Most of what's in that passage has been squarely debunked, to my knowledge. Perhaps not to yours. Onward we go.

Again, my experience has been that this is not the case. — baker

Sorry, what hasn't?

I find it is extremely rare to find people who take one's expression of one's feelings, opinions, and experiences as in fact one's expression of one's feelings, opinions, and experiences. Because most people tend to take them as criticism and judgment. — baker

This seems confused. Do you mean its rare to find people who hear other people's opinions and feelings, and read them as such?

Why not simply be assertive? Textbook assertiveness pretty much does away with the majority of the problems brought up in this thread — baker

I cannot understand what you're driving at here, I am sorry. Assertive about what? Which party in the above tension? Being assertive against someone who claims 'my truth' either results in circular nonsense, as, fair enough, this thread became - or violence.

For example, how the traffic police doesn't hunt down and fine people in fancy cars, even when it's clear they've broken the law, but they hunt down people in middle-class cars and poor-people cars for minor transgressions. — baker

What? Is this some weird like early 2000s caricature? Traffic police cannot "hunt down" anyone. They ticket cars which are parked illegally, or automatically ticket cars that run red lights, drive in bus lanes etc...
You can't get around those by having an expensive car my man. The issue is it is more likely for people in shitty cars to break traffic laws. Various reasons for that.

Or how a high politician who was sentenced to a prison sentence can walk out of a prison -- physically wallk out of the building -- and no guard stops him. And this is in a first-world country. — baker

What are you talking about? Not incredulousness, I just have no clue what you're talking about. I do not know of any prison anywhere who would let any inmate walk out in the way you describe.

Or when a judge asks you a question with a double negative and demands you to answer it with only a yes or no; and when you ask for a clarification or answer with a full sentence, he threatens to hold you in contempt of the law. — baker

Are you able to provide it? I have never seen a judge do something similar, and not have their judgment recalled at a later date. It is not a contempt of court to not answer a question. You have every right (in a criminal case. If you're not talking Criminal many other considerations to consider).

If you refuse to sign it, you're taken to the police station where trouble ensues, and you have to hire a lawyer and so on. (And forget about free legal representation. It's virtually impossible to qualify for that here.) — baker

Where do you live? This seems to me a gross misunderstanding of any related practices i've ever come across. Would be interested to see what the policies are. Particularly given your description of a document for signing is Federally illegal in most states I'm aware of.

I hope i'm not coming across dismissive - I'd love to see these things!

Nor is the meaning of the right culturally relative. The right favors and serves the elite, in practice if not always in rhetoric. — hypericin

Hmm.. I am quite unsure this is the case. I think this is the caricature of the right/conservatism. But I also know, for sure, that supporting elites is at least a reckless by product of most right-wing policy that would otherwise be probably quite uncontroversial.

By who? The developers or my then friend? :) — unimportant

By watching the series instead of the films! They don't represent with Anno wanted in the series overall

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/movies/evangelion-hideaki-anno.html#:~:text=Despite%20its%20popularity%2C%20%E2%80%9CEvangelion%E2%80%9D,to%20a%20surprisingly%20upbeat%20conclusion.
https://www.animationmagazine.net/2022/11/evangelion-creator-hideaki-anno-offers-insights-into-its-audacious-conclusion/

These two articled seem to be a clear indication he was unsatisfied, which was my initial understanding. I imagine as he came out of his depression he got some perspective.

I can't make it through an episode of GoT. Probably the worst show that more than two of my friends like i've ever watched LOL.

Have you watched Shinjeki no Kyojin?

You claimed there were no examples. I gave them. They are about 0.0001% of the plethora of evidence showing evolution by natural selection.

The claim to ad hominem was just a plain reading of your responses. If you feel that's wrong, that's fine. I accept we see your comments differently. But it seems patently clear to me that picking up on typos (which follow a pattern, generally) and claiming this speaks to my state of mind is an ad hominem, and a pretty abysmal one at that.

If you'd like to do a bit of reading, I presume you will take the requisite several weeks to get comfortable with the concepts in these papers, read them, parse them and then interpret them to your heart's content before commenting:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK230201/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25030307/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16778047/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5004836/?
https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.4951?
https://rosenberglab.stanford.edu/papers/GoldbergEtAl2018-OxfordBiblioEvolBiol.pdf

Too funny.

