P1. We are acquainted with the phenomenal character of experience.

We experience experience. We are aware of awareness. We are conscious of consciousness.

Yet we are unable to describe a single quale, or any of the mediums upon which they supposedly appear.

It’s a source-hood argument. If his action is not determined by anything else, how is it compatible with determinism?

I actually question the notion that Libertarian Free Will (LFW) entails the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) - the notion that LFW implies there's true contingency to our choices. Even under LFW, we are guided by our impulses, knowledge, assumptions, etc. Given some series of deliberative thoughts, how could there be a different outcome? We have followed some chain of reasoning, and are subject to the same impulses.

My own test is simple: if the action originates in the agent he is responsible for it. He willed it. It cannot be otherwise. Given that we are our impulses, knowledge, and assumptions, the responsibility for the act remains on the agent whose impulses, knowledge, and assumptions they are. Unless someone else or some other force is moving the agent’s body, his acts are determined by him and by nothing else, and the responsibility lies there.

So far no determinist has shown that any act or choice was determined by anything else, and until that happens I cannot follow it.

I showed you a connection between the very wealthy and the political class, and you bring up Trump. That’s something Biden would do.

Do you always deflect from challenges by not answering questions?

What challenge?

Does you always speak in questions?

It relates to the very wealthy and the political class, a connection you’re now trying to disguise.

I’ve spoken about the influence of dark money on the previous 2 federal elections, and it seems to favor one particular side. You might want to looks into it instead of becoming the end product.

I am surprised at how common this view is, albeit expressed in degrees of subtlety. That is, that those who have settled against free-will are doing so out of a psychological desire to be "free" of responsibility.

I don't believe that to be the case. To me the question is more about the nature/structure of human Mind/metaphysics than morality. I.e., the moral implications follow my judgment about whether or not we have free will, rather than informing it.

But I do find it interesting.

I don’t believe it to be the case either. The metaphysical judgement sets the grounds for the moral judgement. That’s why I said it sets the grounds for it.

But that crucial point is oddly missing from what you quoted. Did your past state determine that your present state would exclude that line?

I don’t think it entails nihilism and fatalism, but it does set the grounds for them. Though I’m sure many people are content with the implications of determinism, that they have zero responsibility, and their actions have somehow began outside of them.

No matter his politics and affinities, his mere presence among the effete political class is enough to expose the scam. Look at them go.

Anarchists, who are not well educated in politics, or moral and social philosophy in general, are the modern day libertarians.

The only thing an educated person can do politically is glorify and aggrandize the state, or disguise their statism as social and political philosophy, which is the direct consequence of their state education.

In any case, I’d love to see an educated refutation of any one of the aforementioned political stances, morally and socially, if you care to try.

At best we're describing the activity of the body from the perspective of the body, an organism who is forever peering outward, towards the world, and never inside towards what is actually occurring in there. The best introspection and subjectivity can provide is a partial or blind view of oneself, wholly limited by our own lack of a sensual field.

But because our senses point outwards towards the world, we can come to understand much more about what goes on out there, simply because it provides us with more information. Dreams, on the other hand, occur while we're asleep. The senses aren't as fully integrated into cognitive processing as they would while we're awake, and with our eyes open. So not only are our faculties hindered during during dreams and hallucinations, accounts of what are actually going on are severely limited in both scope and data. This is more than enough for me to say, no, they are not of a common kind.

I very much agree with the first sentence.

So you are content to sit on the side-lines watching what goes on, paying your share of the price for letting it all happen and telling those people how undeserving they are - and, no doubt, generously helping those you consider deserving.

I confess that I get increasingly annoyed at the widespread acceptance of the view that welfare is somehow equivalent to charity. It isn't. It is enlightened self-interest. See Wikipedia - Enlightened self-interest (But I don't think, as Wikipedia seems to think, that this is a complete ethical theory.)

I am content being just and moral, and yes, helping those who I think need and want help.

