I get that people need a little cuddling right now — StreetlightX

I don’t need any cuddling. I don’t like Biden but if I was in a swing state I would vote for him anyway and not have any guilty conscience about that.

Say your family has been kidnapped and your significant other is going to be forced to fight to the death... but you get to choose which of the kidnappers they have to fight. Picking the one less likely to kill them doesn’t make you guilty of killing them, it just means you (perhaps) failed to save them. But so long as you did your best to try, no blame should go on you, who are also a victim.

Right, so why do you consider “actually experiencing the things that we do” to be trivial? — Luke

Because in comparison to all of the functional differences between a human and a rock, that difference between a human and a zombie is tiny.

Take the concept of a rock without phenomenal consciousness. Now add the concept of phenomenal consciousness to it and you still have... a rock. Nothing really notable has changed: it doesn’t have any perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, anything like that.

Now take that original rock without phenomenal consciousness concept, and make all of the many, many, many changes it would take to instead have a concept of a philosophical zombie: you have to build up the chemical processes needed to built the cellular processed needed to build the biological processes needed to build the neurological processes needed to convincingly “pretend” all of the perception, memory, feelings, thoughts, dreams, etc, of a human being.

Take the concept of the rock with phenomenal consciousness and make all those same many changes to it, and you now have the concept of a real human.

Take that real human and somehow make that functionality “just pretend“, and you’re back to a philosophy zombie.

We might say that humans have the capacity to perceive and experience the world because we have - among other things - sensory organs. — Luke

Perception is not the same thing as experience in the senses being used here. A philosophical zombie has sense organs and can use them in all the ways a real human can, they just don't “really experience” using them.

I’m not sure whether you’re just conflating a rock’s (outward) behaviour with its experience here, but I doubt that you are talking about a rock’s perceptions, or that ‘inner’ perspective which distinguishes humans from zombies. If you think a rock has this, then please explain why. — Luke

You’re not distinguishing the functionality of brain processes from the kind of metaphysical having of a first person perspective that the zombie people are on about. All of the stuff happening in our brains is still behavior. You seem to imagine that only
gross bodily movements count as behavior. You could easily tell a zombie from a human if zombies had no brain activity; but because zombies are stipulated to be indistinguishable from humans, they must have that same brain activity. But somehow they “don’t really experience” it.

A rock doesn’t have a brain to be active, so it can’t experience what it’s like to have that kind of brain activity. But it can experience what it’s like to be a rock, which is... not much.

Good advice perhaps, if the person is around to hear it. (Banned people are not). — DingoJones

Banned people can still read the forum, including the bannings thread.

As the only person who's ever been un-banned, I can testify to that first-hand.

Having a perspective on the world via sight, sound and touch; being able to taste strawberries and smell perfumes. These things are far from trivial to me. — Luke

A zombie can do all those things, but supposedly it's conceivable that despite doing all that it would not actually experience the things that it does. It's that actually experiencing the things that we do that makes a humans different from a zombie.

A zombie can put a strawberry in his mouth and describe to you its complex palette and the similarity of its taste to other foods, and those comparisons can even be accurate since it has all the same olfactory sensors as a real human. But, supposedly, it "doesn't actually taste", despite giving every appearance of seeming to taste.

What reason do you have to assume that rocks might have this same kind of first-person experience? — Luke

I don't think rocks can see, or taste, or smell, or anything like that, because they don't actually do the things that humans do when we see, taste, smell, etc. But I think a rock has the same capacity to experience what it does that humans have -- and that "actually experiencing the things that we do" is the difference between a human and a zombie.

A rock just doesn't really do much, so there isn't really much there to experience. Its experience is as trivial as its behavior, but just as its behavior is technically there, just in a super pedantic sense, so too is its experience.

And how might a zombie conceivably function without them? — Luke

I don't think a zombie could function without them, because I don't think anything can be without them, which is why I think zombies can't exist.

It seems like you're somehow understanding everything I'm saying backwards.

