I will say this, Banno, you're expert at dragging the carkeys back under the streetlight. :wink:

Right. So, would the rules of the game be somewhat analogous to a form in the Platonic sense?

"Imagine what we'll know about brains in 100 years!" the physicalist urges us. "Why, we'll be able to 'read off' any thought you have by analyzing the neuronal activity." — J

There are very impressive displays of this kind of ability in current technology. Subjects imagine a yacht, and, hey presto, the system displays a yacht uncannily like what the subject has imagined (well, according to the subject.) But then, those systems are 'trained' for hundreds of hours on particular subjects, and 'learn' to associate patterns with images. In other words, a lot of technology and scientific expertise is interpolated between the subject and the display. So I question the sense that this can all be accounted for in physical terms, as the scientific expertise that is used to engineer these systems are also the subject of the experiment. The 'images' aren't simply 'there' in the brain, waiting to be seen, like a astronomical object: they're constructed using the very faculties that the science is seeking to explain. So there's a problem of recursivity.

A possible reply to this is that "ineffable" may be one of Chalmers' "temporary" obstacles, as opposed to a permanent one like biological composition — J

Another of Karl Popper's promissory notes, I'm afraid. But it's informative, and slightly scary, the ease with which it is assumed that consciousness (and therefore, life, and being) can be or might be conjured up out of man-made devices. I strongly suspect there's a much deeper issue here than is apparent. (Incidentally, I've mentioned a video presentation a few times recently, actually presented in a conference organised by Sana.ai, How the Universe Thinks without a Brain, Claire L. Evans. Quite a deep consideration of some of these issues.)

If you have no players or field, you have no existent football game. A football game is a game that comprises players and a field. You cannot have a football game apart from these. — Philosophim

Expert chess players are able to play with no physical board. Grand masters, for instance, will play against 10 opponents simultaneously, sometimes while blindfolded, and still consistently win. What about that situation is 'physical'?


Magnus Carlsen plays against 10 people while blindfolded.

This matters because I would put the "biology challenge" a little differently myself. I would suggest that the biggest unanswered question here is whether only living things can be conscious. — J

Gets my vote. I think the insuperable obstacle to such an idea is that the nature of life and of mind are inneffable, and, as such, it can't be defined. So you can't even know what it is that you're trying to synthesise. My friendly LLM suggested the following argument:

The Ineffability Argument Against LLM Consciousness

Premise 1: A defining feature of consciousness is the presence of qualitative experience — so-called qualia — which are irreducibly first-personal and, at least in part, ineffable.

Premise 2: What is ineffable cannot be exhaustively represented in language, computation, or any system of explicit specification.

Premise 3: LLMs (and any system based purely on computation or symbol manipulation) operate entirely by processing and generating explicitly specifiable structures — namely, language tokens and probabilistic relationships between them.

Conclusion: Therefore, LLMs cannot instantiate or reproduce consciousness, because they lack access to the ineffable dimension that characterizes subjective experience. — ChatGPT4o

In the case of living beings, where individual beings, are each observed to have one's own internal purpose (obvious in human intent), the causation here can only be accounted for as a bottom-up form of causation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Top-down causation doesn't mean external coercion or denial of agency—quite the opposite. It refers to the way the organization or unity of a system constrains and enables the behaviour of its parts from within (hence organism, organic, and organisation.) In O’Callaghan’s essay, it’s the Humpty Dumpty model: the organism is not built out of self-standing parts that can function on their own and just happen to join up; rather, the parts are what they are because of their roles in the whole. You can’t reassemble life from pieces. The individual’s capacity for intentional action—say, to enlist in an army—is already shaped by the larger context: language, culture, history, embodiment. There has to be an army to join, otherwise it's just a mob. These are not external impositions, but the structured conditions that make intentionality possible in the first place.

Bottom-up causation, by contrast, is the Frankenstein model: assemble a bunch of pieces, energise them with a force, and voila! a system emerges from their interactions. But as O’Callaghan points out, that’s not how living systems work—not even armies. The army doesn’t simply “emerge” from a collection of atomistic agents exercising unconditioned will. Rather, each agent is already a self-organizing being whose actions are meaningful within the constraints of larger wholes—biological, social, symbolic—which are not imposed externally, but are intrinsic to what agency even is. But the external structure of the army - ranks, divisions, formations - are constraints that determine how individual members are to behave.

