CNN just lobbed the question to Donald Trump about Jan 6th. First of all he completely ducked it, attacking Biden over the border, and then he tried to pin the blame on Nancy Pelosi for not calling the National Guard, which is another lie. He then follows up by saying that Hunter Biden is a convicted felon, another lie (apparently true, but not relevant). Overall, almost everything Trump is saying in this debacle, um, debate, is a lie. Shame is, half the electorate will believe him.

Trump is very worked up about the story that he called military casualties 'loosers and suckers' and repeatedly said the story has been 'debunked'. But it was presented in The Atlantic on September 3, 2020:

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, near Paris, in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed. — The Atlantic

By way of a coda my sister and I both thought that everything Trump said was a lie, but that Joe Biden looks like he should be in a rocking chair on the front porch with a blanket over his knees.

God help us. :yikes:

You could know the exact make-up and location of every particle in a sheep and this, taken by itself, would not tell you that it is a sheep or what a sheep is. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The atoms of a teacup do not collude together to form a teacup: The object is a teacup because it is constituted that way from a perspective outside of itself. — Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter

Do you have any evidence to support the claim that it would happen? — Janus

Maybe the fact that they didn't! Ever see that excellent Speilberg movie with Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham, owner of the Washington Post, over the publication of the Pentagon papers? The Post. Gave a good overview of the dangers involved.

Assange was obviously playing a dangerous game, and it has cost him. — Leontiskos

More or less 'publish and be damned'. And he was!

I've only read press pieces and profiles, over the years. Liz Lette was on ABC talkback the other day, saying he used to stay with her and Geoffrey Robertson in London prior to his incarceration. She was overall positive, but thinks he's on the autism spectrum and lacks insight into the impact of his actions and words on others. Despite his supporters saying there's no proof that Wikileaks disclosures resulted in deaths, it's indubitable that they disclosed the ID's of many individuals in the middle East because of Assange's refusal to redact those details, and put them in harm's way. Even Ed Snowden criticized that.

Because if they did, the publishers and journalists would like have been prosecuted under the Official Secrets act. Let's not overlook the fact that the condition of Assange's release was his pleading guilty to that. Maybe the reason that Wikileaks has been lauded by media organisations is that it took the fall for the release of a lot of top secret information in a way they never would have dared to do. (Also noticed that the official site has yet to be updated with news of his release, by the way.)

Didn't see that. I said already, I believe Assange has paid the price for what he did, and that it's great to see his ordeal come to an end. But I'm very sceptical about him being lionised as a homecoming hero and champion of press freedom.

Who decides what criteria counts as 'bona fide" in that context? — Janus

That's the question I'm asking. I did comment that the NY Times, Guardian, etc, would probably not have published classified documents stolen from military organisations, although after Wikileaks did so, they were then able to reference them, as they had been put in the public domains.

I agree the citations are impressive, that's why I mentioned the Walkley Award.

This NY Times piece, by independent film-maker Alex Gibney, sums up the kinds of issues many had with Assange, prior to his long incarceration (gift link).

Do you think Wikileaks was a bona fide media organisation?

Refresher prior to the forthcoming debate, on what Trump did after the last election and has done since:

• Continued to spread baseless lies that the election had been stolen from him
• Blocked federal officials from working with Joe Biden’s transition team
• Demanded Georgia’s secretary of state “find” him the exact number of votes he needed to turn his loss their into a win
• Pressured the DOJ to investigate the absurd claim that Italian satellites had changed Trump votes to Biden ones
• Urged state legislators to “decertify” their election results
• Incited a violent riot that left numerous people dead
• Let said violent riot go on for hours before he half-heartedly told people to go home (and also told the mob, “You’re very special” and “we love you” and “Remember this day forever!”)
• Said Mike Pence deserved the chants calling for his hanging
• Continues, nearly four years later, to claim the election was stolen from him
• Won’t commit to accepting the outcome of the 2024 election
• Says there will be further violence if he loses again
• Regularly threatens to  use the government to go after his enemies if he wins
• Said he will be a dictator on “day one” in office

Because of all of the above, and because Joe Biden has notably done none of the above, you might think it would be pretty clear to people that of the two candidates, one of them is good for democracy and one of them is bad, and that the latter is very obviously Trump. But according to the results of a terrifying new poll, that is, somehow, very much not the case.

