Well it's pretty clear that there's a genetic connection between the Protestant sects - Puritans, Quakers, etc. - and early classical liberalism and proto-socialistic ideas in England, and (since the UK was the first country to have a serious, kingslaying revolution that inspired the rest of Europe) that ideological ferment was a major contributory strand leading to most European forms of socialism later (along with Jewish influence, also largely universalist), while at the same time being directly carried by the early English settlers to the northern USA.

And then later on, as atheism became more fashionable among the intelligentsia (in Europe and the US), the religiously-based belief in equality was retained as a strong belief, only minus its theistic roots.

It's a way of keeping the cake of (quasi-)religious fervour and eating it :)

Is it wrong for me to see ultra-high-taxation with the intent to redistribute wealth in a way that ensures total equality of outcome as a form of communism? — Sydasis

Sort of, Communism is more thoroughgoing than mere redistribution of wealth, which is more of a Left-liberal/Universalist cause. Obviously there's some relation between the two, genetically and doctrinally (in terms of their shared egalitarianism, particularly, which speaks to them as both being religion substitutes, atheist sublimations of the Judeo-Christian tradition), but Communism and Socialism are actually more to do with totally re-jigging the way society produces goods in the first place ("production for need, not profit").

I don't see why you can't just say it's the moon that exists.

The manifestation (the "face" it shows us) doesn't exist outside that interaction, but that doesn't mean you can't say that the manifestation is the moon - it is after all a manifestation of the moon, not some alien thing that's not-the-moon.

Going down this route would probably get us into mereology - re. what kinds of part/whole distinction are legitimate in this context. A leaf isn't a tree, but a leaf is tree, it's part of the tree-iness of the tree.

For example, suppose you see a leaf filling the screen in a movie, then the camera pans out, the leaf is part of a bunch, which are then revealed to be part of a tree. When one was looking at the leaf initially, was one looking at the tree? In one sense no, one was just looking at a leaf, but in another sense yes, one was looking at the tree, at one of its leaves.

I think we can treat objects in general in a similar way: the particular form of existence a thing has in interaction with us, you can say it's a distinct thing (like the leaf), but you can also say it's a manifestation of the thing (its being part of the whole tree, or in this case one of the object's possible ways of being, sc. its way of being for us).

One way of looking at it is that the marks and sounds of language trigger in us trained expectations about what to expect upon further interaction with the world. Those expectations may set up imagery and thoughts in our minds, but the imagery and thought-of-the-thing is irrelevant to the expectations, which are "carried" outside of us by social habit patterns that we partake in, that do change sometimes, but change much more slowly, so we can treat them as stable meanings relative to us.

Managing our expectations (or beliefs, which have more of a connotation of trusting the expectations set up in us by language) rationally, means that we stick to the same expectation over time and test it, before moving on to the next (we don't change horses in the middle of the stream, we test one sense of things at a time). The larger sense of rationality, which is probably something akin to Bayesian reasoning, means we match expectations (the stock of what we think we know) against what eventuates given certain further interactions of ours, or new evidence, or problems or anomalies cropping up. For that to proceed, the meanings we use (which are setting up the expectations/beliefs) need to remain stable within a given investigation.

In this way, it's possible for any language to be used rationally or irrationally; it's also possible for languages themselves to be more or less conducive to rationality, but that's contextual (how finely the language dices reality will make it more or less usable in reason, but it only needs to dice reality as finely as it needs to in a given context - 50 different words for different types of snow is great for the Eskimo, useless to someone living in Bamako).

I think it's possible to say that we have a pre-verbal layer of expectations and an ability to test them, which we share with the higher animals, so to that extent a measure of rational thought is possible without language, but the articulation of language gives that capacity hyper-drive. (Abstractly, it's conceivable that a child could build a sort of private language by themselves, but it would take hundreds of years for an individual to achieve the degree of articulation of reality we've inherited from our ancestors in language.) I think an investigation of "wild/feral children" (children raised by animals, like wolves or apes) would show the difference and distinction: taken out of the wild, they have some capacity for thought and puzzle-solving, just as apes, corvids, etc., have; however, a full armory of language is required for rational thought as we understand it to proceed, but once such children grasp language, if it's not too late, they can learn to think rationally as normal. (Sadly it's too late for some, because the brain needs to be presented with language within a certain window of opportunity in order to be able to learn to use it properly.)

Perhaps the Moon is the manifestation rather than the external thing(s) — Michael

Well the moon we experience is the only manifestation of anything we know, and it's external in the relevant sense of existing (in its other "faces" for other things) regardless of whether we're experiencing it or not.

I don't think there's any philosophical need for a split between manifestation and something hidden behind it. Philosophically speaking, we can coherently say that we experience what there is, because what we experience is the only place where our sense of "is" comes from, it's the meat and potatoes of existence so far as we're concerned.

Whether we get some revelation or news from afar of something other than what we experience, as we experience it, being all there is, and whether we believe that or not, is another story, but I don't think it's necessitated by any philosophical reflection, for example as a posit to make sense of what we experience.

We've already been doing this topic to death in another thread, but as a fresh encapsulation, I'd say: the most you can say is that the way the moon exists for you when you're looking at it doesn't exist when you're not looking at it, but the ways the moon exists for other things (its interaction with other parts of the world that are not-you) still carry on when you're not looking at it.

This is harping on my main theme of Externalism as being the proper solution to most of these sorts of problems related to consciousness. Consciousness is not the name of a process that goes on just in the head, in the skull, in the brain; it's the name of a process of interaction that actually bridges and connects things (actually physically, literally) and includes both of the interacting processes within itself.

