I don't know if indignation is the right word, maybe "mind****."

I mean, try to sincerely imagine the following.

-You're driving on the highway. It's a clear day and you're wide awake.
-Suddenly you're aware of something awful happening with the 18 wheeler ahead of you — a tire blows out, jack knifing the trailer across your lane. You intuitively realize you're about to hit a semi going 75 MPH as you instinctively hit the brakes.
-Everything goes black on impact, but you have a weird series of sensations similar to those described in the Near Death Experience literature, which slowly fade to nothing, like a deep sleep.
-Next thing you know, you're awake, somewhere dark and wet. You feel fine. You recall the accident. A dream?
>What the hell? You become aware of having not two but six hand and arm like appendages, which you can feel as well as you could feel your old arms— and a tail.
>A light opens. There is a voice, and it's speaking a language you don't know, except, as if recalling something from a dream, you realize you do know what they are saying.
>You're highly confused, but also strangely unanxious, like this is all familiar.
>Hands help you up, but they are the hands of a strange creature, a sort of six armed cross between a dolphin and a merman. Somehow, this also seems familiar and doesn't provoke anxiety.
>Over the next few hours you're given something to drink and begin to recall an entire prior life that occured before your human life. You recall that you are a non-human entity who went into an entertainment pod to experience a synthetic world. You have friends and acquaintances in this world. You're entire life as a human begins to rapidly seem like the false memories one sometimes has during dreams, something that seemed very real, and came with a sense of memory that lingers, but then is ultimately pushed away by the mind as unreal.

----

I mean, provided this actually happened to you, at no point would you say, "hmm, this really changes how I look at some things?" It would make me worry less about auto accidents in the future, for one thing.

Also, unless I now remembered some really good argument for why my new/current reality wasn't also a simulation, I would begin to seriously wonder if I was still in a simulation. Hell, maybe the whole reason entities create such simulations is that they hope, in some possible world, to find the one argument that grounds anything as non-simulation.

I think this is one of those cases where we can say "what difference does it make," and that may indeed still apply for some philosophical questions, but for much else, it would make all the difference. That is, it can only be dismissed because either people can't imagine it or they dismiss the possibility of such a thing occuring out of hand and so refuse to imagine it.

On a side note, I always thought simulating something like this would be a way to get people to confess to things when interrogations don't work, provided you could make it realistic. After all, why would a spy or terrorist keep any secrets if they've been convinced all their memories are essentially from play testing a VR video game?

Also, consider this set of facts that go against the unitary "business party argument."

-Republicans, who have been feuding with big tech, particularly social media companies over what they consider to be inappropriate censorship, have advocated for huge legal changes that would dramatically affect these companies liability to law suits and ability to generate profit. They have also pushed wholly breaking up these companies as monopolies, which is just about the biggest step the government can take against a company and its shareholders outside of dissolving the corporation wholesale, nationalizing it, or fining it into bankruptcy (which is essentially seizing its assets).

-Many of Democrats laws would dramatically effect big agra's ability to generate profits by enforcing pollution based taxes on products. Dems have also entertained the idea of breaking up meat packing companies as 85% of all meat is now controlled by 4 companies and 60% of the value of the average grocery cart goes to 5 major conglomerates.

- GOP state secretaries have stepped in to find companies that move away from carbon based power. These companies are doing so as part of a business plan and the GOP is using policy to overrule business decisions on the grounds that the coal sector is declining due to unjust "woke" agendas.

- Democrats almost universally advocate for an equal rights amendment that would radically shift law suits over discrimination in favor of workers. Currently, in most states, it is completely legal to fire someone for being homosexual or transgender. Arguments over company's rights to deny service based on identity also divide the parties.

That is, they are in no way unitary vis-á-vis businesses and one party getting a super majority would generate major winners and losers in the market.

For example, the Democrats absolutely massive package for green technology obviously has a real impact on the amount of revenue electricity producers generate, not to mention that Dems have generally been far more in favor of having the state take over utilities historically (this is no longer the case, the government doesn't want to own utilities anymore because it often ends up being a political nightmare, but that's another issue).

Texas's deregulation of its energy grid had very real consequences for the lives of Texans for example. The state parties differed as to support for that even though it was a pro-buisness move.

Nationalizing healthcare generates tons of winners. For low wage employees, the employer share of their health care can be greater than 50% of their compensation. Businesses that employ a lot of low wage workers and small businesses stand to gain massively from national health insurance. Health insurance companies would be wiped out and providers would likely see wages dip. Given this is 1/5th of GDP and majority private, it's hard to see his a huge difference in this front can mean the same thing for businesses.

Yes.

If 4 shares an identity with 2+2, 3+1, 5+ -1, 8/2, etc. then the P≠NP problem doesn't make sense and we also are left with the "scandal of deduction," the conclusion that deductive reasoning produces no new information, where information is defined loosely in the way used for Shannon Entropy, i.e., a reduction in uncertainty. That is, seeing Euclid's postulates once, I should be completely certain as to the correct answer for any properly encoded Euclidean geometry problem. This falls flat on its face in the real world.

If a unique description of an abstract objects, e.g., a number, is that number, and actually grants the full information about that object the way information theory suggests, then the phrase "the 981x10^131st prime number after zero," should be equivalent to that object and be able to be used in computation. It can't be. No computer ever made could identity such a number in decimal form despite the phrase perfectly defining an actual natural number because the calculation requires more resources than the visible universe.

That said, we can do computational with that number. We can say it is less than its successor and greater than its predecessors because we can work on the information in compressed form. We do this all the time in computation. But my argument is that the logical operations of computation have a being as real as abstract objects and can't simply be ignored as a "finite, somehow less real thing we do to real abstract objects."

Consider this, there are infinitely more irrational numbers than rationals (despite their being infinite rationals) because each irrational is infinite and a new one can be made by flipping a digit. Thus the rationals cannot be set in a 1:1 correspondence with the irrationals.

Now consider that there are infinite ways to encode all rational and irrational numbers in an equation (let's just stick to the reals for now). That is, for 1 we can do 1, 2-1, 3-2, 4-3, etc. with infinite ways of representing the number using addition, infinite ways to represent it with just subtraction, new infinites when involving fractions, multiplication, exponents, etc.

The set of all equations that are "equal" to any number X is infinitely larger than the set of reals as they cannot be set in 1:1 correspondence. There is an infinite number of encodings for each member of the number set. The decimal form of any number is just a proper unit set of the encoding set, and thus all decimal numbers a proper subset of the encoding set.

Thus, no computer, even an infinite one, can ever recognize every equation as identity, it MUST engage in stepwise logical manipulation, not because of physical limits, but because encodings cannot be set in a 1:1 correspondence with numbers.

I didn't hit on the grounds for a possible proof of this until I was thinking about it on a run last night, but feel free to tear it down. It might not be very solid.

No, I don't think so. It seems like you could be conscious even if your blood had to be circulated by a machine, your blood oxygenated by a machine, etc.

I wasn't really thinking in those terms. I was just thinking in terms of estimates of the total computational power of the human brain in the biological equivalent of floating point operations per second versus the amount of that computational power that can actually be allocated for doing things like planning and executing a Moon landing.

Intuitively, it seems like digital AI would have to allocate a lower share of its total computational resources towards non-relevant activities. I might be entirely wrong about that though.

This is an excellent point. I think it's easy to miss that a huge amount of the brain's "floating point operations per second," or their rough biological equivalent, are devoted entirely to helping a human being avoid tripping over as they walk, keeping the heart and lungs properly synced up, constantly searching incoming sensory streams for threats, motivating a person to go eat, use the bathroom, or talk to their attractive coworker, etc.

It's not even just that humans need to eat, drink, etc., producing down time, it's that a large part of the computation power we have access to, likely a solid majority, is used to maintain homeostasis or so adapted to survival functions that it is hard to keep task oriented.

That said, I think it's also possible that we vastly underestimate the advantages of biological systems' use of dynamic parallel processing and have over emphasized the role of action potentials alone in cognition. I read a book called "The Other Brain," on glial cells a while back and it was remarkable how much this under appreciated set of cells effects everything the brain does. The actual workings of neurotransmitters are incredibly complex and most neural networks reduce this to just "inhibitory value" or "excitation," which we may learn misses a lot more than we thought through AGI experiments.

I'm not that pessimistic, but if AGI proves very far away, I'd wager it is because our shot in the dark attempts to describe biological computing power in terms of our digital computers was massively off the mark due to only focusing on "number of nerve cell firing." There are a lot of signals that change cell metabolism, feed back loops involving hormones to NTs and back, places where a molecule at one binding site subtlety changes the shape of another which in turn radically affects signaling, etc. It would take FAR more information to encode all that, and so if that stuff ends up being essential instead of merely a means to get neurons depolarizing, computation in the brain could involve orders of magnitude more processing power to replicate, let alone the jump if some sort of quantum search optimization akin to photosynthesis shows up in a way that meaningfully effects things.

E.g., https://news.mit.edu/2022/neural-networks-brain-function-1102

But maybe the things we want AGI to do don't depend on this stuff (if it is essential)? That seems distinctly possible.

Hume thinks "causation" reduces to "constant conjunction." That is, "A causes B iff whenever A occurs B occurs after." So, for Hume, causation is a conditional relationship, which is something that exists in/can be known by reason.

That said, I think you're correct about how Hume thinks of causation in a way, because he is essentially saying, "what most people think causation is cannot be what it really is because such a relationship is unknowable, thus by "causation" we mean constant conjunction." However, he doesn't think that there is a secret causation unaccessible to reason lurking behind a veil in the world, he thinks causation is just conjunction.



Measure everything and plug the data into equations we have for exactly this sort of thing. If you do it right you will correctly predict how the balls will react every time to a degree of precision that makes any variance indistinguishable. If you're a good billiards player, you can do this intuitively.

