Considerably more smoke than light in most of the above. — Wayfarer

Hey, you're doing the best that you can.

phenomenology — wonderer1

I didn't mean the school of thought, but the thing itself, the detailed account of a type of experience.

I have enjoyed this meeting of the minds immensely. — wonderer1

Likewise.

That sounds a lot like "But where's the university?" It is a spectacularly awful argument.

The much-vaunted (around here) failure of neuroscience neglects two facts: (1) neuroscience is still in its infancy, maybe adolescence; (2) it has been having truly astonishing and accelerating success.

You evidently think we've been wandering down a blind alley since Phineas Gage's accident. I find that view incomprehensible, but you do you.

"Better a question that can't be answered than an answer that can't be questioned."

I think he said that. (Reading Surely You're Joking at I guess 16 or so was a formative experience for me.)

But I insist the phenomenology of this is hard.

I have sometimes said that many people on this forum don't seem to believe in disagreement: "if you seem to disagree with me, it can only be because you didn't understand what I said, so I'll say it again." We do recognize that even correct arguments don't always land with an audience, do not compel them with the force of reason, so we try different wordings, different analogies and examples, hoping that one of them will finally do the trick. --- My point here is only that we don't know what will work, why it will work, and what worked in our case. We hope to explain this lack of transparency by distinguishing form from content, as if it were the same as to say I've never been convinced by an argument presented in Polish, since I don't speak Polish. If you grasp the meaning at all, logic is supposed to carry the day, but experience tells us this is not so, though we believe it of ourselves. (This a little like @NOS4A2's suggestion that it is always other people we believe need to be kept in line by force, not us!)

Going with intuition is relying on the deep learning which has occurred in neural nets between our ears. — wonderer1

Sure, but

I wouldn't say that the foundations aren't rational, but that the foundations are intuitive, and intuition is a foundational aspect of human rationality. It's just that many philosophically minded people have tended to think simplistically of rationality as somewhat synonymous with logic. — wonderer1

even though there's a story we can tell about sound Bayesian inference being adaptive, even if unconscious, cognitive biases tell another story, that, as Kahneman says, and I never tire of quoting him, system 1 is a machine for jumping to conclusions.

So I still think Hume's horror is hard to shrug off. Our thinking is not what we thought it was. We learn some things about it that are reassuring and some that aren't, but the real problem is there is no transparency here; we're in the land of "for all we know..."

While I think this is fundamentally the right sort of answer, it does require a wholesale rethinking of the idea of rationality, and that might be a bitter pill to swallow.

What happens when we are persuaded by an argument? When we are convinced to change our minds? Those idioms leave us a bit passive, as if an argument pushes and pulls our beliefs like so much gravity. It's more decorous to say that we find an argument persuasive or the evidence convincing; sounds like we've rendered a judgment, in keeping with our high station.

Neither of those is particularly attractive. I think it's easy to accept pragmatism in the abstract -- to think this must be the way we think -- but difficult to believe it in particular cases, where it seems to us we have closely examined the logic and the evidence and taken a position. When doing philosophy, in particular, this is what we tell ourselves, and each other.

We may claim to be comfortable distinguishing the logic of discovery and the logic of confirmation or justification, but I think mostly we aren't. Chess provides a clear example, as usual: there's a saying among masters that the move you want to play is the right move, even if it seems impossible. This is intuition, and the idea is that careful analysis will justify your inclination, so some part of your mind must have zipped through that analysis without bothering to keep you informed, which would only slow things down. That fits nicely with the two-systems model, because the fast system here is just the unconscious and efficient habits that used to be carried out laboriously and consciously. --- But that still suggests that the conscious analysis you do is properly modeled as reasoning of the most traditional sort. There's no difference in kind here, only a difference in implementation. (This algorithm is known to work, so we can run it on the fast but unconscious machine.)

What is difficult to accept is that reason is really and truly rationalization, that justification is always and only post-hoc, that we are simply incapable of relying on logic and evidence alone to form our beliefs even if we do so to justify them. We want to believe that the process by which we reach a conclusion is quite similar to the process we would use to justify reaching it, and we want to believe that includes a free act of judgment.