It's a bit analogous to the roles we play in society - for my co-workers, I'm their boss, for my family I'm the father, for my wife her husband, for my friends a best mate, for my amateur sports team at the weekend, I'm a certain position in the team. In each of these presentations of myself to the world, the other aspects of my potential self-presentation are absent because they're not being presented to their respective receivers. (When I'm with my family, I'm not a teammate, etc.)

Similarly, being in general isn't a monovalent property, but a multivalent property. The aspect a thing has for me, it has only because the interposition of my brain and sensory apparatus at that time and place, affords an opportunity for the thing to manifest a "side" of itself that it could never have manifested without that opportunity - and likewise, it presents me with an opportunity to manifest a new, hitherto-dormant (or hitherto-merely-possible) side of myself to it.

Again, going back to the interpersonal level, that's one reason why we value relationships - because being with different people draws different aspects of ourselves out of us, it actually gives us more opportunities to manifest aspects of our own existence. (And often that reflects back into self-consciousness - for example, it's common for a musician to play their track to a friend, and hear it in a different way "through his ears," so to speak.)

Morality is roughly the habits of interaction that people have, which fall into patterns, the patterns are social rules.

It's partly something people are naturally inclined to (genetically, and of course that varies across ethnic groups and races), but it's then reinforced - precisely because the variance is on a bell-curve, so some people need to be encouraged to do more of what they already slightly intend to do, and others more strongly intend to do. The ones who are stronger in the trait and more numerous, keep in line the ones who are weaker in the trait and less numerous by various means (social shaming, social sanction, laws, etc.).

There's a subjective and relative component, and an objective component. Part of morality is a shared survival/flourishing strategy, and that is obviously objective (i.e. somewhere out there in possibility space, there's an ideal set of rules for interpersonal interaction in the group, given the nature of people in the group, and the nature of the world).

But at the same time individuals still have a choice whether to stick to those rules or not, or to live by other rules (if they can get agreement, or move to another group). That's how morality evolves over time (sometimes outliers can influence the tendency of the group, analogously to the way mutations can spread through a population).

Religions have been the main carriers of morality historically, but more recently (i.e. over the past 3,000 years or so) philosophy has hived off some of the guidance practice - moral rules are subject to intense intellectual scrutiny, which helps the process of discovering what's best (relative to whatever - to a given group, or to humanity as a whole, etc.).

Are you aware of my experiences? — bahman

No but that's privacy, not my awareness being personal; although that word can be a bit misleading in this context (one wants to ask "private to whom?" but it's the common word used in philosophy for what I'm referring to, so we have to use it).

An instance of consciousness is certainly private in the sense that it's unique and un-havable in another consciousness - e.g. the apple exists in a different way, in a different perspective, when interacting with your brain than with mine.

But that doesn't mean consciousness is personal. The opposite of personal is impersonal, which is what consciousness actually is, because it's something that happens between person and object, it's not the sole property of the person, or of the lump of fat inside the skull; it's a property of the interaction, the interference pattern, between brain and object, and includes the object itself, it doesn't belong just to the person who (as we say) has consciousness or is conscious.

IOW consciousness is a manner of existing of the object in its interaction with the brain, as well as something going on inside the brain or in the conscious person. Only if it were something that occurred in just the person alone (e.g. in the individual's brain or mind), would it be personal.

That said, the uniqueness of that manner of the object's existing (in just that particular way for that particular brain), is what makes it private, and not something that can also happen between that same object and another brain.

Consciousness is not personal or local, "consciousness" describes a process that includes the brain but is not limited to it - one's consciousness of an external object is a particular ad hoc physical process that includes the object, that induces it to exist in a way it wouldn't on its own, or in its interaction with some other object.

Whatever "representation" there may be of an apple in the brain is not the thing that's consciousness of the apple (there may well be part of the "machine state" of the brain that represents the apple in a true, strict sense, but that representation is not red, round, juicy, etc., it's a purely mechanical register in biochemical "brain writing," for the purposes of calculation of, e.g. the trajectory of hand reaching out to touch it). The redness, roundness, etc., are a mode of the apple's existence that occurs only in interaction with the brain, they are properties the brain gives the apple the opportunity to manifest only in interaction with it (with the brain, sensory organs, etc.).

Consciousness of the apple is a mode of the apple's existence that can only occur in conjunction with the brain when the brain intercepts certain of its effusions (light, chemical if you eat it, etc.). e.g. the colour of the apple is the very existence of certain subatomic properties of the apple's surface as it interacts with light and with the brain (one could say it's direct perception of those properties as they are, if that manner of speaking didn't mislead us into retreating back into the skull as the "seat of consciousness").

Analogously, when two waves on water intersect, there's an "interference pattern" that's not the one wave, not the other wave, but a third physical thing that occurs only in the process of interaction.

Consciousness is not in the brain, and it is not local (or rather, it's local in a slightly extended sense, to include its objects in their very physicality and bodying-forth, albeit in particular ways afforded to them solely by the brain's presence). Those have been the conceptual errors that have been holding us back from understanding, that have been causing the "Hard Problem", etc.

Just how wedded should we be to a particular view point? Another way to ask the question, just how dogmatic should we be about what we believe? — Sam26

I don't think scepticism is like a possible general stance, rather it's something you engage in based on evidence. Scepticism is a phase of inquiry that's triggered by evidence, or lack of evidence, it's not a possible permanent modality of inquiry (though it may be a psychological attitude - e.g. someone has a sceptical attitude, psychologically speaking, if they're more inclined to take second looks, check sources, dig a bit, etc.).