This seemingly relies on induction, at least from our standpoint. However, multiple paths exist around the problem of induction.

First, we could adopt a Bayesian approach utilizing the principle of maximum entropy. This is an approach where we use methods grounded in deduction to determine the statistical likelihood that observation X predicts observation Y. This method requires jettisoning any attempt to speak about ontology or causation, and any hope of certainty, but arguably grounds itself in deduction from probability theory. Of course, no one actually lives like this, so it's a best an academic exercise to investigate how such a scheme works.

Second, we could adopt the position the the world is inherently rational. We can ground this in speculative exercises and logical arguments, e.g. Hegel's objective logic. From here, provided we haven't gotten lost in our dizzying system or made an error somewhere, we can proceed with "causality as logical entailment," or more popular in physics today "causality as computation, progressions between possible states."

Third, we can note that Hume's argument undercuts any knowledge of the world. To be sure, Hume thought 'relations of ideas,' i.e. logical truths, were secure, and even known 'matters of fact,' but those who came after him began tearing down those concepts. After all, don't we use induction in proving to ourselves that our memories are accurate or in vetting the sources for our matters of fact? And Quine has a pretty damaging critique of relations of ideas (although I am left less convinced by it than many it seems.). This being the case, we are left with radical skepticism about everything. Except no one lives like they assume this to be true, and so we have to assume that Hume made a fundamental mistake somewhere along the line in assessing how we come to know about the world. If knowledge is impossible, why trust the knowledge that knowing is not possible in the first place? It's self-undermining.

I agree that science, as a methodology, does not presuppose monism. However, the modern scientific project begins with an attempt to reduce the "truth" of all observations to a unitary form that will be describable using the mathematics of the day (mathematics that could deal with qualitative or categorical differences being largely a more recent invention). In modern terms, we could say this required the supposition that all intensive traits can be reduced to extrinsic ones, a supposition that has not been proven to date, let alone in the early modern period.

This reduction isn't equivalent to ontological monism, but at times it gets close. That said, you could also say it has supported the growth of dualism as well, because it results in people talking about how color, taste, etc. are some sort of distinct "mental" phenomena.

To excite in us tastes, odors, and sounds I believe that nothing is required in external bodies except shapes, numbers, and slow or rapid movements...

Having shown that many sensations which are supposed to be qualities residing in external objects have no real existence save in us, and outside ourselves are mere names, I now say that I am inclined to believe heat to be of this character. Those materials which produce heat in us and make us feel warmth, which are known by the general name of “fire,” would then be a multitude of minute particles having certain shapes and moving with certain velocities. Galileo, The Assayer(1623)

It's worth noting that the idea that everything is in fact "determined by" a "multitude of minute particles," pre-dates anything resembling science by centuries, showing up in ancient Egyptian thought and the earliest Greek thought. This is a type of monism, and it has been related closely enough to the sciences that the two can sometimes seem to blur together. The same can be said of "everything being describable in terms of mathematics." I think these two points are very different though.

The "fundamental bits," argument is so old, and has been so robust in the face of evidence that suggests its displacement that, as I've mentioned elsewhere on the forum, I think we have good reason to believe that it might be rooted in human biology. That is, the same arguments for doubting the "true" existence of color can be directed quite well against the corpuscular model. And in any event, this isn't something that is essential for the sciences, although it does seem essential to popular conceptions of science.

The idea that the world can be described by mathematics, that it can be rationally understood at all, does seem more essential to science. If the world isn't rational, or if we cannot understand this rationality, then what good is science (and why is it so pragmatically useful)? Acceptance of the validity of induction and some elements of mathematics/logic seem to be a prerequisite for science. This can be interpreted as an argument for monism if you accept the premise that whatever is rational has to essentially be a single type of thing.

The argument would be "there are not multiple types of rationality, multiple, discrete logical necessities, and thus the intelligible aspect of the world must be, at some level, a unified type. The unintelligible aspects of the world, if such things can coherently exist, don't enter into the question because how can one know the unknowable?" That does seem like it could qualify as monism.


Eugene Wigner gets at this indirectly in the opening of his famous paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences."

There is a story about two friends, who were classmates in high school, talking about their jobs. One of them became a statistician and was working on population trends. He showed a reprint to his former classmate. The reprint started, as usual, with the Gaussian distribution and the statistician explained to his former classmate the meaning of the symbols for the actual population, for the average population, and so on. His classmate was a bit incredulous and was not quite sure whether the statistician was pulling his leg. "How can you know that?" was his query. "And what is this symbol here?" "Oh," said the statistician, "this is pi." "What is that?" "The ratio of the circumference of the circle to its diameter." "Well, now you are pushing your joke too far," said the classmate, "surely the population has nothing to do with the circumference of the circle."

Naturally, we are inclined to smile about the simplicity of the classmate’s approach. Nevertheless, when I heard this story, I had to admit to an eerie feeling because, surely, the reaction of the classmate betrayed only plain common sense. I was even more confused when, not many days later, someone came to me and expressed his bewilderment [The remark to be quoted was made by F. Werner when he was a student in Princeton.] with the fact that we make a rather narrow selection when choosing the data on which we test our theories. "How do we know that, if we made a theory which focuses its attention on phenomena we disregard and disregards some of the phenomena now commanding our attention, that we could not build another theory which has little in common with the present one but which, nevertheless, explains just as many phenomena as the present theory?" It has to be admitted that we have no definite evidence that there is no such theory.

Exactly.

At least the concerns about "indoctrination," in public schools has some basis in a concern for reflexive freedom and self-determination...

Unfortunately, the way this is being addressed is patently absurd, finding indoctrination where there is none, and trying to simply legislate into place their preferred form of indoctrination.

It's absurd that I'm forced to lament the old days of corny Toby Keith songs blaring in the supermarket: "and I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. And I won't forget the men who died, who gave that right to me," uncritical chest thumping, because what came next was "tear down all the institutions, you're only free when nothing constrains you!"

I can understand now why Hegel turned on the sans culottes (that and the whole mass executions thing...).

Not really. Just a matter of degree. The poor would be poorer and the rich richer under Trump.

A rape victim being forced to carry her rapist's child to term is not quantifiable in the degree to which "the poor would be poorer and the rich richer." Neither is more people ending up in prisons for drug offenses. Being able to open your own business without losing access to healthcare also has an effect on personal freedom that cannot be quantified in dollar figures. Likewise, people getting to become citizens in the country in which they have made their homes grants them more than merely financially quantifiable benefits.

I suppose if your only unit of analysis is household net worth, this above is true. But that seems more like a problem in picking your unit of analysis than a real reduction. This was always the problem I had with neo-Marxist analysis: "everything comes down to social class, I can prove it by giving an analysis where everything in analyzed only in terms of class," or the newly popular version of doing the same thing with race; it's just a complex form of petitio principii.

I think the goal of the state is to promote freedom. Wealth inequality and overall levels of wealth are certainly a determinant of freedom, but they are far from the only one. For example, a strong sense of national identify that citizens buy into and feel included in is not quantifiable in economic terms. It is, however, essential for freedom for the simple reason that:

1. For a state to be successful requires that citizens are willing to make sacrifices for the state and for the common welfare, and;

2. Citizens will not freely choose to make those sacrifices unless they identify with the state and derive happiness from promoting its greater good.

If citizens do not choose to support the state, but only do so out of coercion, it is on shakey ground. And certainly, with the advent of Trump, I would say that the Republican party has embraced a new vision of freedom that is defined overwhelmingly as negative freedom, i.e., freedom from constraint, particularly government constraint. This view of freedom is, at its core, philosophically anathema to a successful state, though thankfully not all traces of a consideration of reflexive or social freedom has been purged from the GOP, just the "Trumpist" component.

Do you think a Cauchy sequence of positive rationals can be used to describe the Golden Ratio? If so, whats the fundamental difference here?

I think both can be used to describe the Golden Ratio, just as we can use the English language to describe it. They can describe the ratio to arbitrary precision.

That said, because the irrationals require an infinite amount of information to encode, they would require an infinite series of rationals. However, infinity is not a rational number because it is undefined as to its status as an integer, thus I don't think an infinite series can encode an irrational number while remaining itself rational (see also the points on Cantor above re: the irrationals having more elements and density on a number line).

On the Stern-Brocot tree, might irrationals be all the infinite strings which do not end in R_repeated or L_repeated?

It seems the same problem mentioned above might hold here since we have another infinite entity. In this case, we are using an infinite part of an infinite tree, but I don't know if that changes things.

Do you think some irrational numbers have conditional existence while others do not?

That's a tough question. I was referring specifically to ratios being conditional on the existence of something else. A ratio is necessarily a relationship and any relationship between two things is contingent on those things existing. A ratio cannot exist "of itself," which is why I call it "second-order abstract."

E.g., the Golden Ratio is only instantiated in other abstract objects in the same sort of way that numbers are only instantiated in quantities of items in the world (physical examples of the GR are imperfect approximations). This of course entails that the numerical representation of GR is related to, but not identical with the GR, since the GR is a ratio which can only obtain in virtue of other objects.

But against this you could say that, if the objects involved in the relationship exist necessarily, then surely the relationships that follow from their existence are also necessary.

This is a fair point. I suppose in a formalist interpretation the existence of objects depends on axioms and axioms are only selected contingently.

I don't have a preferred philosophy of mathematics. Leaning towards a sort of Hegelian dialectical logicalism, I would say that some objects do appear to be conditional on a dialectical progression; i.e., "x must come before y." This is a view were universals/abstract entities do not exist without particulars and particulars are reliant on universals for their existence (a circular relationship). If the world moves from the most basic differentiations on, then abstract objects are contingent on this progression.

I don't find intuitionism inviting because everything experienced is mental. So, saying "abstract objects exist, but are constructed mentally" seems to reduce to "abstract entities exist." The only difference is positing some sort of unknowable, and thus entirely irrelevant noumenal world.