1. I get you. 2. I have no idea whether this makes sense, let alone reflects reality. That is certainly not my experience of that type of person, although i grok they are all pretty darn inconsistent in many ways.

Theoretically, not. Practically, it's everything. — baker

Do you mean whoever is the best lawyer wins, regardless of truth? Cause there's no "might" in the law at all until you get activist judiciaries.

You've been given several direct challenges that you've failed to rise to. You're free to see that however you want to. But you are lying about what's occurred and are projecting hte fact that you resile into ad hominems every single time a robust rebuttal is given to you. You then post someone else's irrelevant ideas as if that's somehow going to support the situation.

Once again, when all are giving you the same feedback, it's time to drop the ego and have a think.

These people are the kind of people who would be satisfied if certain people died, regardless of method — baker

You could mean many different things here which would drastic change how to interpret and respond to this. Suffice to say I don't think that's true of probably any politician. I do think several would be unbothered though, but so would most people. It seems some celebrate "worthy" deaths. It sucks. But i'm unsure its relevant here... but again, I'm not sure what you mean so i'm being a bit meager.

To dismiss such considerable numbers of people as "psychopaths" is naive and irresponsible. — baker

You'll note I think you're being extremely unrealistic about the types of people you think are about in large numbers, so there's an empirical divide here.

Traumatic how? In the sense that such a person could be in some way legally responsible for the other's suicide? — baker

No, but that does come up. What I mean is if you're 13 and don't actually understand the consequences of your actions, or are responding to abuse and trauma of your own, you wont actually expect someone to kill themselves. It's dissociative in some sense. So when this person goes a head and kills themselves, it absolutely upends you and brings in emotions you've suppressed etc.. and you now see yourself in ways that are pretty hard to deal with. And to some degree, that's fair - that's how you learn. But in some sense, it could absolutely crack a child. There's no defense in this, I'm just noting the unintended consequences of being an ignorant child at the extremes.

and this at least to some extent informs the way people will treat other people. — baker

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here - is this about how people wont wish others kill themselves if they might end up culpable?

So we agree that the apple isn't part of our experience. It's not much, but it is something. — Ludwig V

Yes, sure. Good stuff.

In that case, perception and hearing are suspect, just because they work at a distance from their objects. — Ludwig V

Yes, I think so. But suspect doesn't mean unreliable, I don't think. IT does mean liable to error, though I couldn't tell you what that would consist in particularly. I just find that gap non-worrying.

For me, it is introspection that is suspect, just because it cannot be wrong and therefore cannot be right — Ludwig V

Ok, i understand this and i think it has some serious force. Let's see where it goes..

Hence I regard "I am in pain" as not a proposition like "I see an apple"'. I go with Wittgenstein in thinking of it as an expression, not a statement. — Ludwig V

Yes, i'd say so. I think, and this is "think", I've not delved - that both are expressions of one's current phenomenal experience. Although, this could just be semantic: I often prefer to say "I look at" an object and then discuss what I see as part of my introspective (i guess?) phenomenal experience.

"Picture" and "apple" are distinct objects. — Ludwig V

Do you mean concepts?

only apple-appropriate behaviour. But that's sufficient. If the experience is thought of as some sort of copy or model, it is needles reduplication. — Ludwig V

Can you say more about this? If what you mean is that the experience causes the appropriate behaviour for when one looks toward that object, I have a lot of questions lol. If it just means that teh senses behave apple-appropriate when looking toward one, that makes total sense to me and is a clever wee statement imo.

It is like "I won the race", that is, it is about outcomes, not processes. — Ludwig V

Is this (and hte prior) suggesting that the model of use of "I see" should simply be when your experience tells you such? If so, I have no issue with that but it allows for hallucinations to be caught under the same banner as what the DRist would call direct awareness (or, i think better: veridical perception). That seems a bit of a shot-in-the-foot. But if this is something the DRist bites on, that's cool - It makes things tricky for my position for sure.

I wasn't suggesting that it would always be partial. — Ludwig V

Ah, okay, sorry. I definitely took more from that than I should have.

the scientific story has no place for the experience of seeing an apple - though it may well find correlates in the way that it has found correlates to the experience of pain. — Ludwig V

I disagree in a significant, but also probably a bit pedantic sense: that is the required end-point of the story and the only one we knew in advance. I do agree that theres something like this:

1. Reflection
2. Reception
3. Transmutation
4. ????????
5. Phenomenal experience

though, so that's fair to point out, I accept it.