Most especially, dreaming up alternative logical possibilities is not scepticism, it's merely idle imagination.

One doles out belief according to the strength of the evidence, that's all there is to it. Weak evidence, counter-examples, etc., invite scepticism. But if everything's going along smoothly, scepticism has no function, it's idle, at rest.

At what threshold does a change in individual behavior cause a major unintended social effect? — Abdul

It has a continuous effect right now, and always, in democracies, it's called "rational ignorance."

Compare and contrast with buying a car. Deliberation prior to buying a car leads to getting the car you decide to buy, in a way that deliberation prior to a political decision doesn't. Therefore, for most people, it doesn't pay to be informed.

This is why politics is shallow, prone to demagoguery, easily manipulable by rhetoric and the influence of mere charisma, etc. With democracy most of the time, people just go with their gut on who seems like a decent enough chap or chapess, and hope for the best.

However, while this applies to large scale democracy at the national or federal level, it's different the more localized the democratic process is. When it's a local election where everyone knows each others' asses, and the people up for election are known quantities in their local area (here a known local teacher, there a known local businessman), there's more of a chance of an informed decision being made because less of a special effort with a great cost has to be made to be informed.

Another consequence of rational ignorance is the tendency of democracies to become managerially run ("Deep State", etc.). The problems are so complex and difficult, and often have temporal ramifications that don't oblige 4 year periodicity, that they're better run by "experts" anyway, and it's easier to manipulate public opinion and lead it (so that voters are rhetorically tricked into rubberstamping decisions already long-since made in smoke-filled rooms, so to speak), than to follow it.

But the problem with this is that it depends on the type of "expert." Politics run by statesmen who have noble intentions and a feel (or knack) for politics borne of experience, is all well and good, politics run by bureaucracy where decisions are made on the basis of shallow intellectual analysis (particularly based on statistics that might not even be carving nature at the joints anyway) can be terrible - and tend to a tyranny of mediocrity. (This would be comparable to business: a business run by people who have a proven track record, and just happen to have whatever neat trick in the brain is necessary to do successful stuff, whatever that knack may be, is better than a business run like a machine on pseudo-scientific principles. Or again, one thinks of those awful agricultural or city-design experiments of the 20th century, which often overrode local or traditional wisdom, with disastrous results. In reality, you do need a bit of a blend of the two - brains with neat tricks and experience/tradition, plus some scientific analysis and managerial efficiency - but the buck should stop with the brain that has the neat trick.)

So a brain is somewhat like the polished surface of a mirror, — unenlightened

I know it's a tempting metaphor, and it's a metaphor with a rich history in non-dual mystical teachings too, but there's something troublesome and subtly misleading about the mirror analogy for consciousness, I think.

Externalism is better: the key mistake is to think of consciousness as something (that "mirrors" a world "out there") locked inside the skull. Actually it's something out and abroad in the world, it's the name of a a process that threads between things and the brain, and takes in the actual physical objects as part of its process. The actual tree is part of the phenomenon of consciousness of the tree, the presence of the brain and its perceptual apparatus affords an occasion for the tree to exist in a particular way that it couldn't exist otherwise, on its own. (A rough analogy would be the interference pattern you get when two waves interact: it's a pattern that's not the one wave, not the other wave, but a way that the two interacting waves have of existing that isn't there without the interaction.)

This is also different from Panpsychism - Panpsychism is like copying the bad idea (of consciousness being locked in the brain or mind) out into the world. But Externalism is saying something subtly different that's perfectly compatible with physicalism and doesn't have any whiff of woo.

I'm sure it will eventually simmer down... I think. : l — yatagarasu

Well there are lots of good people on all sides of the political spectrum waking up to the nonsense these days (there are even some old school Leftists who are pissed off with the PC cult, and who are realizing, rightly, that it's bringing the Left into disrepute - it may well even turn the Democrats into a rump third party in the US, for example).

Also, I think there's a quiet but growing movement of people withdrawing sanction, particularly economic sanction, from the ideologically-obsessed products of modern academia, the entertainment industry, sports, fake news, etc., etc. (This has the added salutary effect of making people realize they don't really need to spend their money on most of the crap they've habitually been spending it on anyway.)

There's a peculiar and wryly amusing irony about the entryism practiced by the goons of intersectional identity politics, feminism, etc.: they take over some area of endeavour hoping to capitalize on its cachet, respect or popularity, so they can spread their propaganda; but as soon as they get involved, the thing loses the very cachet, respect or popularity that made it attractive to take over in the first place. "Get woke, go broke" is now becoming a recognizable phenomenon.

So I do have some hope, but it's touch and go, and it could still be a rocky ride, since a lot of it is thoroughly institutionalized now and has some big law behind it. The termites have been dining long and hard and this insane ideology has been gradually creeping up on the world on since the end of WWII, slowly at first, then gathering speed in the 70s, again in the 90s and again, with more desperate intensity, in the last 5 years or so.

the study you linked to had this to say: "[...] and simply doesn’t support prejudiced theories of racial superiority" — Michael

Yeah, I would agree with that to some extent (though to some extent it's also obviously ass-saving boilerplate). But race realism isn't a prejudiced theory of generalized racial superiority. It's a demonstrable theory of specific racial rankings in specific areas. And while general intelligence is certainly an important human trait, it's not the be all and end all of being human.

IOW the average intelligence of Jews is obviously vastly superior to the average intelligence of Blacks, and quite a bit superior even to Asians and Whites; but that doesn't make Jews superior human beings to Blacks, Asians or Whites in any general sense.