I don't believe we ever choose what to believe, but only find that we do or we don't. And that applies here as well. It's what I find I believe, and others find they believe differently. What's worse, I find I cannot help but believe I have considered evidence and argument to reach this conclusion, but even if that is so, at no point did I weigh it all up and freely judge that it is so. All I can say is that argument and evidence seem to assail me like so much sensory input and the result is that I believe what I believe. I have to hope that what reason I have has done a good job filtering and weighing its inputs to reach a sound conclusion. If I try to justify my belief, I will surely succeed. It's one of my best things, as it is for everyone; rationalizing is our super power. Now I have to hope, as well, that my post-hoc justifications are everything they seem to be.

So, yes, I broadly agree with what you posted, @Janus, but I reserve a bit of Humean horror that the foundations of my rationality are not themselves rational.

It is, of course, true that you're not compelled to believe 'c' by anything other than reason. — Wayfarer

The version I presented really targets determinism rather than naturalism, but we'd also want not to say that a conclusion is rational if reached by a process at least one step of which was genuinely stochastic. (Big tent determinism.)

Still, how literally do you want to take "compelled by reason"? Does reason operate something like a natural law, compelling me to reach a particular conclusion as surely as night follows day? (The latter being, you know, physics.)

(That's certainly not the plan for Lewis, who's going to want the sort of libertarian free will I gestured at, and for whom this is a direct confrontation between theism and naturalism, not just between naturalism and 'something else (to be determined later)'.)

But that is not really the point, which is to differentiate the kind of causation involved in physical cause-and-effect, on the one side, and rational necessity - believing something due to reasons - on the other. — Wayfarer

But this is why I need clarification. This "rational necessity" you're talking about, I don't know what that is. We sometimes speak of "logical necessity" but most such talk is pretty loose; if you really need such a thing, it's just a necessity relation that doesn't include any facts or history or natural laws and so on. A "bare necessity", as it were. It just means logic and logic alone, and only applies to what logic applies to. (Propositions, even if those propositions are proxies for states of affairs.)

Your rational necessity sounds like something that applies to epistemic agents, compelling them to hold certain beliefs if they hold others. Logic alone, famously, can't pull this off, or the world would be a better place.

(( Unlikely I'll slog through Victor Reppert, but if I do, I'll let you know. Probably will look at the Stephen Talbott. ))

Back to business.

What does human reasoning look like? Let's go back to the Lewis example. He wants to contrast (1) Grandpa sleeping in because he's sick from (2) my inferring that he's sick because he's sleeping in.

(1) asserts a causal relation between two states of affairs: Grandpa is sick causes Grandpa sleeps in; (2) is considerably more complicated. I am said to know or believe a couple things: (a) Grandpa is sleeping in; (b) Grandpa sleeps in if and only if he is sick. From these, I deduce that (c) Grandpa is sick.

Unlike Grandpa, whose sleeping in is caused by his being sick, my state of believing (or knowing) that Grandpa is sick is not caused by my beliefs (a) and (b); it is a free choice (or act?) of mine to believe that (c) on account of (a) and (b). (a) and (b) together entail (c), and I choose to align my beliefs with what is logical, and so hold (c). Nothing forces me to believe (c), and I could (perversely) do otherwise if I choose. As a matter of logic, (c) flows automatically from (a) and (b), but my holding (c) does not flow automatically from my holding (a) and (b).

That's the Lewis account of the basic situation, but that account is actually intended to be embedded into another argument that will include the free act of inference, something like this: if I am caused to believe something, then I have not freely inferred it; if I have not freely inferred my belief, then I cannot consider it rational, for only beliefs arrived at by the use of reason are rational.

Is that a fair account of the argument from reason as you understand it?

To respond in terms of the argument from reason, I would say that the brain-mind identity theory collapses or blurs the distinction between logical necessity and physical causation. — Wayfarer

Logical necessity never holds between one belief state and another; it only holds between the contents of one belief state and the contents of another.

That's why you need an actual argument showing that if brain state A, with contents P, causes brain state B, with contents Q, that a causal relation between A and B is incompatible with a logical relation between P and Q.

But I digress. — Hanover

Don't think for one second your reputation for depravity can be restored that easily.

What exactly constitutes transphobia isn't clear cut. — Baden

Agreed. One of the original TERFs, Kathleen Stock, is all for gender-affirming care and also for excluding trans women from traditional women's spaces. Is it helpful to label her transphobic or not transphobic? I'm not seeing it.

