So, if a man wishes his penis removed, should he be granted that right, and, if so, should the same right be afforded the man who no longer wants his right arm?

He should granted the right on the grounds of self-ownership alone, but self-surgery is dangerous. So should he be provided with a professional to do it for him, and a setting in which to do it? I don’t think so.

It isn’t clear whether these kinds of surgeries are life-saving or cosmetic. The symptoms are often centered around beliefs and desires. The desire to have a vagina or no arm is just that, a desire. The belief that a man is a woman is just that, a belief. Worse, such surgeries hinder proper bodily function, and as such arguably make one worse off. This is why such surgeries should be relegated to the cosmetic type where access depends on whether you can find it in the market.

Full disclosure: I would welcome such a collapse.

1) guns and ammunition. When the monopoly on violence collapses it is in one’s best interest to see that it never arises again. These tools alone serve to quell most of the adverse effects of such a collapse.

2) partners. Human enterprise will continue without government and regulations, as it always has.

Anything to do with motherhood ought to be cherished and celebrated as activity befitting of a woman.

Relations are actual. For example, my relation to my identity card is that I do not have one. Your relation to my identity card is blithe assumption that there is such a thing. Knowing is itself relational between knower and known.

Tell us about this actual personal identity that does not relate to the world. Of course it is impossible, because to speak at all is to relate to the public world. A private identity is nothing other than the way a fragmented consciousness relates to itself - a mere beetle in a box.

The fact a man can relate to the “public world” says something about his identity, sure, but not much. Man can do many things, like digest food, but it ought not imply that his identity is gastrointestinal. The actions one performs, his beliefs, his proximity to the rest of the world are secondary to, and indeed contingent upon, the thing that performs them.

It is similar with other senses of “relation” which we seem to be equivocating between here. The fact you do not have an identity card doesn’t tell us much about who or what does not have an identity card.

Identity is relational. I am exactly like you in my uniqueness. You are one of us, unless you are one of them. There is always a mutuality of connection or disconnection. Your behaviour and feeling are identified in relation to my behaviour and feeling. Identity is irrevocably social, except to the extent that it is ineffable. Even Crusoe only becomes significant in relation to firstly his origins, and secondly his relation to the deprivation of the social, and thirdly to his 'other' as Friday. The desert island trope is the exemplar of the social nature of identity - the limit of individuality. Crusoe is the absolute monarch of nowhere.

I could glean more of your identity from your ID card than I could by having any relations with you. Personal identity is not relational; it’s actual. Whatever “connections” we imagine exist between each other hold as much information about our identity as they do mass, which is to say none. His proximity to others, his social interactions, the number of friends he has, do not tell us what he is. To use them as grounds to an identity is to misidentify.

A being who cannot see his own ears has less of an ability to determine his own identity, I’m afraid, than someone else. His vantage point and periphery is minuscule in comparison. Another person could do a lap around him, address what stands before his eyes, and give a more accurate description of what he feels, smells, sees etc. than one could have done of himself.

A personal identity ought to be challenged on these grounds, not to disrespect someone’s account of themselves, but to better inform him of how he appears from beyond his limited periphery.

Can he make his blood stop circulating just by his will? Can he decide to be sleepy now, or thirsty? Can he feel happy or sad at will? There is a lot that is involuntary in the body, and it seems that those things need to be working before any voluntary action can develop. The majority of what we call 'self' is not under the control of the part of our mind that makes conscious decisions. It is a very small subset of the whole 'self'. There are many other lower smaller selves inside every self. It's selves all the way down, and all the way up like nested Russian dolls.

It’s difficult to think of these questions in the context of two or more abstractions, for instance the voluntary and involuntary, the conscious and unconscious, many selves, because it invariably pits them against each other when in fact they are highly integrated into one whole. Personally I try to think without them, supposing it is possible to do so.

What I mean by “self” is the extent of one’s being as it can be observed by others, a person or human in common terms, an organism in biological jargon—whatever you want to call it. It appears to us as one thing, not many. Every action the self performs, from doing a backflip to digesting food to pumping blood, not only is the self, but is controlled by the self by the observable fact that it doesn’t appear to be, or be controlled by, anything else. I am both the heart beating and the cause of the beating heart, both controller and controlled, so to speak.