So invoking top-down causation isn’t a denial of free will—it’s an attempt to explain how form, meaning, and function arise in organisms, including human beings. You don’t have to be a physicalist to see that.

One of the strengths of Aquinas’ philosophy, and a point O’Callaghan emphasizes, is that God doesn't need to control or micromanage natural beings in order for their actions to be meaningful or purposeful. Instead, God creates beings with their own natures—internal principles of motion, action, and teleology. This means that organisms act from within themselves; they are genuine agents, not mere instruments or puppets. Their purposes are real and intelligible because they arise from their God-given form or nature, not from external control.

In this view, natural causes are sufficient within their own order, which is precisely what makes natural science possible (and also why Aquinas saw no inherent conflict between religion and science). One can study organisms, physical systems, or even human agents without needing to invoke divine intervention at every step (which is why, incidentally, Thomist philosophers don't generally endorse 'Intelligent Design' ideas.) This the basis for Aquinas’ fifth way, where he says that even non-intelligent beings act toward ends—not because God is directing them, but because their nature is structured in such a way that they are inclined toward those ends. The teleology is internal, not imposed from the outside.

You might want to give it a read and judge for yourself. — NOS4A2

I have no reason to doubt the media reports on it. As for you, you want to believe it, as one who has spent the last 8 years defending and supporting Trump.

There is if there are reasons to believe that I am conscious and that I am a collection of material components. — Michael

Perhaps you’re something other than a collection of material components. You possess something that instruments don’t, namely, organic unity.

The idea that there is such a thing as Mental to Mental Causation is an overliberal use of the term 'Causation'. — I like sushi

What is an example of such an idea? Who holds that there is such a thing?

As for mental causation, what if I were to write something that caused you to become agitated? Would that not constitute an example of mental causation that has physical consequences such as increasing your pulse?

I'm sorry this has taken so long. I hope this is not a disappointment to you. — Ludwig V

Not at all! I very much appreciate the careful and constructive comments on The Mind-Created World. They show genuine engagement, and I welcome the thoughtful critiques. However, I've posted my response in that thread.

From here.

Again, thanks for your comments on the OP. Here I would like to clarify the key points where my claim goes further than a cautiously realist reading would allow.

The main divergence lies in what we take for granted about the independence of the world “as it is”—that is, the world assumed to exist apart from all modes of disclosure, experience, or intelligibility. While nobody would disagree that the mind plays a role in cognition—supplying the conceptual framework, perceptual integration, and interpretive acts by which we know—they would nevertheless retain an innate conviction that there exists, in the background, a world that is fully real and determinate independently of mind. This is what I see as the import of metaphysical realism and that is what I am seeking to challenge.

My position is closer to what might be called a phenomenological form of idealism: it asserts that there is no reality outside of some perspective, not in a merely epistemological sense (i.e., that we only know from a point of view), but in a deeper sense—namely, that the very structure of the world, as intelligible and coherent, is constituted in and through the relation to mind. Not an individual mind, of course, but the noetic act—the perceiving, structuring, and meaning-bestowing – that makes any world appear in the first place. (Relevant to note that the etymology of 'world' is from the old Dutch 'werold' meaning 'time of man'.)

To make this clearer, consider the example you cite of Neptune’s pre-discovery existence. The realist insists: “It existed all along—we simply didn’t know it.” But the claim I'm advancing would point out that what “it” was prior to its discovery is not just unknown, but indeterminate. The very notion of “an object that exists but is wholly outside any possible disclosure” is, I suggest, an imaginative construction. It is an extrapolation or projection. The fact that it might be accurate doesn't undercut that.

I'm not arguing for solipsism or Berkeley's idealism. I’m not saying “nothing exists unless I think it.” Rather, I’m arguing that the world as a coherent totality is incomprehensible outside the structures of consciousness. It’s not that the mind projects onto a blank slate, nor that it merely filters a pre-existing reality, but rather that reality as it shows up at all is a co-arising: dependent on the mutual implication of mind and world. (This is the aspect that is specifically phenomenological.)