That poll, conducted by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, reveals that in the six swing states Biden won in 2020, more voters classified as “Deciders”—that is, they are likely to decide the outcome of the election—think Trump is better equipped to handle threats to democracy than Biden. — Vanity Fair

I think it’s safe to say, that whatever the fundamental substratum is, it doesn’t consist of things.

Quite the epistemological definition, but there is no 'intelligible' in physics. — noAxioms

But even though fundamental particles and their properties can’t be envisaged, the equations that describe their interactions are accurate to one part in a trillionth (or something.) The fact that those equations can be taught and learned and put to use means there’s at least something intelligible about them, doesn’t it? There’s a difference between understanding them correctly, and not understanding them. So there must be something that the mind can get hold of through those equations, isn’t there?

But then on the other hand you’ve got Feynmann’s ‘nobody understands quantum physics’, so maybe it’s not intelligible. That has puzzled many more highly-trained minds than my own.

I took a very nonstandard view when crafting my definition of 'to be', which is more along the lines of 'being part of the cause of a given event/state'. — noAxioms

Your ‘non-standard view’ is very much like the definition of being that is offered in this post from one of the protagonists in a Platonic dialogue:

I am saying that anything actually is, once it has acquired some sort of power, either to affect anything else at all, or to be affected, even slightly, by something totally trivial, even if only once. Indeed, I propose to give a definition, defining things that are, as nothing else except power. — ibid. 247d

If the univocalist has a flat ontology with everything being captured by the exact same univocal concept of being, the analogical thinker has an ontology with a depth dimension, where there is a kind of “depth of field” qua being. — Leontiskos

The qualitative dimension, right? The axis against which a ‘higher good’ is meaningful?

This is why it can be startling to realize that when I look around, I'm seeing ideas. It's just Plato back again, right? — frank

I've been puzzling over, and reading up on, the basic dictum of Plato's metaphysics, which is 'to be, is to be intelligible'. From what I've gleaned, it means that to grasp an object's intelligibility is to see what it really is. Perhaps that's why @Count Timothy von Icarus's non-objects are intuitively felt to be 'creepy and disgusting'.

Even animals recognize discrete wholes; the sheep knows "wolf" and knows it from the time it is a lamb. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Hence the 'gestalts' in this post.

He looked ok on the news footage - a lot more middle-aged but then he’s 52. I don’t see any reason to expect he’s at risk of imminent death. And I don’t know how much mileage he’ll get out of his life story. We’ll see, I guess. (You know that obnoxious toad Clive Palmer is bringing Tucker Carlson to Australia, right? Although Carlson’s had his day, I would hope.)

Worth noting that the Walkley Foundation recognized Wikileaks and Assange in 2019:

16 April 2019, Sydney

In 2011, Wikileaks, with Julian Assange as its editor, received a Walkley Award in Australia for its outstanding contribution to journalism. Walkley judges said Wikileaks applied new technology to “penetrate the inner workings of government to reveal an avalanche of inconvenient truths in a global publishing coup”. One of those many inconvenient truths was the exposure by video of US helicopter attacks in Baghdad that killed 11 civilians including two Reuters journalists.

Many mainstream journalists worked with Assange’s material to publish their own reports including media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Australia, The Guardian in the United Kingdom, The New York Times in the US, El Pais in Spain, Le Monde in France and Der Spiegel in Germany. There has been no attempt by the US Government to prosecute any of those journalists involved. …

https://www.walkleys.com/board-statement-4-16/

It is highly chaotic. — Tarskian

I think you’re mis-using the word there. If everything were chaotic, nothing would exist, and if everything were perfectly ordered, nothing would change. Existence requires both. Beyond that, I can’t see the point, if there is one.