Again, these are just averages across populations; it doesn't mean you can't find lots of dumb Jews, or lots of smart Blacks, etc., in absolute terms, it just means you'll find less of them proportionately, in each group.

The statistics matter for things like public policy, or what you can expect, on average, of given racial or ethnic groups; and the matter of the degree of genetic influence, in particular, sets ceilings and floors on what's achievable or desirable with public policy. But I emphasize: none of it touches the liberal principle that you must judge given individuals by their manifest qualities or revealed actions, and not by the average characteristics of the group (or socioeconomic class, for that matter) that they happen to belong to. It's the latter that is literally prejudice.

This wasn't quite what I wanted. — PossibleAaran

Yeah, I know it's kind of a boring answer. :)

I understand that you think that one can use a track-record argument for the claim that sense perception is reliable. Sense perception got things right on occasions X, Y, Z, N, N+1... therefore sense perception is reliable. My question is, why believe, in any particular case, that sense perception got it right? — PossibleAaran

There's no reason to believe it in any particular case, not by "reading off" from the perception (or even schmerception) in isolation. The perception's validity isn't given alongside the givenness of the perception.

But that's not a problem, because the reason to believe (trust in) the validity of any random given instance of perception comes from trust in the general series, which includes also the possiblity of occasional error. It seems kind of paradoxical, but it really isn't. We aren't guaranteed the validity of any given perception, taken in isolation, but we have a reasonable degree of proven confidence in the series as a whole, which means that the given perception is likely to be valid, but may occasionally not be.

It would be a problem if we were in the position of having to "read off" any given perception's validity from the perception itself in order to have knowledge. But we aren't, so it isn't.

I look into my bathroom and form the belief that there is a toothbrush on the sink. Why should I believe that there is? Remember, at this point we haven't established that sense perception is reliable, so we cannot appeal to that. — PossibleAaran

You should believe it's a toothbrush because you're having a toothbrush-like perception, that's good enough reason to TRUST that you'll be able to brush your teeth with the damn thing.

Now that trust may turn out to have been misplaced (maybe it's an alien spaceship), but we know it's highly unlikely to have been misplaced (the chances of it being an alien spaceship, or any of an infinity of other logically possible things, including your hallucination as a brain in a vat, or whatever, is vanishingly tiny, and would require strong proof to counterbalance the chain of expectations-fulfilled that we've gotten by going along with perception as generally valid).

Why, then, should I take it that sense perception is getting things right in this particular instance if I can't take it to be reliable yet? If the track record argument works, there must be some reason to believe its premises. — PossibleAaran

You can't take any given perception in isolation to be reliable, its reliability is something that can only be validated subsequently as part of a linked network of expectations fulfilled (so long as you're using perceptions as a guide to reality, in order to fulfil those expectations).

But the expectations' fulfillments are themselves things perceived, after all, so what else do you have to go on?

IOW, it's not a bug, but a feature. ("It" here being the lack of one-to-one guaranteed intrinsic relationship between a perception and its validity, that's somehow given along with givenness of the perception itself.)

In doing this [Descartes] recognizes that he's pursuing matters much further than they are usually pursued, but he has goals which he thinks are best achieved by doing this. — PossibleAaran

Yes, and that's been a valuable exercise, but the fact that it hasn't led anywhere is what's instructive.

I moreso doubted the time it would be necessary to create differences — yatagarasu

Isn't "doubting the time" one of the main arguments from creationists? ;) Evolution doesn't have to take all that long. For the claimed effects on intelligence variance, you only need timespans similar to those for lactose tolerance and that kind of thing to develop (i.e. tens of thousands of years-ish).

They could have evolved separate from the genetic side. — yatagarasu

This would depend on whether there's such things as replicators in culture. I do like the idea of memes and memetic evolution as a cute idea in and of itself, but I'm not sure how much weight to put on it. At any rate, the convoluted avoidance so prevalent these days, of the slightest hint that genes might have an influence above the neckline strikes me as the modern-day equivalent of "epicycles."

All sides just assume the worst. : / — yatagarasu

A few decades ago, I would have agreed that there's roughly equal blame on both sides, but these days the Left is much more to blame than the Right. (This shouldn't be such a surprise; the Left has had its time on the naughty step in the past.) Currently, the Left is chasing intersectional identity politics into the abyss, it's gone completely insane, and it's pulling the rest of society with it. It really has to stop.

I just don't see where the particular selection and isolation comes from. — yatagarasu

Well for example you'll get a different average attitude to deferred gratification, planning ahead, etc., where you have an environment that rewards it. That's one hypothesis why the relatively more intelligent races (Asians, Whites) evolved across the northern "band" of regions, which alternated between temperate and cold to temperate over hundreds of thousands of years.

(Just as an aside: I do think there's an intermediary factor though, which is family forms and structures. The full picture would be that environment (in the long run) shapes genes, which shape (in the medium-term) family forms, which (in recent historical terms) shape culture. It's absolutely true that race has some cultural aspects to it - it's just that the genetic aspect is also there, and it's silly to suppress it.)

Mainly because of the implications of eugenics and also partially for discrimination. — yatagarasu

You're actually more likely to get eugenics from the Left (which is historically where you mainly got it from in the past) because they're much more concerned with remaking man into a more ideologically satisfactory being.

But anyway, I must emphasize that none of these racial differences affect the core liberal principle that when it comes to potentially doing violence to people, you judge people by their actions, not by their group membership. The group averages matter some for politics, policy, etc. (e.g. you can only "level the playing field" up to a point, though of course you should level it up to that point), but they don't affect the "negative" rights due to the individual qua individual (of whatever race) in any way. I think a lot of fear of race realism comes from a bit of a muddle over this point.

