Just reasserting the obvious because there seems to be a few people cheering this kind of tyranny.

Nope. I just checked and found out it’s a parody account. What a dupe.

Special Counsel going after a criminal.

A wholly biased special prosecutor who displayed his bias in his tweets, and all for a glorified paperwork dispute. If justice is supposed to be blind then this isn’t justice.

Meanwhile, Biden, who never had unilateral declassification powers, took and kept classified documents for almost a decade in unsecured locations. Not a criminal, I guess.

Biden and the deep-state going after their political opponents once again. I’m sure none of it is to distract from Biden’s bribery scandal. The US government is both crooked and stupid from top to bottom.

The fundamental features of any animal is its anatomy. Anatomy is a direct one-to-one ratio with all behaviors, capacities, abilities, etc.

We are conscious when we sleep for the reasons you stated. We still hear, see, feel etc. even to the point where these sounds and sights might show up in our dreams. If we weren’t conscious when we sleep we wouldn’t wake up at an alarm clock. It’s not that we have some subterranean level of consciousness, though, but that we are more conscious than we care to admit.

Was Helen Keller less conscious than most people?

I would say so.

I would say that if you lose a finger, you are exactly that much less conscious than someone who has the same finger. You no longer have the conscious biology where your finger once was, like having the tactile and other sensations that you would have otherwise.

I can accept that distinction, but I think it’s a distinction without a difference when it comes to dualism. It seems to me property dualists have merely adopted the language of physics in order to smuggle in their substances.

I do not "assume" an inner life. I experience it. It is, in truth, the only thing I know is a fact. I don’t know that you have an inner life. I am willing to assume that you are like me in various ways, including being a human with an inner life. But you may try to prove me wrong if you want.

This is naive theory of consciousness. You are unable to connect your “inner life” to your inner biology. You can’t see or feel past your senses to what is actually there and what is actually occurring, so you rely on what little fleeting sensations they offer you as as facts.

You may pursue a spiritual route if you wish. Not my cup of tea. I don't have a problem with that new name, but it doesn't help explain what I just said above.

If we do not assume “inner lives”, like Chalmers does, consciousness can be reduced to biology. In fact consciousness and biology are one and the same. The hard problem disappears and all that remains are the easy problems.

Perhaps it should be called the hard problem of biology, but then it wouldn’t have that nice spiritual ring to it.

The point isn't that you cannot know what it is like to be a bat. The point is that there is something it is like to be a bat. And, while we are not aware of any consciousness that is independent of a brain's activity, knowing everything about a bat's brain's activity doesn't give us any insight on the bat's inner experience. It doesn't suggest the bat has any inner experience. It's all just physical processes.

I cannot assume inner lives because whenever we take a peak inside there is nothing of the sort in there. What we can see and what we can confirm is that there is biology in there, and this biology, its complexity, and the whole range of movements it makes are largely imperceptible to everyone involved. The fact that the phenomenology and the actuality differ so much suggests the one is unable to grasp or comprehend the other.

We are biologically identical, to all intents and purposes. Sure, science can tell our DNA apart but from a biological perspective, we're both members of the same species, and all our fundamental biological traits are identical.

The law of identity, the fact that I’m here and you’re there, the fact that you do not have a single cell I have, proves there is nothing about us that is identical.

States only experienced by a conscious sentient being. Not an anaesthetized being, nor a corpse.

If I’m to avoid question-begging and deification, I’ll have to say the states and the conscious being are the same. Altering the state alters the consciousness for this reason, for instance with anaesthetics and death.

Presumably, you would agree that there is a difference between a non-sentient organism, such as a tree, a simple sentient organism, such as a fish, complex sentient organisms such as elephants and primates, and complex, rational, sentient beings, such as humans. All can be understood through the perspective of biology, but biology does not necessarily extend to, or explain, the nature of what differentiates the complex-sentient and rational-complex-sentient beings from trees and comb jellies. They are subjects of experience - something which is not plausibly deniable. At issue is what it is that gives them this quality of subjective awareness.

I do agree, but I do not need to add mental properties. Their biologies are different. Their positions in space and time are different (the principium individuationis). This accounts perfectly for what differentiates the complex-sentient and rational-complex-sentient beings from trees and comb jellies.