"Direct realism" as a theory of perception is coined as a reaction to indirect realism. — Ludwig V

I more-or-less agree with this take, and as you'll have noted, very much respect Banno's approach over most comers - but it boils down to a semantic argument that misses the disagreement at hand imo. He thinks otherwise, and onward we go :P

Appreciate it!

I've provided you with ample evidence of evolution. If you chosen path is to talk about grammar, in the face of my pointing out that typos exist, I can only assume you are attempting to remain ad hominem.

Not to worry.

fwiw, that divide happened here and there was not much of a way to tell who was on each side prior to it occurring.

Our "left" cohort is divided fairly sharply into two camps, as is our "right" cohort:

On the left, we have:
1. the "current" standard - what would cartoonishly be illustrated by piercings, blue hair etc.. and all the beliefs and hopes that tend to come along with that caricature (notice, I am not saying this caricature is right - but the expectations that underlie it do seem to be highly, highly relevant to the cohort I'm discussing) - essentially socialism lite with some un-examined social liberality, unexamined "trust the science" type thinking spurred by having never read the science; and

2. the 90s type of lefty - new-agey, hippie, and generally traditionalist in the sense that things like sex and sexual roles/energies are highly important, self-determination is important, skepticism of "big pharma" and similar concepts, skepticism of any government, rather than just right-wing ones among some other stuff.

You can probably see where the divide was. Camp 1 were literally calling for the assault and death of anti-vax or even vax-skeptical people. Camp 2 were basically saying that the government was a fascist propaganda machine visiting chemical warfare on the population.

I see the merits in both, but as we've discussed elsewhere, these radical positions became the norm during that time. The fear people felt caused them to lose their minds.

On the right, it was pretty much the same. True conservatives who saw emergency legislation as illegitimate and a mandated medical procedure to be ultra vires in every possible way - and then "modern" conservatives who called their dads "hateful cunts" for not wanting the vaccine when they live i the same house.

Again, I see the merits of both - but fear had us literally dobbing in neighbours, assaulting each other and calling for the country to basically be seized by a medica-military style dictatorship due to the emergency. Wild times. It wasn't just the US.

Butting in - thanks for your posts. I've not seen you about, so -- Hi! lol

1. I'm unsure what doesn't make sense about that? If God was real, and was the source of moral fact, it would be implicit in that fact that a non-God universe has no moral facts. As it is, I don't believe there are moral facts besides facts about what people want/don't want to see/hear/be around/experience. I am unique in this on the forum apparently, so I take that.
2. He could have. But he didn't. So where's the lack of sense? You're using a counterfactual to reduce th sense-making of a supposed factual?

I think it is much more reasonable to hold that moral facts, if there are any, are entailed by natural facts, so that you cannot have a universe in which there are such things as rape, torture and murder without those things being morally bad or wrong. — Herg

I do not think this makes sense. Natural facts are not moral facts, by definition. Morality exists within human minds, as far as we know, solely. So it is for humans to dictate morals. That's why the invocation of God had been so strong in the past. People can justify their behaviour without having to justify their emotions. I think.

Is demanding a one-size-fits-all truth the sign of maturity or a kind of childish tantrum in the face of perspectives that don’t fit neatly into the established norms? — Joshs

The former, as far as I'm concerned, without question. It is the child who refuses to accept their position is wrong because they want to hold on to it. It is the religious impulse in the species that grasps onto empirically false beliefs. It is immature historically and individually. The idea that Questioner is putting forward is one which requires stay in intellectually infancy for life, and encouraging others to do the same, never transcending one's emotional reaction to the world around them. It is the stuff of nightmares.

I think here you've moved from the concept of 'truth' to 'norms'. They are not the same, and even if you think they are, we are not discussing this topic in that light. So the above is both slightly disingenuous (as in does not accurate represent what's been said, not suggesting it contradicts what is "true"), and probably so easily answerable its hard to grasp the point of asking, other than to rationalize behaving that way. I really enjoy how most of your replies to anything are open-ended and don't quite land on claims as such. It's cool. But in this case, it comes across as prevarication.

In your rush to push forward that only the objective matters, you forget the person.