Welfare certainly isn't equivalent to charity. Welfare is simply the means through which people can absolve themselves of their responsibility to members of their own community, and worse, to delegate that responsibility to a some cold bureaucracy. The most a welfarist can say he's done to help others is pay a little taxes. Charity at least involves some sacrifice and effort.

You are already paying a price by not preventing them from continuing in their life of crime. Passing laws, buying alarms and locks, and funding the police hasn't worked. Try investing in something else, more effective.

It would be effective to kill them, but effectiveness can often be immoral and unjust. So utility is not any kind of goal for me.

Metaphysically, yes, downstream from that which is not physiologically conditioned; scientifically, yes, downstream from nerve endings.

And what lies downstream?

This isn't what naive or indirect realists mean by "experience". They are referring to a particular kind of mental state with phenomenal character. These are, we now know, what occur when the appropriate areas of the brain are active, e.g. the visual and auditory cortexes.

The jargon of it all is largely nonsensical. We can’t experience states of the brain and its activity or else we’d be able to describe with some degree of accuracy what is actually going on in there.

Instead we’re left to experience the residual effects of brain activity insofar as they may reach and affect the senses, which is very little. We might feel a headache but cannot say what the body is doing to cause it, for example. A mental state is the portrayal of a bodily state as given by a being whose senses look away from the body. That’s why its description is always one of grasping, and in that sense, forever naive. It is the loose and often inaccurate feeling of a bodily state according to the tiny amount of information provided to the senses.

Naive realists claim that it is the distal objects themselves, not mental representations, that are the constituents of experience.

It’s a weird formulation and I’d be wary of any direct realist who accepts it.

I refute it because “distal objects” are constituents of the world, not of experience. So are we. Experience isn’t some realm in which objects, distal or mental, are its parts. Experience is an act where the “distal objects” that we experience are acted upon in a certain way. In this sense “experience” evokes a relationship rather than a realm. They are constituents of this relationship, and this relationship just so happens to be direct.

OK. I doubt I would sympathize with the criminals. It depends how they got in to crime. You would sling them in jail for a long time - at your own cost, not theirs. When they come out, without any prospects or help, what do you think he will do? He needs food and shelter and he craves social connection. As we all do. What will he do?

I’m not wondering about sympathy. Having feelings is the very least one can do. I’m wondering if you can be just in your redistribution.

Personally, I wouldn’t put anyone in jail. But I certainly wouldn’t reward their behavior and subsidize their lifestyle by sacrificing my own and other’s.

Yes. I would even sympathize with both. In any case, it is in my interest to get him off his addiction.

Your feelings and interests sound nice, sure, but I’m curious about your actions, specifically what you are willing to sacrifice and if you would sacrifice for both of them equally.

What is seen and heard is sensation in general, derived from the stimulus of the distal object, in general. It has not been determined, i.e., as “shoe” or “phone”, or as any particular named objects.

Is it not the precept that is seen or heard, or, in general, it is not the precept that is sensed. It is the sensed that is the precept, non-fallicious cum hoc ergo propter hoc, upon arrival in the brain (in fact), or, arrival in understanding (metaphysically).

You sense sensations, then?

At any rate, it’s closed system. You wouldn’t know anything if all you could ever know was yourself, but I suspect that’s the point, isn’t it?

There are people who deserve prospects and those who do not. Someone who has become impoverished through no fault of his own, for instance, deserves his community’s help, while the one who has impoverished himself and his community through crime and malfeasance does not.

There are those who find themselves on hard times because of illness or tragedy, and those who find themselves on hard times because they prefer getting high as soon as they wake up. Will you sacrifice your opportunities for both of them equally?

I beginning to lose patience with the move trying to be made here that because our body directly interacts with objects (in this one avenue of sense, anyway) that somehow our mind is doing the same thing. This is patently untrue…

There we have it. Dualism.

What do you think about the relationship between ethics and politics?

To me, politics is the application of ethics to power and monopoly.