How, exactly, can you distinguish veridical sense perceptions from non-veridical ones? And how can you show that we have more of the former than the latter? This is the crux of it. If you can do that, then you have an answer to those pesky "why" questions. — PossibleAaran

Count them. Seriously, just count them. Think of all the times when you've proceeded as if your sense perceptions have been correct, and your desires and expectations have been fulfilled by proceeding on the assumption that they're correct, versus the times you misperceived. You get up in the morning, you see what looks like a toothbrush, you pick it up and find you can brush your teeth with it. You reach for what looks like a door handle and find you can use it to open the door and get out of the house. You go to the train station, you step into what looks like a train and you find it's taken you to what looks like your place of work, which look like it has your workstation, where indeed the work is as you remember leaving it, etc., etc., etc. Maybe on the way home you encounter a situation like this:-

"I thought I saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus,
I looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus."

So there you have a whole slew of desires and expectations fulfilled by taking sense perceptions as veridical, and you have one misperception, one expectation baulked. The ratio I'd say is par for the course for the average day.

What else are you to conclude other than that sense perceptions are reliable? What else would reliability consist in, other than ... this sort of thing?

Is it logically possible that any segment of that sequence, or the whole sequence, might be systematically mistaken? Sure, but give a reason for it - until there's a reason to take seriously the idea that there's been systematic, thoroughgoing erroneous perception, then the hypothesis of systematic error is (as I've insisted elsewhere) mere idle imagination.

But even then, you'll always be juxtaposing correct perceptions against erroneous perceptions, even then correct perceptions still have to be possible in order to demonstrate that the whole sequence of perceptions above was erroneous. And that's because perception does that job: that's the burden of empiricism. Perceptions are truth-makers for propositions, that's the place they have in the economy of thought, and we have no other thing to take their place, certainly not schmerception (which is the truncated, presuppositionless way of looking at perception).

My old supervisor criticized my conception of skepticism for being "childish". I agree that there is a parallel between the child's constant questioning and the sceptical one. But I don't see why that makes the sceptical questioning objectionable. It isn't as though if children do P, then necessarily P isn't sensible. — PossibleAaran

It's really more that the sceptic or the endless why-questioner isn't quite getting the game. "Why" questions have a limited ambit, always, they're delimited in a given universe of discourse, against a background in which some things are accepted as true. The extrapolation and extension is basically just continually moving the goalposts.

But we have to be careful here, because sometimes (e.g. a careful detective or journalist, or indeed a scientist or philosopher) pursuing questions a layer or two deeper than the original will discover something useful or interesting. (In this connection, see this wonderful Richard Feynman clip.) But that - knowing when to pursue a "why" question and when to drop it - is what makes inquiry partly an art and a game as well as a science - and partly a matter of judgement arising from long experience with particular fields.

Racist bullshit. — Pseudonym

I was wondering when you'd drop the passive aggressive stance and trot this out. ;)

Francis Parkman, the first to research these events, described "the shameful plan of infecting the Indians" as "detestable". — Pseudonym

A shameful plan which was an aberration and not in fact responsible for more than a tiny fraction of the decimation of the Native Americans by foreign diseases.

And Native Americans gave as good as they got in terms of murderous horribility - unless you think the Indian wars were all initiated by the settlers and the government.

So what mechanism do you imagine generously transfers property, mineral rights and resources from the people who conquered the land to those who were conquered. Did they just change their minds and give it back? — Pseudonym

What transfer of property are you talking about? What "did" happen?

Yes, exactly, and large amounts of capital are the most non-redundant contribution, which is why the investors in a business reap most rewards from it. — Pseudonym

Only if they're successful, as I keep reminding you. Your fantasy is that capital is an automatic machine that churns out riches, that's simply not so. Capitalism is a profit-and-loss system, not just a profit system. The profits outweigh the losses over time for the investor class, and for society as a whole, as I said, and consistently good investors do well - but the losses also exist. "Rags to riches to rags" is a common enough story:-

"By the 1970s, the [Vanderbilt] family held a reunion with 120 members attending, and there wasn't a millionaire among them" - CNNMoney article, 2014

The socioeconomic class of "the rich" continues ever on, but very few people or family dynasties retain their wealth down the generations. Income mobility is huge, still huge in the USA today (which is what makes nonsense of all the "rich are getting richer" mythology).

So those with enough capital to invest get richer, capital to invest comes ultimately from the ownership of land and resources, which come ultimately from violent conflict. — Pseudonym

Again, no: violent conflict is not the source of most property, and certainly not the source of the major fortunes of today. While we're on the subject of the Americas, look at the difference between North America and South America. South America was based directly on violent conquest (in search of gold) in a way that North America wasn't at all. Much good it did them.

Any minuscule differences do not matter as only populations evolve. — yatagarasu

Miniscule differences are what get weeded out by evolution. A fraction of a second's poor physics calculation avoiding a predator can mean the difference between life and death. A tiny error in abstract thinking can make the difference between winning a Nobel prize and cleaning the halls like a schlub. Repeat that across a relatively isolated populations coping with particular types of environment in given geographical regions, and you get average spreads of traits across races, which then get amplified in the cultures those races create.