Have you been living under a rock?

I'm not testifying here, but offering an explanation for why an "issue" that affects almost no one, that need not even be thought of as an issue at all, is sucking up so much oxygen these days. Disgust, moral revulsion, what have you, these can produce outsize responses, and we have beyond question one of those here.

Do you disagree? Do you think where some kid pees is an important issue that adults should be talking about all the time, holding press conferences, making speeches, arranging panel discussions and debates, proposing and passing laws about?

I'm guessing you experience this yourself. — frank

Um, no.

I really thought the italics would do it. Adding a note now.

Going beyond that then you have hatred, mockery, and disgust which is unambiguously transphobic and needs to be pushed back against firmly. — Baden

"Disgust" I think is the key word here.

It's been mentioned a couple times that FtM transitioners are of much less interest in the debate. For the anti-trans activists, they're sort of a curiosity, but MtF -- these are men who are shirking their sacred duty, cowards and weaklings, worse even than gay men, who, it turns out, can still fight and play sports and stuff --- aarrrggghhh -- even though they have, let's say, a hobby that's weird and kinda gross. At least some of them, maybe even most of them, are still men in some of the ways that count. (Hitting stuff and/or people.) Not 100% real men, but pretty close in some cases. But those men that want to be women? That is literally like being a traitor.

NOTE: everything after the italicized phrase is written from a point-of-view not mine.

I would assume that if I walked into the women's gym locker and began disrobing, I would face hostility from the women, even those not in fear of assualt, but just pissed off that I invaded their space and exposed myself to them. — Hanover

Well, sure, but I understand @Michael received applause that one time he did it by mistake.

At this stage, he avoids using the bathrooms at all costs, to the extent of not eating or drinking during the school day. — Baden

This is horrifying. Here's a genuine problem that needs to be dealt with.

There is an odd point here though, in that if this student identifies as a girl and wants to present as a girl (I presume) and be allowed to use the girl's restroom, that would be some kind of solution for her at least -- before we even get to the question of how other girls would react.

On the other hand, there is no solution for a boy who has been branded as a "sissy" -- whether he's gay or not.

I do not believe the genuine danger faced by boys and girls at the hands of other boys is a necessary (you know, biological) feature of our lives, but a result of fucked up parenting and fucked up ideas about what being a man is.

the implications of the argument — Wayfarer

The implications of what argument?

I thought in this thread you were presenting a specific argument, credited to Lewis with an assist from Anscombe, not just the usual clash of beliefs, and not just the bare claim that "we are not our brains" or something.

I don't yet see what the argument is.

Is it equivalent to an argument about free will and responsibility?

Doesn't seem to be, unless you wanted to say that abusers of children rationally infer that they should do what they do. (And I can't believe you'd reach for such an example after pooh-poohing psychological history, when it is widely known that abusers were often themselves abused.)

It is because of the physicalist assumptions of the kind of naturalism that the argument is aimed at. — Wayfarer

Still not seeing it.

This is true: the kind of reason I have for believing in UFOs is not the same kind of reason my treehouse fell down; those are two different senses of the word "reason", the former to do with inference and the latter with gravity.

This is unargued for: if I believe something for a reason, my belief is uncaused, or whatever you'd prefer to say there --- not describable without remainder in physical terms, blah blah blah.

Is there an argument from "because" having two senses to there being two realms, one ruled by Physics or Something and one ruled by Reason or Something? If that's even what we're going for.

It wasn't intended as the sort of reductionism you describe. You could claim if you want that the history of my mental states is not reducible to the history of my brain states.

My point was that we are talking about my mental behavior here, and if I have mental behavior -- rational or not -- that isn't reducible to biology, then you're good, naturalism is refuted. I don't understand the focus on my mental behavior you consider rational, and how its being rational makes it special evidence against naturalism.

Sure, I get that. Two meaning of "because", two meanings of "reason". I get that, but I'm not clear how you make an argument out of this and if an argument has been made.

It's a matter of my psychological history that I have made the inferences I have, rational or not. But you and Lewis seem to think my good inferences are evidence of something that my bad inferences are not, and I don't understand why.

Take Grandpa. He hasn't come down, and I can reasonably infer that he's sick. Cool. I'm mister rationality and my behavior disproves naturalism.

