Good point. Maybe the problem is more with representative democracy than voting itself. In America, at least, some constituencies are massive. The conceit that one person can represent the will of that many voters is pure humbug.

“It is compulsory by law for all eligible Australian citizens to enrol and vote in federal elections, by-elections and referendums.”

https://www.aec.gov.au/enrol/

Seems clear cut to me.

True voting isnt synonymous with politics, but I would say its a necessary part of the political system in Canada or the US. Aren’t you opting out of a system based on votes when you refuse to vote? I would compare it to playing baseball but refusing to take the field. Not really playing baseball then. (And likewise the baseball field is not synonymous with baseball).

Yes, refusing to participate would be opting out of the system, in a way. But it’s more like refusing to play baseball but having to remain in the dugout.

What do you mean by this? If you’re saying that apples directly stimulate our sense receptors then except in the case of touch this is false; apples don’t directly stimulate the rods and cones in our eyes, so visual perception under your account isn’t direct.

Or do you mean something else?

“Direct” in the sense that we directly perceive the environment, including the lights, smells, touch, taste, of apples. “Indirect” in the sense that we perceive the environment through some kind of medium.

You’re right that it entails little more than avoiding the polls, except for wherever compulsory voting is in order. But voting isn’t the same as politics, so I would not say refusing to vote entails not being political.

For someone like the OP author who openly wants fascism and corporatocracy, and defends the likes of Donald Trump to the bitter end -- all why pretending to denounce the state -- should most certainly not vote. Their non-voting is a deliverance.

More lies. I openly oppose fascism every time I oppose your political activity.

Protest voting is still voting. I don’t want to stand in their lines and go along with their charade.

I would not want to see a withdrawal from the legal right to vote, only to retain the legal right not to vote.

In a way the vote, at least in elections, is to afford someone the privilege to govern over you. It is also to afford someone the right to represent you, as if such a feat was possible. It seems to me that the refusal to bestow these rights and privileges is the first step to unlinking oneself from their deeds.

Yes it is and for the same reasons I already stated. There is no mediating factor between experienced and experiencer, so the experience is not indirect.

I have read the article, and if you want to quibble about definitions be my guest. The thread is about phenomenalism. I’m speaking of “Perceptual Directness”, section 2.1.3 in your article. We either directly perceive the world or we do not.

But I can watch you directly eat an apple. There is literally nothing between the experienced and the experiencer prohibiting one from directly experiencing the other.

I’m not sure how that is the case, so I’ll say “no”.

You’re assuming that the apple is being presented in something called experience. But there is no evidence of such a place, let alone that apples appear in them.

Sure it is. I’m watching him experiencing an Apple directly.

It’s not a desire for change that motivates me but a conscientious effort to refuse participating in what I view as an evil arraignment. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.

There are other senses, though.

Does air prohibit us from directly experiencing air?



He's blind. He cannot see the apple.

Surely you can name or point to what prohibits direct experience.

Bodily interaction is not phenomenological experience. The former being direct says nothing about the latter being direct. A blind man can pick up and eat an apple, therefore picking up and eating an apple is not evidence that someone has a direct visual perception of the apple.

It is experience viewed objectively, from a view independent of any phenomenological account. From this view, to watch a blind man directly eat an apple on the one hand and say he is not experiencing the apple directly on the other is absurd. There is neither the evidence nor the reason to suppose that he is experiencing it indirectly.

And seeing someone pick up and eat an apple shows nothing that supports Direct Realist Presentation.

It shows that he is directly interacting with an apple. Nothing appears to be mediating his experience or perception, or otherwise hindering his experience of the apple. The contact between him and the apple is direct, therefor the experience is direct.

If a schizophrenic says he is hearing voices, yet others do not, we can confirm that he is in fact not hearing voices or any other sounds from anyone’s mouth, but that something else is occurring somewhere in his biology.

Direct Realist Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/#Dir

An apple is an ordinary object.

But he’s touching it, destroying it, consuming it. At no point are the interactions indirect, so we need not say the experience is indirect.

If you watch someone eat an apple, what does the evidence show regarding the directness of his perception?

At times, the empirical needs to set the boundaries for the creative mind.

We can easily witness any person and the objects he interacts to see how direct perception really is. It’s so direct that some of the objects, like apples, can be consumed, physically entering the so-called inner world and passing through it. So we can put the directness of perception, or at least interaction, to the side.

Since the indirect realist neither has the periphery or range of sense to examine what is really going on during perception we can say his “experience” is invariably a limited and impoverished view of his own biology. His eyes and ears don’t point inward, and thus needs other instruments, other people, to fill in the blanks where his senses cannot reach. For example, all it takes is one or two other observers to confirm that a person is hallucinating or dreaming.

So why the indirect realist prefers the limited and impoverished view of his own biology is the real question.

The psychologist JJ Gibson has some good ideas about perception. Two good books, well worth the read, are The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception and The Perception of the Visual World.

The issue is direct vs indirect experience. Physically, we can directly experience only the five senses. We directly experience the idea of a tree and indirectly experience the tree as a physical object. (An analogous situation is seeing a tree on a computer monitor. All we can see on a computer monitor is light.)

Think "brain in a vat". Or the movie, The Matrix. Both make a similar point.

The matter of identity rears its head again and again. All of what you said could be true if you identify as a brain, a mind, or some other small and limited observer existing within the body. But everyone in the entire world can see that you are no such entity.

:fire:

Confusion doesn’t explain how a past action can impose on a future person.

Ok. So, for example, which past persons and which situations imposes on you?

I just don’t understand how one can impose on someone in the future. Which past people or situation imposes on you?

How does someone impose on a future person without having to travel through time?

Good explanation.

Of course this all depends on your theory of selfhood (what is 'me'?) but that's probably a whole 'nother can of worms we don't want to open here.

That’s an important point.

If one expands “the network doing the inference” to include the sensorimotor systems, what happens to the hidden state?

It troubles me because every single “network doing the inference” appears to be the organism itself. By their own admission, and our own, organisms infer.

Maybe this is partly a problem of systems theory in biology, the idea that this or that group of organs can be considered its own system, while other parts and other systems remain outside of it, different nodes so to speak. While this may be a decent abstract model of biological function, empirically this isn’t the case because whenever such a system is isolated, or otherwise taken out of the system, it no longer performs the functions it is supposed to and is known for. A brain sitting on a chair, for example, could not be said to be thinking. It’s only function as a system at this point is to rot.

So can an activity that only organisms can be shown to perform—experiencing, thinking, inferring, believing, seeing—be isolated to a single part of it?

You wouldn’t care if they were doing crack and hookers. That’s mighty lenient of you.

I’m all for it. What I’m against is the two-tiered justice system. If this was anyone else, for instance the son of the last president, the media coverage and persecution would be legendary.

I thought you of all people would be reporting on the criminal behavior of the first family of the Uniter States.

Oh, it’s just obvious. Very convincing.

The first son.

I honestly feel bad for the guy, and for many in this dysfunctional family, but the fact this man has avoided jail is the height of privilege.

I can’t find it in their cases, though. No such cases arose from the Mueller report, either.

Any witness tampering cases to show?

Teflon don. Keep trying.

And zero trials or convictions for what you claim are crimes. The patterns of the false accusations, though, are never-ending.