The reason I refrain from limiting the act of “willing” to some subset of biology, whether conscious or subconscious, is because the act of “willing” appears to involve the entire organism. It isn’t helpful to look at it this way for something like biology or medicine, but for acts like willing, thinking, reasoning, and so on, I think it is appropriate. For what is willing without metabolizing or circulation or breathing?

While it is true I cannot stop my heart by thinking about it or furrowing my brow (by virtue of there being no way to perform the task in this manner), there is a wide variety of willful steps one can take to stop his heart, or become tired, thirsty, and sad. One can take a series of willful and conscious actions to see it accomplished—fasting, ingest medication, closing an electrical circuit with one’s hands, and so on.

Anyways…

NOS4A2 appears to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, that of the speaker and that of the listener, roughly the second response I described in my first reply here: "the meaning is some subjective response in their own mind". Nos says "meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding", but what is happening is that the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things. We don't have two distict uses, and a change in meaning, but just two differing uses. This should help dissipate the nonsense of "meaning never breaches the skull" and so on; no mysterious private mental substance that can't leak out of your ears - just what we do with words.

I seem to think that there are two meanings to a given expression, but you seem to think there are two different uses of a given expression. Apparently “the utterance is being used at two different places, for two different things”, “just two different uses”, except that the listener is not using any utterance. He is not doing anything with words. He’s listening to articulated guttural sounds, and no matter their use or context, he is supplying this activity with his own meaning, derived from his own understanding of the language and how it is used.

You give us an example. I have never said “there are two different meanings to a given expression”, and in fact said meaning is generated “every time it is expressed or understood”, which implies two separate acts. Two separate acts generates two separate accounts of what the meaning is, by virtue of there being two people involved. So it’s no surprise that, despite the lack of usage on the one hand and the contradictory use on the other, you came to believe I thought along the same lines as your bad faith usage of my utterances permitted. You devised your meaning first, then twisted the usage to fit it—the usage is in the meaning.

Isn't it true that meaning persists over time and everything else that happens in the meantime is separate and distinct from what language itself has to convey?

I would argue it is false. Meaning does not persist over time. Meaning is generated, so to speak, in an act of language, every time it is expressed or understood. The discrepancy in meaning between speaker and listener occurs because the meaning is generated at two or more different places, from two or more different perspectives, each furnished with their own levels of understanding. But meaning never breaches the skull; it doesn’t persist in the symbols; and it is gone the moment the effort to generate it is over.

It all goes to show what Moravec's paradox implies. We can mimic tasks of the mind much easier than other tasks of the body, and as a corollary, tasks of the mind are of lesser value than than other tasks of the body.

When you typed your sentence were you using your brain and nervous system to process your actions? Did you have a reason for typing the sentence, or was it a random sentence? I don't believe you had a free choice in what you wrote, your choice was determined by the specific activation weights and thresholds in your nerve cells as your sensory signals propagate through the system. At every step of the chain reaction the laws of physics determine the outcome. A choice is simply a causal chain reaction in your nervous system that weighs many factors that you are unconscious of. All of this is "coerced", even though you don't feel coerced; the whole process is perfectly natural. The reason you don't feel coerced is because there is nothing outside the laws of physics that can make it feel coerced; it's perfectly natural in that sense.

He is his brain and nervous system, though. So if his choice was determined by the specific activation weights and thresholds in his nerve cells as his sensory signals propagate through the system, then his choice was determined entirely by him.

The debate succumbs to a category error as soon as we start abstracting the self into different ways of being, like the conscious and unconscious, mind/brain and body, and apply selfhood to one aspect and not the other. It results in something so convoluted that it is a strange wonder why anyone even bothers.

If a being is capable of willing then it must be true of the entire being. If a being is not capable of willing then his actions must be determined by something else. Why do we limit the will to a tiny and arbitrary subset of actions but not to all of them, from the most obvious to the most hidden? He wills the blood to move just as much as he wills his arm to move, as he always does and must do, with the entirety of his living being. In any case, refusing to abstract the self in such a schizophrenic way makes the debate much simpler, in my opinion. Whatever action a human being performs is determined, decided, and chosen by that being; and until an action can be shown to be determined by anything else in the universe he has free will. No appeals to “laws of physics” and other metaphors need be invoked.