This is why, when I write that “what we know of its existence is bound by and to the mind,” I do not mean this as a mere limitation of our faculties, but as a disclosure of something fundamental: that intelligibility is not something we add to a blank canvas but something that arises with, and through, the encounter of mind-and-world.

The critique that “the world exists anyway” misses this crucial nuance. Of course, something is there. But to designate it as “the world,” or even as “something,” already presupposes the categories of thought—form, object, existence, and so on. The realist mistake, in my view, is to treat these categories as transparent labels for things that are "there anyway", failing to recognise the way the mind categorises and situates them, without which they would be unintelligible.

Regarding “form”: Aristotle posits forms as intrinsic to particulars, but in a way that already implies a kind of noetic participation—form is what renders a thing intelligible, it is how we know what it *is*. I agree with that, but add a post-Kantian refinement: the intelligible world is not merely a cross-section or partial view of some greater reality—it is the only world we encounter. To speak of things as intelligible independently of any mind is, I believe, to risk incoherence. Intelligibility is not something that can be separated off from consciousness and remain intact. As our empirical knowledge of the universe expands, it becomes incorporated into the intelligible body of knowledge that consitutes science.

So in sum: my position is not that mind is just one actor among others in an otherwise mind-independent world. It is that there is no world at all without mind—not as a subjective opinion, but as the condition for appearance, for disclosure, and for anything we might meaningfully call real.

And finally, the reason this matters is so we do not lose sight of the subject—the observer—for whom all of this is meaningful in the first place. The scientific, objective view is essentially from the outside: in that picture, we appear as one species among countless others, clinging to a pale blue dot, infinitesimal against the vast panorama that scientific cosmology has revealed. But it is to us that this panorama is real and meaningful. So far as we know, we are the only beings capable of grasping the astounding vistas disclosed by science. Let’s not forget our role in that.

If so, then it is not an "objective (mind-independent) process"; otherwise, "thrown into question" is only subjective (i.e. a mere interpretation). Scientific realism (à la Deutsch)** – contra "shut up and calculate" instrumentalism / positivism – makes more sense (and is more parsimonious) to me. — 180 Proof

For Deutsch, the wavefunction never collapses; instead, all possible outcomes of a quantum event occur in a vast, branching multiverse. This preserves the universality of quantum laws and avoids the ambiguities associated with observation or measurement. But at what cost? Many physicists and philosophers question it, not least because it postulates an infinite proliferation of unobservable worlds. The deeper irony is that while Deutsch defends objectivity, the very proliferation of interpretations — none of which can be empirically distinguished — suggests, as I already said, that the concept of objectivity itself is under philosophical pressure, not from mysticism or “woo,” but from within the context of scientific theory. (Not to mention the intrinsic ridiculousness of the many-worlds theory being 'parsimonious' :lol: )

I believe that when we consider the way that internal teleology is 'given' to beings, it is necessary to conclude that this is a bottom-up process of creation rather than top-down. — Metaphysician Undercover

But you've cherry-picked that quote. O'Callaghan then distinguishes between 'creating' and 'making'. He says making 'presupposes something already existing upon which the maker acts'. That is the model for human artifacts. By contrast, 'God in creating all that is in every aspect in which it is, including the causal powers and efficacy of agents that respond actively or passively to other created agents, presupposes nothing other than God’s own being, power, knowledge, and goodness.' And that is nothing if not top-down!

Because, so far as we know, consciousness is an attribute of sentient beings. And there’s no reason to believe that any collection of material components has ever been conscious. Computer systems are not beings, as such, even if they are able to simulate human thought.

I think the belief that they can be, signifies a deep misunderstanding of the nature of being (sorry for being blunt).

He thinks it will become less plausible at that point to deny they're conscious. — RogueAI

I question whether computer systems possess any element of consciousness whatever. Organic life, for instance, is organic on every level, right down to the cellular; mitosis, respiration, digestion, and so on, are organic functions. Whereas there’s nothing organic about microprocessors, they are wholly and solely information processors. I have no doubt that they can generate philosophically rich text, as I have daily philosophical dialogues with them - but they’re still simulations of thought, something which they themselves will reinforce if prompted. As Bernardo Kastrup says, you can create an extremely detailed simulation of kidney function on a computer, but you wouldn’t expect it to urinate.