The simple reason why I cannot know what it’s like to be a bat is because I am not a bat. I am not of the same biology. I am a different thing. This also accounts for why I cannot see from your perspective, which is the perspective of your particular and discrete biology. We do not need to stir in fictions like experience, consciousness, and mental properties, because all states of experience (as Chalmers called them) are states of the body.

It’s why I cannot conceive of the p-zombie, and the conceivability of p-zombies is one of his strongest arguments. It just falls apart unless you beg the question regarding experience, and reify the ghosts.

There is an irony in atheism insofar as it is a theological position. It both requires study of theological arguments, epistemology, metaphysics, and religion. In order to be without gods he must first have gods to be without. In some sense he never leaves religion, always keeping one foot in its sphere.

What is it like to be a football? What are you thinking of? Round (or oval if you're a septic), inflatable, ect? Is that what you mean?

I'm just confused by the statement that "there is something it is like to be such-and-such". It refers to the same thing too many times for me. There is something (the football) it (the football) is like to be the football (the football). It can be applied to literally anything, is all I'm saying.

Well, one has to use ... something! :smile:
Words like "something", "thing", etc. function as wildcards, passe-partouts. They are used for lack of ... something more concrete. I guess they are OK, as far as they help expressing, explaining, etc. ... something.

My own view is this. We do need to use something, and that something is whatever physical thing the word “conscious” describes. That thing is the object we need to analyze because it is that thing we are speaking about when we speak about a conscious thing. So in my opinion we need to abandon the question begging and the reification, not only because they are fallacious, but because they tend to lead us to false conclusions.

Please cite the text to support this statement.

Which one?

You were using the idea to make a distinction between what might be a problem of experience between beings who care about it with an object you are confident does not share the problem.

A panpsychist like Chalmers might disagree. “Conscious experience”, to him, is fundamental after all. It does not supervene on the physical properties.

There is nothing it is like to be a football, then?

I suspect Dashiell was a behaviorist, but I suppose he would be eliminativist today.

there is something it is like to be that system

I never liked Nagel’s formulation because it seems to me to apply to any system, conscious or otherwise. There is something it is like to be a football.

What am I not grasping?

Like any grammatical modifier the word “conscious” lends us information about another word in the sentence (say, a man) and therefor applies to whatever thing in the world that word signifies (the conscious man). The word “conscious” signifies that thing and must be a direct 1-to-1 ratio with that which the word describes, or else the modifier is false.

Adding the suffix “-ness” to the adjective “conscious” turns the subject of analysis from the conscious man to “the state or quality of being conscious”. What is it that is being conscious? The man, but men are physical, so we abstract out the man. This slight linguistic maneuver might provide us with a new subject of abstract thought to analyze absent what it used to signify, but unmoors us from the world, entering us into the paradox of a state or quality of nothing in particular, and leaving us with a noun which signifies neither person, place, nor thing. Our theory of consciousness has quickly been inflated to include new nouns and new nothings.

It’s all in the grammar. Chalmers almost exclusively uses noun-phrases like “consciousness”, “experience”, “mind”, which grammatically signify a person, place, or thing. He could say “I’m just being abstract about the conscious man”, and that would be the end of it. But that would refute his own theory, men being physical, biological, and all that. Rather, he posits these nouns and whatever it is they signify as fundamental features of the world, ontologically independent of physical properties.

I'm not interested in pursuing anything irrelevant.

If Chalmers doesn't think consciousness is an object, element, aspect, or entity, then why does he speak about it like it is?

I picked up the entire 1957 Americana Encyclopaedia collection at a garage sale, all 30 volumes. They came with a very nice cabinet.

What is this "something that can be experienced"? All these references to "something", for instance, "there is something it is like", but once we look there is nothing. Simply saying it is existential doesn't convince me much, I'm afraid. It seems to me that if you want to explain and prove this "something" it must first exist. But, as I said, it can only be assumed in a series of question-begging assertions.

This is evident in the paradoxical notion of "p-zombies", that there is some missing element in one of two identical beings. All that is possible is first to assume this element, and then further assume that this element can be missing.