Or are you making a claim about numbers in general requiring abstract objects to exist?

Wouldn't numbers be an abstract object? In any event, I think this comes down to my contention that the irrational number corresponding to the GR is not identical with the GR unless it is instantiated as a ratio.

Am I understanding correctly that you believe there is no decimal representation of the Golden Ratio? If that's the case, do you believe there are 2 solutions to the equation x^2-x-1=0? Are you saying something subtle here, such as there are 2 solutions but we can't represent them in decimal form?

I'm saying a decimal number is just an encoding of a pattern/abstraction, it isn't identical with it. I believe this point is essential to understanding the P = NP dilemma. Computation has an abstract existence. Perhaps, we could even say that some mathematical relationships are only instantiated through computation or are somehow dependent on it? I don't know if I would go that far yet.

If any given encoding of a number was truly identical with it, then anyone with a working knowledge of arithmetic and Arabic numerals should find the equation: 〖(35^2*1/57)〗^3+1,912* ∛592.704 readily identifiable with its decimal form or any other of the infinite ways that same number could be encoded in an equation. According to quantitative information theory, just glancing at the equation should allow you to instantly reduce your uncertainty about the identity of the number in decimal form to 0.

Obviously, this is not how things actually work, we don't read Euclid's axioms once and instantly know geometry. Throw a sufficiently complex algorithm that is supposedly equal to a relatively simple number at a supercomputer and it might not finish the computations until the heat death of the universe. Stepwise computation seems necessary to relationships between mathematical objects; complex relations have to be broken down into logically simpler ones to be manipulated. Dialectically, we could say we have the specific encoding juxtaposed with the universal abstraction, which is a bundle of relations. Computation is the sublation of the abstraction into quasi-concrete symbols through which the encoding is actually understood... or something like that.

I honestly have no clue what a GOP dominated US would look like. They had their best showing in over a century in 2016 and the major legislative achievement during their small window controlling all branches of government was just another round of Reagan style tax cuts. They didn't hold a single vote on migration, which was the Trump issue or repeal Obamacare, another core issue they spent a decade on.

The party failed to even publish a platform in 2020. It needs a new set of leaders to try to right the ship and come up with some sort of a coherent vision of what the ideal state looks like.

I mean, given there is a 50% chance that they will be in control each term, it'd be nice to see a return to sanity and an ability to govern at the national level. At least with the Dems, even if you don't like their policy, it is easy to articulate what it would be.

I don't think anything like "statistics," for that exists. You'd be hard pressed to get people arming up to protest tyrannical government to fill out surveys for you.

However, armed right wing protests since 2020 have generally been photographed in detail, so you can take a look for yourself. That the crowds are majority male, by a large margin, majority White, by an even larger margin, and skew older seems readily apparent.

And I was making a comparison to other revolutionary movements and the compositions of militaries. The maximum age to enlist or receive a commission is 35 for the Army, 28 for the Marines for example. It's a historical anomaly for such a movement to include more men with grey hair than ones you could mistake for undergraduates. That said, it's not particularly surprising since Donald Trump, still mostly a hero in far-right circles, lost voters under 30 by a landslide 29 points (by contrast, W. Bush split 18-24 voters almost even). https://www.statista.com/statistics/1184426/presidential-election-exit-polls-share-votes-age-us/

Not that there is any definite overlap between people who vote for Y candidate and those who bring assault rifles to their governor's front lawn, but I'd have to imagine the recruiting pool is a subset of the larger whole for any set of political radicals.

I don't know, maybe that sort of thing will become more common as society ages overall. Anyhow, I wasn't trying to be ageist. Certainly there have been plenty of older, very successful revolutionaries. It's just strange for the entire cohort to be older. Normally it's the young people who get all hot headed and want to tear institutions down without fully thinking through what that means. I don't think the small subset of people marching around state houses with rifles particularly represents any age bracket as a whole.

That's not even the wild part. Generally if you want to take control, especially as a minority, you want the military on your side. And this has always tended to be more true of right wing groups. The far-right turning on the military is the truly bizarre part.

I don't think this works. In your link there is a proof of the fact that the Golden Ratio is irrational. As such, how are we going to describe it with the positive rationals? There is no "last" set of turns that can describe the GR, since there will always be more to describe. This akin to how Zeno's Achilles can never catch the tortoise.

Moreover, there are some infinite sets that have more elements than others and some infinite sets can be denser than others. A common example of this is that there are infinitely more irrational numbers than rational numbers. However, if we could fully describe one irrational with the rationals than it stands to reason that we should be able to do this with others through a different series of turns. However, that can't be the case given the aforementioned.

On a more philosophical note, I think there might be another problem. The Golden Ratio is a relationship that maintains between parts of a whole (e.g., segments of a pentagram, the ancestry of male bees, etc.) This is true even in the abstract sense. It is not an abstract object, but rather a property of abstract objects, ratios being necessarily relational. That is, it exists only as it is instantiated in other abstract entities, making it a sort of "second-order abstract" entity.

In the formalist interpretation of mathematics, where "an entity is what it does," the ratio is just one of the relationships that define an entity. In the Platonist/realist view, I'm not sure exactly what it is (same goes for computation).

The complete series of decimals or turns wouldn't be the ratio though, even if such a series was finitely possible. If symbols, human names for abstract objects, were those things, then writing down the unique descriptor "the first number that violates the Goldbach Conjecture," would be the same thing as "discovering" it, and should entitle us to some prize money and a place in the history of mathematics.

Now, there are definitely both philosophers and physicists who challenge the reality of infinities, in which case, perhaps such a "last sequence" can exist. That's a broader question though.

Sort of. They are accused of pushing woke ideology for a variety of reasons, which in turn makes them a target for "cancellation." It is surprising though, given Disney has very much catered to the Evangelical right in its content production over the past decades.

But it is less shocking then the new right wing trend of attacking the US security apparatus (the FBI, the intelligence community) and the military. This would have been unthinkable in the W. Bush Era, but now memes like this are quite common:



It's a very weird thing that the radical far-right, with their proclamations of an immanent "Boog," or "second civil war," has decided to attack the military as insufficiently righteous. Apparently, the new utopia/minority rule will be brought about by legions of amateur, majority senior citizen revolutionaries.

I can't say I recall a single revolt in history with a median age of 55, but if you look at armed protests in the US that would be my low end estimate for age. It's weird, especially since half the nation's budget is transfer payments to seniors. I suppose it is more about social control, not economic factors though.

Not sure what you're referring to. The last thing I wrote ITT was a rejection of the idea that one state somehow controls global economic production. I pointed out that global issues tend to be emergent phenomena with inherit collective action problems that reduce actors' degrees of freedom in action, see: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/801612 .

I suppose the other big things feeding into the illusion of a uniparty are:
-an independent civil service
-federalism with extremely strong regional government (really unlike any other modern liberal state)
-the common law system

The Civil Service: On a day to day basis, local, state, and federal government is managed by a relatively independent careerist civil service. Government employees have way more protections then private sector employees (look up "Loudermill Hearings") and are 33% unionized (more at the local level) with even high level supervisors, e.g. police captains and zone fire chiefs commonly being unionized.

This means that, regardless of who takes control, the same people end up enacting policy. This is the true "Deep State."

However, this isn't a bad thing. Political science has identified a professional, independent civil service as a pillar of successful states, right up there with rule of law and a state monopoly on use of force. The independent civil service, and in the US context the strong, independent non-government civil society organizations (e.g. the American Bar Association) are the reason that, contrary to partisan propaganda, the entire country doesn't radically change every time a new party takes the executive. Imagine if the President got to appoint almost all public employees based on ideology...

Such independence can be a barrier on reform, although an adequate level of independence and professionalism is also a prerequisite for effective reform. The civil service can act as a road block for reform when reforms challenge its prerogatives. A civil service that is too strong will actively torpedo the government to coerce it into paying out donatives and grow corrupt (e.g. some police unions).

However, it also acts as a curb on demagogues ripping down the foundations of the state overnight. I've worked in local, state, and federal government. There are plenty of very conservative people and very liberal people in both who buy into cable news narratives... for the most part. But in the area they have substantive policy expertise from their work, they virtually always have had much more nuanced opinions about how to go about reforming the system and the need to avoid super ideological nonsense. That's the plus side of the strong civil service; they know their issues. But you also need checks on them. Plus, a strong esprit de corps goes a long way in stopping corruption; norms matter.

Federalism also makes the parties seem more similar, since the Feds, what most people watch, have only an ancillary involvement in many of the areas of government people care about most. Take out entitlements and defense and state + local makes up a far larger share of government spending than the feds. For most citizens, their biggest involvement with the state is spending most days in a public school from age 3-5 to 18. But in most states schools are largely run at the district/county/municipal level. States have a bit more leverage, and the Feds not much at all. Same goes for police, fire, roads, business permits, and utilities.

The common law system can also act as a curb on change because you face the weight of historical precedent. Lifetime judicial appointments do the same thing because liberals norms tend to advance over time, leaving a liberal from decades ago more towards the center (although the reverse can be true as well).

But that just creates a mirage of lack of difference. It's extremely hard to imagine that if either party for 70 votes in the Senate, a large House majority, and the White House, we wouldn't see massive changes in legislation touching most aspects of life.

I mean, if Donald Trump or Joe Biden got to appoint all government employees (obviously delegating a lot), does anyone doubt the country would be radically different?

Another is ideological narrowness. There is a dynamic with two parties that tends towards narrowness, and extremity on one side of the political spectrum. Suppose one party veers to the left or the right. This is seemingly a blunder: the logical response for the other party is to move along with them. After all, the constituents on "their" side of the spectrum have no alternative, while they may acquire new moderate voters who are turned of by the other side's extremity. But then, this moves the ideological spectrum of the whole country towards the direction of the more extreme party, including those contested moderate voters. This leads to ideological narrowness and a veering towards one ideological direction.

