I understand the folk psychology of “influence”. You make decisions based on information you pick up from the environment and believe the information has effected you in some way, somehow forcing you to turn left. But there is zero physical evidence of this cause and effect.

No, I get it. If I had not started talking about this you would not have responded. But your argument is redundant. I did not influence you to read, think about it, or respond. You chose to by your own volition.

How do the neutered propose to protect themselves without guns? They call upon others who do have guns.

I don’t think there is a ghost in the machine. I also don’t believe in a brain in a vat. The self extends beyond the brain and it’s activity but not beyond the skin. We’re organisms, not brains, not brain activity. So no; no decisions or prior states occur outside the self.

I saw and read your post. I’m not denying that. But your influence and persuasion neither influenced nor persuaded me. You came across my posts, decided to engage with them by your own volition. I didn’t influence you to do anything. Words don’t have the kind of causal power you claim they do.

OK.

But it's still an empirical fact that advertising increases sales. That's why companies spend so much money on advertising. And it's an empirical fact that campaigning increases votes. That's why political parties spend so much money on campaigning.

It is an empirical fact that our decisions are influenced by our environment, including the things other people tell us.

That you, personally, don't succumb to such influences every time is a strawman.

I was disputing the argument that “Words/information cause reactions”, and that this is the reason that advertising works. I wasn’t saying advertising doesn’t work.

So you're saying that persuasion/incitement is a (meta)physical impossibility? That advertising and campaigning work would prove you wrong.

And if we were to take a more technical view, the libertarian concept of free will is inconsistent with what I think is the more reasonable account that the human mind (and any associated decision making) is a product of brain activity which is subject to the same deterministic (and occasionally stochastic) physical processes as everything else. We don't have anything like a "soul" that is able to transcend these influences.

It doesn’t prove me wrong. Ads and campaigns hardly work. They are better than nothing, though.

The physical processes that produce brain activity are nonetheless that of the individual, and therefor determined by him. Until you can show that a human’s action is determined by some outer or foreign force, it seems to me your view is without merit.

Yes; we hear articulated sounds and observe marks on paper, among a seemingly infinite deluge of other details, all of which are factors. But this is activity we perform. We hear, we look, we read, we understand, we act, and so on. We are the agent of this activity at every moment. We may act upon those particular marks and sounds more or less than others, but they hardly act upon us more or less than any other detail.

I’ve never used your slogan. No need to make stuff up.

Governments are large employers, even corporate in nature, but you don’t like when someone speaks ill of it. Why is that?

A connection, influence, the words caused me to go buy something—it’s all figurative. None of it negates the conscious, decision-making process, which is the true cause of one’s activity. Words cause none of it.

The government has done such a great job.

Remember when it was the parent’s job to teach their children about sexuality?

Words/information cause reactions. That's why advertising works.

I don’t go out and buy something whenever I see an advertisement for it.

What is the connection?

Alienation isn’t the feeling of estrangement, but an act of hostility that causes someone to feel estranged. So an unalienated worker is someone who doesn’t face such hostilities.

They are crimes according to some species of legalism, but they wouldn’t be if people refused to do what they were ordered. So despite the legal theories the fact remains: whether people obey or disobey an order is not determined by the words.

Good. Repubs are equally as evil, in my mind.

I appreciate free speech too much to punish someone for speaking.

Bullets can tear through a person’s body. Shooting someone is justifiably a criminal act. Words possess no such force, have zero connection to another’s actions, and thus speaking cannot be justified as criminal act. I think your view is magical thinking.

Anyways, have a good one. Be free.

For what?

Slavery was once legally sound. Philosophically, it’s magical thinking. Speaking cause little more than the movement of air. Speech is an act but words are not actors.

Then it’s their stupidity that led them to do it, not the words of someone else.

Do you go out and kill cops if a politician says such things?

Because words do not cause any such crimes

Nope

People should not be prosecuted, jailed or impeached for the sounds that come out of their mouths. But, as that era has proven, the bar has already been set.

The COVID pandemic proved who the fascists were, and it wasn’t Trump. Now they have all the power they need.

I have zero faith in the American justice system, but some hoaxers are finally being put through it.

Michael Sussmann: Clinton lawyer 'lied to manipulate FBI over Trump'

Unfortunately the useful idiots that fell for it and promulgated it every chance they could will never learn from their stupidity. Tales like this and others reminds me that Anti-Trumpism and it’s supporters have shaped the world to what it is today—war, inflation, division on a mass scale.

Nagel’s most important insight is that humans aren’t bats.

The belief that everything must be “bridled” by an elected group of bureaucrats is ideology in the strictest sense, a superstition far deeper and obsequious than any political ideology that arises from it.

Not too different. The National Socialists, Italian Fascists, and New Deal liberals developed surprisingly similar systems to inspire and control their citizens. A good book on this subject is Three New Deals by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.

Looks like Xtrix came back for a read. A glutton for punishment, I guess.

I’m not sure if this is lost in translation or not, but you’re equivocating between two senses of “history”. You might know something of history in the grand sense because you’d read a history book, but you know very little about the history of any given acquisition and transfer. In order to find out whether you are entitled to the object of any transfer—that it was not stolen for example—you’d need to examine what actually happened in the course of the acquisition and transfer of that object. If you know anything about history, you know one cannot know the history of his bike by taking a history class.

If this idea is so simple why is it so hard to grasp?

Not interested in continuing until you present an argument or rebuttal of substance. Take care.

A minute later....

:grin: — ZzzoneiroCosm

Good riddance.

The Public Good. Is that the same as the State?

All of that is irrelevant to our exchange of eggs.

Without the possibility to prove it, it is arbitrary and therefor a procedural proposal and procedure has little, if anything, to do with justice, which is why Nozick is not taken seriously by philosophers in Europe. Kind of like a footnote to Rawls if he's discussed at all. It's purely cultural that Nozick is considered an important thinker in the US due to its outsized individualism and Nozick is just an excuse to shore up anti-social laws.

Come to think of it, I fully support everything you propose to be implemented as quickly as possible in the US and watch it crash and burn as a result.

The fact you cannot prove that all transactions throughout history are just does not entail you cannot prove that some transactions are just. Some can be proved, some cannot. Therefor it’s not arbitrary and not procedural. But I'm disappointed that all we are doing is quibbling about the word "historical". It's so trivial as to be irrelevant.

It's a simple matter; if someone stole a bike and you receive it as a gift, that's not a just exchange. You are not entitled to it and ought to return it to the person it was stolen from. If the bike wasn't stolen and the exchange was voluntary, that's a just exchange. So why is state distribution of wealth just or unjust?

Europe has given us the collectivist and social politics of Communism, Socialism, and Fascism, which have spread worldwide, ruining every country infected by their ideas.

Doesn’t make it not so, either. It is impossible to prove and thus nonsensical to believe every transfer of a possession is unjust. Not all of us are giving each other stolen art, colonial plunder, and blood diamonds.



I’m not transferring you stolen land or highways. The hens laid the eggs just days ago.

I appreciate your opinion.

I don’t think it’s too difficult to ponder. If my chicken lays eggs and I give you a dozen that sounds to me like a just exchange.

It’s either unjust or it is not. The cognitive dissonance must be painful.

If you think such transactions are unjust, how can you be indifferent when the state does it?