This OP title would have benefitted from a single-word response:


YES?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if in a couple of years he runs for the Australian Greens. He'd be a shoo-in.

Gift link to Washington Post wrap on his release.

Obviously a vexed question. My elder son was a journalism student ten years ago (although he hasn’t gone into the profession), But at the time he was critical of Assange for appealing to press freedom when he didn’t have to conform to any of the conventions (at least I think that’s what he said.) I’m not against him being released, I agree with the Australian government that Assange has paid the price. But I’m not an admirer.

And beyond whether he’s a journalist, he’s a symbol - a symbol of the struggle against the mendacious corrupt establishment and the lies and coverups of the military-industrial complex. For which reason, criticize him at your peril :yikes:

I could replicate wikileaks' functionality and advertise its existence in the hope of attracting uploads. Would that make me a journalist?

I suspect that nothing 100 million years ago envisioned a foot as a distinct object. That was the point of my comment. — noAxioms

And didn't my comment elaborate on that very idea?

It is great on a personal level to see Assange walk free after his ordeal - 14 years all up, as his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy was also tantamount to imprisonment (although I also second what @180 Proof says above, let’s not forget that it came out that one of the reasons Assange leaked all the DNC files was to demonstrate Wikileaks ability to ‘change history’. That was a totally invidious interference in my view with disastrous consequences.)

The question that nags at me, however, is ‘is Wikileaks a bona fide media organisation’, and can what it does be described as journalism? Consider the Chelsea Manning documents, and the related but separate Ed Snowden leaks. Both of these were conducted by employees of an organisation who had presumably signed a contract requiring them to observe the confidentiality and secrecy of the documents that they leaked. Apart from anything else, they broke that contract.

If these materials had been made available to a mainstream media organisation, such as the New York Times, would that organisation have published them? I presume not, as they would be aware of the penalties involved for divulging confidential and top-secret information.

The theory behind Wikileaks, as I understand it, is that it is supposed to be a publicly-available repository into which anonymous users are able to post whatever information they choose, with no editorial oversight or interference from the Wikileaks organisation. But no bona fide media organisation would provide such a facility, for fairly obvious reasons.

I feel that a genuine distinction is being lost amidst the smoke and heat. Of course the crimes which Wikileaks exposed deserve to be exposed, and governments ought not to use secrecy as a shield for wrong-doing, which they inveterately will. It’s a balance of ‘right to know’ vs ‘need for confidentiality’. But then how much ‘transparency’ could be expected from, for example, the CCP, or from Russia? Presumably if one of Assange’s counterparts had hacked and leaked information from the Russian FSB - well, he or she would face a fate much worse than legal threats, and we in the West would probably never even know their name.

Unlike what most people believe, math is not more orderly than the physical universe itself. — Tarskian

Nevertheless, and to all practical purposes, mathematics enables a very wide range of successful predictions, doesn’t it? The mathematical physics underlying the technology on which this conversation is being conducted provides a high degree of prediction and control, doesn’t it? Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.

There's no no reason to draw a line where 'foot' is no longer applicable and 'rest of leg' comes into play. That's a complex model of a body with distinct parts all hooked together, and the dinos probably didn't work with such needlessly complex models. Maybe I'm wrong about this. — noAxioms

One of the main points of Pinter's book is the way cognition works is by carving out gestalts. A gestalt is a meaningful whole - basically, an object, but an object as perceived by a cognising subject, which distinguishes the object from its sorroundings and sees it as a unit. (The 'cognising subject' is not necessarily a human - this is something found in the cognition of even very simple animals, including insects - he gives the example of a fairy-fly, so small as to be impercetible to the naked eye.) These gestalts are the currency of structured cognition - along with every other sentient organism, we see the world in gestalts, in conjunction with the accompanying sensory and somatic inputs that enable us to navigate the world. In this context the mind has an active role in 'constructing' gestalts. That's what I think you're driving at. For us, there is clearly a reason to draw the line between 'foot' and 'leg' as we instinctively understand anatomy (which probably goes a long way back before knowledge of medical anatomy, to the carving up of prey animals with stone tools not to mention knowledge of your own and others’ bodies). So - I think you're on the right track.