But if there's a deer nibbling the grass in my yard when I step out on the porch, it will hear the slightest sound I make and freeze. If I make a considerable noise, it'll bolt. To me, Grandpa staying in bed is a sign that he's sick; to a deer the noises I make are a sign of danger. Is the deer's behavior also a refutation of naturalism? --- I mean, you can punt, because you don't need another refutation of naturalism if you've already got one, but what makes my behavior so special? (If you don't like the deer, substitute the dog that knows the particular sound of his owner's car.)

'Grandfather must be ill today because he hasn't got up yet (and we know he is an invariably early riser when he is well).' — C S Lewis, Miracles, Chap 3

'It must have hurt him because he cried out' — C S Lewis, Miracles, Chap 3

If our B does not follow logically from our A, we think in vain. — C S Lewis, Miracles, Chap 3

In neither of these examples does the B follow logically from the A, not the way we usually use "follow logically"; in each case the A's count as evidence for their respective B's, and it's the easiest thing in the world to construct a defeater. (Grandpa's not ill, he's dead, still angry about what you said about Trump last night, etc.)

I'm still not clear how the argument works. If I hold A and think B follows from A, infer B and then hold B on the basis of A, that's all you and Lewis need, right?

Since we are not conscious of the process of input to the sensorium, I would agree that phenomena (defined as recognizable sense objects) are the output, so it seems we agree on that. — Janus

Cool.

And if we reserve the word phenomena for what we can possibly be aware of, then objects are constitutive of phenomena, agreed?

All this business about views — I understand what you're getting at, I just want to be clear that views are not phenomena. Views belong to the perceptual system, which offers to our awareness fully assembled phenomena complete with whole objects. (Ambiguity about how to classify an object makes no difference; it's an object, whatever it turns out to be.)

As you say, there may corner cases, things not working as designed, and the perceptual system throws us something abnormal, but for the most part it's medium-sized dry goods.

Are we still agreed?

In truth, we never perceive whole objects, but only views of them from different perspectives, so we construct the notion of whole objects from the various views (and feels) we have of them — Janus

But -- to start with, wholes and views aren't opposites; they're different sorts of things altogether, and it's exactly this ambiguity that's troublesome.

So would you rather say we perceive partial objects, out of which we construct a whole in our minds, conceptually, or that we have views of (presumably whole and complete) objects? I've substituted "have" there, but you can stick to "perceive views" if you intended to treat a view as a sort of object.

If the model is that there's something out there, and then our sensorium, and then finally, at the greatest remove from what's out there, our intellect, are phenomena the input to the sensorium, or the output of the sensorium? I'm thinking it's output, which is to say, the input for the intellect.

But that too is ambiguous, and if we expect this account to align with the findings of neuroscience, we have to decide whether to count the processing of perceptual data as part of the intellect or part of the sensorium. If you say intellect, then phenomena are almost nothing, the firing of neurons without considering where those impulses go (must go). But if you say sensorium, then an awful lot has already been done, without your awareness, before it reaches the intellect.

And that's fine, still seems like this is the way to go because that signals processing isn't incidentally unconscious but necessarily so, and we get to call phenomena whatever the first things are that we even can become aware of, whether we happen to be or not.

But at what point do we get objects? That's the question. Does perception make available to awareness uninterpreted views? That looks unlikely. Color constancy suggests that whether something is an object determines how its color is presented to your awareness, and you have no control over this. It seems your perceptual apparatus is already making decisions about which parts of your so-called field of vision are objects, or anyway something has.

And if objects are only offered to your awareness pre-assembled, we might say, then objects are constitutive of phenomena, not the other way around. The alternative is to take intellect to include this unconscious processing, but then I'm really not clear what phenomena are supposed to be. Not views certainly. Not color patches. I really don't know what.

If someone is born, there is already an assumption that they ought to be born for some reason. — schopenhauer1

Well you know I don't agree.

By the way, ever read William James's "Is Life Worth Living?" Worth a look.

it fits within a broader theme — schopenhauer1

Sure, and one way to describe that theme is, "I have pretty severe depression and am not receiving treatment."

I wouldn't actually presume to diagnose Cioran from his writings. I won't pretend literature is the same as confession. And I'm not saying that if it were a known fact that Cioran had depression we ought to dismiss him.