Take a human being, in concept. Subtract everything about them that a philosophical zombie also has going on -- which is just about everything, because zombies are definitionally indistinguishable from humans, at least in the third person.

Whatever you have left is the difference between a human being and a philosophical zombie; that's the thing that the zombie is missing, which if it had it, it would be a real human.

In other words it's the only thing a human has that a zombie lacks, completely separate from all of the things that humans and zombies have in common.

NB that things they have in common include talking about their favorite music, complaining about bad days at work, and sharing the fears for the future of humanity. Whatever it is that is different about them, it's unrelated to any of that kind of stuff.

And whatever that is, that's what I ascribe to everything.

What is it you think you are ascribing to everything? — Luke

The trivial thing that zombies still lack, after all of their functionality that gives every appearance of them being conscious to a 3rd person observer has already been accounted for.

Yeah it was the sudden descent into meme posting that made me think he was beyond reasoning. At first I thought he might be someone who could be reasoned from anarcho-capitalism to anarcho-socialism if only someone would gently listen to his concerns and explain why the latter addresses them better than the former. Then he posted a vibrating "TRIGGERED" meme in response and all hope went out the window.

The phrase “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinski” is embedded in the American psyche, I’m surprised you forgot about it. — NOS4A2

That particular quote was not made under oath. The one that was made under oath was in the present tense, after the affair had ended (and hence was true), which lead to the also-infamous "that depends on what the meaning of 'is' is". Which is a delightfully philosophical point: the case hinged on whether that was a present-tense "is" or a tenseless "is".

You'll recall that he was not found guilty of lying under oath. Impeachment is just the holding of a trial, not a conviction. He was tried, and ultimately found not guilty.

Not that I especially care to defend Bill, but if we're being technical...

In real life I would relate to someone 50 years my junior in a more patient manner than I may online when I have no idea of their age. Well, I suppose I could grow up myself and relate to everyone in a more patient manner. — Hippyhead

That is, I think, a positive aspect of the pseudonymity of the internet. There are ways that everyone deserves to be treated, and ways we bias our treatment toward people of different demographics. If you can't tell what demographic someone is in, you can't act on your biases, so you're left with just treating everyone the way that everyone deserves to be treated.

Scott the Woz was banned — Maw

Oh man, I missed that drama? I was looking forward to that.

they lack the sense experiences normal humans have of sight, sound, taste, etc, but they outwardly act the same as humans — Luke

Which requires that they have brains and sense organs that function just the same as ours, and so can “see”, “hear”, etc, in every functional way — a zombie could explain over the phone a scene it is witnessing, for example. The only thing lacking is whether they “really experience” all of those fully functional senses. That is the trivial difference that I ascribe to everything.

Yes, which I consider to be a better response than resorting to the extreme position of panpsychism. — Luke

Saying “you can't have something without a first-person perspective” is exactly my kind of panpsychism. If you can’t have something without it, everything has it; and it’s a thing some people call “mind”.

I don't see what this has to do with phenomenal consciousness or minds in the usual sense — Luke

Phenomenal conscious is not about minds in the usual sense, it’s about whatever it is that zombies indistinguishable from humans in the third person could supposedly lack. A zombie world have a mind in the ordinary sense: it would say it has a mind and report on its contents just like you do.

But we’re supposed to suppose it’s conceivable that it might not have the first-person experience it claims to have. That difference between behaving in every way like a human and actually having the same experience as a human is just having a first-person perspective correlating with its behavior. I think that’s such a trivial thing to ask for that it can even be ascribed to rocks, so it’s not actually conceivable that something otherwise indistinguishable from a human would somehow lack it.

Is this the same sense of "mind" you are talking about when you say that a rock has a first-person perspective? Which philosophers talk about "mind" in this other sense? — Luke

The ones who think there could be some difference between a philosophical zombie and a human. Since the zombie they stipulate is behaviorally identical to a human, indistinguishable in the 3rd person, the only supposed difference they’re on about has to be the trivial having-of-first-person-experience like I’m talking about here.

