I'm not against people being de-platformed for hate speech when the platform is owned by a private organization (or individual).

What I'm against is banning individuals from publicly speaking hatefully.

And I'd say that the right to vote is relevant because it's analogous.

What would happen if we stopped the worst sorts of people from voting for bigoted reasons? What would happen if we stopped people from voting against immigration for reasons like "I hate non-whites"? What would happen is that those people would just start pretending to be non-bigoted and they would become dangerous but hidden rather than dangerous but out in the open.

It's the same with hate speech. It's better to have the bigots out there in the open where their ideas can be challenged than to have them pretend to not be bigots until they get into a position of power and then, when they do, they can legislate against the rest of us.

If these people want to openly reveal how monstrous they are: let them. Don't let them go into hiding and only reveal themselves after they have power.

No, it would be pointless. If everything is one color then there would be no need for words of separate colors. Color would mean nothing to people who live in a world with only one color.

Morality and spirituality are different. Morality is about moralness whereas spirituality is about goodness. Not everything that is good is moral but everything that is moral is good.

The right way to go is for everybody to stop caring about gender and race and just see each other as human beings. (Even better, as sentient beings—that way we can also avoid discrimination against other animals).

Aristotle was right: there is only one world. Or, at least, there's no evidence of Plato's Forms. Platonic Ideals are precisely that which we can have no evidence of—just as with Kant's Noumena—so I see absolutely no reason to believe in them.

It's hard to even define infinity in a way that makes sense in reality, I think.

Mathematics and logic is one thing ... but reality is temporal and spacial. And if everything has always existed everywhere that just means since the beginning and in all places ... it doesn't actually imply infinity. The idea of infinite stuff seems rather odd, to me. There is however much there is. Everything is everywhere but there can't be more than there is ... and actual infinity would seem to suggest that there's more than there is... and that makes no sense.

The universe is eternal but finite, I say. Everything has always existed but that doesn't imply infinity because it doesn't imply before time because there is no time before time. There was a first moment—hence the universe is finite.

If hate speech is ever disallowed then those same people should also be disallowed a right to vote for the same reason.

Because I think the latter is never justified I think that the former is never justified, again, for the same reason. Everybody should be allowed to say what they want and vote for what they want.

It's immoral if their assisted suicide would cause more suffering to those who care about them than the suffering that they are currently experiencing.

Which is, basically, almost never. I can't actually think of a case where it's immoral. I can only think of cases where it's moral. People who want help to kill themselves seem to be always suffering a great deal. And a great deal more than their selfish friends and/or family who would rather the person, who they supposedly loved, forced themselves to keep living merely for their own benefit.

Of course, in some cases, the person is suffering so much that even their friends and/or family want them to die. And it's just the law that doesn't allow it. And that's just stupid, of course.

I, essentially, agree with the OP and I often think that it makes sense to say that "reality" refers to experience of reality.

This is why I think that if we're in a Matrix then it doesn't matter: this so-called 'unreal' world is more real than the so-called 'real' one that we never get to experience.

But I think we can use the term 'objective reality' in two different ways. If by 'objective reality' we are referring to the reality that is actually signitifantly real, the reality that matters, and the only reality that we can know actually exists, then that is, indeed, experiential reality.

If we are, on the other hand, referring to the possibility of a reality consisting of things-in-themselves, apart from how they are experienced, if that's what we mean by objective reality, then objective reality is not experiential.

But, in that case, I would say that objective reality doesn't exist. Because EVERYTHING is experiential. But, because subjects are actually a subcategory of objects, objects do exist so it would be really weird to say that. A world of real objects should really be considered objective reality. But, I guess, most people think of an 'object' as necessarily ontologically distinct from a 'subject'. Most people think that an object refers to an object that necessarily has no subjectivity. In which case, it's just that most people are wrong. Objects having subjectivity is no more problematic than brains having minds.

But, basically, from the point of view of those who believe in a noumenal world of things-in-themselves-apart-from-experience: I can understand why they call that objective reality. It just makes no sense to me, because I'm a panexperientialist, and, also, because experience is by definition the only thing that we can ever have any evidence of.

Evidence is empirical and empiricism is experience-based. What's more, something is only evident if it's evident to someone, a subject, so, again, evidence is entirely experience-based. Nothing non-experiential is evident—and nothing non-experiential ever can be evident.

Minimizing suffering is always good and, hence, Anti-Natalism is true.

I would go further, though, and say that Pro-Mortalism is true. You can get from Anti-Natalism to Pro-Mortalism by realizing that Epicurus was right about the nature of death.

Ethics and the A Priori: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Meta-Ethics by the Australian Philosopher Michael Andrew Smith

Experientiality.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/16/opinion/consciousness-isnt-a-mystery-its-matter.html

We don't have any choices:

(1) Ultimately, to control your actions you have to originate your original nature.