There is also the primary system that selects candidates. The primaries occur at different times of year in each state, and often there are multiple primary/preliminary elections in a single year, each for different types of posts. This results in very low turnout, especially when elections are scheduled for non-presidential election years. Many states also only allow official party members to vote in the primary.

The timing and restrictions on primary voting mean that a small share of voters gets to pick the candidates. These are more motivated voters and radicals tend to be more motivated. Primary voters also tend to be wealthier and older.

Then add in the antiquated signature system for getting on the ballot and the role of party horse trading in lower level elections which get almost no media coverage and you get a system where influence with a party (which money can buy) and money itself are huge in determining if you are a viable candidate for many races. There is also the issue of some state and local elected positions being paid too little to live on, so that only the independently wealthy can hold them.

The US primary system is designed in such a way that more radical members tend to get elected. If we did ranked choice voting with 2-4 candidates per party for Congress you'd get representation much closer to the median voter.

But it is this very radicalism that counter intuitively makes people think the parties are identical. Because you can block legislation from passing with a minority in most states and at the federal level, radicalism actually results in less being done. Basically, only stuff that isn't politically salient gets passed (i.e. the "Secret Congress hypothesis."). This isn't because all the legislators secretly agree, it's because anything seen as politically charged gets blocked by radicals and people scared of being challenged by radicals in a primary.

This seems entirely context dependant. Depending on your culture, level of technological developments, and means of governing I could see very different systems being appropriate.

I used to live in a state where, if your town was under a certain population, you had to have an Open Town Meeting form of government. This is a style of government big in New England where every adult resident of the town is part of the legislature. They set the budget, appoint the select board (3-5 people who act as the executive and hire staff), etc. That works fine with a few thousand people, especially if most people are content/busy enough not to bother showing up for meetings and politics aren't very divisive, but it's not going to work if you have sectarian strife* or a larger population.

*Not that I haven't heard horror stories of a handful of residents acting like zoning debates in their town are basically on the same level as the Thirty Years War, it's just that luckily no one else cares as much as them about which street the Taco Bell drive through opens onto or whatever...

Yeah, I suppose having a choice over carrying a child to term, or having universal access to child care versus spending about a third of your pre-tax income on it (how the math works out for someone making $40,000 a year even in a very low cost of living area) isn't that big of a difference in the long run.

I mean, the median cost for a family health plan (including what employers pony up) is only just over 50% of the median national household income. How much difference could a single-payer option have really meant in people's lives?

The two parties obviously have serious, substantive differences on policy. This is especially clear at the state level. Massachusetts, which has largely been run by Democrats for a century, some Republican governors winning on centrist campaigns notwithstanding, has a public health insurance plan that provides universal healthcare for its citizens, a needs based education funding scheme that makes it so that poor urban districts often have more funding per pupil, sometimes significantly more, than even wealthy districts, access to fire arms is extremely constricted (shockingly so, even having lived in New York before moving there), marijuana is sold over the counter, etc. These policies would be anathema in locales where the opposing party holds sway.

The two parties also have substantive differences vis-á-vis foreign policy. Clinton era multilateral idealism was not W. Bush's neoconservatism. Trump's isolationist agenda is radically different from either. Right now you have MTG and Tucker Carlson lauding the leaking of information that will benefit Russia in Ukraine, and Trump and Desantis talking about cutting off aid. That is, whatever you think about US involvement in that conflict or NATO, GOP leaders have recommend policy substantially different from the Democrats, who have to date been unified in voting for aid (yes, a small group of progressive Dems did float pushing back on aid, but that lasted all of 48 hours because their constituents blasted them). Obviously it isn't an area of polar opposites since a less vocal majority of Republicans still support aid, but it's a real difference on THE security issue of the day.

The parties also differ substantially on ongoing asylum claims and the status of undocumented immigrants. Given that this population makes up a quite meaningful share of the total population, and that close relatives of undocumented individuals make up an even larger share, this is a huge difference. Amnesty, which would entail access to benefits, and voting rights for this population has huge consequences for millions of residents of the country, as would a push for mass deportations or even just the continued denial of retirement benefits for people who have paid into Federal entitlement programs for decades.

The creation of a large, legally vulnerable underclass definitely effects labor markets in a big way, as does continual high rates of immigration by people with the equivalent of a high school degree or less in education and no trade skills, despite long term slumping demand for that segment of the labor market. Obviously, when migration is proportionately higher for below median and average earnings potential/net worth individuals and people move primarily into higher cost of living areas, it necessarily increases inequality. The parties differ a lot on how best to deal with these society shaping issues.

Really, Chomsky is just doing what demagogues always do, boiling down a complex problem filled with feedback loops, shifting alliances, histories of unintended consequences from reforms, etc. into a simple story of "bad, evil, greedy people make society bad. The truth is that everything is coordinated behind the scenes by a monolithic group. Thus, if we all unite we can replace the evil people with the righteous (us) and all shall be well forever."

It's the same sort of story the far-right spins. "Most of the 'other side' are useful idiots, but some elite clique actually coordinates everything. The scary nuance of the world can be reduced to a manichean struggle in which you are on the side of righteousness. Better still, you get to feel smart about having seen through the smoke screen of apparent nuance too!" They just disagree about who the "useful idiots," are.

He can spin a self-congratulatory narrative safe from having his policy recommendations ever having to deal with the nuances and difficulties of actually becoming reality. It's always easier to be the good guy when you don't need to get your policy voted on and then effectively implemented. You can claim the unpopularity of your positions is simply due to brainwashing, and you never have to deal with anything definite, which is good, since definiteness sullies purity

"The ability to make choices not constrained by determinism

I do not think this works. If the the world is not such that doing one thing determines/entails another, how can we make meaningful decisions about anything?

For instance, if I feel bad about having purchased a lobster to cook, I can choose to drive down to the ocean and set it free. My actions can align with my values because they entail specific consequences. I want to prevent the lobster from harm. I know that lobsters live along the coast and can thrive there. Thus, my releasing the lobster entails that it gets a second chance to live a natural life.

But if my putting the lobster down into the coastal waters it came from might result in teleporting it into a boiling pot of water in some seafood restaurant, what choice did I ever have? Likewise, if dropping lobsters into boiling water also causes them spontaneously teleport back to the ocean half the time, how am I to implement my values into actions, a seeming prerequisite of freedom?

Freedom requires that our actions determine other events. Developers of a video game don't give the players freedom by allowing them to press buttons on the controller, but then having the inputs, or lack of input, do something unpredictable in every event.

Freedom also requires that our events are determined by other events. If I go dump my lobster in the ocean for no reason I can fathom, then my behavior is just arbitrary. For me to be free to do something like "quit my job," I need to be able to have that choice determined by something else, e.g. I decided to quit because I found the work boring and my boss was rude. If I quit based on no determining factors then I haven't decided on a choice, I've just been along for the ride, experiencing arbitrary actions I cannot fathom the origins of.

Even if our movements were "discovered by science to be determined by some magical soul particle that activates neurons," we wouldn't think we were commiting voluntary action when we had a muscle spasm. We would need to have a determining reason for the action, like grabbing a glass of water because we feel thirst, for it to be a choice.

or randomness

Randomness presents the same set of problems. However, degrees of uncertainty that force us to assess things probabilistically do not seem to preclude freedom in the same way. I can be somewhat unsure if act A will produce goal B, or somewhat unsure of why I would like to attain goal B in the first place, and still make a decision based on assessed probabilities. But again, for us to be free, the probability that we are actually right about our assessments has to be non-arbitrary. The mechanisms underlying outcomes must be rational and something we can understand, even if we will never understand it entirely, otherwise we are back to the realm of the arbitrary.

Freedom itself is a contradictory. You can't have pure freedom. If I can simultaneously move up and down, eat my cake and have not eaten it, etc. then I cannot make a choice. Absolute freedom requires a flight from any determinateness, as all determinations are constraints. You can't make a shape that is a triangle and also have it have 4 sides.

Freedom also only exists in the context of change (becoming). You can only be free in becoming because the past is fixed and the future can't have been decided on yet, else where is the freedom? Becoming free entails the ongoing passage of any "decisions" into "the decided;" it exists only in the mysterious twilight between "already has," and "not yet."

A free being would have to fall withing the happy midpoint of absolute constraint and absolute freedom in a way that is, unfortunately, hard to define rigorously. Freedom isn't unique in this regard. We spill a lot of ink trying to define complexity in the natural sciences and end up with "something that is neither too orderly (constrained) or too chaotic (maximal degrees of freedom); adaptive, changing in response to inputs, but not so adaptive that its structure is totally determined by inputs.

I would even go as far as to say that any free entity must be complex. It needs the same ability to respond dynamically to inputs and discern between them, and yet to maintain an essential structure even as it undergoes dramatic changes in response to internal and external stimuli. This similarity isn't just coincidence; when we talk of complexity we are talking about degrees of freedom in discernible responses to interactions.

I would say a person is free when they:
-Make one of many conceivable actions.
-Experience a sense of volition in acting.
-Want to act in the way that they do act.
-Want to want to act in that way (Frankfurt's higher order volitions, e.g., I might want to take heroin, but I also can have a higher order desire not to want to take heroin- a drug addict is not fully free)
-Know why they are acting and would not act otherwise if they had more relevant information.


Given these standards, all freedom is relative. We can understand "well enough," why we do something, but we will never know ALL the relevant information, since that would require understanding the origins and evolution of the universe. Having our actions be determined by other events, relations, is a prerequisite for freedom, not anathema to it.