The only two options for phenomenal consciousness are either strong emergence (i.e. magic/supernatural, so impossible) or else panpsychism? Surely there's another option. — Luke

Or else we are zombies ourselves (which eliminativists would say), but yes basically.

I don't follow your leap in reasoning from your first paragraph to your second. Wouldn't a better response be - as you say elsewhere - that the idea of p-zombies is simply incoherent? — Luke

I only say it's incoherent because I hold that you can't have something without a first-person perspective, and the first-person perspective of anything matches its third-person-observable function, so any "zombie" that's functionally identical to a human must have the same experience as a human and so not actually be a zombie.

Why take the extreme position that everything must have a first-person perspective? I view this as diminishing the usual meaning of the word "mind" to the point that it evaporates entirely. You are no longer talking about the "mind" at that point (in the non-trivial sense), because not everything has one, unless you are a panpsychist. Correct me if I misunderstand you, but I think your position is not that everything has a mind - according to the usual meaning of the word "mind". And therefore, you also aren't using the word "panpsychism" in its typical sense, which I understand to mean that everything does have a mind - according to the usual meaning of the word "mind". — Luke

I did clarify in the OP that my view is specifically pan-proto-experientialism, and not the old-fashioned kind of panpsychism. It's pan"psych"ism about phenomenal "consciousness", which I hold is just the prototypical capacity for experience, not fully fledged actual mind/psyche/consciousness in the usual sense.

Other philosophers talk about "mind" in that other sense though, the sense I think is trivial and not the usual sense, and they seem to find plenty of traction with lay people. So rather than tell people that they're using words incorrectly -- because words just mean whatever we agree to mean by them -- I just distinguish between the different senses of those words that different people mean.

Ah, then we have crossed wires somewhere. Here's what I get thus far from your argument...

1. There exists a metaphysical construct called 'phenomenal consciousness' or 'first-person experience'.
2. This appears to be unique to humans (or sentient life)
3. It cannot not be there because otherwise we'd be philosophical zombies
4. It cannot appear out of nowhere simply by the action of some cells coming together otherwise that would require supernatural intervention.

So it must have been present feature of the cells (and other objects?) all along, just weakly expressed. — Isaac

That sounds pretty much right.

What I don't get (and I think this is Luke's question as well). Is why you're concerned about a metaphysical construct emerging out of nowhere. It has no implications for physicalism at all. Metaphysical constructs are aspects of the human minds which hold them, they can be attached to absolutely anything by any rules whatsoever. If we want to attach 'first person perspective' to only humans, then what is preventing us from doing so? We made it up after all, we can attach it to whatever we like, surely? — Isaac

It sounds like we have different understandings of what a metaphysical claim means. As I understand it, a metaphysical claim -- the predication of a metaphysical construct to something, to say that something is or has a metaphysical construct, or that there exists some metaphysical construct -- is a claim about the thing of which that construct is predicated, not a claim about any human's thoughts. Like, saying "minds are immaterial mental substances" isn't just saying "some people think about minds in terms of immaterial mental substances", it's saying that way of thinking is the right way of thinking about minds.

Saying that only humans have a first-person perspective isn't saying that we (or someone) only think of first-person perspectives when humans are involved, it's saying that there's something incorrect about considering the first-person perspective of anything else. Conversely, when I say that there's a first-person perspective to everything, I'm not saying that people do or ought to think about the first-person perspectives of everything -- most of the time there'd be no point, because the first-person perspectives of most things are dull as rocks -- just that you can consider anything from its first-person perspective.

So the question to ask is not whether the government of the United States under Biden somehow receives extra power or legitimacy from your individual vote. It doesn't. — Echarmion

:up: :100:

The state has power and it is going to use it. We should be doing things we can to limit its ability to abuse it. But also, meanwhile, it gives us each a small input on how it uses its power. It's going to use it one way or another, until we can stop it, but if we get some say in how it's used meanwhile, how is exercising that say that a bad thing?