The arche fossil is very much targeted against combining embodiment and materiality with reciprocal co-constitution. You can even read it as a constructive dilemma - reciprocal co constitution implies idealism about what is interacted with, or what is interacted with has independent properties, choose. — fdrake

Reciprocal co-constitution is the idea that human cognition and the material world mutually shape and define each other - that our understanding of the material world is inseparable from the cognitive frameworks we use to interpret it. But if in positing that, cognition is treated as an object or factor, alongside it's object, then that implies adopting a perspective outside of it, from which both cognition and its object can be contemplated. But how can that be done? This is why citing dinosaurs as an example of phenomena that pre-existed h.sapiens, and necessarily existing independently of the mind, misrepresents what it's seeking to criticize. Anything that pre-exists h.sapiens could be cited, as it is an empirical fact that h. sapiens evolved a finite period of time in the past (and relatively recently in geological time-scales). This criticism is not too far removed from Johnson's argument against Berkeley, the 'argumentum ad lapidem'. The idealist (or perhaps I should say the cognitivist) view is that the entire constellation of ideas and facts that are drawn upon to cite the fossil evidence, exist in a cognitive framework, which we bring to the picture. Whatever is 'outside' that cannot, as a matter of definiton, be cited or even referred to.

Dan Zahavi, a phenomenologist with whom I've become acquainted through philosophyforum, put it like this:

Ultimately, what we call “reality” is so deeply suffused with mind- and language-dependent structures that it is altogether impossible to make a neat distinction between those parts of our beliefs that reflect the world “in itself” and those parts of our beliefs that simply express “our conceptual contribution.” The very idea that our cognition should be nothing but a re-presentation of something mind-independent consequently has to be abandoned.

(From Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy.)

Dinosaurs are temporally prior to human existence - they happened before. Thus however they behaved is prior to human faculties of reason - we developed later. Thus there existed a time in which dinosaurs were not judged by human intellects. Thus there was a time dinosaurs weren't conditioned by the human understanding. But they still had properties and stuff. Like they had teeth and bowel movements. They had feet. — fdrake

Do you think that discovery, had it been made at the time, would have discredited Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’? Granted, dinosaurs weren’t known to him, but he did help author a theory of nebular formation and presumably would not have given any credence to Biblical creation mythology. The general question being, does the fact of discoveries that pre-date the human species undermine transcendental idealism? Mellaissoux seems to argue that they do.

*

I was partly asking what all is part of a human, but I'm also asking what all is included in 'that ->' when pointing at a human, but I'm actually pointing to the bug. — noAxioms

One of the books I was singing the praises of a couple of years back was Mind and the Cosmic Order, Charles Pinter. He’s a maths emeritus (now deceased although he lived until a ripe old age. I wrote to him about his book in 2022 and got a nice reply.) It’s not a fringe or new-age book, it’s firmly grounded in cognitive science and empiricism. A glance at the chapter abstracts in the link will convey something of its gist.

The fact that cognitive scientists are talking about ‘how mind creates world’ is directly relevant this conversation. See also this video Is Reality Real? with a couple of cognitive scientists and a rather alarmed Richard Dawkins (“Of course it is! What are you saying”?!?)

A lot of scientific effort goes into eliminating the possibility that something about the bodies, or environment, or unwanted product of equipment, of experimenters is influencing outcomes. — mcdoodle

That’s not really the point of the lecture, though. It’s about the fact that science is conducted by humans, who are subjects of experience, who are attempting to arrive at the purported ‘view from nowhere’ which is believed to be something approaching complete objectivity. But that doesn’t mean science is ‘getting it wrong’, either. It’s a philosophical observation about interpreting the meaning of scientific observations. It doesn’t invalidate those observations. (It’s related to an Aeon essay I posted ages ago, The Blind Spot of Science, which likewise was interpreted as an attack on science, which it wasn’t.)