But I also don't like pretending there isn't an elephant in the room. Philosophical pessimism reasons its way to a worldview that comes naturally, without the need of argument, to those unfortunate souls who suffer from depression.

I also don't claim pessimism is unique in aligning with affective disposition in this way. I just don't think we have a good way to talk about these connections and the need is most obvious in a case like Cioran's.

the problem already existing — schopenhauer1

Not exactly.

The original quote could be read as a sort of paradox: if you wait until you have a reason to kill yourself, you'll have an experience bad enough that you want to kill yourself, therefore the smart move is to kill yourself for no reason, before things get bad. Quit while you're ahead.

This "argument" does not claim that you have a reason to kill yourself from the moment you're born. It doesn't even say that you are bound to have one someday. It only says that if you have one, you've already missed your chance not to, and of course that's true.

I'm not sure it bears analysing. Strikes me more as gallows humor, suggesting that life is itself kind of a sick joke.

It's a tricky issue. In a sense all of Nietzsche's genealogical analysis works this way, and we live in an age where the ad hominem argument has gained a certain authority. I'm not itching to go down either of those roads.

But here we are. Cioran's words are pretty nearly textbook indicators of depression. If he'd had a good therapist and maybe some meds, he might have sung a different tune. What are we to make of that?

It doesn't make what he wrote untrue, quite the contrary, but it does add some context. For the anti-natalist, all that matters is that he suffered, and therefore his parents should not have brought him into the world.

We could say, what if we made sure everyone with depression got excellent treatment? Well of course we all want that, but do we all want a future where everyone is permanently happy and just the same? That's horrifying. But for the anti-natalist only the promise of such a dystopia could justify procreation.

Not sure I want to go wandering through this particular fun house again, fascinating as it is. I just found it peculiar no one had remarked on the obvious, and it does raise difficult issues of what we think we're doing when we do philosophy.

I wouldn't say that all those who hold this view are depressed. Additionally, even if this was true, it would not mean that their ideas are without merit. — DA671

Should have added some context, was referring to the Cioran quote schop posted, for instance:

The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don't know where that elsewhere is. — E.M. Cioran, The Trouble With Being Born

Does it matter to our discussions if Cioran had depression? If Thomas Ligotti has anhedonia? I don't think it settles any of the issues, but might serve as particularly salient reminder that eloquence is not a reliable indicator of truth.

And while I'm loath to say that every philosophy is really just autobiography, it might only be the "just" that I object to, for surely it is also that. And so it is for our responses. We read the work, and ask ourselves, is this true? Cioran's account may strike a chord if you have experienced depression, but if not?

I don't know if this is just an issue of methodology or of substance. I suspect James was onto something when he spoke of philosophical temperaments.

It does strike me as silly to ignore the issue entirely, and discuss dispassionately, intellectually what is obviously a record of suffering.

This sounds like depression. Intellectualized, articulate depression, but still depression.

Not only that, but he has considerable support among Christian fundamentalists despite being a womanizer, a liar and a cheat, a man obsessed with earthly wealth and prestige, and from New York City of all places! I remember when Mike Huckabee published a book that opened with a story about going to a fancy restaurant in New York and they didn't even know what grits are. 'Nuff said. "New York" used to be code for "everything wrong with America". You might as well say "Babylon". And then they turned out in droves to support the quintessential New Yorker.

The most convincing explanation I've heard is that what these Americans practice is in fact an heretical offshoot of Christianity that is essentially a cult of masculinity. (Josh Hawley's new book is Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs. He got the memo.) Trump fits that bill, despite having nothing else in common with these folks. You would think the Access Hollywood tape all by itself would be disqualifying to conservative Christians, but it certainly wasn't to these folks. That needs explaining.

It is deeply peculiar that so much of the current posture of the GOP can be understood as anxiety among certain people about the place of men in a changing world.

Consider the die example: When the die lands on 'six', you can't distinguish whether this outcome is from the fair die or the loaded one. — Pierre-Normand

But there are two sources of randomness in this example, the die and the coin.

Similarly for all analyses that treat SB's situation as describable with two coin flips. We only have one.

The halfer position comes back to individuation, as you suggested some time ago. Roughly, the claim is that "this interview" (or "this tails interview" etc) is not a proper result of the coin toss, and has no probability. What SB ought to be asking herself is "Is this my only interview or one of two?" The chances for each of those are by definition 1 in 2.