100% agree. I saw a call for papers recently on "The Limits of Philosophy." The prompt itself was filled with technical jargon that even I, a pretty avid reader of contemporary philosophy, found somewhat hard to parse. I considered sending in a paper about one of the limits being "getting people to read philosophy," or "having philosophy written in the last 50 years on the shelf in Barnes and Noble."

This isn't for lack of appetite for things philosophical. Eckhart Tolle sells plenty of books with a brand of semi-philosophical mysticism. Gurudev Sri Sri Ravi Shankar seems to be selling plenty of books in the West. America's churches, temples, mosques, and synagogues still draw more people on any given week of the year than watch the NBA Playoffs or World Series combined, and while religion is distinct from philosophy, this is certainly in part due to people seeking out the philosophical aspects of religion.

Plenty of "popular science," books deal with philosophical issues; oftentimes they make up the main subject matter of the book. In popular science we get plenty of appeals for other scientists to take philosophy more seriously, scientists discussing contemporary philosophers, etc. (David Deutsch did his big Born Rule derivation with a philosopher).

Yet, it does not seem like philosophy departments have jumped on this opening, perhaps because philosophy of science is somewhat niche as people interested in it gets degrees in the sciences instead. But you could see a world where all science majors get an introductory epistemology/ontology course on the sciences, and maybe on specialized course in the philosophy of their field (e.g. philosophy of biology). Certainly this would help prevent a lot of bad science and further students' understanding of their subject.

However, I generally don't see courses with that sort of focus outside of graduate programs. Philosophy as most people are exposed to it is the study of "the great thinkers," a sort of historical humanities project. Basically, you're going to read Kant and Plato, not anything from the Springer Frontiers Collection.

This seems to me like the discipline doing a bad job branding itself. In the same way English programs have switched to focusing more on critical thinking, persuasive writing, technical writing, etc., there is certainly room for philosophy to put more emphasis on how philosophy has practical implications for the sciences, how philosophy helps with interdisciplinary programs, the ethics of contemporary public policy, etc.

More disturbingly, divisive, racist, sexist garbage like Bronze Age Mindset and the various works of the "Manosphere" can become best sellers because there is a total void in contemporary areligious philosophy written for young men. It's lamentable that there isn't a Will Durant for our day to walk budding "Western chauvinists," through the actual evolution of Western thought. At the very least, it would head of online questions to the effect of: "this Aristotle guy is boring and seems like a lib, where are the great Spartan philosophers?"

I was re-reading Walter Stace's "Man Against the Darkness," the other day and was astounded by quite how much he takes for granted about the nature of reality, much of which is grounded in 19th century science-informed philosophy. For the most part, "the world is purposeless, a brute fact, and all things are determined by and reducible to little billiard balls bouncing around in space and this necessarily reduces ethics, aesthetics, and even logic to illusions," is still the dominant viewpoint taught in schools. I certainly never got a whiff of Platonism or the inherit beauty of mathematics in school. Math was, at worst, an arbitrary system for completing tests questions, at best a useful skill for predicting events in our billiard ball world, which could let me make money so that I could purchase ultimately meaningless positive sensations.

My argument isn't even that the above line has been definitively refuted in all respects, but there are good refutations worth teaching. Particularly, reductionism and the impossibility of free will (and thus meaningful ethics) due to the fact that "everything happens for some (natural) reason," seem to be particularly weak areas of the prevailing view. After all, Leibnitz came up with the Principal of Sufficient Reason as a prerequisite for free will, not an argument against it, and reduction has not fared well as a program as of late. But the only philosophy I got before college came through English class, and it was all "we can take the meaninglessness of life as a self-evident given," existentialism.

The science that supposedly tells us the world is inherently valueless itself presupposes that the world, or at least key aspects of it, is rational and that we can understand this rationality. Hence, physical laws, explanations and models in place of a shrug and grumble about our arbitrary world. But if this is the case, then attempts to ground values in the inherit rationality of social structures doesn't seem doomed even if we accept core premises of the "valueless" view. Certainly, solid attempts at this exist, even if they are imperfect, e.g. Hegel's "Philosophy of Right," or Honneth's "Freedom's Right."

At the very least, people understanding the difference between:

- Hobbesian freedom as freedom from external impediments, i.e., negative freedom, legal "rights from," and

-reflexive freedom, rational control over the authentic self (see in Saint Paul, Hegel, Frankfurt, etc.), the ability to make choices one understands and not be merely subject to manipulation or unfathomed drives and instincts, including the ability to take on constraining duties,


...would be good for political discourse. Particularly the acknowledgement that reflexive freedom requires development and education, but that it no way ensures that such a free individual will make choices that allow others to be similarly free, thus setting up the need for a sort of overarching social freedom that grounds freedom "as a good."

There is a complex chain of events leading to colors being created in the brain. I accept this.

Saying "brains create color" is like explaining that "batteries produce electrical current" without any reference to a closed circuit, or explaining that "magnets attract (or repel)" without any reference to what it is in the related objects that are involved in either attraction or repulsion. It seems hard to explain how the physical process of evolution came to involve the "non-physical" trait of color as well.

A brain in a vacuum isn't going to experience anything. The sensation of color results from an interaction between the sensory system and the environment. Color being "created in the brain" sounds like something ex nihilo; the environment creates the brain and the brain and the environment, together, create color, right?

But how is this unlike any other physical phenomena? My tires don't "create friction," friction is generated by the interaction of my tires and the road, and friction is itself a composite phenomenon. Covalent bonds aren't created by electrons, or by the molecules they define (except tautologically), but by the interaction of EM forces vis-a-vis relevant set of electrons and protons.

All physical processes are relational. Imagine any physical entity in a vacuum (allowing for the sake of argument that such a thing can truly exist). What does it do except in respect to other parts of itself? If the entity is undividable, it doesn't do anything, it effectively has no traits, while if it is a composite entity, we can only define its physical interactions in terms of processes between parts of the whole.

Maybe the real external sky doesnt look like the sky in our visual field but that doesnt necessarily mean it has no color.

This seems confused. If color only exists in sensation, then the sky has no color without the possibility of sensation existing, no? How can the sky have a color "of-itself," when color is necessarily something that occurs relationally? That's like an electron having a negative charge without relation to the field of which it is a part or any existent positive charge. If the entire universe is just one electron, charge is meaningless, undefinable. If color doesn't exist without an observing entity then does EM charge, isospin, flavor, mass, etc. not exist when there isn't an ongoing relevant interaction?

The sky observably does have a color. Common denials of this fact generally hew to a reductive line, even if this commitment to reduction is not made explicitly (something which has become more common as reduction has increasingly fallen out of favor). The relationship between a system that experiences color and the object that has color is ostensibly a natural one, even in most dualist ontologies. On the face of it, there is some sort of causal relationship between the colored object, the experience of color, and a source of light.

The claim that color isn't real, "because it is really just different wave lengths of light reflecting off an object and interacting with photoreceptors that in turn produce a pattern of neuronal action potentials," requires that:

A. If something can be reduced to something else in an explanation it is somehow "less real" than the things it reduces too.

B. Everything can be effectively reduced to some fundamental unit of reality, else this devolves into an infinite regress where nothing is real because there is always some lower level of being that negates the reality of the higher. If physical limitations place an epistemological limit on how basic the entities we can know of can be that is above the ontological basement, then we only ever deal with "non-real" entities in the first place.

C. Contained in B is the assertion that no information is lost in this reduction, which clashes with the relational nature of physical phenomena. For example, my coffee mug is hotter than the table it is sitting on. I can reduce this statement into an analysis of the relevant systems' composite parts, but by the time I reduce it down to individual molecules I have lost the concept of heat. How can a molecule have velocity in relation to nothing but itself? Thermodynamic systems do not contain heat, heat is defined by a boundary condition.

None of these points seem particularly well established. Again, I think this flawed way of reasoning is a biproduct of the human sensory system itself (see above). Hence why it predates anything resembling modern science by millennia and remains remarkably robust even in light of evidence against such a view (e.g., why should we think things are really just the motions of smaller things anymore when we have evidence that these apparently fundamental smaller things are really fluctuations of a field and only definable in terms of the entire field, the part explained by the whole, or why believe in the aforementioned fields if they can be reduced to information theoretical datum?)

They merely play no causal role in dyamics.

Cars are bodies in motion. They stop at red lights and begin moving again when a green light appears. Galileo bracketed dynamics to a set of simple problems, but we now look at physical systems much more holistically precisely because this gives us a better understanding of the world and allows us to make better predictions about it. The change in motion of cars due to color is part of any holistic explanation of traffic patterns.

But there is no strong argument for believing in this mind dependence. Galileo needed to only say that the color of a falling object is irrelevant to its place in physics, not that it has no color. In distinguishing between primary and secondary qualities Locke needed to only say that certain spatial configurations and movements of matter had the power to create sensations but not that the sensations have to exist "in us".

I'd argue that the dichotomy is false in the first place, even from a scientific point of view. Minds are ostensibly created by, and part of, nature. Sensations of color, depth, scent, etc. are all natural phenomena. The mental/physical dichotomy was created in the early modern period to help the natural sciences bracket off a whole off a whole set of philosophical questions so that progress could be made on the problems that were proving soluble. It's high time for that firewall to come down, but unfortunately it has become a calcified dogma— something accepted uncritically and defended with religious zeal.

Corpusclarism, or approximations of it, also seem to be naive, arising long before science and persisting in the face of contrary evidence from the sciences.

Empiricism gives pride of place to sensation. The models of our world that empiricism has produced has shown that at least the substance of these sensations is dictated by natural phenomena. That is, the Hard Problem may remain, we do not have a good answer for "from whence sensation?" but the fact that changes in the environment can dictate changes in sensations, or that changes in the nervous system likewise affect sensation, even holding the environment constant, is as well established as anything. When you turn the light out, you can't see; likewise, when your eyes or visual cortex are damaged, you also cannot see.