Good essay and very carefully composed. Overall, I find it congenial, although I’m not as disposed to consider the theological elements. But this concluding thought is not at all remote from the thrust of the OP:

What I have argued here does not prove that evolutionary history is teleological and has a purpose, much less a divinely intended purpose. But what it does prove is that the random variation of traits that result in survival advantages does not rule out evolution having a teleological end or purpose. Evolutionary science is and should be neutral with respect to the question of whether the process of evolution has a teleology. If an evolutionary biologist claims that evolution has no purpose because of the role of random variation within it, that is not a scientific statement of evolutionary biology.

(Although I would add, I'm more focussed on these relatively new areas of embodied cognition/enactivism and less so on theological or scholastic arguments, although, that said, I don't feel any conflict between the OP and O'Callaghan's essay.)

I’ll pass on your regards.

So what god wills, god thinks, and what god thinks, god wills. Hence he cannot think what he does not will, nor will what he does not think. — Banno

I think the issue here, is that what classical texts mean by 'thinks' is not what we normally intend by it. I read in The Embodied Mind, that prior to Descartes, 'ideas' were not understood as the property of individual minds:

Prior to Descartes, the term "idea" was used only for the contents of the mind of God; Descartes was one of the first to take this term and apply it to the workings of the human mind.. This linguistic and conceptual shift if just one aspect of what Richard Rorty describes as the "invention of the mind as the mirror of nature".

So when a medieval thinker says “God thinks,” this doesn’t imply that God has something like private mental episodes or shifting representations. Instead, it refers to the divine knowing of eternal truths—or what might classically be called the Forms, which the rational intellect can have some insight into.

In that context, “what God thinks, God wills” isn’t a statement about psychology or decision-making, but a metaphysical expression of divine simplicity: God’s knowing and willing are not separate faculties or processes but identical in the unity of divine being.

Shame you can't lower yourselves to our level, but I suppose we'll have to get by, somehow.

In this case, “is” doesn’t mean numerical identity (as in "Clark Kent is Superman") but rather participation in a common essence.

The Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God — but they’re not each other. So “is” here is not transitive, and trying to make it so leads to either contradiction or heresy, depending on your preference.

To hark back to an infamous episode of American presidential politics, 'it depends on what the meaning of "is" is'. As I understand it, predication in Aquinas is allegorical, rather than literal. This is connected to the 'analogical form of knowing' which was later undermined by Duns Scotus (and according to Radical Orthodoxy, a major part of the decline of the West.)

I've read that it looks like a contradiction if you assume “is” means numerical identity. In Trinitarian theology, “is God” means shares the same divine essence, not is numerically identical.

How so? Could you unpack that for me?

A visiting theologian once presented this diagrammatic representation of the Trinity which I, at least, found useful in understanding the idea:

we know that we can map the conceptual content of the brain to the synchronous activity of different neural centers. This is statistically so. — Ulthien

You’re not seeing the point. No depiction of pain, no matter how extraordinarily detailed, is pain. Pain is an experience, and experiences are undergone by subjects. Large Language Models are not subjects of experience. This is the ‘explanatory gap’ also known as the hard problem of consciousness.

Why, thanks! Will read carefully.

I think the realist position (and not just the direct realist position) is that there would still be the world (quantum definition of the word), relative to something measuring it (a rock say), but yea, all that synthesis that the human mind does is absent, so it would be far more 'the world in itself' and not as we think of it. Time for instance would not be something that flows. Rocks have no need to create that fabrication. — noAxioms

:100: The universe that most believe would be there in the absence of any observer would not have any form, as form is discovered by the mind (per Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order). The world 'in itself' is formless and therefore meaningless. We mistake the form discovered by the mind as something that is there anyway, not seeing that the mind is the source of it. Kant 101, as I understand him.

The general consensus in this thread is that Sabine got it wrong.

addendum:

AI systems like ChatGPT are not beings in the philosophical sense of entities with a mode of existence, let alone lived experience. They have no interiority, no standpoint, no world—they are tools that process inputs and produce outputs based on statistical associations. They're not subjects of experience.