I'm undecided.

I am reading Descartes as saying will is freedom of choice — Paine

I've been following the discussion (without rereading the text, else I'd contribute) and this is exactly what I've gotten from the quotes posted. Will is the capacity to choose.

Were I always to see clearly what is true and good, I would never deliberate about what is to be judged or chosen. — ibid. Fourth Meditation page 38

And this very specifically says "I would not deliberate" rather than saying, "I would have no choice." There is a tradition of equating sin with error, simply mistaking the bad for the good. But Lucifer chose, knowing full well he was choosing the bad. Descartes sees here, correctly it would seem, a power greater than which none can be conceived, in its own sphere far greater than the intellect is in the field of knowledge. You do not get to choose which options are open to you; you do not get to choose that all your goals be perfectly realized; you do not get to choose even to stick by your decisions and carry them out; but the power of choice itself stands unopposed.

Is there another external agency, that counters the Linear momentum of the initial Cause? In billiards, the pool shooter is the First Cause, and subsequent paths of the balls are the result of momentum & direction (vector) inputs. I suppose you could say that the perimeter of the table "prevents" the balls from exploring all paths in the universe. But the table is a man-made object, constructed with intent to prevent or constrain degrees of freedom. — Gnomon

I don't think we need to talk about intentionality, or not yet, or not this way.

Ask yourself how your approach would change if, instead of just saying the path of the billiard ball is a result, you said that the billiard ball is constrained to follow such a path.

If you can get yourself into a Humean frame of mind, and imagine that almost anything could happen when one billiard ball strikes another, then you are ready to see the resulting path as a narrowing of this possibility space, as a possibility left open by the various operative constraints.

And there's a sense in which such a view is frankly statistical, as Hume's was. (Other antecedents would be the ideal gas laws and statistical mechanics, the statistical framework for evolution by natural selection due to Fisher, etc.)

That's how I understand this approach, in broad strokes.

You make some very interesting points I missed:

But then for the global constraints to survive, this free generation of local actions must also be reconstructing rather than eroding that larger world that is allowing them to exist by not ruling them out. — apokrisis

And of course they might not. Sometimes there are runaway processes and you end up with Easter Island. Thus:

The right kind of limiting constraints must evolve to produce the right kind of constructive actions. That is, the ones that rebuild the system of constraints in some general, statistically robust, way. — apokrisis

Which might not happen in one go, because at this level in the hierarchy there is also construction and selection going on. From the lower level's point-of-view, if they erode the constraints that enabled them, they're in for a paradigm shift, as the kids say.

So causality broadly is a unity of opposites – the partnership of downward-acting constraints and upwardly-constructing degrees of freedom. The overall goal of this system's causality is to discover a persistent dynamical balance. — apokrisis

But there's only one system that's so well balanced that it's stable, right? Namely the heat death of the universe. Every system of constraints must allow slightly more freedom that it really ought to if it's to become stable, because in the very long run all such systems are temporary and must seed their own destruction. The whole purpose of these temporary solutions is to waste as much energy as possible and then fall apart, right?

But then, as Wallace Stevens observed, "Death is the mother of beauty."

Systems that fall apart too quickly to be much help burning off energy are replaced by more complex and robust systems, but on the other side of that curve there's less to work with as you slide downward toward oblivion and the systems are again less complex.

There's a sweet spot -- like how much a dissident can get past the censors, or how much an artist can challenge convention. In that zone, the whole thing produces wonders that are only possible because they are temporary.

"Degrees of freedom" cannot construct. — Metaphysician Undercover

If I may... Step 1 to understanding @apokrisis is to swap the idea of "causes" for the idea of "prevents".

Whatever has happened is not what was caused to happen; it's whatever was not prevented from happening. Certainly for evolution, this ought to be obvious: variation happens wherever and to whatever degree it can, and insofar as one variation gains predominance in the next generation, to that degree there is some new constraint -- and new options -- as we go around again. Related mechanisms, which is to say, similar behaviors, can be found in other sorts of systems, without evolution's particular twist involving replication.

The gist of it is that -- particularly considering the time-scales and populations involved -- whatever can happen, will. And "can" here is glossed as "not prevented by some (generally top-down) constraint", and keeping in mind how change gets locked in, at least to some degree and at least temporarily, so we're never talking about everything conceivable happening, but only what is a genuine possibility under current conditions.