I do not forget the person. — Questioner

This doesn't mean anything to anyone but you. So be it. That is exactly what we're discussing, and you've given ample example of exactly why the concept of "my truth" is incoherent, unhelpful and causes people to be worse interlocutors.

it has caused you to be unable to stay on a topic, answer a question directly or do much but post other people's ambiguous, and usually unrelated thoughts in service of belittling those who disagree with you. Its childish, anti-intellectual and likely a result of an emotional defiance to other people's views. Ironic.

Wittgenstein’s — Richard B

I suggest this is probably a sure sign you're in the wrong lane. But that is literally an opinion, I'm not making an argument of any kind - just noting why this wouldn't move someone in my position.

Or then when people literally start to be afraid. — ssu

Certainly this bit is the issue for me. Outside of this forum (well, not quite, but as a matter of comparison to us) there's a fairly stark divide between people who can adequately parse information in front of them and intellectualize and those who cannot. Unfortunately, this seems about a 35/65% split. So most people get scared irrationally. This is usually obvious in their response to whatever scares them.. such is the nature of social media. We used to just never see those reactions.

Your posts contain spelling mistakes on the basic simple English words too, which gives impression you are not in clear mind when typing posts. — Corvus

Are you not quite aware of typos? This is an absolutely ridiculous ad hominem.

Hope it helped. — Corvus

As noted i the quote you've used, no, it did not :) Status quo remains...Evolution is occurring.

If you cannot honestly say, "My belief could be wrong, I will fairly consider it," then like a child, you will lie, ignore anything which would counter that belief, and go to the manipulation of language to dodge accountability. It is irresponsible, childish, and makes the world a worse place. — Philosophim

All of that.

it is possible you have been duped.

NGE was run through the 90s until old mate ran out of time and money (over three attempts to get it done!!). He absolutely hated hte ending, because they weren't able to do what he wanted to do. He became incredibly depressed and his wife left him (i think).

"Timing constraints[citation needed] at Gainax also forced Anno to replace the planned ending of Evangelion with two episodes set in the main characters' minds. In 1997, Gainax launched a project to re-adapt Evangelion's scrapped ending into a feature-length film. Budgeting issues left the film unfinished,[citation needed] and the completed 27 minutes of animation were included as the second act of Evangelion: Death and Rebirth. Eventually, the project culminated in The End of Evangelion, a three-act film that served as a finale to Neon Genesis Evangelion. "

Years late he was given the opportunity to complete it properly. The films Evangelion 1.0 through 4.0 (sort of) are what you should really be watching. A shame, because I understand not being bothered with it after getting through the series. Perhaps leave it another few years and watch these films instead. Incredibly work - but it's not the Shakespearean gold it's sometimes held out to be! The creator, Hideaki Anno, worked a lot with Hayao Miyazaki so there's some credibility to it lol.

More of the same - other people's ideas and avoiding your foibles.

I assume that is a Bible, — Athena

It is usually understood to be a volume of history, not a Bible.

A single atom cannot accomplish what the whole brain does. Atoms do not process information, integrate signals, have memory, or exhibit awareness. Neither does a single neuron, either. It is in the interaction of the system components – large scale neuronal networks - from which consciousness emerges. — Questioner

The logic runs directly against this. You have not given anything that could remotely support the emergence of consciousness from elements which are themselves non-conscious. We have zero examples of this elsewhere and no evidence it is the how consciousness is generated. That is your extreme obstacle. You don't even seem adequately across your own beliefs to explain them clearly.

You are, though, because you are being obtuse, defensive, refuse to stay on topic, cannot answer simple questions and refuse to accept that your position is an emotional one (which simply means its a conviction you can't support - but want to continue).

These are all on you. I have tried to tease out some answers from you to no avail - so have others. This is not my problem at all.

Hmm. In my view, you have not answered these questions. I have also responded, pointing this out, to each example you seem to think you have answered with reasoning. The answers avoid entirely what's being asked of you by providing yet more ambiguous, unclear responses that don't seem to really set out what you think the answers to those questions are - just some other information about your emotional response to them - often, these are off-topic from the question at hand also.

If that is your wish, that is fine. I was looking for clear answers. It seems others are having this same problem...

Lets keep those goal posts moving! More speculation! MORE condemnation!

One would think a rational person would be relieved.