If the man with a gun to your head will take direction from you on where to point the gun, ask him to point it away from your head. At the least it buys you a little time before he points it back at you again, and at best maybe it will open up a better opportunity to disarm him.

I'm just saying to recognize it for the failure it is, and will be, if he wins - and the contribution to that failure of anyone involved in bringing it about. — StreetlightX

And if you don't vote, and Trump wins, have you not then contributed to that even greater failure?

That's the situation we're facing. Fail a little, or fail a lot. There's no point in blaming people for trying to pull up from "fail a lot" into "fail a little" territory. Sure, it'd be better if we can pull up into "not fail" territory, but so far as voting goes, which option does that? None of them. That's something that has to be done outside the ballot box. So we should all go do that outside-the-ballot-box stuff as much as we can. But then there's still the question of what to do with this ballot box. Obviously we shouldn't make it fail harder, so our choices are either to let it fail as much as it wants to (not vote), or try to make it fail as little as possible (vote for the lesser evil). That choice should be just as obvious. And then when you're done spending less time than I took to write this post doing that, move on to doing the real work that can make some progress toward not failing at all.

Yet you've not explained why you have an issue with there being something metaphysically special about us. — Isaac

I'm surprised to hear you of all people asking for a justification to physicalism. Aren't you hard-core all-there-is-to-the-mind-is-the-brain?

In any case, you've already seen my arguments against the supernatural, as you were engaged extensively in the thread where I presented them. And by "metaphysically special" I mean pretty much "supernatural": that there's something going on with the fundamental ontological status of human beings that is not the same as all of the other stuff in the universe, not the kind of thing we could do empirical science to.

But I'll quote some other writings here to briefly justify that physicalism:

I oppose transcendentalism ... as a direct consequence of my position against fideism. While fideism is only a methodology, a process by which to accept or reject opinions, and does not in itself mean any set of such opinions, there are some kinds opinions that cannot possibly be justified except by fideistic methods, so the rejection of fideism demands the rejection of such opinions. Transcendentalist opinions, as I mean the word, are precisely those that would demand appeals to faith to support them, because they make claims about things that nobody could ever check, those things being beyond all experience.

...

The most archetypical kind of transcendentalist opinion is belief in the supernatural. "Natural" in the relevant sense here is roughly equivalent to "empirical": the natural world is the world that we can observe with our senses, directly or indirectly. That "indirectly" part is important for establishing the transcendence of the supernatural. We cannot, for example, see wind directly, but we can see that leaves move in response to the wind, and so find reason to suppose that wind exists, to cause that effect. Much about the natural world posited by modern science has been discovered through increasingly sophisticated indirect observation of that sort. We cannot directly see, or hear, or touch, or otherwise observe, many subtle facets of the world that are posited by science today, but we can see the effects they have on other things that we can directly observe, including special instruments built for that purpose, and so we can indirectly observe those things.

Anything that has any effect on the observable world is consequently indirectly observable through that very effect, and is therefore itself to be reckoned as much a part of the natural world as anything else that we can indirectly observe. For something to be truly supernatural, then, it would have to have no observable effect at all on any observable thing. Consequently, we would have no way to tell whether that supernatural thing actually existed, as the world that we experience would seem exactly the same one way or the other, so there could be no reason to suppose its existence, no test that could be done to suggest any answer to the question of its existence. And so if we held a belief in it anyway, we would have to do so only on faith; and if we reject appeals to faith, we consequently have to reject claims of the supernatural.

...

