Oration is speech.

If you consider oration powerful then?

The oration is speech. Speech is an act. Speech is powerful.

What are you thinking here?

Speech is a noun, which is a person, place or thing. To "give" a speech, or "speaking", is the act. I mistakenly nominalized "orate" with the suffix "tion", which only served to confuse things.

You do have to believe in the power of speech to believe there can be great orators. It's rather confused to think you can have powerful speeches but no powerful speech. The medium isn't irrelevant, but it's not the most relevant attribute of speech, which is the power of words on human minds.

I’m not sure how you get from “MLK and Winston Churchill were great orators” to “it’s rather confused to think you can have powerful speeches but no powerful speech”. Oration is an action they perform and I like the way they do it. None of that means or implies that they have powerful speech.

I don't know what you could possibly mean by 'the power of the brain' in this context. Are you the kind of person who insists that it's not the gun that kills you it's the bullet? Do you really go through life as if you don't understand the difference between proximate and non-proximate causes?

"The high demand for wheat's going to cause a rise in prices"

"No, actually I think you'll find, the high demand for wheat isn't going to actually cause anything, the key presses on the stock exchange computer is going to cause the price rise, anything else is one step removed and so irrelevant"

I bet you're a hoot at parties.

From the resting metabolic rate we can understand the rate of work of the brain and how much power it requires. We can even view its activity with brain scanning technology. We have a general idea of what it does and how it effects the rest of the body.

Can you do the same with words? We can measure the intensity of sound and understand how that effects the body, sure, but do words come with more intensity? If they do not, then how do they affect you different than other sounds from the mouth? Do words on paper possess more mass and energy than arbitrary scribbles? If not, then in what way are they more powerful?

“Words have power.”

“How?”

“Look at these images of the brain! [insert appeal to ridicule]”.

Only someone beholden to the superstition would try pass off evidence of the power of the brain as evidence of the power of words without irony. In fact, I've been saying the brain is the cause all along, and you present the brain imagining techniques and investigations into neural mechanisms as a refutation. So thanks for providing even more evidence, not only of the power of the brain, but also of your own sociopathy.

I believe in rhetoric, I just don't believe it works how you say it does. I also believe that some language is far more appealing and beautiful, some ugly, that people enjoy some language more than others, that MLK and Winston Churchill were great orators, and so on. I'm just trying to be clear where these feelings are coming from. One doesn't need to believe speech has power to note the genius of Shakespeare's writing, simply because the feelings and ideas one gets when reading it isn't generated in the ink and pages.

There is no empirical evidence that some combinations of sounds and marks on paper have more power than others. There is no instrument that can measure it, no hypothesis to account for it, no formula to describe it.

The danger of this superstition is that it weakens people and justifies tyranny. It teaches them to treat symbols, words and the people who speak them as the cause of their pains, and the only way to protect themselves is to excise the speaker and the language from the environment. Such thinking leads the censor to pretend that an execution for the crime of blasphemy is the consequence of the blasphemer's words, and not the consequence of the superstitious and barbaric laws that bind them. Socrates wasn't executed because his words floated around the marketplace corrupting the youth, but because people like Anytus and the Athenian statesmen couldn't deal with what he was saying.

Anyways, I know we won't agree, but I appreciate the ear nonetheless.

They have meaning, which unintelligible sounds/scribbles lack.

They don't have meaning. Meaning is generated in and provided by the person who views the symbols. Meaning does not exist outside any human being. We can't understand a foreign language just by listening to it, for example. We must learn what the words mean and learn to associate them with the sounds and symbols, and forever be ready to provide meaning to them.

The argument was that speech does have power; hence the ability to suffer as a result of it, which victims of verbal abuse is an example of. Do you deny that these victims truly suffer? If not, then how do you explain their suffering?

I do not deny their suffering. All I know is neuroplacticity suggests the brain wires itself. If someone is consistently in an abusive environment the brain adjusts itself in a certain way. It is only through training—whether through cognitive therapy or meditation, perhaps medication—that it can readjust and be undone.

I’m just stating what I believe on a popular topic, and the only effect I’ve had is your weird, baffled rage. I assure you, though, I’m not some nefarious figure in your little propaganda fantasy. I don’t care enough about what people believe to even bother. I just despise the conformity and invariable statism your kind of proselytizing demands. It doesn’t seek to change minds; it seeks control, and I will dissent from it every time. That’s all.