Science has had to become like an eye trying to see itself. Notably for this analogy, that is something that is quite possible in the natural world; the eye can see itself using a reflection. Science is, in part, a system based on observations through which we try to untangle the how and whys of those same observations. Where things go awry is when dogma declares that such sensations, the ones upon which all empiricism rests, are illusions, somehow unnatural. That is, as you say: "objects are really colored." Yes, this is a fact of the natural world.

What is interesting to me is that people seem to have an easy time dismissing scent, an ancillary sense for humans, as clearly illusory. "Shit smells bad to us and good to flies because scent isn't real." However, abstractions of space-time, e.g., volume, etc., based on a combination of visual, tactile, and vestibular sensations, are taken as iron clad facts of reality. It seems to me that, if we were dogs, we might go the other way on scent.


What is key though is that these senses help reinforce a unified model of reality. Senses appear to be used to cross check each other; when we can't tell if a flower is real or plastic by looking at it, we stroke and sniff it. This is why, while a mild degree of synesthesia seems adaptative, we still have extremely distinct sense impressions from different systems after billions of years of evolution (i.e., no one mistakes hearing for seeing)— one sense can cross check the veracity of another.

There is no intrinsic reason to preference one sensory-based model or another. When we say "color is an illusion, the reality is photons moving through space," this is merely substituting an explanation of a reality in terms of an experience that only exists in one sense (color for sight) for a new model based on the sensation of movement through 3D space, something we experience primarily through three reinforcing senses.

Corpusclarism, allegedly dead in science, but seemingly very much alive, is the substitution of multiple models based on different types of sensory experience for a unitary model derived from the 'experience of / an analogy to', discrete objects in motion, something experienced in three senses. Thus: "Everything is objects in motion, sense experiences inessential to conceiving of objects in motion are illusory." Hence, "color is an illusion, volume and velocity are not."

I have to think that something unique to our biology (e.g., that our natural model of spacetime comes from multiple senses) is the motivation here because the entire concept of "discrete objects" has been challenged by physics, corpuscularism itself rebutted, and yet it remains the dominant way to envision the world. Not only that, but the concept is as old as written philosophy. It didn't take scientific revelations to make people buy into it, the position arose ascientifically at the dawn of philosophy (e.g., a world of atoms, elements, Platonic solids, etc.), and has remained in vogue despite countervailing scientific findings. That is, it seems to me that such views are also naive forms of understanding.

What do we replace this seemingly inborne tendency with? That is a harder question. But it seems to me like a whole description of any given phenomena needs to include our sensation of it. Information, in the sense the term is used in physics, exists relationally. The current dogma involves an unnatural amputation of one half of the relation and the substitution of a magical, unnatural, "eye that sees things-in-themselves," in its place. Thus, neuroscience can inform our understanding of the illusory nature of things like color, but apparently not about the models that we have built atop those self-same illusory sensations?

A good start would be to try to knock down the tendency towards reduction that corpuscular thinking generates. A common view is that, not only is "color," not "real," but so to social status, recessions, etc. And yet a recession causes massive, observable physical changes across the globe, so in what way is it not "real" in the same sense that rocks are real?

Recessions are real, but they are incorporeal, a term from Augustine's day that is worth resurrecting. Incorporeal doesn't necessitate "non-natural" or "non-physical," although I will allow that the word is often used that way today. It means simply "lacking a body." (Corpus - Latin for body; "in" a Latin prefix for "un" or "not.")

Where is a recession located? In physical changes spanning the globe: in unfinished houses in Florida, in empty grocery shelves in Sudan, in government databases— trillions of digital logic gates— and in uncountable neurons and (natural) mental sensations. It exists substrate independently, in information that is naturally isomorphic vis-a-vis its encoding. That is, it is incorporeal, lacking a discrete body.

Color is likewise incorporeal, it exists in patterns of neuronal activity, in the physical make up of stop signs, in the electrical currents powering lighting traffic lights, etc. It is impossible to study the science of marketing, traffic, the economics of entertainment, zoology, religious symbolism, etc., all natural phenomena without reference to color. Major problems in the social sciences could be resolved if it was acknowledged that, not only are the objects of study complex and emergent, but also incorporeal, but incorporeal in a way that does not entail that they are "less real," or "non-natural."

The common sense view also says the Earth is flat and stationary.

A view that was overturned by careful observations, i.e., by sensory experience. Note though that the new view, of a sphere in space rotating on its axis, moving through space around a larger sphere, is also a conception based in sensory experience. To be sure, more sophisticated models look at the system in purely mathematical terms, but mathematics itself is a discipline where visualization is more important than most. The axioms that ground proofs often come from appeals to (seemingly) essential truths about our visual or temporal-spatial sensations. That is, we accept Euclid's axioms because we cannot visualize their violation coherently.



Sentience is a fuzzy term. But, to your point, slime molds demonstrate intelligence when solving mazes, respond to stimuli, etc. without a nervous system. An interesting behavior of slime molds is that, when food runs scarce, numerous individuals will link together and form a migrating colony that can walk. Essentially, it is a composite body, a unity that appears to utilize a composite sensory system. As the name "acellular slime molds" suggest, a subset don't even have proper cells.

Problem solving wise, they can do some neat things. People have used them to solve Hamiltonian path problems (e.g., the traveling salesman problem), a class of problem that gives digital computers a hard time. Although, DNA and RNA have also been used to "compute" answers to these problems by creating selection pressures that privilege shorter paths, but we don't think of those molecules as conceivably having any sort of sensory experience.






Seems to me like an assertion that will only get murkier as AI advances. Organisms lacking nervous systems nevertheless have sensory systems, so I don't see why the nervous system should be the deciding factor here.

If the core conceit of computational neuroscience is correct, then sensation is the result of sensory organs working in concert with computational processes. "Conscious" sensation would simply entail some given level of complexity and a "global workspace" in which sensory data is gathered and re-presented to another layer of holistic computational processing. On this view, there is no reason why a sufficiently complex digital apparatus, or a primarily digital apparatus utilizing some biological components for parallel processing, could not experience conscious sensation.

But that makes sensation an information process, and such processes are generally considered to be substrate independent. So, if that conceit is correct, and it appears to be the number one theory, then you can theoretically build a mind that experiences sensation out of extremely well-crafted steam pipes that have been set up such that they mimic the informational structure of a human brain.

In any event, until there is a good theory for what exactly causes sensation, this is an isolable debate (i.e., something more specific than "very complex information processing/computation processes," where "complexity," "information," and "computation," are all terms which generate hundreds of articles about how poorly defined and vague the currently are.)

That was my thought when seeing the thread title. I thought it was going to be a thread about all the experimental evidence against the idea of a unified "self," Hume's "bundle of sensations", Buddhist Anatta, Nietzsche's "congress of souls," etc.

I think we find such results so fascinating precisely because they clash with our everyday experience and intuition. However, there is a definite tendency for people to overplay counter intuitive findings. I'm not totally sure where this instinct comes from, but you see it everywhere, from serious philosophy to silly stuff e.g., "swords were just status symbols, rarely used in warfare, a Hollywood myth!

But for all the interesting facts about people with split brains, blind sight, etc., the fact is that most studies of conscious awareness show exactly what we expect, a fairly unified stream of conscious. IMO, the fact that many of the more interesting phenomena where the self seems to split or unravel occur due to serious malfunctioning in the brain, generally severe brain damage or exogenous chemicals flooding synapses, should only reinforce the view that there is some essential, if not absolute unity of consciousness, i.e. the self.

But of course that didn't end up being what the thread was about.



But do the higher order entities in the "hive mind," have selfhood as well? Does the state for example?

The great advocate of geist, GWF Hegel seemed to think so, at least in some ways. The ideal state being one that "wills what it does and knows what it wills."

I can see states or other organizations having a sense of self. I am not sure how they could have qualia except as insofar as they are made up of things with qualia. Then again, the question "where does qualia come from," doesn't have a good answer, so this is more intuition on my part than anything else.

On a more general note: this conflict seems to have reversed the trend towards trying to create smaller, more flexible formations as the primary unit for combat operations (e.g., the Russian Battalion Tactical Group, US Brigade Combat Teams).

Doctrine seems to be falling back to a focus on division level operations. I think this makes increasing sense given the larger role drones and UGVs will play in the future. These require more infrastructure to support.

Autonomous 60-81mm mortars that can be mounted on IFVs, UGV 105mm field guns, autonomous support drones, etc. all give smaller units more organic firepower, but they do so at the cost of a larger logistical footprint.

You can see this in the new US divisional structure, with the Robot Combat Vehicle Company attached to each ABCT. RCVs will also be broken out into light/medium/heavy akin to the divisional structure, in terms of equipment, except now divisions are penetration or armored (heavy reinforced or heavy), light, airborne, or air assault. So, "medium" sticks around as a classification in some respects, but the old medium level division (Stryker) is gone.

The theory is pretty straightforward.

1. Russia invades, threatening Kyiv to force negotiations, while occupying the most strategically relevant areas in the south (land bridge to Crimea).

2. Negotiations fail, so Russia switches gear for prolonged war. The Russian army was overstretched and pulled back its lines to something more stable. This was mistakenly perceived (or deceptively marketed?) as a "Ukrainian offensive", which it clearly wasn't.

Sure, they gave up on the quick victory plan. That doesn't mean they never expected it to work. A lot appears to have hinged on bribes and the expectation that areas would be handed over by collaborators, as in Kherson.

3. With the prospect of prolonged war and having to take parts of Ukraine by force, Russia's primary concern becomes the prevention of an insurgency. This means it will seek to pacify areas it occupies before conquering more territory - the 'bite-sized chunks' approach. This could take months, or even years.