To borrow from Heidegger: ChatGPT is not a Dasein—a being that is concerned with its own being. It has no care, no embodiment, no finitude, no concerned involvement with the world. Without these, there is no horizon in which pain—or joy, or meaning—could arise. — ChatGPT

But then, you're willing to trust Tulsi Gabbard's rewriting of history, over the unambiguous findings of the bi-partisan committee that investigated the matter at the time, and came to the opposite conclusion.

Key Findings of the Bi-partisan Senate Intelligence Committee:

• Russian Interference Was Extensive – The committee confirmed that Russia engaged in a sweeping influence campaign, including hacking Democratic emails (via GRU operatives) and spreading disinformation through social media (via the Internet Research Agency).
• Preference for Trump – The Russian government viewed Trump as a candidate who would align more closely with their interests and worked to boost his candidacy while undermining Clinton.
• Contacts Between Trump Campaign and Russia – While the committee did not establish a formal conspiracy, it documented numerous contacts between Trump associates and Russian officials, some of which raised counterintelligence concerns.
• Bipartisan Consensus – Unlike other politically divisive reports, this investigation was notably bipartisan, with Republicans and Democrats largely agreeing on its conclusions.

Contrast with the Mueller Report:
The Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation (2019) also found that Russia interfered to benefit Trump but did not establish enough evidence to charge Trump campaign officials with a criminal conspiracy. However, the Senate report went further in detailing the extent of Russia's preference for Trump.


As for Gabbard, CNN reports:

The director of national intelligence told Americans this week that what everyone has known about the 2016 election is backwards.

The US intelligence community; bipartisan Senate review; the Mueller report; the Durham report — years of investigations concluded or did not dispute the idea that Russia meddled in the election and that it preferred Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.

In Gabbard’s telling, the idea that Russia meddled and that it favored Trump is a narrative spun out of a conspiracy hatched by then-President Barack Obama to undermine Trump from the get-go. Trump clearly approves of Gabbard’s version, although there’s no evidence to support her claims.

The upshot is that right now the Trump Presidency is consumed by two competing conspiracy theories: one, that Russian interference in the 2016 was a hoax, the other being the Epstein affair. It's a complete schemozzle and a shitshow.

the same way AI interprets any kind of pictures, it can EASILY map out the MR scans of the active brain areas to conclude which qualia is (statistically) present. — Ulthien

What do you think, ChatGPT?

A clear false, with an important caveat.

Let’s unpack both statements.

Banno’s Claim:
“ChatGPT cannot participate in the ‘form of life’ that would enable it to be in pain.”

True — and philosophically well-informed.

Banno is drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of "forms of life", meaning the shared, embodied practices and ways of being through which concepts like "pain" have meaning. For Wittgenstein, understanding a concept like pain isn’t merely about identifying a signal or a word—it’s about living within a context of behavior, reaction, and shared experience. Pain isn’t just a data point—it’s an experience embedded in a web of reactions, practices, and norms.

ChatGPT doesn’t inhabit any such form of life. It doesn’t have a body, or feelings, or concerns. It doesn't suffer. So it cannot understand pain in the way humans do—not even potentially. It can simulate descriptions of pain or analyze patterns, but that’s not the same thing as feeling or genuinely understanding it.

ULTHIEN’s Claim:
“AI can easily map out the MR scans of the active brain areas to conclude which qualia is present.”

This is false, both scientifically and philosophically.

Scientifically:
Even the best neuroscientists cannot determine the specific qualia (the what-it’s-like aspect of experience) from a brain scan. We can correlate certain brain patterns with reported experiences of pain, vision, or emotion—but this is always interpretive, not direct access to qualia.

Machine learning systems can be trained to classify neural patterns—e.g., “this pattern likely corresponds to pain”—but they do not know what pain feels like, nor can they bridge the explanatory gap between neural activity and subjective experience.

Philosophically:
Mapping neural patterns doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be in pain. This is the Hard Problem of Consciousness (Chalmers): explaining how and why certain physical processes give rise to subjective experience at all.

Even if a model gets very good at predicting that someone is in pain, that’s not the same as knowing what pain is. It’s just recognizing statistical regularities—shadows of something it doesn’t and can’t touch.