Also, what is 'right' or 'wrong' about political correctness, and how far should such correctness go in outlawing what may some may regard as being 'offensive'?

What is right about political correctness is that we ought to treat people with respect and dignity, and avoid insult. What is wrong about political correctness is that respect and dignity ought to be applied to amorphous groups of people, whether they deserve it or not, and not individually. That is precisely where it becomes unjust.

Add on top of that coercing people to do so with threat and force, rather than through argument and example, and we have the makings of an authoritarian movement.

I think I understand your position.

I suppose each position can be viewed as degrees of realism. If I am to use the aforementioned phrases (as it is, in itself), you think you perceive the world as it somewhat is, or as it sometimes is, whereas the indirect realist thinks he perceives the world as it isn’t.

That's all very well. But what if the privileges are themselves the result of exploitation? Or what if the privileges are used to exploit people? Then, right-minded people at least would accept. It does happen, surprisingly often. I think the point is that everyone deserves prospects and opportunities.

If someone’s lack of prospects was the result of exploitation or injustice, and not, say, by choice, then I would gladly accept a set of principles that would increase his prospects at the expense of my own. In my mind, he would be deserving of my support.

In our current bureaucratic trajectory, though, we do not differentiate between the deserving or undeserving, and do so according to more trivial factors such as class or tax-bracket.

Would you be willing to accept a set of principles that increases the prospects of others, even if it means having fewer opportunities yourself

I would not because it is immoral; such an arraignment is premised on the exploitation of those who accept the principles. The arraignment is also unjust insofar as it does not consider those who are deserving or undeserving of the prospects and opportunities you mention.

Right, but the direct/indirect realism discussion is also commonly framed in terms of whether we directly perceive real objects or whether we instead directly perceive a representation or other perceptual intermediary (and only indirectly perceive real objects). I reject that we perceive a mental representation and say that we directly perceive real objects.

As stated earlier, I think the naive realist position is based on the misguided notion that when we perceive a real object we perceive the world in itself (or somehow identify the perception with the object). A perception that is identical with its object is not really a perception at all; it is the object.

The indirect realist opposes the naive realist position, saying that we do not directly perceive a real object but that we directly perceive only a mental representation of the real object.

I reject the direct realist notion that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself (or that our perceptions are identical with the perceived object) and the indirect realist notion that we directly perceive only mental representations of real objects. Instead, I say that our perception of real objects is direct (in a non-naive sense) because perceptions are mental representations.

Thanks for the explanation. A question arises regarding the misguided notion of naive realism, that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself.

The qualifiers “in itself” or “as it is” confuse me to no end, and to be honest I have never seen a naive realist affix these phrases to statements about an object of perception, at least in common language. It makes me think that in order to see an object “as it is” I must see it from an infinite amount of perspectives at the same time, that in order to really see an object I must also see what I cannot possibly see, for instance the back of an object while looking at the front of it, or what it looks like if no one was looking at it, and so on.

So the question is: If we’re not perceiving the world in itself or as it is, what are we perceiving?

I’m not even aware of his arguments. Got one on hand?

If the video’s title was “Trump exposes Pecker” I might be more inclined to watch, but I’m not going to fund their grift with a viewing.

Yes, to me, internally representing the world begets a representation of the world, something that represents, models, or stands for, the environment. We have a space in which representing occurs (internally), and presumably this representation or act of representation (sight) is the intentional object.

I could be completely wrong; that’s just how I always understood representationalism.

The representation is the condition for seeing something, not some thing that you see.

The condition of the body, I presume?

I’m curious because as far as I know representations prohibit us from seeing the world, and I’m interested in how you can see (or represent) around them.

“Watch this propaganda as delivered by this anti-Trump cabal.”

Projection indeed.