I have merely established that I am conscious. The term "conscious" describes me. I exist, sure, but we have not established the existence of anything else.

Are you coming to a point here, frank?

Yes I am.

Thanks for the lesson, but I'm pretty sure I wrote "electrometer".

That is a safe assumption.

Why?

I'm pretty sure you can directly measure electrical charge with an electrometer.



I think you're right, and I'm sure there is much internal sensing, like pain. I mostly meant he is unable to match the internal movements and biological states to those sensations with observation and measurement, but point taken.

Can we measure charge?

Laws have been quite terrible and oppressive throughout history. So I’m not convinced they’re necessary, let alone to be desired. They are often enforced with brutality; they’re often unjust; they often serve only those in power. That’s to say nothing about the wars, genocide, slavery, colonialism, conscription, segregation, and plunder—all of it at the whim of some political coterie. I’ll pass.

We can get away from political authority developing. Though it’s true that they’re present, a vast majority of people interact with each other everyday without any authority intervening.

Herbert Spencer has a great little essay on this called The Great Political Superstition¹. He makes the decisive case that political authority is nonsense.

To paraphrase, the belief in the political authority of men is just as superstitious as the belief in the authority of God because there is no natural justification for either.

Given the premise of the divine right of kings, that the king was god-appointed, there is at least the logical conclusion that no bounds can be set on political authority. But for modern political authority no such premise exists.

Since the divine right of kings, philosophers have tried to invent justifications like the social contract, where we came together “organically” in order to give up our freedoms to the sovereignty of some autocrat. Nowhere in history can we find evidence of this. But all we have done is rejected in name the doctrines which we now hold in fact. We retained the substance, posture, and hierarchies of the divine right of kings after we have abandoned the form. Now we’re left to wonder why we must submit to a group of men which has no naturally or supernaturally-derived authority.

1. Spencer, Man Vs. The State, p. 123 https://oll-resources.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/oll3/store/titles/330/0020_Bk.pdf

I assume (maybe wrongly) that most people are raised by women in their "formative years". This suggests the influence of the mother at a time when a human being learns the most is at its highest, and in a way sets the conditions of the majority of human behaviors and impacts everything from simple relationships on down to the formation of entire societies.

Colonization is a fiction too because tribes had no governments and thus nothing could be stolen.

I’m not sure why. It doesn’t follow that because I reject abstract entities I ought not to use abstract language. I remain aware the term ‘organization’ refers to nothing in particular, so I’m not troubled by any dissonance. It’s just that it would take too much effort to find every particular entity involved in any given organization and furnish each with its proper noun. It’s enough to just recognize the limits of language and move on.

Nonetheless among the people who organize themselves under a common banner and around a common code, there are a minority who hold authority and status above the rest.

That’s how one can have an account that has all social institutions tending towards oligarchy while denying that there are any social institutions.

The mistake is conflating society and government. Government is compulsory while society is largely voluntary.

Remember Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

The government is anti-social, while the same cannot be said of the people who oppose it. Government seeks to regulate society and have it conform to its will. The people who oppose it do not. I doubt that the people seeking to escape government control would bring it with them. But they would no doubt bring society and forge a new one.

There are governments who protect the freedom of people in such zones, like the Sentinelese people, for fear that they may be interfered with. But they are not completely helpless. Anyone who has shown up there has been met with proper hostility and force, proving that they are not entirely dependent.

Note that somehow the leaders were able to come together consensually and work together without any government forcing them to do so.

I don’t use the word “gender” anymore unless it refers to grammar. Better to abandon the term, I say, and stick to “sex”. It basically clears up any confusion.

Money is just a medium of exchange. We could use jumping beans if it makes you feel better.

Note that no one can do anything other than pooh-pooh his criticisms and try to attack his character as if they knew the guy, and all to defend a system in which they pretend they have some modicum of control. It’s knee jerk, like he was saying something about their mom.

I think it’s a good book. The superstition is obvious. None of which critics say is even physically true, let alone logically. They pretend politicians represent them, as if a person they’ve never conversed with, nor ever would, was somehow able to grasp their concerns. It’s all true to them by sheer force of repetition, or ritual, or whatever else it takes the superstitious to begin to believe nonsense.