But by "faith" I don't mean any particular religious beliefs, such as belief in gods, souls, or afterlives, but rather a more abstract methodology that could underlie any particular opinion about any particular thing. I also don't mean just holding some opinion "on faith", as in without sufficient reason; I don't think you need reasons simply to hold an opinion yourself. I am only against appeals to faith, by which I mean I am against assertions — statements not merely to the effect that one is of some opinion oneself, but that it is the correct opinion, that everyone should adopt — that are made arbitrarily; not for any reason, not "because of..." anything, but "just because"; assertions that some claim is true because it just is, with no further justification to back that claim up. I am against assertions put forth as beyond question, for if they needed no justification to stand then there could be no room to doubt them.

In short, I am against supposing that there are any such things as unquestionable answers.

I object to fideism thus defined on pragmatic grounds. I think it is fine and even unavoidable that we pick our initial opinions arbitrarily, for no good reason. But when we do, we then have a very high chance of those initial opinions just happening to be wrong. If we go on to hold those arbitrary opinions (that we just happened into for no solid reason) to be above question, which is the defining characteristic of fideism as I mean it here, then we will never change away from those wrong opinions, and will remain wrong forever. Only by rejecting fideism, and remaining always open to the possibility that there may be reasons to reject our current opinions, do we open up the possibility of our opinions becoming more correct over time. So if we ever want to have more than an arbitrary chance of our opinions being right, we must always acknowledge that there is a chance that our opinions are wrong.

I still don’t understand why you prefer panpsychism to emergentism. — Luke

because the alternative is either that even we do not [have phenomenal consciousness], or that something is metaphysically special about us. — Pfhorrest

Also, you claim that phenomenal consciousness can "only emerge strongly" and is "like magic", so is impossible. Yet, you also define phenomenal consciousness as having a first-person perspective. Having a first-person perspective is impossible? — Luke

No, I claim that strong emergence is like magic, and so impossible.

So phenomenal consciousness (like anything else) cannot strongly emerge.

But if it emerges at all, it must emerge strongly, by the way it is defined (as something that no combination of the ordinary behavior of physical stuff can equate to, and therefore not something that can weakly emerge from ordinary physical stuff that completely lacks anything like it).

Therefore it must not emerge at all.

So either it does not exist at all (and we ourselves are zombies), or else it is omnipresent.

We are not zombies, so it must be omnipresent.

I think you are defining “first-person perspective” in such a way that it has nothing to do with minds. — Luke

In a way that is completely insufficient for mind as we usually mean it, sure. But that is a way that some philosophers speak of as "mind". So to address their arguments, I need to address this thing that they call "mind", even if it's not the thing I think we ordinarily mean by "mind".

They talk about the concept of philosophical zombies who behave in every way like a human, so there's nothing behavioral, no test we can do from the third person, to tell if they are zombies. They say these things that certainly act in every way like they have minds could conceivable lack "minds", in the sense of lacking a first-person perspective: though from the outside they seem exactly like humans, from the inside nothing seems like anything because there is no seeming-from-the-inside to them.

And I just say that there's a seeming-from-the-inside (a first person perspective) to anything, and that's completely trivial and nothing special at all for most things, because most things don't have any complicated sensory apparatuses and interpretive intelligence and reflexive awareness and control, and those are the things that make our first-person perspective interesting the way it is.

A rock both doesn't appear to do any of that interesting stuff as seen from the outside, and also doesn't experience what it's like to do any of that interesting stuff from the inside, because it's not doing any of that interesting stuff. But there is still a from-the-inside first-person perspective to a rock, it's just completely without note, like the from-the-outside third-person perspective on the behavior of a rock is.

A rock "doesn't do anything" in a casual sense, it just sits there. But technically it is still doing something, because to be at all just is to do something. It's doing a bunch of boring inert low-level physics stuff (its particles interacting with each other and the air and light and the Higgs field and so on), but nothing we would normally call "doing something". Likewise, a rock "doesn't experience anything" in that casual sense; but in the same boring sense that it technically is doing something, I hold that it's technically experiencing something, just nothing of any note to us, something as dull as the low-level physics behaviors it's doing.

