Yep, that sounds like Ojai alright. :rofl:

I consider myself a pragmatist and instrumentalist and consequently a direct (not “naive”) realist. This diagram has problems.

Ah cool, that’s who I thought. She was an old friend from TaeKwonDo way back in the day, and I helped her get her dye sublimation merchandise business up and running way back then.

Yes, anarchists usually like this sort of direct democratic participation; which is majoritarian. — boethius

Only in matters where multiple people have a legitimate stake, though, and not even always then.

51% of people, all of them white, deciding that nonwhites may be enslaved, isn’t anarchic. That’s just tyranny of the majority.

If the people who live in a building or work in a company need to make a decision about that building or company that they all have a stake in, that may require a vote, and majority rule might be the best that can be done in such a vote, but even then many anarchists would argue that it is consensus, not majority, that matters.

The important point though is that 51% of the general populace doesn’t get any say on what goes on inside that house or company; only the people who actually have a legitimate stake in it.

E.g. most rational persons understand that cheating on their spouse is morally wrong, but are tempted to do it because it gives pleasure. Free will kicks in when they choose between moral value and pleasure. At that point, indeed, the act is determined by that judgement of the best outcome, based on the values they chose. — Samuel Lacrampe

I would say that if someone did something that they themselves though was the wrong thing to do, then they did not do it freely, but rather had a lapse of will and did something they meant not to do. And that deciding that something is the right course of action is identical to deciding that it is moral. Someone who cheats on their spouse thus either honestly thought that the pleasure it brought them was more important than the other consequences of it, and acted according to that judgement, in what they felt was a justified, and therefore moral, way; or else they thought that they should act out of more consideration for those other consequences than for their own pleasure, and yet did not act that way, doing something they thought was wrong ought of weakness of will.

In either case, no indeterminism need be involved, and if it were involved at most it would be on disrupting the causal chain between intention and action, creating that very weakness of will.

I'm in the same field as you are, and even breifly did some freelance work for one of the employers listed on your resume. — praxis

Oh cool, I’m curious which. Feel free to PM me if you don’t want to say publicly. (I think I can guess, if you mean graphic design work).

Since you’re local maybe we could grab lunch or something once all this stay-at-home is over. Would be nice to know someone else IRL.

I found this useful and encouraging information:

In order to qualify for a PPP loan, you’ll need to restore your business and any changes that you’ve made, including employment levels and salaries, by June 30, 2020.

[...]

If you’ve had to lay off employees or reduce salary levels between February 15, 2020 and April 26, 2020, you can still qualify for PPP loans.

In order to be eligible, you just need to hire back your employees (technically any employees, but of course the intent is to keep your former staff employed) and restore their salaries and hours worked to be the same that they were before this time period. You must have this done by June 30, 2020. — “Womply

So it stands to reason that I should wait until the end of June to see if my work will get their old act back together. If not then I’ll still have a whole month of enhanced unemployment that pays even more than my normal pay, then another three months of regular unemployment at half pay which combined with subsidized heath insurance is a break-even income/expense balance, and then I have a year of normal expenses (not factoring in how subsidized health care will make that last even longer) to go off of before I even have to touch my IRA, which in turn would buy me at least another year.

So I’m pretty sure it’s safe for me to wait a few months to see if normalcy returns before rushing out into the worst job hunting climate in decades.

Rousseau? Not an anarchist, but that kind of majoritarian.

And direct democracy in the usual sense is normally functionally majoritarian. If 51% of the electorate directly approve of something then it’s law, fuck the other 49% if they disagree and can’t persuade 2% more to change their minds. Anarchy isn’t “direct democracy” like that.

I definitely am in a fortunate position compared to many.

What I want is relevant insofar as it informs what I should do. I shouldn’t do things that will lead me away from my goals, like giving up on my old job and rushing to find another I’ll enjoy much less when I have the opportunity to wait and the possibility that things will go back to how they were.

My parents, girlfriend, and the government all tell me I don’t have to be looking for work right now. Strangers on the internet mostly say otherwise. I think I’ll follow the former rather than the latter.

Anyway, all I was asking about was if anyone has any insight into what the law does say about PPP and mandatory rehiring, because I’m not clear about that.


Also, anyone else feel free to share about how coronavirus has impacted your work situation too.

The majority can be wrong — boethius

That’s exactly what I mean by “not majoritarian”: just being the majority vote doesn’t make it right. Just being some minority’s vote doesn’t make it right either, but I wasn’t implying it did.

Others have already shared a bunch of good information on anarchism generally, but I thought you might also be interested in my particular view on what anarchy could look like.

"Direct democracy" is a modern euphemism for anarchism. — boethius

Not so. Anarchism is not majoritarian.

I don't really need tiding over, since the enhanced unemployment is paying slightly more than I would even have been making at my normal job -- and also I have piles of savings to tide me over long enough to find new work after that. My only worry is about whether I will have to look for new work, which I really don't want to have to do. I don't want to be a freelancer. I don't want to do piece work. I want my old hourly W2 work-from-home job back, if at all possible.