Conclusion:
So yes, Banno is right. Understanding pain isn’t about mapping brain data; it’s about being a kind of being for whom pain is possible. And ChatGPT, or any other current AI, is not that kind of being. — ChatGPT

@Banno

and hope that the government never turns them on you. — Leontiskos

The one liberal democracy that is under real threat from its own government is the US, and no amount of gun ownership is going to change that.

What do you take "purify the mind" to mean? — Tom Storm

Purification in Theravada Buddhism is to observe the precepts and learn to bring the mind to bear on wholesome states of mind. In addition there are various meditative disciplines such as kasina which is concentration on various shapes and designs and mindfulness training. These are aimed at ‘one-pointedness’ of mind culminating in states of jhana (meditative trance) of which there are eight gradations. But that is in turn predicated on the vinaya or the lay version of the precepts and the Buddhist way of life. It’s very different from and probably at odds with typical modern lifestyles in many ways (mine included.)

(I thought the portrayal of Thai Buddhism in the recent season of White Lotus was quite realistic in many ways. The idealistic young Piper Ratliff who had had her heart set on staying at the Wat for a year changed her mind after staying a week, largely because there was no air-conditioning and the diet was meager.)

I generally supported the Australian Governments Covid precautions. Despite similar populations, Florida experienced a significantly higher number of COVID-19 deaths than Australia during the main period of the pandemic. For instance, an early comparison in October 2020 showed Florida with 14,142 deaths compared to Australia's 882. While numbers increased for both jurisdictions over time, the disparity remained pronounced, while American libertarians spread all kinds of nonsense about facemasks being an infringement of civil liberties and vaccinations being a UN plot. As with gun rights, the consequence is a lot more deaths.

Enactivism can be consistent with more traditional Aristotleianism, Thomism (even of the existential variety), or more "Neoplatonic," thought, although it often isn't. — Count Timothy von Icarus

My comments on about were directed at dfpolis, who seemed dismissive of the idea of 'intentionality' in any context other than that of a rational subject. I was trying to explain that enactivism indicates to a larger sense of intentionality. That was very much the point of this post. But two of the books I'm reading on systems science and biology (Deacon and Juarrero) both draw on Aristotelian biological and (to some extent) metaphysical concepts. Aristotle after all is part of the 'grammar of Western culture'.

I will acknowledge that one source of my interest was my reading of Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. This is (again) the relevant passage from his précis of that book:

The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental – consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose. The physical sciences as they have developed since then describe, with the aid of mathematics, the elements of which the material universe is composed, and the laws governing their behavior in space and time.

We ourselves, as physical organisms, are part of that universe, composed of the same basic elements as everything else, and recent advances in molecular biology have greatly increased our understanding of the physical and chemical basis of life. Since our mental lives evidently depend on our existence as physical organisms, especially on the functioning of our central nervous systems, it seems natural to think that the physical sciences can in principle provide the basis for an explanation of the mental aspects of reality as well — that physics can aspire finally to be a theory of everything.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. The physical sciences can describe organisms like ourselves as parts of the objective spatio-temporal order – our structure and behavior in space and time – but they cannot describe the subjective experiences of such organisms or how the world appears to their different particular points of view. There can be a purely physical description of the neurophysiological processes that give rise to an experience, and also of the physical behavior that is typically associated with it, but such a description, however complete, will leave out the subjective essence of the experience – how it is from the point of view of its subject — without which it would not be a conscious experience at all.

So the physical sciences, in spite of their extraordinary success in their own domain, necessarily leave an important aspect of nature unexplained. Further, since the mental arises through the development of animal organisms, the nature of those organisms cannot be fully understood through the physical sciences alone.

That “important aspect of nature left unexplained” refers to the very issue at the heart of the so-called hard problem of consciousness: the first-person, felt nature of experience — the immediacy of embodied existence. This, I think, is where phenomenology enters: it seeks to restore the primacy of first-person experience that the objective sciences methodologically bracket out.

What is bracketed, however, is not incidental. It is, quite simply, Being. (And tellingly, we ourselves are designated 'beings'.) Over the years, I’ve engaged in many vexed discussions on this forum over whether there is an ontological distinction between organisms and things. I continue to maintain that there is — and that this distinction begins to manifest as soon as life appears.

