But then Mww would cease to be an individual, rigidly designated by "Mww". — Banno

That's incorrect. It appears that you ignored most of the essay.

When we say his memories are essential, we're saying that in all possible worlds where this particular Mww exists, he has these memories. It's basically part of our definition of him.

Just like Kripke's wood lectern. In every possible world where that lectern exists, it's wood. That's why wood becomes essential. It's a matter of the object of the statement.

If Mww subsequently loses his memory, what is now essential? It's all a matter of what we're trying to say.

Hence his memories are not essential to his being Mww. — Banno

They are if they're essential to the Mww we're talking about. Look back at the aposteriori necessity.

Oh good grief.

Yes. If being made of wood is essential to what you mean by "that lectern" then that's an essential property, even though you learn about it a posteriori.

Mww and I were just talking about long-term memory, and we could say Mww's evolving memory is an essential feature of the guy in question, even though things could have been different.

It's tricky, but cool.

Individuals need not have an essence. — Banno

According to Kripke, they always do.

And is there any chance that an immigrant in a no-go area stuggling to make ends meet taking multiple jobs, a striving family father in a lower middle class area, an a middle-aged woman, born in a habitat rich on cultural and social capital having chosen an occupation of interest and following progressive values to do something good with her life, could three persons like that be unified as a ”people”? — Ansiktsburk

Whether the last two can both see themselves as members of the same group depends on the circumstances. There has to be a basis for unity like religion, ethnicity, or nationalism. Sometimes exterior threats unify people across economic lines.

The immigrants are a different story. They can be like invisible members of the community. For instance, there is slavery in the US, but few know about it. It's immigrants who have fallen prey to exploiters. Even if law enforcement tries to help them, they lie about the conditions they're in because they've been threatened. They have little hope except to know that their children will be American citizens.

One of the reasons they come to the US is that their own countries are in turmoil. In many cases this stems from previous American action designed to cripple them.

So ultimately, there needs to be a global authority who can put a stop to behavior of the kind the US has demonstrated. That would help immigrants everywhere.

Yes. We were talking about his organization, not his goals.

I’ve had a dozen occupations, both professional and incidental, yet I’m still just lil’ ol’ me. — Mww

There are certain kinds of childhood trauma that result in dissociative personality disorder. People who have that don't report what you do.

The fact that you do indicates that you didn't have that trauma, and your short term memory is being stored properly. A lot of this happens when you're asleep. That's just the tip of the iceberg of environmental, cultural, and biological elements that go hand in hand when your sense of self. So it's just hard to imagine how your self could be independent of your body.

Can the interest which makes one good at something, and conversely the lack of it that makes him not so good, be predicated on cultural or environmental influences? — Mww

Sometimes. If you teach a girl that females are bad at math, voila, she doesn't put any effort into it, and subsequently sucks at it.

His organizational backbone was democracy coming out of the enlightenment and the belief that science and preparing everyone to be good citizens would improve our lives, which it has. — Athena

No, it really wasn't. He wasn't included as a beneficiary of the American vision of the free society. His kind weren't allowed to vote. His foundation was the community of the African
American church.

It's just clear that who you are is culturally and chemically mediated. Whether you are a lawyer or a gangster, that stuff depends on your environment. Was there lead in the water you drank as a child? Did you inherit schizophrenia? Were you sexually abused? Was your father a billionaire? Did you become a heroin addict?

You'll be a very different person in each of these cases, with very different emotions and cognitive functioning. This leads us to ask what the homunculus is supposed to be.

Where is it written and how and by whom is it enforced? — Vera Mont

I'm kind of surprised you haven't googled it.

It's a feature of human organizations. — Vera Mont

Nope.

'the rule of law' is neither and institution nor an agency: it is an idea. A nebulous one, open to interpretation. — Vera Mont

It's pretty specific. It means that no one is above the law. It's a feature of democratic arrangements that lack aristocracy or monarchy.