• An act is called freely chosen when it is voluntary, intended, willed, as opposed to being accidental, fully caused by external forces outside our control. — Samuel Lacrampe

This is correct, but being voluntary, intended, willed, is a deterministic matter (of whether your judgement of the merits of alternative courses of action determines your actions), and being accidental is more or less the same as being random, undetermined.

freely chosen, and therefore not fully determined. — Samuel Lacrampe

False premise. Freely chosen does not entail undetermined. Free choice is a deterministic process; random (undetermined) choice is unfree.

...Bueller?

Fdrake thought I should keep doing these, but I’m not sure there’s a point if nobody has anything to say.

Would people be more interested in these if I were open to arguing about the content too?

I don’t see what connection you are trying to draw between consciousness and free will here, or what question about that connection you are asking.

I do think there is a connection though, in that consciousness and free will are analogous to each other. Phenomenal consciousness is like incompatiblist free will: everything has it, it’s just an inevitable aspect of existing, so it doesn’t differentiate anything from anything else, and isn’t of any practical importance. Access consciousness is like compatibilist will: they are the important kinds of their respective things, that distinguish fully fledged people from rocks and trees and simple machines, but they aren’t of a much philosophical interest, being only a kind of reflexive functionality (self-awareness and self-control respectively) built up out of simpler ordinary physical functionalities.

That looks like propositional logic already.

In that case you also need to compare methods. The USSR and PRC for instance aimed to bring about communism via socialism via state capitalism and never got past the state capitalism stage, which in turn was responsible for all the atrocities they’re known for. Someone else aiming to establish socialism while never going anywhere near state capitalism should not be expected to turn out similarly.

Thanks.

It says at the top of the page: me.

Cool. So Frank was discussing bullshit. Engage him, ignore anything I write. Please. I promise to extend the same favor to both of you. -GL — Greylorn Ell

You were replying to Frank before. I was just pointing out that you reply was about something different than he was talking about.

Sure, but Frank was discussing the bullshit vs normal distinction (supernatural vs natural), not the artificial vs natural one.

Natural vs artificial is not the same thing as natural vs supernatural.

I think philosophers have nothing to offer when it comes to physics or even mathematics. While no scientist can take the theory of relativity to be 100 percent accurate, doubting it's over all validity is akin to doubting whether my hands exist or not. We can devise clever arguments, like Hume's problem of induction and try to present science as only an interpretation of the world but it will not influence scientists in any way. I don't like scientism and science will always be silent when we to understand metaphysics, ethics etc but we shouldn't downplay how successful science has been in predicting the world/nature. — Wittgenstein

I’m not questioning the success of the physical sciences, but rather highlighting how they spun off from philosophy, became a success of philosophy, and so largely ceased to be a topic of philosophy, except for little quibbles and fringe viewpoints. And how it’s perfectly possible that the same could happen for ethics. Once philosophy has done its job on a topic, cleared up how to answer questions about it, it rightly stops having anything more to say about that topic, besides repeating why you ought to go do the other thing that’s now been created, e.g. philosophy’s relationship to the physical sciences is now just to attack or defend them, and only those who would attack them still attempt to do work in conflict with them, while their defenders show why not to do that.

Yes.

That is a miscomprehension... of what it would mean for solutions to ethical questions to be objective. It doesn't mean that they are physical things like that. We "choose solutions" to questions about reality every bit as much as we do questions about morality. The only difference is that there is much more consensus on that choice, but still not unanimity... look at all the kooks who deny this or that bit of science.

Philosophers are not intellectually qualified to understand physics — Greylorn Ell

Some aren’t. Others are. All should be to do their jobs correctly.

I hold that the relationship of philosophy to the sciences is the same as that between administrative fields (technology and business) and the workers whose tools and jobs they administrate. Done poorly, they constantly stick their nose into matters they don't understand, and tell the workers, who know what they are doing and are trying to get work done, that they're doing it wrong and should do it some other, actually inferior, way instead, because the administration supposedly knows better and had better be listened to. But done well, they instead give those workers direction and help them organize the best way to tackle the problems at hand, then they get out of the way and let the workers get to doing work. Meanwhile, a well-conducted administration also shields the workers from those who would detract from or interfere with their work (including other, inferior administrators); and at the same time, they are still watchful and ready to be constructively critical if the workers start failing to do their jobs well. In order for administration to be done well and not poorly, it needs to be sufficiently familiar with the work being done under its supervision, but at the same time humble enough to know its place and acknowledge that the specialists under it may, and properly should, know more than it within their areas of specialty. I hold that this same relationship holds not only between administrators and workers, but between creators (engineers and entrepreneurs) and administrators, between scientists (physical or ethical) and creators, and most to the point here, between philosophers and scientists. Philosophy done well guides and facilitates sciences, protects them from the interference of philosophy done poorly, and then gets out of the way to let the sciences take over from there, to do the same for creators, they to do the same for administrators, they to do the same for all the workers of the world getting all the practical work done; whether that work be the original job of keeping our bodies alive using the original tool of our bodies themselves (i.e. medicine and agriculture), the job of making of new tools to help with that (i.e. construction and manufacturing), multiplying and distributing our power to do that (i.e. energy and transportation), or multiplying and distributing our control over that power (i.e. information and communication). — “The Codex Quarentis: The Metaphilosophy of Analytic Pragmatism