It might be helpful if you could tell us why, or what about, the human mind makes it so special that standard logic doesn't apply? — AmadeusD

Is the suggestion that a certain level of complexity in a system magically generates a novel attribute? — AmadeusD

Then you need to tell me what it is, and how it works. Every single piece of information we have about hte brain is biomechanics.Please.. tell your story. — AmadeusD

You need to explain how this, all of it non-conscious, results in first-person phenomenal experience and you are not doing that. — AmadeusD

I just read over your reply to me and didn't see any questions. — Questioner

Who says we don't need to fly around cities apart from you? — Corvus

Do you have trouble getting around the city? That would be an evolutionarily pertinent question. And the answer, as a species, is no. We don't. We've adapted technologies for that. Pretty cool, tbh.

But if you lived in a large city with loads of cars, then you will know the problem. Air pollution destroys folks lungs putting them in the hospitals in large numbers every year. — Corvus

Ok, sure. This is not an evolutionary pressure, and if it were what we would see is strengthened lungs which dissolve contaminants (from our current perspective) how plants do with Co2 (in excess of what we need, anyway).

Your comments give strong impression that you can't read and understand any suggestions put forward in simile statements. — Corvus

This may be because you provide no arguments to make your similies work. They are suggestions, in your comments. If you want to be clear, be clear. If not, continue :)

We have several English words for this: conviction is one. Devotion, faith and deeply-held belief all do just fine for this concept, which I've been aware of for years.

This may sound philosophical, but shradda is not an intellectual abstraction. It is our very substance — Questioner

He is literally describing standard world-view, base-level belief. There is no reason to think this is special in terms of various concepts of deep belief. It's probably dangerous, having beliefs you wont question.

A little, yes, but I don't think it's on purpose. I trust Questioner is being fully earnest in these replies.

This is just ignoring the discussion and insisting on using manipulative language. — Philosophim

I do think this is occurring, though.

If evolution were true, humans should have wings to fly around the cities and some other physical features combating environmental pollution. No such things can be noticed. — Corvus

This misunderstands evolution in many ways: We do not need to fly around cities. Pollution hasn't been a big issue for more than about 300 years.

To develop wings would take in excess of 100 million as I understand. These are simply silly suggestions the betray misunderstandings of hte theory. Some examples of observed evolutionary changes in humans:

Lactose tolerance
Adaptation to Low oxygen, particularly in the Andes
CCR5 HIV resistance
Decreased avg jaw size
Increased impacted wisdom teeth (because we don't need them anymore, basically)

These can be gleaned from observing rapid allele changes across time. In some cases, as little as 1000 years. Every single birth contributes to evolutionary changes. And we can see them :)

Some people do feel satisfaction when someone kills themselves. — baker

Butting in, but I think this misses a trick: children who say these sorts of things (and, indeed adults, but explication will make the distinction pointless..) are trying to support an internal emotional state, not accurately assess the world for benefit.

If you told someone to kill themselves in earnest (from their perspective) and they do it, it is going to be pretty traumatic to then admit that you caused someone's death vicariously. Particularly a child.

It is self-preservation to rationalize the prior behaviour into something which make sense of your emotional state - defiant, self-absorbed and unflinching in the face of real gravitas. Active ignorance, I think.

Not that your scenario never happens, though. There are psychopaths.

It reflects his deeper claim that standards of theory appraisal, what counts as explanation, simplicity, accuracy, even what counts as a problem, are internal to paradigms. — Joshs

I am genuinely sorry if I was insufficiently clear, but this is exactly what I have explained in my response. I'm really sorry if anything sounds short, but its probably going to be things I've either stated, or intimated.

The issue is that what counts as matching reality is itself partly paradigm-structured. — Joshs

I do not read Kuhn this way. I read him as presenting an issue with falsifiability. If questions are asked within a paradigm, then the answers come within the paradigm and interpretation is an issue - but this does not mean we are not truly (pun intended) aiming at "the case". I realise this is a tricky concept, not because its clever, but because it took me a while to actually figure out in "The Structure..". I couldn't get my head around the claim you're making precisely, but when I shifted to noting his issue is with structural choices and not an epistemic issue per se everything fell into place.

If this isn't how you read him, that's all good.

but it does mean that “the case” is never accessed from nowhere. — Joshs

This is hte issue, as I see it, in Kuhn. And I think what I've described accurately captures how he approaches it. If you don't, that's all good with me :) We are, after all ,interpreting from different paradigms.