Again, yes brains are largely similar, individuals brains are largely similar, all human brains are largely similar, but the tiny differences matter in given contexts, both for individuals and for races. Brains may be 99% similar, because they can all do the tremendously sophisticated calculations needed to walk, talk, chew gum, find food, eat it, etc., etc. - that vast iceberg is shared, true. But it's the differences at the tip that count, both for the natural environment, and for the social environment. There's no reason to expect an intelligent brain to look all that different from a dumb one (although size does matter a bit).

There are no genes identified at this point that contribute to intelligence. [...] I'm linking peer reviewed studies to back up my claims. — yatagarasu

I linked to an article about peer-reviewed studies to back up my claim too, and you are flatly wrong, science is starting to identify the genes that contribute to intelligence (about 40 of them according to that meta study). Obviously there is controversy in this field - mainly because there's still a hangover of influence from the early 20th century pseudo-science of Boasian anthropology in general, and the more recent influence of Marxist hacks like Gould, Lewontin, etc., as well as the chilling effect of the contemporary PC cult - but there are peer-reviewed studies on all sides, and science is far from settled in favour of your position.

How would a brain that is anatomically no different and still classified as modern human be any less or more intelligent genetically? — yatagarasu

What on earth are you talking about?

similar brain structures. — yatagarasu

Similar but not identical, there are differences between individuals and average differences between racial/ethnic groups in terms of brain "build" that are subtle and slight, but make for relatively big differences in speed of problem solving, etc.

Our genes are "similar" to chimpanzees', but small differences at the genetic level make for big differences in body/brain structure. Same for intelligence. Depending on the "grain" of your investigation, you could truthfully say that the brain of Einstein and the brain of a moron are similar too. The similarity means they can both perform janitorial functions (for example), but the slight differences mean that only one of those two brains has the headroom to discover deep principles of physics.

Fine-grained investigation of the genetic basis for intelligence is proceeding apace in the current year.

this globalized world. — yatagarasu

The world isn't "globalized" in any meaningful sense genetically - there's a bit of miscegenation at the fringes due to globalization obviously, but there always was mixing at the edges to some extent (cross-border. cross-race trade and mixing isn't something new), and indeed that's what keeps the larger racial/ethnic gene pools healthy.

If you've actually got an argument, then make it, — Pseudonym

I already made it: yes, violence is part of the story, but a relatively minor part. The decimation of Native Americans was a result of diseases accidentally brought from the Old World, they weren't murdered by Whitey. The historical record is always mixed: sometimes there were agreements, sometimes agreements were broken, sometimes by Native Americans, sometimes by the settlers; just as the record was mixed before the settlers arrived (it's not as if all the Native Americans were gentle hippies living at one with the Universe before the nasty settlers arrived).

Basically, since we're all benefiting from some elements of stolen goods in the past (and that would include the "minorities"), it all pretty much cancels out (and where it doesn't, where there's a major imbalance - e.g. blacks and slavery - then of course some specific course of action might be required to level the playing field to some extent, that's all arguable): the point is to ensure that we act justly now and in the future. That is not an aim best served by taking stuff now from people who themselves did nothing wrong but just happen to be of the same race/class as people who did wrong in the past.

Really? Is that why most stock brokers and investment bankers are poor, whilst all those people who actually make things are billionaires. — Pseudonym

Read what I wrote again, the whole passage; most enterprises fail, but the ones that succeed pay for the failures. The average businessman will try several things and fail several times, but if they persist they'll either break even in the long run and make enough to sustain themselves in comfort, or they'll hit the jackpot and all the failures will have been worthwhile.

And who "actually makes" things? The reality is that all the factors contribute to "actually making" things - capital, ideas, labour, etc. And ideally, they all get paid compensation for the relative non-redundancy of their contribution to the final value of the product. (No labour, no widget, true; but no management, no labour, no widget either. And no factory, no management or labour, no widget; and no idea, no factory, no management/labour, no widget.)

unequal shares for equal people and equal shares for unequal people are unjust. In other words, it's justice as equality — Benkei

I think you should really look more closely at what you've said here. The operative principle is proportionality (suum cuique tribuere) not equality, they are not the same thing at all. The "equality" is between varied individuals (for Aristotle, varying in virtue) and their several deserts (small to small, large to large), not between individuals. So it's got absolutely nothing to do with "social justice" as that's conceived in modern philosophy and politics, which is based on a myth of equality.

In fact you have to break proportionality, i.e. you have to act unjustly, in order to attain equality of outcome (as illustrated in the myth of Procrustes).

No, the whole of America was stolen from the Native Americans, so every single non-native (and many natives) is trading in stolen property.

The entire industrial revolution was financed by resources stolen from the colonies, so all major industries are benefitting from the proceeds of crime. — Pseudonym

Oh for crying out loud, this is just PC cult indoctrination. Put down your Howard Zinn and step back from the bong.

No, if that were the case then artisans would be the wealthiest class. Wealth, in a capitalist system, comes from the investment of capital (the clue is in the name), capital is obtained by the ownership of property and the resources the rings. — Pseudonym

You can invest capital and lose it - in fact most investments of capital fail, it's just that the ones that succeed pay for the failures, and more.

Aristotlean social justice was "the proper and proportionate distribution of common assets". — Benkei

I don't know where you're getting this nonsense from. Aristotle talks mostly about what is now called "procedural" justice (Aristotle's "rectification"), not "distributive" justice in the modern "social justice" sense.

His use of "distribution" is mostly in the abstract, and only pertains to actual distribution (such as would be engaged in by a modern state) in a few cases (distribution of honors by the state, distribution of property held in common, e.g. by a partnership).