This doesn't explain continued offensive operations against Bakhmut. If the goal is to sit back and consolidate gains, why keep attacking? The Vuhledar offensive, widely panned as a catastrophe by Russian milbloggers and resulting in the sacking of officers, resulted in the loss of 13 BTGs worth of tank compliments and plenty else aside. That isn't "sitting back and consolidating." Not to mention that Russian state media has definitely tried to play up what small gains it has made as the result of a "renewed offensive."


4. Meanwhile local tactical battles are fought, with the primary goal of degrading the Ukrainian fighting capabilities.
[/quote]

This is inconsistent with continued Russian offensive operations. For example, by all accounts, Ukrainian losses were proportionally much higher when they were forced to attack entrenched defenders in Kherson. But Russia isn't sitting back and waiting for Ukraine to attack entrenched positions, they have been attacking in a number of areas.

Some other points:
- Neither Ukraine nor Russia has carried out large-scale offensives since the start of the invasion.

Given the shortage of armored vehicles and of well-motivated, well-trained troops on both sides, I would consider regiment-scale operations (3,000-5,000 soldiers) to constitute major efforts. At time's both sides have put together division sized offensives, but they have been the exception. Leaked estimates for Russian losses at Bakhmut are the equivalent of 3-5 US divisions, which constitutes a major offensive anywhere, even if the losses were disproportionately low-quality, under equipped Wagner forces.

- It's debatable whether the territory lost by Russia was meaningful. Some argument has to be put forward as to why these areas would be strategically relevant. The fact that the Russians gave up most of that territory without a fight implies the opposite. Movement patterns of the Russian forces across the areas of northern Ukraine also do not imply the intent to hold for prolonged periods of time. You can still view these patterns on sites like https://liveuamap.com..

If their goal is to hold all of Kherson Oblast, which they annexed, then it is not debatable that losing their foothold across the river is a major setback.

"Setting most economic policies on the planet (what and how things are produced) has been the US"

I wouldn't even grant this. Market equilibrium is an emergent phenomenon; no one state and certainly no small group of people is "in control" of global production decisions. Pollution is an example of a negative externality. While liberal democracies have put regulations into place to reduce such negative externalities within their borders and done much to raise the living/working standards of their populations, this has often just resulted in the working class of the West being exported to countries without these protections.

Obviously, it was not in the US's strategic interests to move so much of its production to China. Nor was it a good strategic move to become so heavily dependent on Taiwan for microchip production. It's not even clear that this shift was good for the economic wellbeing of the average American. The shift occurred because firms that moved overseas could outcompete firms that did not due to lower prices; no one had to plan to make this happen. To be sure, Clinton and W. Bush era policymakers did seem to believe that rising wealth in China would cause the state to liberalize, but the offshoring trend only accelerated as policy makers soured on this concept.

And we see the exact same patterns of consumption in China as it becomes wealthier that we saw in liberal states, even though, Deng's major reforms notwithstanding, it is very much still a communist country in key respects (state control of large corporations, the government's ability to freeze financial exchanges at will, etc.). Meat consumption is surging for example.

The Chinese state, which in many ways can exert more control on domestic production that Western states (see: the Covid lockdowns), has still been unable to stop the country's sliding food self-sufficiency rate. In 2000, China had a food self-sufficiency rate above the US's today, 93.6%. That has plunged to 65.8%. This isn't because China lost the ability to produce as much food; it's because labor got more expensive as the country grew wealthier (changing opportunity costs for workers) and Chinese food became relatively more expensive compared to exports (also rising incomes increasing demand for limited domestic meat production). Chinese farms responded by cutting production, or switching to producing meat with foreign feed, and net imports increased. This is despite a powerful state actively working against this trend. No one was "deciding" anything here, it's just the logic of the dynamical system.

But such power doesn’t come for free (i.e. not all humanity will benefit from it, no possible cynical abuses or nasty unintentional consequences can be systematically prevented) nor without consensus (e.g. by being the perceived as the lesser evil wrt realistic alternatives). The point is that no long term goal policies (whatever they are) can be ensured if there isn’t enough economic/coercive power to support it, so no economic/coercive power will be likely spent by political elites to pursue such policies if that is perceived as just loss of power for themselves and/or for serving their base.

Exactly. The problem with global warming and ocean acidification is that it is a global collective action problem. Every state has an incentive to cheat because even the largest emitters still represent a small share of the global total. Adding to the problem is that some states are far more susceptible to climate risks than others. Current international institutions lack any teeth for enforcement.

Every state would be better off if all states agreed to do more to tackle the issue, although some would benefit more than others since they are more at risk. However, every state also has an incentive to cheat. Within states, politicians also have an incentive to get their states to shirk their responsibilities so that their constituents can realize the benefits of doing so. What is needed for climate change, the problem of powerful transnational corporations, global inequality, and migration is some sort of regional/global governance mechanism with enforcement power akin to the EU or the US federal government. That is, a system that keep particularity for local governance, but which has authority on global issues.

I am not optimistic that such a system will evolve without a crisis. Such a system needs coercive powers, but it also needs to offer members significant benefits. Military alliances that allow members to achieve a "peace dividend," what you've seen in Europe, is one way to do that. However, I think that bringing lower income states into such an organization probably requires aid budgets to grow to a size around the same scale as defense budgets, something that is currently unthinkable unfortunately.

Russia withdrew from the Kyiv and Sunny axes. It left Kharkiv retreating past Kupiansk because of a general rout in which it turned over warehouses full of munitions and hundreds of vehicles. It withdrew from Kherson City and the general environs, but only after a grinding offensive had finally broken through Russian lines and made holding anything on the far side of the river untenable.

I mean, they legally declared land taken in both counter offensives part of Russia and put up billboards around the city that said: "here forever," lol.

For some levity, check out the accents on this "intercepted radio call" by American mercenaries in Ukraine. Seems the Bradley's are all being destroyed and the Americans hate the Ukrainians. Can anyone place this US accent?

Smolensk, NY? Moscow, Kentucky? St. Petersburg, Florida? Maybe the accent of very far east Alaska, the trans-Bering Straight Region?

https://files.catbox.moe/ky2gnv.mp4



I'm not what the relevance here is supposed to be. Obviously the T-55s have a use. My point was that Russia was out of more modern tanks and that this is going to hamper their ability to make forward progress.

I am not sure how Russia failing to take meaningful amounts of territory for almost 12 months, despite carrying out large scale offensive operations, while also losing control of meaningful amounts of territory, is not evidence that they can't take more territory.

You have to either claim that:
A. Russia hasn't wanted to take any territory in these offensives and planned on losing territory it officially annexed or:
B. For some reason Russia is going to significantly improve its offensive capabilities in the near future.

Otherwise, I don't know how my assertion that Russia can't push to the Moldovan border isn't warranted. They tried that, were defeated, retreated from the area, and have now spent months failing to achieve much more modest goals.

But I am sure this will be followed by "but how can we possibly know! Any video of Russians being killed might be some CGI false flag, or videos Ukrainians posted of their own losses! Never mind that some types of equipment are only used by one side, uniforms, markings, etc. We just can't possibly know anything at all. Russian milbloggers might also have been mislead about the faliure of the offensives, even the ones who were at the front. Actually, Russia hasn't been failing to make progress for almost a year, the reality is that they have worn away the UAF and any second now they will begin making dramatic gains. A year of failures can't tell us anything, the lightning offensive is two weeks away."

Weren't they trying to liberate their Ukrainian brothers and sisters from the Nazi regime? Generally you don't liberate people by getting frustrated that the progress of your diversionary probe has failed and then leveling apartment blocks. Likewise, the massacres in Bucha came amidst intercepted calls to "take the gloves off," after Russian forces were routed in Holstomel.

It's also unclear why a diversionary force would have men riding up with parade uniforms or have police in riot gear attached to it. Such gear is incomprehensible for a military use case, but makes perfect sense if the goal was to topple the government and then hold a parade in Kiev.

The Kyiv Axis utilized 70,000 soldiers and 7,000 vehicles. The 30,000 figure from the "Battle of Kyiv" Wikipedia entry is for the Kyiv Convoy, which tried to invest the city, but you had additional supporting efforts in the Kyiv region aside from that. If one axis out of six has one third of your entire invasion force, it's unlikely to be a diversion.

And was Kharkiv just a longer diversion? The rout and turning over of hundreds of tanks to Ukraine another gesture of good will? Sumny another feint? And I suppose the Kherson retreat was just the latest feint?

In general, it's not a good sign if you've geared up for a big offensive and your soldiers begin driving into obvious mine emplacements, sometimes dismounting first. Seems like it might be a morale/training issue: https://files.catbox.moe/iqhmcd.webm

Makes me seriously question if this was ever really a joke:





Yeah, never mind the geotagged evidence of losses on both sides makes such a figure completely ridiculous. By this logic, Russia began shelling residential blocks in the suburbs and pounding Kiev proper with missiles "just to make their diversion more realistic."

Sure looks like a low intensity conflict.

Yeah, hard to see how this theory is consistent with Russian messaging early in the war or the info they produced for domestic consumption. This was March 2022.





And indeed, I recall people in this thread telling me how Russia was about to close a massive caldron across all of eastern Ukraine. "Thousands of tanks" were going to cross the gap and meet up in Dinpro, just as Russian state media and military maps suggested.

But now that the course of the war has changed, that past intent has also changed. We're supposed to focus on "data," who is taking control of more of the country apparently, but Moscow has been on the wrong side of that metric for almost 12 months now despite the mobilization 7 months ago that was going to change everything.

In my view, the Russians didn't seek to take large amounts of territory after the initial invasion.

So, the attempt to encircle Kiev was a feint? The attempt to encircle Kharkiv was also a feint? The Sumny axis was a feint too? Russia took Kherson just to give it back because it doesn't want to control large amounts of Ukraine?

Then why did they attack from Belarus in the first place? Why did they send out pincers to cut off all of Eastern Ukraine? They sent those columns out to be destroyed as a diversion? And they officially annexed land they were planning to retreat from?