Yes fair point. That pertains to objective understanding of reported sensations, experience, and so on. But without the ability of subjects to report on those phenomena, there would be no data, so it's something like 'objective knowledge of subjective reports'. But the subject of experience as such is not objectively perceptible. What I had in mind was more like what Michel Bitbol says in this talk:

What is unseen in objective science? The first item that is unseen is my, your, own bodies – not the body as an object for anatomy, of course, but my body while it stands in front of any object whatsoever. If I am a scientist, I have a body. I go back and forth in the laboratory doing gestures, shaping chunks of matter, making instruments, in workshops essentially like this studio. But scientists dream of bypassing their bodies. When they build their theories, scientists act as if they were pure, point-like gazes from which they can enjoy the show put on by the world. This assumption extends to the scientists’ instruments as well, which are usually subtracted or forgotten in the ultimate outcome of their work. Science wants to understand ‘the world out there’; scientists no longer care about the instruments once they have used them to obtain whatever knowledge they’re after. — Michel Bitbol

That also extends to the axioms, theories, bodies of knowledge which comprise the basis on which objective analysis is conducted. That too is dependent on decisions and choices - on what to study, what to include or exclude and so on. And of course many of those elements might also be subject to modification as a consequence of experiment and experience. But the point remains that the subject who is conducting all of this work, the scientist who's theory it is, is generally not considered as a part of the object of analysis. (Isn't something like that exactly the conundrum that was thrown up by the observer problem in quantum physics?)

Thank you for your answers, I shall think them over.

I look at biology as a technology that we mostly fail to reverse engineer, if only, because we do not have access to its design documents. — Tarskian

Rather hubristic, isn’t it?

Actually I want to go back to something you said at the beginning - that religion is ‘built into our firmware. When pressed, you said:

Whenever a behavior is universal throughout history and throughout the world, it can only be biological. Otherwise, there would be or have been numerous societies in the past and/or throughout the world that did not have it. — Tarskian

But what if you believe that, because the only explanatory paradigm you accept is the biological? (Presumably because it’s scientific.) I agree that religious experiences or visions have occurred to h.sapiens throughout history, which is certainly supported by anthropological and archeological evidence. But why should that be ‘biological’ in origin? Might that be because the only kind of theoretical basis that science accepts for human faculties and abilities is that provided by evolutionary biology?

There obviously many features of h.sapiens that are biological in origin - practically everything about human physiology and anatomy can be understood through the lens of evolutionary biology. But why should a particular kind of experience be regarded as being attributable to biology? Sure, the experience of birth, disease and death are common to all species, therefore biological. But what about the religious experience, in particular, can be understood through that perspective?

Thank you, I shall follow your advice.

An entry on Mellassioux says:

Correlationism is thus not the thesis that we must relate to something in order to know it, but rather that what we know of anything is true only for us. In this regard, correlationism is a form of scepticism for it asserts that whether or not things-in-themselves are this way is something we can never know because we can only ever know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves. For example, for the correlationist there is no answer to the question of whether carbon atoms exist apart from us and whether they decay at such and such a rate because we only ever know appearances. This is Meillassoux’s support for scientific realism. For the correlationist we are never able to get out of the correlation between thought and being to determine whether or not carbon itself has these properties or whether it is thought that bestows these properties, which is sometimes the view of scientific functionalism. Meillassoux calls this unsurpassable relation the correlationist circle.