My view might resemble panpsychism in some respects, but it maintains a principled distinction between the organic and the inorganic. Call me romantic, but I’m drawn to the idea that the appearance of life just is the appearance of mind — not as an élan vital, a separable essence, but as that without which the constituents of life remain mineral. Life is not caused by mind as something external to it, but mind manifests itself as living organisms. And so the physical, as we understand it, is insufficient on its own: it is an abstraction, and something deeper — subjective presence, embodied directedness — has always been part of the picture, even if the objective sciences generally set it aside.

Rogan has nothing to fear from the head of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. And nobody here gets sued for criticizing the Prime Minister provided the criticism is fact-based.

Yet the chart pairs 11 (ot of 200 countries) against 1 — Outlander

It's true that (from memory) Guatemala and some of the Central American republics have a higher murder rate than the US. Hardly something to skite about. The point was comparisons of liberal democracies in the developed world where the US 'death by firearm' rate is clearly anomalous.

:up:

But, the question to answer to determine if it is misleading or not is quite simple: How's freedom of the press, though? — Outlander

In all those countries in that chart, I would think freedom of the press can generally be assumed, can't it? Got any counter-examples?

Plainly, they want their guns and will not be swayed. — Banno

It's what I said - there is a strong belief that guns=freedom.

That mass shootings continue to occur is a good reason, IMO, to abolish the 2nd amendment. — Moliere

The Second Amendment was framed in the context of the War of Independence in terms of 'well-armed militias'. Switzerland has a similar provision, but are much stricter on the regulation of firearms, which have to be kept in stipulated conditions i.e. locked cabinets etc. There are regular stories out of the US of infants shooting other children or themselves or adults with guns left lying around the home.

There was a Supreme Court ruling that definitively established the "well-regulated militia" term in the Second Amendment applied much more broadly than to actual regulated militias, and instead protected an individual right to bear arms for self-defense, namely, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). In a 5-4 decision, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess firearms for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense in the home, unconnected with service in a militia. The majority opinion, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, analyzed the two clauses of the Second Amendment ("A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.") and concluded that the "prefatory clause" (regarding the militia) announces a purpose but does not limit the "operative clause" (the right of the people to keep and bear arms).

But the obvious principle still applies: the main reason people want guns, is the high likelihood that the guy next to them has one. If you knew that hardly anyone had a gun, then you wouldn't feel the need, or so you'd think. Furthermore many sources from psychological and media studies report that by the end of elementary school (around age 10-12), the average American child has witnessed thousands of violent acts, including murders, on television. It's modelled for them. Now there are also shoot-em-up video games, which allow users to simulate the process of mass shooting. All up, the recipe for the violent gun culture we see in today's America.

The only gun control that makes sense is to destroy every gun on the earth and never make them again. — Fire Ologist

A project supervisor holds an Armalite rifle during the 1996 Australian gun buyback.

I hope so. Nothing like a good opponent!

Not being killed is fundamental to liberty.

I write from Australia. As is well-known, Australia has much greater controls on gun ownership, in part due to the reaction to an horrific mass shooting in Tasmania in 1996 (often held up as an example in debates on the issue.) Not to say there is no gun crime, but it is much less frequent than in the US. I've never felt the need to arm myself, although there are parts of the world where I surely would, were I to live there.

Something I notice in the posts of the advocates for gun ownership is an appeal to fear, and a sense of being menaced or threatened, which justifies it. It seems a very sad state of affairs, but I'll leave the discussion to those who wish to pursue it.

Of course our knowledge is "grounded in our mind's eye", but that doesn't mean that the things we know about (most of them) would vanish if our mind's eye or even the eye in our heads did not exist. Knowledge is not existence. — Ludwig V

Knowledge, you will agree, is mind-dependent. Outside of knowledge of the object, the object neither exists nor doesn't exist. This is elaborated in The Mind Created World, if you're interested in further discussing it.

Guns are literally why Americans have civil liberty in the first place. — MrLiminal

Most other democratic countries managed it without.

The first experiments however were made in the 80s and Bell was still alive. — boundless

I stand corrected.

Nice article BTW. — boundless

Thank you :pray:

My comments on mind (in)dependence were mainly to illustrate that what it means is not as obvious as many would think.