If the Ukrainian military was just "better" then it would not be the case that Russia woul be occupying any part of Ukraine right now.

The criticism of Russia from the point of view that they aren't winning "hard enough" and "easy enough" is still Russia winning.

This is a false binary. I said that Russia cannot just waltz to the Moldovan border through hundreds of square miles of defenses and through major urban centers when they have failed to make any significant gains since last summer. Moreover, that Russia attacking NATO and opening up a second war through Belarus is preposterous.

Russia not being in a position to start a war against a second, much more powerful adversary ≠ everything is going great for Ukraine.

Second, the idea that "if Russia occupies any foreign land than it is "winning" and the other side must be failing," is overly simplistic nonsense. By this logic the Germans were winning the Second World War until August 1944 and Japan was still "winning," with huge swaths of foreign land under its control and the US in control of almost no Japanese land, on the very day it accepted terms of unconditional surrender.

Russia seems incapable, in the near term, of achieving its original objective of changing the government in Kiev. I don't think it is likely that Ukraine can expel all of Russia's forces from its borders. Indeed, I don't even know if it is in their long-term strategic interests to take back a bunch of absolutely devastated land that is also a source of separatism (although that second part may no longer be true, given both the share of Donbas men who have been killed and Russia's treatment of them a disposable secondary forces).

Is

• losing a quarter million men injured or killed,
• 1,903 tanks (including almost the entire modern tank fleet),
• 1,240 IFVs and APCs,
• 560 artillery pieces (disproportionately self-propelled),
• 191 rocket artillery systems,
• 140 AA systems,
• 79 fixed wing aircraft (mostly fighters),
• 81 rotary wing aircraft,
• 12 warships (including the flagship),
• and thousands of other vehicles (10,000+ total),
• plus becoming an international pariah and losing the EU gas market,
• having two neighbors join NATO, effectively ensuring that Ukraine and Moldova later join the EU and likely NATO,
• Massively increasing NATO military spending by European members,
• Losing influence in Armenia and Central Asia due to an inability to respond to security issues or live up to defense treaties there,
• having 3 million citizens flee abroad in the midst of serious demographic issues,
• and having your GDP contract by 2.6% (about the same as the US during the peak of the 2008 financial crisis)...

...in order to gain control of not even all of Donbas "winning?"

In short, we can deduce absolutely nothing from the mere appearance of old weapons systems in the war theatre ... and the Maxim machine gun, which the Ukrainians are using, wins this competition in any case.

This is ridiculous. We can deduce "nothing," from the fact that Russia started the invasion with much more modern tank models and is now relying on early Cold War era equipment? We can obviously deduce that they don't have additional modern or even late Cold War Era tanks to use since they obviously preferred to use more recent equipment. We are not talking about a single Maxim Gun, we are talking about their armored formations coming to rely largely on such equipment.

If these were something like the T-55S, that would be one thing. Yes, it is old, but it has modern fire control systems, thermals, etc. But the captured T-55s are just extremely old pieces of equipment with some ERA thrown on them.

Take off the fan boy hat, hold back the instinct to what-aboutism for a moment, and consider that the claim was the "the West better watch out or Russia will invade NATO while it fights a war in Ukraine." Ukraine using Maxim Guns is irrelevant. If Russia tries to roll T-55S across the Lithuanian border it would be met by nothing but Leopard 2s, M1s, Typhoons, F-22s, Strike Eagles, etc.

Old systems might be "better than nothing," in Ukraine because Ukraine itself is overwhelmingly using the same old systems, but invading NATO means dealing with thousands of modernized tanks and aircraft, operated by professional militaries trained to use them, not the few dozen modern tanks Ukraine has been given, which a mostly conscript force has been hastily trained on.

Apparently. There is a hilarious level of faith in this supposed "real Russian military," that is just waiting to take the gloves off. How many pairs of gloves must they have had on this point?

Russia has been loosing ground, substantial amounts, for most of the war. But this is part of some big scheme. The Kiev offensive was a feint. So was the Kharkiv offensive. Kherson, annexed into Russia officially, then abandoned? Another feint!

Is using old T-55s without thermals some sort of advanced ruse? Russia has modern tanks left but isn't fielding them?

Can they fly sorties and use PGMs but aren't?

What possible reason is there for firing missiles from the S-400 in ground attack mode on a regular basis if Russia isn't low on missiles?

"Bite-sized chunks" has been a few hundred meters a day around Bakhmut and no net gains elsewhere over half a year. What possible reason is there to advance a few square miles over months while you also have to retreat from the Kiev axis, retreat from the Sumny axis, get routed out of the Kharkiv axis, and then have a combination rout / retreat out of Kharkiv. Quite the interesting plan. Did it include letting Ukraine capture 500+ tanks such that Russia has been the biggest heavy equipment supplier to Ukraine since the start of their war?

From whence all the videos of the announced Russian offensive that went nowhere this winter? Sure, territory didn't change hands, but we got a flood of new videos showing Russian armored columns, a hodgepodge of new stuff and 70 year old equipment, being destroyed. Is it all fake? An elaborate ruse?

But then why are Russian milbloggers in favor of the war saying the same thing about the losses and equipment shortages?

I will agree that the Ukrainian position might be also significantly degraded. In some respects it clearly is. However, the idea that Russia is in a position to start a second war, one in which they essentially declare war on Finland, Turkey, Romania, Poland, France, the UK, and the US at once, while attacking through Belarus, thus making them protect a large area with no real military force of its own, is absolutely preposterous.


If this is "deliberate," then I'd hate to see what a disorganized offensive looks like:

How is Russia going to get to the Moldovan border? They haven't exactly been making much by way of progress since last summer. Even where they have more favorable terrain, they have been impaling themselves on Bakhmut, while the Vuhledar offensive was a total disaster.

They're now using old model T-55 tanks from 70 years ago. They gave up on their missile attacks on power infrastructure, but only after resorting to using anti-ship missiles and AA missiles in ground attack mode. Their daily number of fire missions is way down. Russian aircraft rarely even enter Ukrainian airspace and sorties are way down, this, despite leaks showing how degraded Ukrainian air defenses are. They are definitely not going to start a new war when they are unable to make progress in the current one and are clearly running out of the Soviet stockpiles they have relied on to date.

If anything, they should have already stopped current offensive operations and regrouped.

And they're going to start a second war? With a NATO member they don't even share a land border with?

Don't believe me, take it from a key player in the original move to annex Crimea and the Donbas.

lol

I get that Tucker will say anything he thinks will make his base happy, but his base doesn't even like Russia, which makes the whole over the top pro-Russia stuff really weird. Like the other day he showed photoshopped copies of the recent leaks and claimed "Ukraine was losing men 7 to 1," (actually, the documents showed Russia with 2.43 times the losses) and further claimed US forces were in full combat operations against Russia (another face saving Kremlin talking points). He then went on to give an endorsement and defense of the leaker. Strange.

There are a lot of these, and they look like they should be on Russia Today:



If you want to see something really bizarre, here is back before he went to Fox rebranded: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfxnMChoMNY

IDK why you would be a pundit for beliefs you think are bankrupt (his texts reveal he never believed the 2020 election was rigged either). Especially since he is a wealth heir; it's not for money; I guess it is attention?

And since there is no substance to the non-dimensional boundary which separates past from future, all substance is either of the past or of the future. Because the substance of the past is radically different from the substance of the future, substance dualism is justified, and it is the best option for understanding the nature of reality.

Interesting. I've never heard the argument that past and future are different substances. Substance is generally supposed to be able to undergo change though, so doesn't that presuppose that it exists through time? And if past and future are substances, can they change? If they change it seems like they might require a second time dimension to exist in which such a change can occur. But, since what is past is always changing, it would appear that the past does change, although maybe it can do so without changing the underlying substance.

This would seem to assume that the past and the future are actually different though, which eternalists deny, and that the past and future actually exist, which presentists deny, so I suppose people might disagree based on the premise, although I don't. It seems to me that past events exist at the time when they occured and future events are, as you say, different from past ones.

And like twenty different things to boot! I've seen:

Realist = time and change exists
Realist = substrate independent, diffuse entities like economies and states exist
Realist = countries always self-interestedly act to maximize their own security and power (big in international relations)
Realist = universals exist
Realist = propositions exist
Realist = abstract objects and mathematical entities exist
Realist = mind independent objects exist

Etc.

Total tangential point here: I don't even think it's a good label most of the time. Like, in IR, it seems somewhat fanciful, like the grand strategy video game view of how states act. If John Mearsheimer's Offensive Realism was true, it seems ridiculous that the USA wouldn't have annexed Canada and more of Mexico at any point after the Civil War, when its military would have easily defeated any force that could cross the Atlantic.

Values explanations make way more sense. Americans used to think of Canada as similar to themselves, just other British colonies. Thus, as soon as Massachusetts ended up at war with Britain, even before the other states joined, an army of Massachusetts and New York men immediately marched north and sacked Montreal. This ultimately failed due to Quebec City's walls and the fact that a winter offensive and siege in Canada with 1770s technology is, to put it bluntly, dumb. Then in 1812 the US invaded Canada again. But by 1860 there is a distinct difference in identity and moral sentiment is much different.

Just an example. I don't think you can divorce moral opinion from state action. The US did annex Texas, but it had to vote to ask for annexation first to motivate the actual action. /rant

I just hate that the "realist" position is so goofy.

Bit of an aside: I find it funny how often Aristotle's ordering of physics vs metaphysics comes up in all sorts of discussions and texts on this point given the guy probably didn't even order the books himself. Not a dig at anyone, I've seen it referenced in plenty of books too.

Like Hegel, a lot of Aristotle appears to be lecture notes dutifully compiled by students and mixed in with additions by the students to fill them out.