MeidasTouch was a liberal American political action committee formed in March 2020 with the purpose to stop the reelection of Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election.[4][5][6][7] The SuperPAC aligned with the Democratic Party in the 2020 United States presidential election, the 2020–21 United States Senate election in Georgia, and the 2020–21 United States Senate special election in Georgia.[8][9][10]

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

A fundamental law of anti-Trumpism is the continuous presence of a racket composed of privileged but panty-waisted group of beneficiaries working behind the scene to both take Trump down and to benefit from the adulation they receive for doing so.

It’s par for the course. For instance, there is an off-the-record Zoom call between people working across different television, print and digital media outlets where lawyers and legal pundits collude to attack Trump legally and propagandize to their followers politically, all of which helps their podcasts, substacks, and commentary careers.

The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment.

The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/23/anti-trump-legal-pundits-calls-00153300

Why would the brain represent the world to you if you weren’t to view the representation?

How do you distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination? It certainly wouldn't make sense to say that you can distinguish them because the English word "see" should only be used for veridical experience.

I would confer with others or seek more information otherwise. If they see the same thing it is a good indication I am not hallucinating. I certainly wouldn’t seek confirmation from the phenomena of my hallucinations.

By definition, if I have to infer some X then I do not have direct knowledge of X, so I don't understand your argument here. Are you asking how inferences are even possible? Are you calling into question the very scientific method?

It was not an argument, it was a question. Usually we have direct knowledge of the grounds, evidence, and arguments to make inferences towards one conclusion or another. I’m just wondering what direct knowledge or evidence derived from mental phenomenon can lead one to believe there is a proximal stimulus that causes the cortex to generate an auditory experience, and further, that that experience represents mind-independent objects.

If both hearing and hallucinating are the activities of the auditory cortex, and the voice is merely the product of this activity, there seems to me no way to distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination, whether it arrives from an appropriate proximal stimulus or not.

If one only has direct knowledge of the voice as the cortex has constructed it, how does one infer whether there is a proximal stimulus of the cortex or not? It seems to me there must first be some direct knowledge of a proximal stimulus that is not merely the product of the cortex.

According to what you mean by “hear”, but what you mean isn’t always what others mean, and certainly isn’t what they mean when they say that the schizophrenic hears voices.

You can tell me what you mean by “hearing” and “voices” and I’m willing to adopt your definitions. If you think hearing doesn’t involves the use of ears and that a voice isn’t the sounds from the larynx, then what are they?

The claim “I hear voices” in the case of hallucination is not true, though. It’s not that I demand that you should make true claims, implying some restriction, I’m just explaining why I cannot believe the claim. You need not restrict your theory to true claims, but I wager it would help your case, not to mention it would better help those who hallucinate.

For those who claim we do not have direct knowledge of mind-independent things, it just boggles my mind why they’d appropriate the language used to describe those things and interactions to describe mind-dependant things and interactions. It’s curious why they’d use the terminology used to describe that which we have no knowledge of, to describe that which we do have knowledge of. I think it’s an indication that indirect realism is a little more naive than it is letting on.

I’m fine with them saying it. But I’m not fine with the indirect realist saying it, especially if accuracy is any concern.

What would be your motivation for wishing to retain the language used to describe the interactions of distal objects and the sense organs to describe mental objects and the mental organs?

A voice, though, is the sound released from the larynx. To hear a voice is to have that sound affect the ears. Since neither of these things and events are present in a hallucination, to say “I hear voices” is to mischaracterize the experience.

One can distinguish between between two different hallucinations by simply describing how they are different. One might be audible or visual, for example.

Unfortunately, when it comes to words like "see" and "hear" and "smell" and "taste" we don't (as far as I know) have terms that can be separated out in this way, and so Banno conflates the meaning of "see" in "I see colours when I hallucinate" and the meaning of "see" in "I see a cow". Indirect realists are using the former meaning when they say that we see mental images.

“Hallucinate” would be a better verb than “see” when comes to such events. “I am hallucinating voices”, for instance, doesn’t imply that the sound of a voice is hitting the ear, and recognizes that some bodily activity is producing the phenomena.