I really don't see why the homunculus is a logical problem, maybe you could explain this problem for me. — Metaphysician Undercover

The idea of a Cartesian theatre is subject to the development of an infinite regress if we imagine that the stream of data coming into the CNS is being witnessed by an internal person.

. I realize consciousness presents us with a problem, but I think it's more of a problem of premises rather than a problem of logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

You know, it's really that we're at the very beginning stages of even theorizing about the nature of consciousness. We're still grasping for conceptual tools while wondering if such a science is even possible.

If the homunculus is inconsistent with some other premise, maybe it's the other premise which is the problem. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, the faulty premise is that the psyche is a full fledged being that is somehow independent of the body and the body's environment. For a lot of reasons, we know that can't be what's happening. The homunculus fallacy is just part of that.

It's a fascinating topic to me, how leftism succeeded post war, and how we ended up here. I'm just not going to discuss it with a rabid dog.

In the grand scheme of things, a conservative view is more about practicality.
— frank

"Jesus Guns Babies" are each rather impractical, truth be told. — praxis

Is it?

American liberals do fervently want to impose their view on others.
— frank

And conservatives don’t? — praxis

Social conservatives do. Again, it goes back to the importance they place on morality.

That's in line with the importance they place on morality.
— frank

Morality isn’t as important to conservatives? — praxis

In the grand scheme of things, a conservative view is more about practicality. Individual conservatives vary.

Martin Luther King that organizing “doesn’t work well”, — Mikie

His organizational backbone was religious. I explained this earlier.

The phrase "rule of law" as is generally used in modern western political parlance is assumed to refer to a legal system enacted by a congress or parliament, because that's the system we're used to. — Vera Mont

I agree that rule of law evolved from earlier forms of government, but the phrase specifically means a society in which no one is above the law.

liberalism isn't really about consensus
— frank
It seeks consensus, in preference to imposing one person's or faction's values on everyone else. Which conservatives very much do. — Vera Mont

I'm not sure which kind of liberalism you're referring to. I was using the word in the American sense. American liberals do fervently want to impose their view on others. That's in line with the importance they place on morality. If slavery is wrong, it's wrong for everyone.

Union organizing, civil rights movement, environmental movement, etc. “Random whining.” — Mikie

I'm glad to see you accepting that labor unions were once powerful in the US. You denied that the last time we talked. Doing some history reading? :up:

Don’t worry your little heads about it. Go back to naval-gazing. Because that’s worked wonders the last 40 years. — Mikie

Whereas random whining has elevated the downtrodden. :up:

“Organizing”…it’s worked so well up until now. — NOS4A2

It doesn't. The people make the most progress when there's violence in the air.

It's more likely because, at any age, they are believers in Law and Order - that is, top-down governance, chain of command, bosshood (they prefer to call it leadership): a pyramid structure of power. Which, of course, tends toward some form of monarchy — Vera Mont

True, although rule of law and monarchy are directly opposed concepts.

Liberals are loosely organized, constantly shifting power relations, leadership and policy: it seeks consensus (mostly in vain). — Vera Mont

I agree except liberalism isn't really about consensus. At it's heart, it's about morality. For the liberal, if the choice is between living morally and dying, they choose death. The conservative puts life first. Or at least that's one way to look at it.

The problem is that you refer to a number of very different acts "sensations, thoughts, and so on", and conclude that they comprise a single act called "consciousness". Don't you think that the unification of these vastly varying acts requires something like a "homunculus"? Or do you appeal to magic as the source of such a unification? — Metaphysician Undercover

So the homunculus is only a logical problem if we're using it to explain something about consciousness. Otherwise it's no more a problem to refer to consciousness as a thing than it is to refer to gravity that way.

Insisting that consciousness is a set of actions implies knowledge about the nature of consciousness that we just don't have at present. There's no good reason to adopt that pretense.