More often than not “extreme” is used to dismiss a philosophy on the premise that it is too far outside a certain consensus, which is mostly an appeal to tradition or the populace. Any thinker worth a straw ought to be able to entertain a philosophy without accepting it, and do so on its merits rather than its proximity to mainstream opinion. Lastly, philosophies do not have consequences. So philosophy ought to have no boundaries on what position is reached or defended.

Organize so that you can beg for scraps from another organization’s table.

“Organizing”…it’s worked so well up until now.

The only way democracy prevails is if there is no class of governing people. The rule of the people presupposes that the people can govern their own lives. So long as there exists a class of masters democracy is impossible.

In my own case, I imagine attaching one end of a string to a word and the other to the referent. Since a universal or abstract object would not string to any particular object in the world, it is without a referent or is self-referential, and has little bearing on my ontology beyond the marks on paper and the guttural sounds that spell out the universal.

The idea that an abstract object must refer to some concrete object because we can speak about it and treat it with noun-phrases doesn’t suffice for me to accept its reality.

The liquid. Why would it be the condition? A condition doesn't possess any of the qualities that would make up "wet".

But the condition of the water is wet. It possesses a wet condition. The abjective “wet” describes the noun “condition”. The point is, the fact that we use language in a such a manner need not evoke entities such as qualities, conditions, states, or properties in our ontology. It’s just another way of saying the water is wet.

That's why I posit that the liquid itself has "laws" that determine its "states". We merely discover those laws. We don't make them up. If they were entirely mental constructs, then how come when we alter them, the things bound by them don't change behavior accordingly?

It’s simply an empirical point. in learning about water we never come across something called a law and there is nothing law-like about liquid. Liquid doesn’t describe itself. We’ve devised the units of measurement, the languages, the formulas, the metaphors, the laws, the conditions, the experiments, hold it up to nature and make sure it’s an as accurate representation as possible.

Loaded questions, double-barrelled questions, complex questions—all could be considered fallacious.

It’s healthy to hold one’s philosophy to the grindstone of contrary ideas.

No, you cannot change the capabilities of a given liquid by thinking about it. But you can imagine different values in its properties and get a fairly accurate idea of what it will do in that state.

if you were to describe the condition of any given liquid, do you believe the liquid possesses something called a “condition” by virtue of using such possessive language? If so, which is wet? the condition or the liquid?

In this case it’s the liquid at any given point and under any given conditions, what it looks like, what it’s doing, how cold it is, etc.

We’re not talking about any particular liquid here so it’s entirely a product of the mind.

Very cool.

An “indirect realist” I suppose, at least according to the philosophy of mind and perception. I myself am a “direct realist”. It’s fascinating that these ancient philosophical quandaries will forever reappear.

Do you identify yourself as the brain, or some other internal locus? I ask because I can see such a belief orientating a person towards a belief in the reality of abstract objects, universals, representations and the like.

I think you’re right and I like your take. I know in my own case that my politics is the inevitable conclusion of my metaphysics. I cannot put any value into abstract objects and universals when I cannot believe in them. But I disagree with Dugin that these valuations will lead us to a post-human world, where we will abandon the notions of “humanity” itself. And I doubt that nominalism is a prevalent as he claims.

Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes, friend.

Yeah I think abstract objects and universals are inescapable features of speech.

There is a Russian political philosopher known as “Putin’s brain”, Alexander Dugin, who claims that the advent of nominalism is the precursor to liberalism, and thus represents the inherent danger of The West. He claims that it serves to destroy notions such as community and family and has led to the worst kind of individualism. So I wonder if nominalism has had such an effect on the one hand, and if it is indeed a strictly western notion in the other.

Sam Harris argues that in the chain of causation the buck does not stop and our "free will" cannot interrupt the determinist chain. There is no free will at any particular point. What do people think?

If every state is determined by its anterior state, It seems to me that a determinist “chain of causation” could not exist since there is no anterior state to determine the initial state in the chain. Either the chain is infinite or there was a first cause.

To avoid this and other troubling notions, such as discrete states of the universe, we can say that the “anterior state” is merely a retroactive description of the one state, namely, the universe, and as such has no deterministic powers upon any other state.

I'm sure you realize stones don't have any weight in outer space. By your account, the nominalist is pretty confused.

How is he confused? He hasn't evoked "weight", so no property called "weight" has suddenly vanished. The stone has not changed. Instead the nominalist can focus on what has changed and come closer to accuracy in describing states of affairs.