I think I can spot a weakness in that argument. My view that we know things as they appear, not to us as individuals, but to us as a species, a language-group, a culture, and so on. To say that we know things only as they appear ‘to us’ is indeed to fall into scepticism and relativism. But I don’t deny the domain of empirically-verifiable facts that will be verifiable by any other observer given the appropriate conditions and controls. In that sense, I’m a scientific realist. However, scientific realism always pertains to the objective domain, that which can be made an object of analysis, measurement and observation. And the subject who performs that measurement is not part of that outside that scope. I don’t know if Meillassoux addresses that idea (which is discussed in many papers by another Frenchman, Michel Bitbol. Incidentally, all of these names are people I’ve only learned about through participation in this forum, so that says something.)

I think I might be able to tackle After Finitude, but I’m put off by not knowing anything about Badou and being a bit scared by Cantor. But, you know, live and learn.

You'd get something out of reading it I think. — fdrake

Although the book is written with clarity and consistency, it presupposes a familiarity not only with dogmatic metaphysics, post-Kantian critical philosophy, phenomenology and post-Heideggerian philosophy, but also and above all with Alain Badiou's materialist ontology, and more specifically, with his ontological re-formulation of post-Cantorean set theory, as well as his conception of the event as what exceeds the grasp of an ontology of being qua being

I think the price of entry is a little steep :yikes: .

Serves me right for bringing it up.

Odd as it may seem, I kind of agree. The caveat is that about 99% of people will say, ‘oh, you mean God designed it’. The reason being that, in the case of human-created design, there’s an obvious agency involved, namely, humans. But DNA, so far as we know, came into being without an agent - although, of course, intelligent design advocates will say that the agent is a higher intelligence. To lay my cards on the table, I don’t argue for intelligent design, but I’m at least open to some of those arguments.

It’s true that computers provide a metaphor for mental functions. In fact, that was the presiding metaphor for a school of thought in cog sci called functionalism. Functionalism is the view that mental states are defined by their functional roles—how they interact with other mental states, sensory inputs, and behavioral outputs—rather than by their internal physical or biological makeup. This perspective is analogous to how a computer operates, where what matters is the function of the software rather than the specific hardware it runs on. (Myself, I run on Idealist OS :-) )

In this case however we’re considering more than mental functions. That life seems designed is news to nobody, really. it was the basis of the watchmaker argument of Bishop Paley, and the subject of deconstruction in any number of books by Richard Dawkins.

So let’s get clear on what you mean by ‘designed’. Where do you think your idea fits into that overall set of ideas, or does it not?

But they’re not designed - not unless you’re defending an intelligent designer. Are you?

Biology is a natural technology — Tarskian

Not so. Technology, derived from the Greek ‘techne,’ means something made by art, craftsmanship, or human intervention. Biology, on the other hand, pertains to natural processes and organisms that arise without human fabrication (or any fabrication so far as we can tell.) While technology can mimic or be inspired by biological systems (biomimicry), it remains fundamentally different because it is a product of intentional design and manipulation by humans. In contrast, biological systems evolve through natural selection and other processes intrinsic to life itself.

To equate biology with technology is to overlook the essential distinction between naturally occurring phenomena and human-engineered artifacts. Biology operates through mechanisms and principles that are not designed or created by humans, whereas technology is inherently a product of human creativity and engineering. It’s important to have conceptual clarity in respect of such fundamental terms.

Well, supposing that the world can be adequately described with mathematics, there would be a big difference between the mathematical entities consistent with "triangle" and those consistent with "any being having a first person subjective experience of a triangle or triangularity," right? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think you’re conflating, or confusing, several separate points. My question about the triangle was simply ‘is it a physical object?’ - to which I say the answer is ‘plainly not’. ‘Physical things’ include - well, pretty well anything you can lay your hands, or eyes on. But geometric forms, numbers, rules, principles, and the like, are not physically existent in the same sense that physical objects are. They are what were called in classical philosophy ‘intelligible objects’. It is germane to the discussion ‘what is an object’, insofar as it requires consideration of whether such entities are or are not objects.

Whether the world can be adequately described with mathematics is a different question.

But neither of those points are directly entailed by my post about the sense in which knowledge implies or requires an observing intelligence. They can be connected to that, but at this point I haven’t tried to connect them.