But the kicker here is that asking Kuhn would give us a fixed "the case" if he were alive! Heh.

You know when someone believes it, when they believe it to their bones. That's their truthbelief. — Questioner

I have fixed this for semantic consistency and logic.

Sorry to double post, but editing in seemed weird as its going back to a different element of hte exchange:

I think it's not so absurd to think there's something to the Replacement Theory in light of statements like these:

"I always tell people the day the Latino, African-American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor is the day we start winning... because we are the majority in this country now. We can take over this country" - Gene Wu, Tex Dem (prior house Rep I think?)

"Hopefully, with replacement theory, we can rid this country of fascists and racists with migrants, with working people" - Irene Montero (Spanish far-left rep).

"Show them(whites, native French) that we are more numerous and that we are more intelligent. If we’ve had more children than them, too bad for them.”
“If they wanted to have children, they should have just loved each other, made love, and had children. We managed to have them. Our mothers managed to raise us properly.”" - Carlos Bilongo (French far-left rep)

"Folks like me who are Caucasian of European descent… will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America… Fewer than 50 percent of the people in America from then on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing — that’s a source of our strength" - Joe Biden (this borders on Eugenic talk)

I'm still not taking it seriously, don't worry. But it is a little more charitable, I think, to acknowledge these weird statements for what they are. People who tend to go off on seeing statements like this are well-grounded in at least objecting to them. Taking it as some actual theory is insane (besides Montero, but she appears to be, in fact, insane).

Yep, nice. He is still the loser here in many ways.

Please answer at least one question put to you first.

That's also true - thank you.

Ah yep, fair enough. Thank you.

It's been revealed he called the police on Epstein, barred him from Mar-A-Largo, no one has credibly accused him of anything untoward, your mate Cameron had to retract what he said and give an admirably full-throated apology to Trump for his erroneous and libelous claims on CNN. The one statement people seem to be relying on was from a case years and years ago where the Witness tells of Trump not doing anything wrong. In this case, yes, his name will come up a lot.

It seems odd to want the CIC to be a pedophile Questioner.

When Kuhn says “later theories are better puzzle-solvers” he introduces that formulation precisely to avoid saying that later theories are “truer” in a correspondence sense. — Joshs

I think this is more to do with avoiding using "true" at all, because a theory isn't a truth. Its a "best possibility", and the scientific method essentially gives us license to take it as "true". But hte scientific method is not private, or even caught in labs. The layperson can carry out a scientific investigation, and so truth can be shared. But what is not possible is for some scientific method to come to a conclusion across multiple individuals/labs/whatever and another to come to another conclusion (other than interpretation - that doesn't seem apt for the true/not true distinction but I admit this is hard to tease apart) and for both to be the case. There is only one "the case" about the vast majority of questions science can answer. I think we would be doing a disservice to the world and ourselves by suggesting that our access to those "is the case" statements is mediated by context. It is the questions being asked that are mediated by context, and I think this is specifically what Kuhn is talking about.

The success of the method, in answering those questions, doesn't appear to be his target basically.

You seem to read this as a reassurance that objectivity is intact and that subjective variants of truth are excluded. — Joshs

Hmm. Not quite. But rather that facts are intact, and we should be striving for them. We often obtain them. But "practice" is not stable or sound in this regard. It may be accidental that a particular paradigm was able to answer questions C, F and J while we must await another to also answer G, Q and V. I don't think Kuhn is, anywhere, suggesting that we understand truth as anything other than a 1:1 match between the world and ourselves, but that we can't actually achieve that so let's take a step down and approach what we can approach - which is understanding paradigms and contexts as motivators for what science investigates.

the room for divergence in interpretation is much wider. — Joshs

I agree, but I guess I wouldn't (and take it Kuhn wouldn't, even before having these thoughts that lead to Structure...) call that truth in any epistemic sense. Those interpretations are the raw materials that must be adjudicated between, with reference to the "is the case" of the questions at hand. Maybe this is not achievable. I think that's ok, though.

Are you for real? — Questioner

Yes, and I suggest your immediate dismissal of literally every objection to your points speaks to perhaps needing to reflect a little.

Review your grade 9 notes about the types of chemical equations. Now multiply that by a thousand and you'll have maybe a smidgeon of the chemistry that goes on in a human brain. — Questioner

This has absolutely nothing to do with the claim. More of the same thing is still the same thing. This is why I suggest you are having an emotional reaction, because you sure are not presenting anything which operates as an argument for your claims.