When the nominalist weighs a stone he understands he’s measuring the stone, not something called “weight”. This can be observed: he is indeed putting the stone on the scale. Nothing called “weight” even needs to be postulated.

The realist, on the other hand, implies that the stone possesses something called “weight”. So now we have two substances, the stone and weight. Yet there is only stone on the scale.

So why must we evoke two or more substances when there appears only one?

If so, replace A with "boiling point" and B with "the temperature at which something boils" and you get "the boiling point (a property) exists"

The liquid exists, the atmospheric conditions exist, but the boiling point is just a value produced by a human mind, as is temperature. You’re just describing the state of the liquid.

That light being within a certin range

That light exists, yes, and it appears red, sure, but red is just a description of the light.

States of affairs are truth-makers. So a proposition in your sense is not a state of affairs. Yes, I don’t want to wade into these things, personally.

The fact that I use an object pronoun ought not to suggest I believe “us” exists as an object.

It would probably bring clarity if you explained what you think a proposition is.

It depends on the sense in which you use it. If it is a “state of affairs”, then it is a statement. Do you mean it in another sense?

A proposition is a state of affairs. Propositions transcend time and space by definition. It's easy to demonstrate that they can't be the product of any particular mind, and if they're products of mind at all, it would be in a Kantian sense. An individual human may give expression to a proposition by uttering a sentence, but in that act, the only thing with spacial and temporal extension is the marks or sounds of the utterance.

But even if you reject the above and opt for some sort of hard behaviorism, you've still given an abstract foundation to descriptions: us.

Propositions do not transcend space and time. I’ve quoted your propositions right here, the product of a particular mind. If it’s easy to demonstrate that a proposition transcends space and time perhaps you might entertain us by doing so.

If so, then what is the explanation for all of us largely attributing redness to the same things? It sounds as though there is something in common between all the things we describe with the adjective "red" or to which we attribute "redness". What is that thing in common?

For apples and other fruits it’s Anthocyanins. For blood it’s Heme. The color is similar because the light bouncing off of these compounds is similar and our biology is similar. They appear red, they can be described as red, but there isn’t something called “red” in Anthocyanins and Heme. We’ve looked.

Yes we can, what?

Redness is the property of reflecting light of wavelengths around 625-740nm and absorbing other frequencies. That's something in the world is it not?

Forget universals. Do you believe properties exist? Do things have properties?

No, things do not possess other things called “properties”. Properties are basically values we put into formulas. The boiling point, for instance, is the temperature at which something boils. There is something about the liquid that causes it to boil at a certain temperature, but there is nothing called “boiling point” in liquid.

I believe abstract concepts and universals are necessary for language. I just can’t find them outside of it.

Using a suffix to turn an adjective such as “red” into the noun “redness” is purely an exercise of the mind, not an observation of something in the world. It allows you to equivocate between using an adjective on one hand, and a noun on the other, but they both nonetheless serve to describe the same thing: the apple. We cannot point to or quantify something called “redness”; we can only point to or quantify things that are red, or at least appear red.

A description is an abstract object, since it's made of propositions, so you're confirming the existence of at least one independent abstract object.

It’s not independent, though. You said yourself it’s made of propositions. We make propositions, descriptions, abstract objects, universals, and so they are forever dependent on the human mind. They might manifest as words but they will never manifest anywhere else.

Instead of defending abstract ideas not being real, how would you attack abstract ideas being real? What issues arise if we consider abstract ideas to be real?

They are without a referent, or at the most co-referential. Wherever they appear they can only prove to exist as products of the mind. How can a realist overcome such a deficit?

The above description of spin and electrons is full of universals and abstract objects. If you deny the existence of those properties, you have no real terms with which to explain what an electron is. "Electron" becomes a blank.

Descriptions are full of abstract objects and universals, certainly, but the contention for the nominalist is that abstract objects and universals do not exist independently of descriptions. And their inability to exist independent of the descriptions does not limit their usefulness in describing things that do. So the electron can be described in countless fashions, in abstract and concrete terms, never blank.

I don’t know. I’m not a physicist. I’m only saying that we’re speaking about electrons when defining their movements in mathematical terms, such as with “spin”.

But we already describe what an electron is. We’re speaking about an electron when defining its movements in mathematical terms. So I do not see what you mean.

My mistake. How is it, then, that if you rule out the existence of the properties of an object, you'll soon find that you have no words at all to describe reality?