In this sense, yes indeed, degrees of freedom construct. It's their job.

(Pretty close, apo?)

In April 2014, he hired Hunter Biden. — Relativist

So what's the story on this? How much do we actually know?

The two explanations that spring to mind are both bad: (1) he was hired in an attempt to co-op VP Joe Biden ("Why come after us? We can be a very good friend to you..."); (2) he was hired as a sort of human shield ("You can come after us, but then your son is in the crosshairs too...").

No doubt Hunter was well-paid, but is there any evidence that either of these plausible intentions were realized?

Trouble is, even if VP Biden didn't back off, that's not necessarily evidence that he didn't personally make a deal with Burisma, or make one through his son: he might have made a deal and then broken it. Criminals often count on being able to get away with that sort of thing. (Which, according to Goodfellas, is why the mob existed, cops for people who couldn't go to the cops.)

If VP Biden were corrupt, it's hard to believe he'd want to advertise it by getting his son a job with the crook whose money he was taking. But that's not much of a defense, and sometimes people are dumb.

Here's one more unsupported theory: Zlochevsky was attempting to put a respectable sheen on his company, but misunderstood how status works in the US. "How can we be bad guys? We have a Biden on our board. His father is an important man, so we are respectable." Hunter Biden, as the child of a celebrity (albeit a political one), is not inherently respectable and untouchable; he's right out of central casting as a someone headed for big-time scandal. Americans, for all kinds of reasons, love to put the children of the famous through the ringer.

To me, it looks like Hunter and his Yale buddies Archer and (though less in this case) Heinz were just engaging in the typical eating-all-the-cookies behavior of elites. They don't have to be purposefully corrupt because opportunities to take more and more just keep coming their way. (Cf. Bush, George W.) He's far from the only guy in America with a history of addiction and infidelity, who might still be decent at whatever job he holds at the moment -- but he also happens to be 90th percentile.

A couple links:
Washington Post
Reuters

It appears he did file them separately, took them with him, and disputed with NARA over them. — NOS4A2

He also turned over at least fifteen boxes of material to the Archives in the first go round. Why did he do that if they were all personal records? The NARA discovered material with classification markings in these boxes and alerted the Justice Department, and yadda yadda yadda here we are.

There's still Congress, of course, but it's true there is some tension here, insofar as most of the executive branch was created by legislation, and that means the President is responsible for carrying out the will of Congress in many areas. He has other powers specifically enumerated in the constitution that do not derive from Congress, and all of this will obviously continue to be a matter of debate and litigation.

Personally I think the PRA is an excellent reminder that we do not have a monarch, but only a President, and he is subject to the rule of law like everyone else.

That's very helpful. Answers one of my questions.

Barr is a longtime proponent of the unitary executive theory of nearly unfettered presidential authority over the executive branch of the U.S. government. — wiki

If anyone would think the President has the sort of unchecked authority you think he has, it would be Bill Barr, and evidently he does not think so.

Remember that the main point of the PRA was to prevent a President from destroying documents.

Trump regularly shredded "both sensitive and mundane" papers while at the White House, at Mar-a-Lago, and on Air Force One,[11][12] despite repeated admonishments from at least two of his chiefs of staff and from White House counsel.[11] His aides had developed special practices and protocols early in his presidency to retrieve the piles of torn paper and attempt to tape documents back together with the help of staffers from the Office of the Staff Secretary or the Oval Office Operations team.[11][13] — wiki

If all he had to do to legitimate such behavior was designate it as a personal rather than a presidential record, the law would serve no purpose at all. Evidently Bill Barr does not believe that, nor did Trump's staff or counsel think that.

Maybe Congress did inadvertently leave such a loophole, and maybe no attorney or official who ever considered such matters noticed. I consider that unlikely, but we'll see. For now, the theory that the President can do whatever he likes with any document is akin to the theory that the Vice President can refuse to certify the votes of duly appointed Electors.

17. Pursuant to Executive Order 13526, information classified at any level could be lawfully accessed only by persons determined by an appropriate United States government official to be eligible for access to classified information and who had signed an approved non-disclosure agreement, who received a security clearance, and who had a “need-to-know” the classified information. After his presidency, TRUMP was not authorized to possess or retain classified documents. — Paragraph 17 of the indictment