-south-africa/

https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/2017/03/25/-bury-them-alive-white-south-africans-fear-for-their-future-as-horrific-farm-attacks-esc

https://africacheck.org/fact-checks/factsheets/factsheet-statistics-farm-attacks-and-murders-south-africa

https://www.artikels.afriforum.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Farm-attacks-and-murders-in-South-Africa-2023.pdf

"In his brutal honesty, Ramaphosa told me of the ANC's 25-year strategy to deal with the whites: it would be like boiling a frog alive, which is done by raising the temperature very slowly. Being cold-blooded, the frog does not notice the slow temperature increase, but if the temperature is raised suddenly, the frog will jump out of the water. He meant that the black majority would pass laws transferring wealth, land, and economic power from white to black slowly and incrementally, until the whites lost all they had gained in South Africa, but without taking too much from them at any given time to cause them to rebel or fight."

https://irr.org.za/media/articles-authored-by-the-institute/the-anc-and-ramaphosas-1994-plan-for-the-whites-politicsweb-17-september-2017

instead of being so dumb as extrapolating from anecdotal evidence maybe study the subject first.

The stories from survivors of attempted murder, rape, torture, and robbery are anecdotal evidence. Do you say that about all victims of crimes or just the ones that are politically inconvenient?

Ignorance is no excuse. The stories may be inconvenient for you, but if they continue I hope your conscience gets the better of you.

https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/2017/03/25/-bury-them-alive-white-south-africans-fear-for-their-future-as-horrific-farm-attacks-esc

Because all physical events have some prior physical cause, and if eliminative materialism is correct then there’s just a physical brain and a physical body and not some non-physical mind that “interferes”. There’s just electricity and chemicals responding to physical stimuli causing muscle fibres to contract or relax, and other such things.

It’s true, I do not need a non-physical mind to explain how a human being listens to his environment, or otherwise uses the environment in various ways. That electricity and chemicals is produced and managed by the human being, and nothing else.

Yes, I haven’t claimed otherwise. How the brain and the body respond to external stimulation is determined by its current structure and inner workings, just as how a computer responds to me typing on the keyboard is determined by its current structure and inner workings, but it is still the case that the human brain and body, like every other physical object in the universe, is causally influenced by things external to itself.

Then, shouldn’t it be the other way around? That the computer is causally influencing you to look at it, to read, to type, to understand what you’re typing?

You can't just cut a long causal chain into individual pieces and claim that one part is not the cause of the subsequent part.

Sure I can. Some acts begin and end. Where do you propose we begin the act of hearing? Some arbitrary point out there in the environment?

You might as well try to argue that the brain doesn’t cause the muscles to contract because once the electrical signals have left the brain and entered the muscle the muscle has “taken over”. So I guess we can only say that the muscle causes itself to contract?

I wouldn’t try to argue that because the brain and muscles are a part of the same physical, biological system, the majority of which is required to contract muscles.

You should try listening to victim’s stories. They’re horrific, and I don’t believe they’re lying because they happen to be white.

No one really cares about any of that, apparently, or actively dismisses it.

The human body might be more complex than a plant and a computer but its internal behaviour is still causally influenced by external stimulation. The human body is not an isolated system.

It’s not an isolated system but it is a different system. Humans don’t use photosynthesis, for example.

If you want to argue against determinism (whether compatibilist or incompatibilist) and in favour of libertarian free will, then you must reject eliminative materialism, because eliminative materialism entails that human behaviour is a deterministic response to prior physical causes, both internal and external to the body.

I still don’t know how eliminative materialism entails that human behavior is a deterministic response to prior physical causes. Further, even if you assume determinism, many of the “prior physical causes” are prior states of the brain and body, which is still the person in question except at an earlier time.

What is an example of prior physical causes external to the body? What else besides yourself causes you to listen?

The soundwaves cause transduction to happen which causes neurons to fire which causes the muscles to contract and relax which causes the ball to be kicked which causes the window to break.

The sensory receptor causes the conversion of the energy in a stimulus into an electrical signal. That is what it does. Only this thing can cause that change. From then on every cause, effect, change, or whatever is under the complete control and influence of the body, which uses a different form of energy to make these conversions, and not any outside kinetic stimulus.

As I said before, your claim that one causal chain ends at this point and that a second causal chain starts immediately after, and that there's no causal connection between the two, is both inconsistent with physics and an arbitrary delineation.

I completely reject that formulation.

It’s not inconsistent nor arbitrary because only one system in the universe is converting that energy into another, and using that energy as it does. The body uses sound waves and other aspects of the environment to extract that information. Soundwaves don’t cause us to listen, to differentiate between one sound and another, to turn our heads or cover our ears, to understand the language spoken or to disregard it entirely.

If you want to employ causal chains to explain it then the causal chain occurring in one environment is taken over, used and controlled by another system, operating its own movements and providing its own conditions, and utilizing its own energy to do so. Your efforts to paint it as a kinetic Rube Goldberg device is inconsistent with physics, biology, and is completely arbitrary.