Because its experiences correlate precisely with its behaviors, just like everything's experiences correlate with their behaviors. And only things that behave like our brains do have the kind of experiences that our brains do, which is the important thing for "mind" in the sense that we ordinarily mean it.

"Mind" in the sense that people who talk about zombies mean it is something so trivial, it can't even distinguish a human from a rock. Saying that everything has it is basically a way of insulting the significance of it. It's not something special.

I suggest that our ability to talk about our own thought and belief as well as other people's is special enough. — creativesoul

Indeed, but that's a functional ability, and so not the thing that people talking about philosophical zombies are talking about.

I've no idea what "metaphysically special" is supposed to mean. — creativesoul

That there is something "magical" about human beings. That the thing that differentiates us from rocks is not just the things we're capable of doing, but some kind of "soul" or something. (NB that that is the position I am against).

First person perspectives are self reports. — creativesoul

So you literally cannot experience anything unless you tell someone about it? Wow, maybe something like philosophical zombies exist after all, and you're one of them! If I'm to believe your self-report, at least.

Joking aside, self-reports are things we observe about other people in the third person. They're not the same thing as the experiences being reported.

Why do you prefer panpsychism to emergentism (leaving aside the issue of weak vs strong)? — Luke

The issue of weak vs strong is precisely the issue, so we can't leave it aside. Well, strong vs weak, and access vs phenomenal consciousness.

I think access consciousness does emerge, weakly. And the specific content of our phenomenal consciousness emerges, weakly, along with it.

The mere having of any phenomenal consciousness at all is the kind of thing that, by the way it's defined, could only emerge strongly. And strong emergence is like magic, so a no go.

I would think that given what we already know about the evolutionary progression of life on earth, minds would slowly emerge. — creativesoul

Access consciousness does, certainly.

And that, I think, is what we ordinarily mean by consciousness.


It really feels like I'm talking around in circles here, and I think it's because people refuse to keep the concepts of access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness separate. They're not at all the same topic, and confusing them for each other is, I think, the root of all the trouble in philosophy of mind. So maybe let's taboo those terms entirely, and speak instead of:

"reflexive awareness and control"
(as opposed to simpler e.g. stimulus-response throughput)
which is a kind of functionality
and is what's meant by "access consciousness"

and

"first-person perspective"
(as opposed to third-person perspective)
which is a kind of metaphysical status
and is what's meant by "phenomenal consciousness"


My position is that:

not everything has reflexive awareness and control, not everything even has any awareness or control, most things just respond to stimuli, or less than even that, react when acted upon in an inert Newtonian way. Out of that simple action-reaction can be built up, or can weakly emerge, stimulus-response, first-order awareness and control, and eventually reflexive awareness and control.

but

everything has a first-person perspective, because the alternative is either that even we do not, or that something is metaphysically special about us.


Merely having a first-person perspective is not supposed to be a substantial thing to claim about something. It's a boring, utterly trivial, mundane thing, that's nothing special. Only the functionality of reflexive awareness and control is special.

Anyway, I’d almost lost sight of my original reason for wanting to post here, which was to ask you: what reason is there to attribute minds or experience to things, such as rocks, that show absolutely no signs of having minds or experience? — Luke

In the ordinary sense by which rocks and such don’t seem to have minds or experience (but a philosophical zombie does at least SEEM to), I don’t say that rocks and such have them. I hold that that ordinary sense is access consciousness, and it’s entirely about function, so philosophical zombies who function like real humans have that, and rocks don’t.

But then other philosophers say “yes but what about the thing that the philosophical zombie lacks, phenomenal consciousness?”, and I say “oh, that’s trivial, everything has that, even rocks”. And I say that because either everything has it, or nothing has it (and we ourselves are all zombies), or else some things don’t have it but humans somehow do, in a way that has nothing to do with our functionality (else philosophical zombies would have it too), which would thus be like magic.

And between magic happening, us being zombies, or everything “having a mind” in some trivial way that has no bearing on their function in the real world, the last seems least absurd.