OK, so what constitutes 'theft', what marks it out exactly? — Pseudonym

Theft is taking control of something away from someone without their consent and without justification on the basis that they were doing harm. Property is a social rule based on the observation of the natural relationship that people have to matter, of controlling its disposition, or using it, in various ways. The social rule says (something like): "let people keep control of whatever they control, until and unless they're doing harm." It's so simple even a child can understand it. Not some deep thinkers though, apparently.

Does marching into a place with guns and declaring that the entire country and all it's assets belongs to you count as theft?

Yes.

Because that's how literally all property ownership came about,

No it's not. Some property (land mostly) has historically been stolen, true, but most property comes via inheritance and exchange, and if you trace it back to its origins, it's some form of original acquisition out of the state of nature.

which is the basis of wealth. — Pseudonym

Partly, but wealth mostly comes either from the fiat creation of currency (which is basically a kind of legalized Ponzi scheme) or by people transforming things from less preferred to more preferred uses (which is the normal process of capitalism).

Take it up with Aristotle. — Benkei

What the hell are you talking about? Aristotle says nothing about social justice, the concept was invented in the 19th century.

Social justice is a subspecies of justice, e.g. the proper and proportionate distribution of common assets. — Benkei

"Common" begs the question.

it is you who are attempting to shut down debate. — Pseudonym

Now you're just being silly.

And some minor college sub-rules and a handful of scuffles do not constitute an attempt to "silence" the thinkers you mention. — Pseudonym

They're pretty major and intimidating to the people who were subjected to them.

The thinkers I mentioned, I mentioned (as a hopefully educational response to your question "what constitutes an attempt?") as people who were starting to broach the subject in the public arena, not necessarily people who had themselves been subjected to attempts at silencing or harassment (although some of them have - for example Ben Shapiro has had recent troubles).

BUT, and this is a big caveat in the reading of any of this research, how can you say a difference in IQ isn't entirely an environment creation. — yatagarasu

The consensus seems to be that variance has varying degrees of genetic vs. environmental causes - for example with political preferences, the variance is around 40-50% heritable, with intelligence something like 60-70% heritable. The usual source for these kinds of claims are twin studies and other types of behavioural genetics studies. Obviously environmental factors like nutrition and parental encouragement are extremely important, that's factored in to these kinds of studies.

How are any of those differences relevant in a interconnected and constantly mixing world? — yatagarasu

Races come from longish periods of relative isolation (usually by geography) - they were mostly formed in a span anywhere from tens of thousands of years to a few hundred thousands of years.

Right, so where's the incontrovertible evidence you talked about? — Pseudonym

Why are you sneaking "incontrovertible" in here? I didn't use the concept.

All you've done is listed books and thinkers who've commented on these abhorrently racists and sexist ideas, give me examples of where someone has attempted to "silence" them. — Pseudonym

https://www.thecollegefix.com/bulletin-board/professor-injured-charles-murray-melee-ignorant-colleagues-tried-shut-us/

https://www.thefire.org/cases/?limit=all

That book is demonstrably racist. See:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/ — Posty McPostface

Well-poisoning, ad hominem twaddle.

Apply this to the view that things exist unperceived (unschmerceived if you like), and unphotographed. The thought would be that we have never experienced anything which refutes that hypothesis, although there is nothing by way of positive reason to support it. Is that your idea? — PossibleAaran

Yes, more or less. The burden of proof is on "not existing unperceived" as a positive, competing hypothesis with "existing unperceived". The latter has (things like) camera evidence, what can you give me for the former? If you can't give me anything, then there's no reason not to work on the latter hypothesis, bearing in mind that both hypotheses are conjectural.

Will respond to your other post later.

OK, so which prominent "Liberal intellectuals" have claimed that "People are equal in their capacities, capabilities or inclinations." I've not heard any myself. — Pseudonym

The position that people are equal in their capacities, capabilities and inclinations is implicit in any drive to equality of outcome. It's not actually often explicitly stated, because it's so obviously stupid.

For example, a big one today would be the gender pay gap; but any form of affirmative action, or move to proportionate representation in a field, presupposes that the sole cause of imbalance in group representation must necessarily be some sort of intrinsically wonky social structure or biased ("racist," "sexist") social circumstances ("white privilege"), even when no actual, verifiable racists or sexists or privileged white people can be found doing anything wrong or obstructive.

But all that goes out the window if it's simply a fact that (to take the racial angle) Jews are on average smarter than Asians, who are on average smarter than Whites, who are on average smarter than Browns, who are on average smarter than Blacks, and if these groups on average have strongly-genetically-influenced inclinations to different kinds of social interaction, different reproductive strategies, different political preferences, different preferences for how they spend their time, different capacities for deferred gratification, different proclivities in relation to violence, etc., etc.

I see, what constitutes an attempt, in your view? — Pseudonym

Oh "you see" do you? :)

Start with, oh I don't know, the hullabaloo against the Bell Curve and Charles Murray, and work your way down to the contemporary kerfuffles on American campuses re. conservative speakers, Alt Right speakers, etc.. You're not living that sheltered a life are you? ;)

If you have perchance been living in an igloo at the North Pole without access to media or the internet for the past 30 years or so, a good starting point would be the work of Jonathan Haidt on the current horrendously biased state of the academy. Other thinkers who are also center-Left or independent, whose investigations have led them to similar conclusions would be Steven Pinker and Sam Harris. (The Right of course has been banging on about this for decades - a recent famous public figure who's center-Right who rails against what I'm talking about would be Jordan Peterson. Other starting points would be Thomas Sowell, and further to the Right Ben Shapiro, David Horowitz and others along similar lines.)