I believe the climate is changing, as it always has, but I do not see it as inherently frightening. What is frightening to me is watching the same all-too-human hands that led us here work to send it in the opposite direction. The idea of solar geoengineering, spraying aerosols to dim sunlight or to brighten clouds, is the stuff of dystopian nightmare. The hubris in this respect is worrisome.

This is the sort of pap that comes from Ivy League schools these days, radical only in its demand for conformity and groupthink and identity politics, that is to say, not radical at all.

What theory of mind do you ascribe to? How does an intention form, and how does it then get to have physical results, and how do these then in turn again travel "into" the mind?

Feel free to give basic descriptions, I'm not expecting you to write a book here.

I believe mental states are really body states. I’m not one to say we should eliminate the concept of mind altogether, just that we should never forget the object it abstracts. Embodied cognition is somewhat appealing, but I prefer biology to philosophy when it comes to mind.

What do you believe?

So, connected with what I wrote above, when does "she" begin? Does her mind rest somewhere fully formed for all eternity, or is it temporal, and if it's temporal, what causes it to change?

She probably begins at conception.

I rest on the sensible fact that, until she is struck by something like a billiard ball or kinetic energy, every move she makes begins and ends with her. So unless something forcers her to move against her will there could be only one cause to her actions. There are probably a vast array of external and environmental factors she may be considering, of course, but the choice and the action itself comes from only one being.

Even if I did believe in the computational theory of mind (I don't), we've avoided entirely how a subsection of sounds from the mouth or scribbles on paper possess more power than others. Now they have "influence", which according to the dictionary is "the capacity to have an effect on the character, development, or behavior of someone or something". It's magical thinking all the way down.

"It's what's encoded and how it's processed that is important". If I try to translate this back to biological terms, I find only one type of object that encodes and processes speech: the human body. When I search around for a reason you might keep bringing up Trump, I see only one culprit.

The reason you can't get Trump out of your mouth is because you've developed through conditioning the requisite neural connections surrounding that man and his name. I could just as easily blame Trump for the state you find yourself in, but that's too superficial, and doesn't explain how others have come to vastly different conclusions under the same conditions. I cannot blame propaganda for an act of belief that you yourself commit, any more than I can blame it for my disbelief. The reason you orientate yourself around Trump in such a fashion is you, yourself, your body, achieved via the methods, principles and means of understanding that you've spent a lifetime developing. So it's almost a tragedy that the output rarely rises above mediocrity.

It is physical. Spoken words are heard via physical vibrations. Written words are obviously written on something physical. BTW, are you intentionally leaving my post regarding emotional abuse unanswered?

So are all other sounds from the mouth. Unintelligible scribbles are also written on something physical. What I want to know is what makes speech and words more powerful. I explicitly stated this: "Speech possesses no actual, physical power, insofar it lacks the capacity to transfer more energy than any other sound from the mouth."

I did intentionally leave your post unanswered. That some people beg to differ with my view is not compelling enough to change my mind, and I could not follow the argument much further.

I don't fear equivocation. It says more about you than it does about me.

I'm afraid you're equivocating between my ability to speak and the power of speech.

Philosophers have not shown, but surely some have said, that speech has power. But if it is not physical in nature, how can this “power” have physical consequences? This is action at a distance, or worse, magic and sorcery, and without a viable theory to explain how speech can manipulate matter that’s the kind of superstition it shall remain. It’s clear to me, though, that the only physical energy powerful enough to set those events into action began and ended within the individuals who acted them out.

At least Bloom was reasonable enough to say that Rousseau and Nietzsche did not cause the horrors that followed them.

What does it matter? We’re of the same species. In fact, we are the last extant species of human being, and it is quite possible we mixed with our extinct cousins once we left the mother continent, long before any modern technologies.

So now could you show some evidence of it?

I can try. What would you like me to argue or defend?

I only mentioned Trump once and that was to say I never mentioned Trump once. There are only a few reasons why you’d spread such a falsity and all of them suggest a perversion of some sort. What is bizarre is that you approached a minor side point I was making, accused me of not making an argument while you yourself made no argument, and then continue to invite me to engage with it as if you did, and implying I’m a bullshitter while doing so. This is bullshit of the highest order.

I assure you I have focussed on those topics, and long before you “invited” me to do it. So now what?