Sure, you could find a solution - but would it be the right one? Would it set out what we ought to do? If you agree with the mooted solution, you would say yes; but if you disagree, well, off we go, disagreeing again. — Banno

The exact same can and has been said about relying on the methods of science to tell us what is real.

The first was given by Russell. Philosophical problems are solved only when science finally tackles them. Philosophers handle all questions which scientists at the present moment cannot investigate or answer. The obvious objection would be that, there are many philosophical problems that will never fall under science such as ethics and further more, it still does not tell us why philosophers can't solve such problems. — Wittgenstein

Whether or not to trust the results of science (and why) is itself a philosophical question, and arguably something only really becomes a science when a philosophical approach to how to tackle a certain kind of problem is widely agreed upon. That is why speculative "philosophical problems" are only solved when science finally tackles them: a philosophical solution just is the giving of a way to tackle the problem in such a conclusive manner that we'd call it "science".

I disagree that ethics will never "fall under science" unless by science you mean specifically the physical sciences (as in common today); I see no reason why an approach to answering questions about morality that is just as solid as the physical sciences' approach to answering questions about reality cannot be found, and widely adopted, beginning fields of ethical sciences that can answer questions about morality as conclusively as the physical sciences can answer questions about reality.

That just shows that those ethical questions were never really philosophical questions to begin with, any more than what was effectively "speculative physics" ever was. The philosophical questions are the ones about how to answer questions about those things. A successful philosophical answer says how to answer them, and then another field takes over actually doing that answering.

What is this Solaris? From a book or movie or something? All I know is the old OS.

should I just stop posting these?

Humean vs Kantian first bring to my mind their disagreement on the existence of moral facts and moral beliefs. Hume thinks there are only desires, which are not truth-apt, while Kant thinks there are genuine moral beliefs that correspond to some “queer” kind of moral fact.

is there a better thread I should post in to talk about the economics of this crisis more than the medicine?

I texted my boss today to let him know i am financially secure through at least july thanks to enhanced unemployment and i’d be happy to do a trivial amount of work for him for postponed pay if it helps him qualify for PPP loans since those require that you don’t lay anyone off.

he replied that they are restructuring due to covid19 and i shouldn’t count on his company at this time, but he will refer some friends at other companies that are doing better to me. now i’m having a panic attack because the only thing keeping me from having one before was the expectation that this job would recover and be required to hire me back.

So what would you have me add. A part of their theology, which I have included in their overall ideology? It is already there.

IOW, there is nothing else that they follow. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Still missing the point, which is that you aren’t lacking in your description of atheism, but in your description of religion. A religion needs to be an institute, some kind of social arrangement, and it needs to appeal to faith. Unassociated people with a variety of reasons for having the same status of belief about the same topic don’t constitute a religion. Atheism is not a social institution, and doesn’t require appeals to faith, so it isn’t a religion.

There could be a religion with atheism as one of its tenets, if some social institute claimed that people ought to disbelieve all gods as a matter of faith. But that still wouldn’t make all of atheism a religion.

What else do atheists follow if not their ideology? What would or could be added? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

The point is that ideology is necessary for religion, but not sufficient for religion, so not everyone who follows some ideology is therefore religious, even though all religion is ideological.

Since following an ideology is a prerequisite of religion, atheism can be considered a religion — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Necessary conditions are not sufficient conditions.

That is why atheist churches are called atheist churches. — Gnostic Christian Bishop

I’ve never heard of such things. Link?

Yes, but this - the truth-functional propositional calculus as you put it, applies only to matters of fact and the natural sciences, not to everything — Pussycat

Not so. If other kinds of claims can be assigned truth values on some other grounds than empiricism, then they can be manipulated through truth-functional logic just the same. The logic doesn’t care what the truth values mean or where they come from.

So the Paycheck Protection Program ran out of money this morning. My semi-former employer was counting on that to keep his business afloat, and I was counting on that in turn to have a job to come back to before my enhanced unemployment runs out.

It sounds like a bill to re-fund it is already in the works, but the new funds are expected to run out just as quickly, and apparently Democrats are holding up the bill (!?), though I can’t find any good information on why.

ETA: It appears Democrats want more hospital funding and better access to the money for small lenders, and Trump sounds pretty okay with that, it’s just senate Republicans who want to leave that out.