I try to keep my feelings out of it, because they don’t really matter. Politics is about doing all you can to help people, which requires a disciplined mind. — Saphsin

:100: :up: :clap:

Maybe you could try explaining to Bongo since you seem to get it now?

Pan-psychists' being wrong about zombies — bongo fury

Panpsychists can't believe in zombies. So if you think they're wrong about that, then you think there are zombies? (Or could be, at least).

Propositional logic is basically algebra with words and so should be teachable to kids who are also learning algebra.

Following most philosophical arguments just requires that basic level of logic, so those algebra kids should be apt to do philosophy too.

I thought Nietzsche, Hobbes, Mackie and Rand were obvious for their egotism/nihilism, but I don’t see how someone like Singer who wrings his hands over even animal suffering factors into this conversation.

I’m still curious where Singer fits into this conversation.

I’m arguing against the possibility of zombies, on the terms of people who are arguing for them. They construct their zombie argument whereby no matter how you build a perfect replica of a human there’s still the question of whether it has a first-person perspective (or else is just a zombie), and I answer yes of course it does, because everything does, so there can’t be zombies.

Santa Claus is far more plausible than a philosophical zombie.

Feeling bad doesn’t make anything better. One can completely acknowledge everything that’s wrong with Biden, and also see that voting for him is tactically useful for harm reduction, and then move on to continuing to oppose him and everything he represents, without needlessly feeling bad about having done the right thing when it comes to voting, even though just voting isn’t nearly enough.

Contrapoints just posted a great video on this subject last night:

Isn’t the third alternative that only we (or things like us) have that, but without some magic happening? — Luke

If it could happen without “magic”, that would mean it was something that could be built up from non-conscious processes, and so would not be whatever the supposed difference is between a philosophical zombie and a real person.

I think it would be a great idea and I can’t see any negative consequences.

Right, I forgot about that, sorry. Brain just went "W lost the popular vote in 2000" -> "W presidency was not won by popular vote", so I scanned backward to HW as the most recent Republican popular victory.

On my account zombies are not possible. That's a large motivator behind panpsychism, to eliminate the possibility of zombies.

Edit to elaborate: Take whatever the supposed difference is between a real human and a philosophical zombie. On my account, everything has that. Because the alternative is either that nothing has that, and we're all zombies; or that some magic happens such that that only we have that, and other things don't. Both of those are more absurd than admitting that there's a first-person perspective to every thing, it's just not of note for most things.

It may be hopeless, but I'm trying anyway (that's literally my motto and the core of my entire philosophical system), and buying time gives more opportunity to try.

It is apparent that you prefer "slow death". — Merkwurdichliebe

Slow death buys time to escape death.

Looking at the map on that link I just posted, I just realized how very very close that compact is to taking effect. If any ONE of the following states joins, in addition to those already joined (including those pending), it will tip the scales to activation: MN, WI, MI, AZ, IN, TX, TN, GA, NC, or FL.

Additionally, any TWO of NV, UT, IA, KS, OK, AR, LA, MS, AL, KY, NE, WV, or any one of those but the last two plus either ID or ME, would be enough to enact it as well.

Enacting that would basically bypass the electoral college, and in doing so probably doom the Republican party in its entirety, since they haven't won a popular vote in over 30 years.

Some states allocate electors based on the national popular vote. So yes, if you want Biden, vote Biden. — frank

No states do that yet. There is the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact where a bunch of states have agreed to do that, but only when there's enough of them on board that that would actually decide the election.

Thanks for reposting that. Chomsky as usual is spot on.

You've thought about everything haven't you? You must be a brain in a vat or something, fed on royal jelly. — bert1

He has, to his immense credit. — Kenosha Kid

:grin: :cool:

To be fair to Dawkins re your last paragraph, "evolutionary altruism" is a different thing from just "altruism" simpliciter.

I wrote an essay on it for a class on moral psychology 13 years ago:
https://geekofalltrades.org/essays/evolutionandaltruism.php