Some intellectuals, especially a lot of intellectuals in certain liberal arts fields, fit these descriptions. But a lot don't. — Bitter Crank

I don't know about "a lot" - I think perhaps secretly there are definitely more than we think, but people (especially people with good positions and families to support) are so terrified of losing their jobs these days for stepping out of line with PC cult dogma, it's not as often vocalized, so the dogma is what's bruited abroad by default. To some extent obviously it's different in STEM, but these lunatics are even starting to encroach on maths and science now.

You have to have a fairly high level of achievement, or tenure or something like that, and a fairly good liberal "ant smell," like a Pinker or a Haidt, to get away with not toeing the party line, even to the fairly mild extent those guys do.

On the plus side, the PC cult isn't long for this world, because it's destroying the very respectability and power that made institutions like academia and business so attractive for them to take over. They're starting to cause financial problems too (e.g. universities losing customers, HR departments being more trouble than they're worth, etc.) - and that's really the bottom line, to a large extent. I think probably 20 years from now, there won't be a "gender studies" class in sight, and people will look back on this period of the past few decades like a kind of intellectual Tulipmania, shake their heads and wonder wtf people were thinking.

Interesting. So this absolutely incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, care to elaborate? — Pseudonym

People are not equal in their capacities, capabilities and inclinations.

Also, the attempts to silence to opposition intrigues me. What is this opposition that no one has heard? — Pseudonym

"Attempts."

social justice — Benkei

Social justice is not a thing, it's pretty much an oxymoronic concept that means "injustice." Any analysis that uses the concept instantly marks itself as being of little account.

It would be far better, and more honest, to simply say one wants to steal from the rich to give to the poor because one feels more sympathy for the poor than the rich. That's actually the plain intuition behind the concept. But the attempt to dress up theft as a species of justice by using a qualifier that effectively reverses the meaning of "justice" is just a silly Motte & Bailey tactic. Nobody is fooled (except, apparently, the people who use the concept in all seriousness).

That said, of course there's a level at which people generally do agree that some measure of equalization of opportunity is in order, and are willing to pay for it, and the amount of it that's necessary is always a live topic for discussion (partly because circumstances are always shifting as a result of changing technology, partly because any measure designed to equalize opportunity bumps up against the depressing fact that there's a lot of variance in natural capacities and inclinations, both across individuals and across races and ethnic groups).

But that is charity, not justice.

So anyone who has some axioms as a fundamental belief, admits that this is the case, and then makes rational scientific arguments extrapolating from those axioms logically, is deserving of contempt? — Pseudonym

If they do it in the teeth of evidence contradicting their axioms, without any attempt to address the discrepancy, while attempting to silence opposition, yes.

I would say most anti-intellectualism is actually well deserved these days.

Intellectuals get kudos when they stand somewhat against the establishment, when they're a gadfly on the establishment, or at the very least are impartial and capable of standing aloof enough to render judgement. That's how Left-wing intellectuals got respect when the establishment was traditionalist and Right-wing.

Intellectuals today, on the other hand, are part of the "liberal," globalist, multiculturalist establishment, they support it blindly. Some of them even admit openly that their unquestioning support for the absolutism of equality of outcome is a leap of faith.

In effect, they are largely conformist shills for the PC cult, too terrified to say boo to a mouse. That deserves not respect, but contempt.

But, given your initial remarks about "getting the idea that there is an anomaly" in one's model, perhaps you think that for some reason Descartes cannot sensibly raise this question about the reliability of sense perception. It would be great if that were so, but how could it be? — PossibleAaran

No, of course he can ask it. But the short answer to the question "Why believe that sense perception is reliable?" is because it is in fact reliable.

And you can show that sense perception is in fact reliable because you can distinguish reliable perceptions from unreliable ones, and show that we have more reliable ones than unreliable ones: which means that sense perception is reliable. It's not absolutely guaranteed to give a nugget of truth every time, but it sometimes does and sometimes doesn't, and the fact that it mostly does is the very meaning of "reliable."

Again, it's the two concepts together that apply to reality, not just the one. If perception always gave guaranteed nuggets of truth, we wouldn't have the concept reliable, because we wouldn't have the concept unreliable, there would be no contrast, so we wouldn't notice, so the question wouldn't even come up.

The longer answer would involve evolutionary biology, anatomy, neurobiology, etc. And it would also involve looking at perceptions in the context of desires and expectations (whether they're fulfilled or not) - perception (for animals and us) is a phase of action in service of desire, and under expectations set by models as aforesaid. This would be connected with pragmatism, but I think pragmatism goes too far in tying truth connections simply to fulfillments. We are talking about truth, which is to say we are ultimately talking about the models/projections of how reality is, and using perceptions to filter the model. But the fact that using our perceptions gets us what we want is definitely tied in with what we mean by the reliability of perception: if we were baulked at every turn by following our perceptions, and ended up starving in a ditch, we wouldn't think much of perception.

(Now in all the above, I can sense you champing at the bit: you no doubt want to say, "But aren't sense perceptions being used in the very process of checking out whether sense perceptions are reliable?" This seems to be homing in on our disagreement even more: somehow, you think this is circular. But why?)

Btw, I can't resist it: if Descartes relentlessly asks "why?" then ultimately he's in the position of the child relentlessly asking "why?" in the comedian Louis CK's skit, and his intelocutor is entitled to lose patience with him at some point: "WHY? Aw fuck you, eat your french fries you little shit, goddamit." :D

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=louis+ck+why&view=detail&mid=9D4912E6BB08967131D39D4912E6BB08967131D3&FORM=VIRE