Not one mention — by anyone — about organizing. No talk of working together with others, no talk of unions, no talk of outreach. It’s all up to the “individual.” — Mikie

Conservatives are usually excellent organizers. I assume it's because they're usually older, and their cause is associated with religion and traditional values.

The capacity to differentiate colour is there, but it is trained by our interaction with others. — Banno

Just a tidbit of info: innateness usually includes capabilities that develop through some sort of engagement. For instance, walking upright is an innate feature of humans, but there are needed structures that won't develop until walking is attempted. The physical stress of trying to stand triggers their development.

This meaning of innateness goes back at least to Leibniz.

There is no 'The People' as such there are just people - cacophonous, diverse, polarized people — Tom Storm

Alternately, it's not people who matter wrt power. It's money.

Democracy happens when aristocracy declines and money comes into the hands of the common people. Money makes democracy and money ultimately undermines it. When the whole thing becomes too corrupt, the power goes back to dictatorship, and along with it, the money.

The aristocracy should definitely be slaughtered, though, no matter who's in charge.

If you say objects don't share an abstract form, then they must share a material one. — Gregory

Form, by definition, isn't material. It's a property.

So you have to say something abstract is involved in an object, which is to reject matter altogether — Gregory

That's one possibility. One could also think in terms of neutral monism.

They are just rocks, each individual. — Gregory

True. I dont have the universe figured out. Nobody does. What I discern is the way we're bound to think. Form and matter. Statue and clay, clay and atoms, atoms and subatomic particles, down to the last pair of form and matter. This is the schematic of thought.

Sure. Yet the answer to: "What is the square root of 2?" is not a mental or physical object. It's an abstract object, which means it's something I learn about, something I could be wrong about,etc.

But this abstract "thing with a head" is just a facet of our thought and language, not some object with a mind-independent existence. — Michael

Physicality is most definitely a facet of our thought and language. Whether it has some mind independent status is unknown.

You're free to think in terms of physical realism. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that your view is better founded than some other. The weight it seems to carry is just a matter of the times in which you live.

It doesn't follow from the fact that we talk about abstract objects that abstract objects exist in the realist sense. — Michael

It also doesn't follow from the fact that we talk about physical objects that they exist in the realist sense.
That is also an unfounded notion. There is no evidence for it and no need for it.

If you must downgrade the existence of something that is embedded in the way you think, you pick your poison.

Another thing you can do is make an endless supply of aliens. This requires importing a picture and adding key words and styles to shape them in different ways. For instance "Queen Victoria" applies features from Queen Victoria's face to the image. "Dragon skin" adds reptilian features. For some reason "dragon" doesn't do anything. It doesn't understand what to do with it.

I can understand it in the sense of "it is possible for things with heads to be decapitated", but that has nothing to do with the realist existence of abstract objects. — Michael

'Things with heads' is an abstract objects. It's basically criteria for a set. That's abstract.

but that has nothing to do with the realist existence of abstract objects. — Michael

It does, since you haven't escaped talking about abstract objects yet. I propose that you can't do that. Universals and properties are too embedded in the way you think to escape them. For instance, try imagining an object that has no properties.

What you can do is just leave their status undetermined. What you can't justifiably do is say they don't exist.

There was a time when I didn't know what it was. I remember one guy told me that a baby is born with his fists clenched tight, but an old man dies with his hands open. I thought that sounded great, but it was meaningless.

Yes

So we are both just fishing. Fine.

Use your own bait. — Banno

So you're fishing? Have at it.

So we are both just fishing. Fine.

Use your own bait. — Banno

So you're fishing? Have at it.

Do you have a salient point? — Banno

Just noting that you state your theory as if it's a fact. May just be a custom.

Sounds sort of like trope theory.

You're offering a particular theory. It's about as well founded as any other, isn't it?

Numbers and other mathematical entities are not a thing we talk about but a way of talking, a grammatical form. Like money, property and institutions they are a construct of our collective intent. They do not "exist" in someone's mind, nor in some unseen parallel reality. — Banno

How do you know that?