It appears that Canadian soldiers participating in the military world games in Wuhan were getting sick with covid-like symptoms back in October of 2019. They said Wuhan was a ghost town, almost as if it was on lockdown. The communist party lied, of course, and told them it was like a ghost town just to make it easier for the athletes to get around. Commies lied; people died.

https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/diane-francis-canadian-forces-have-right-to-know-if-they-got-covid-at-the-2019-military-world-games-in-wuhan

That enumerating instances where people thought that speech was rousing is not an argument that speeches aren't rousing.

I wasn’t making that argument. I was only drawing a parallel between sophists, sophistry, and the belief that words and incantations can manipulate matter.

What’s the argument?

That’s not an argument. So go ahead and make one.

It shouldn’t matter either way. I never mentioned Trump, at any rate, so the criticism is projection or worse. But I thank you for letting me speak for myself.

The overestimation of the power of speech is an old tale it and goes back thousands of years or more to the Sophists. Gorgias, for instance, believed speech had an effect like drugs upon the body.

I thought we were talking about existential threats and global catastrophe, like climate change and nuclear destruction. Silly me.

I do not dispute climate change and I think protecting the environment is of upmost importance. These are indeed important issues. Whether it is an existential threat I am not so confident. I only think behavior should be influenced by example rather than through religious enthusiasm and tyranny.

We get it right all the time, every day in fact. This is just another stupid talking point used whenever climate change is brought up. You're not fooling me or anyone else.

Which one of these has come true?

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

I suspect you’re so tied up in your own equivocations and proofs by assertion that this is all you could come up with. A shame. I almost hoped to see some power here but could only find the lack of it.

Saying something is also a power. Moving the goalposts is yet another. You're doing both... with speech.

I’ve never said we don’t have the ability to speak. You said speech has power; now you’re saying we we have the ability to speak. You never had any goal posts to begin with.

Your speech says more about you than it does about me. Your evasions and ridicule reveal to me all I need to know about the contents of your mind and methods of thinking and speaking. So much for power.

We have a lot of abilities, but moving human beings against their will with speech isn’t one of them. But again, I’d love to see you try. Until then…

I don’t use them as a means of convincing others. I use them as a means of expression, of creativity, to communicate my thoughts and to manifest my thinking. It’s not up to me whether you agree or not, and it’s clear that despite the power you confer to speech, my speech lacks the power to alter you in any way. So the performative contradiction is yours.

But if you want to test your theory I submit myself as your willing subject. Oppress me, injure me, exert your power, do what you will.

Humans are notoriously awful at predicting the future. At least I can’t think of anyone who got it right. Some of them may have, but there are more who are still waiting for Revelations to pan out. So nowadays the whole doomsday thing is a hard sell. Oh well. Better to lead by example than try to lead a mob, I’d say.

Censorship begins, in part, with the conferring of power to speech. One must fear the effects of speech to seek to regulate it, and to do this one must suppose the speech has enough power to cause effects in the first place.

The problem is conferring power to speech is much like conferring power to kings; the only power they have is what society gives them. Speech possesses no actual, physical power, insofar it lacks the capacity to transfer more energy than any other sound from the mouth. Yet there are people who believe speech has consequences beyond the expelling of breath, that it can oppress minorities, injure or influence the weak, or lead to varying fits of societal disorder. This may be the most ubiquitous superstition of man.

To confer power to some articulated sounds but not to others is magical thinking and folk psychology at best, but at worst a kind of sophistry used to justify censorship. It is why censorship is the handmaiden of injustice, ever-erecting a false cause (speech) while continually absolving the actual ones (actions).

It is simply untrue that words possess any power over that of man. After all, he is the creator of them. So we should work to dispel that myth, defang speech, remind people of their power over and above that of words and opinions, and free ourselves from our most deep-seeded superstitions.

I fell into nominalism a number of years ago. Having banished the specters from my mental furniture, life seems much clearer these days.

Thinking is an action. A thought is the act of thinking. We do not gain mass when we perform actions, but the body does perform work.

Violent speech…one can scan the annals of medicine and not find a single case of anyone being injured by words. This is because violence is caused by certain human actions, and the act of speaking is not one of them.