You are talking structure, not function — Questioner

You argued that the brain is not merely a "combination". That is exactly what it is. You need to get from structure to function with an argument or narrative of how that occurs. You are not doing so, and therefore are not making an argument in support of your claim. You are dodging all the objections to your discreet points.

God, no. It's chemistry to electrical circuitry. it's on and off switches, and a whole lot of other things. — Questioner

That is, in fact, combination. It is no different that other biochemistry. You have not explained how this results in consciousness, against the logic of that not being a follow-on from neural structures. This is explicitly understood among philosophers of mind and indeed, is what indicates the problem we're discussing. I would be helpful if you could stay on one track. You have described combinatory activity in the brain. You need to explain how this, all of it non-conscious, results in first-person phenomenal experience and you are not doing that.

Like where? — Questioner

Other animals. Where else would "neuro" apply? Human brains are simply more complex - more of the same. So, if you like, we can ignore humans entirely and ask you to tell me how Cats are conscious, given they have extremely less complexity than humans, but are still conscious and have first-person phenomenal experience.

No, the brain is not mechanical. — Questioner

Then you need to tell me what it is, and how it works. Every single piece of information we have about hte brain is biomechanics. Please.. tell your story.

then, explain to me why I cannot ask a rock how it is feeling? — Questioner

This has an obvious answer: Not enough consciousness.

I suggest you are unaware of any popular theory about this issue. Look into Panpsychism and explore hte interplay between David Chalmers, Jaegwon Kim and Christof Koch. Lots to be understood before we can have a worth while conversation about this. Clarendon is right. You are not being intellectually honest here.

Science works, not because it is truth with a capital T, but because it allows us to predict events in a useful way in spite of the fact that each participant in the enterprise of science contributes their own perspective on the meaning of what is called true. — Joshs

This is only half the case. THe first half seems to be true - but that's because we aren't God, not because we cannot adjudicate what the case is. This is why the second is false - science does not proceed on mere consensus. Kuhn is well aware of this and makes much of it in "The Structure..". I'll respond with a couple more from him:

"Nature cannot be forced into an arbitrary set of conceptual boxes"
"Though the world does not change with a change of paradigm, the scientist afterward works in a different world."
"I am not suggesting that there is no reality or that science does not deal with it."
"Scientific development must be seen as a process of evolution from primitive beginnings—a process whose successive stages are characterized by an increasingly detailed and refined understanding of nature."

A very key one, which I think illustrates that while Kuhn does reject T truth (as many do - or at least, access to it), he explicitly rejects subjective notions of it, too:

"Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied."

His Revolution is in structural applications of scientific apparati. It's not about whether or not true things can be known and adjudicated, from what I can tell. The position is more than science, as a practice, is not concerned with trivial things and so the paradigms relating to which questions to ask are unstable and go through these cycles. I don't think there's much to suggest he thinks "my truth" could be a reasonable phrase.

There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there'; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving.

What I understand to be a common critique of Kuhn is encapsulated here well - The first half of this suggests we cannot improve, because conclusiory notions are incoherent in some way ("illusive"). But goes on to say does not doubt hte results of that very activity occurring. It was certainly the most obvious tension I picked up in the book.

While I agree, there's no need to slide down into suggestions of motivation. Joshs is a well-spoken and respectful poster. I doubt anything is "sneakily" being done here.

It is involved in a highly complex chemistry - I would say the most complex chemistry that exists on this planet. — Questioner

Hmm. I think perhaps you're misusing many of these words in service of an emotional position. A complex is a combination. The human brain literally combines different atoms into microstructures, microstructures into brain areas and brain areas into hemispheres. This, combined with neurochemicals rushing between them, is what hte brain does. It's all combination. THe logic stands. It's not uninformed at all, it's just perhaps counter to your preferred way of thinking about the mind.

I'm just trying to understand what you're saying. It's really unclear. You're claiming something about the brain which is just not supported by what you're saying. The complex neurochemistry of the brain is not different from complex neurochemistry everywhere else. Is the suggestion that a certain level of complexity in a system magically generates a novel attribute? I understand that IIT runs this line, in a way. But your position seems to me magical thinking rather than some kind of mechanical explanation.