“Violent speech” fits neatly into a more accurate category of speech, which is speech the censor does not like. History is replete with such magical claims against speech, used as they were in order to justify censorship. Speech “corrupts the youth” as in the trial of Socrates. Making contrary world-views explicit leads to “disorder and mischief” against the one true faith, as in the inquisition of Galileo. Nowadays laws teach us that others can be “incited”, encouraged, roused into various fits of immorality—hatred, discrimination, lawless action—by speech.

But is this true? Is the mere possibility, essentially a fantasy, of the corruption of Athenian youth a good enough reason to silence the expressions and life of a philosopher, and thereby deny posterity the insights he may have imparted otherwise?

The overestimation of the power of speech is a sin, as is the censorship applied in its name, and the untold casualties thrown to the noose and stake testify that censorship is where the violence always lies.

Isn't this comparable to saying words that form concepts in the minds of people have no possible effect on the actions of those people. Language does not shape minds? Neither can visual stimuli move us. Orchids can not dupe wasps (mindlessly) to target disperse their pollen?

You don't thing a young child, who has had a McDonalds Happy Meal and a toy, would not see a giant McDonalds billboard and then start crying out for McDonalds. But the advertisement does not cause anything to happen.

If words were able to form concepts in the minds of people we would understand a foreign language simply by reading or hearing it. Rather, one has to do the required work, put in the effort, and shape his own mind before he can utilize words. In a sense, the mind shapes the language, not the other way about.

Well yes, a young child who associates McDonalds Happy Meals with tasty food and toys will no doubt see an advertisement and remind himself of the association. But one who cannot associate it, perhaps because he does not know what McDonalds is or how their Happy Meals taste, will be unable to make that association. In each case the cause of these different effects is the child, not the words.

I'd agree with you. How does this warrant intolerance to the vast majority of trans women who aren't advantaged in this way, or those that are who wouldn't do it?

There's something self-similar in transphobic arguments: in lieu of an argument against people living their lives in a way that makes sense to them, it's always: "Well this person committed a crime while trans," and "That person got an unfair advantage while trans." So what? What does that have to do with whether the majority of trans people should be allowed to live their lives?

It doesn't warrant intolerance. I don't see how it could. But certainly some people will see it that way.

A New Zealand athlete will be the first trans-woman to compete in the olympics. Until 2013 he was competing in men's competitions.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/jun/21/olympics-tokyo-laurel-hubbard-trans-weightlifter-new-zealand

Personally I don't think any of this is fair to the women participants, because unlike the trans athlete the women did not develop as males in their formative years, but I'm interested to see how it plays out. I predict that some countries might come to abuse this loophole like East Germany did with its state doping programs.

In that respect, since there is obvious mystery, paradox and contradiction in life, how does the typical Atheist reconcile their belief system, logically?

The noun "God", or whatever name it is given, has yet to be shown to refer to anything in the universe. One can only scan certain literature to find any remnants of it, or at any rate, the existence of it cannot be shown to extend beyond our language.

Given history, it is clear the concept has sprung from the human mind as an explanatory fiction, more a product of ignorance than of experiment and reason, and not much different in form than the idea that anthropomorphic beings move waves and thunder. Such beliefs have long-since been superseded by more plausible, evidence-based models.

Advertisement, as appearances (eg. sexual selection), might have shaped more species than we can count. Don't advertisers hands/minds shape advertisements?

Sight/perception does not mediate action (force) of choice? It has no bearing on whether you bump into a pole or fall down a well, whether you go to grocery storer #1 or #2.

Is a colorful fig in some jungle an advertisement for the animals who eat figs?

From the moment the light reflecting off an advertisement hits the lens of the human eye it is manipulated by the human body. The advertisement first must be brought into focus, seen, the symbols and images upon it scanned, understood, long before the product itself is considered. At no point in this interaction or any other is the advertisement acting upon the human body, unless it falls on someone’s toe. If the advertisement cannot act upon the human body, how can it shape minds?

I’ve only ever claimed I’m a liberal.

It’s not unlike Body Integrity Identity Disorder, where people have urges to amputate healthy limbs or sever their own spinal cord. The crux of the question for me is whether one should go so far as to disfigure his body in such a way so as to satiate a mental urge. Maybe the urge is the problem and not the body.

But yes I think mutilation is barbaric and goes against the hypocritical oath.

Perhaps something like the integration you speak of would be a better and more humane goal than disfiguring the body. Therapists should move to disfigure the shadow rather than the self.