(2) But you can't originate your original nature—it's already there.

(3) So, ultimately, you can't control your actions.

Reductionism makes sense because everything ultimately reduces to fundamental elements. This applies to ethics as much as anything else.

Some values are invalid because they cause more harm than good.

"Motives are causes from within." - Arthur Schopenhauer

Ultimately the laws of the universe dictates everything we do, though, because our motives stem from them. And our motives are just part of the way we are (our nature).

(1) Ultimately, to control your actions you have to originate your original nature.

(2) But you can't originate your original nature—it's already there.

(3) So, ultimately, you can't control your actions.

Beyond the physical freedom of not being physically restricted or coerced: we're all unfree.

Freedom doesn't really mean anything to me besides freedom *from* certain things. I don't believe in my freedom *to* do anything. I do everything unfreely, as does everybody else, whether they realize it or not.

I mean, here's my argument against free will:

(1) Ultimately, to control your actions you have to originate your original nature.

(2) But you can't originate your original nature—it's already there.

(3) So, ultimately, you can't control your actions.

It does equal awareness, but not necessarily self-awareness.

With regards to attention: it may not imply attention in *every* sense but there is a very good sense in which you are attending to something simply by being conscious. There is a sense in which by simply being conscious you are attending to what you're conscious of ... since the being aware or conscious orf X equates to attending to X.

Knowledge isn't created ... it's discovered.

Philosophers mostly explain things rather than discover things ... nowadays. But I think that that's always been the case. Philosophy moves a lot slower than science does. And that's fine. Developments in other fields, such as science, are thanks to philosophy after all.

"Epistemically objective" is an oxymoron. Knowledge can't be objective. Knowledge is necessarily mental. — Vessuvius

It seems that you are misusing the word "oxymoron".

Knowledge has to be objective otherwise it's mere belief.

Scientific facts and mathematical truths are examples of things that can be objectively known.

Knowlege is indeed necessarily mental ... but it's also necessarily objective.

Knowledge requires a combination of ontological subjectivity and epistemic objectivity.

An irrational fool has the ontological subjectivity but lacks the epistemic objectivity.

A rational robot has the epistemic objectivity but lacks the ontological subjectivity.

Your mistake is due to thinking that if something is ontologically subjective then it also has to be epistemically subjective. That's an equivocation on your part.

The World in its every aspect as we ourselves regard it, is mere appearance in full and nothing more. — Vessuvius

True.

Truth is that which corresponds to reality.

Objectivity splits into two kinds:

Epistemic objectivity refers to knowledge. Knowledge is different to truth.

Ontological objectivity refers to existence. Existence is different to truth.

So it's not the same.

No, to say something is likely doesn't mean that we know the precise probability.

We can't put a precise probability on the existence of God but that doesn't stop God from being highly improbable.

Parsimony, lack of parsimony, evidence, lack of evidence, etc—none of these things give us exact probabilities ... but they certainly give us good reason to believe that something can be very far away from 50% ... in either direction.

Setting parsimony aside would be really silly because it's one of the basic principles of deciding how likely a belief is to be true when there is no direct evidence either way. When you can't prove a negative parsimony is *extremely* important. Again, God is the perfect example.

No difference.

To quote Galen Strawson again:

"When it comes to experience, you can’t open up the is/seems
gap. Descartes makes the point. To suggest, as Dennett seems to, that the apparently sensory
aspects of phenomenology (say) are in some sense illusory because they aren’t the product
of sensory mechanisms in the way we suppose, but are somehow generated by processes of
judgment or belief, is just to put forward a surprising hypothesis about part of the mechanism
of this rich seeming. It is in no way to put in question its existence or reality. Whatever the
process by which the seeming arises, the end result of the process is, as Dennett agrees, at
least this: that it seems as if one is having a phenomenally rich experience of (in his
example) green-golden sunlight, Vivaldi violins, and so on. And if there is this seeming,
then, once again, there just is phenomenology.
— Galen Strawson

As always, Galen Strawson nails it beautifully.

I'm with Galen Strawson.

"What is the silliest claim ever made? The competition is fierce, but I think the answer is easy. Some people have denied the existence of consciousness: conscious experience, the subjective character of experience, the “what-it-is-like” of experience. Next to this denial—I’ll call it “the Denial”—every known religious belief is only a little less sensible than the belief that grass is green."
— Galen Strawson

Knowledge requires a combination of epistemic objectivity and ontological subjectivity.

Look at it this way: Knowledge is *at a minimum* Justified True Belief (we can exclude Gettier cases for the time being because not every case is a Gettier case): Truth and justification is the objective aspect and belief is the subjective aspect.

I don't see how that contradicts anything I said. In fact, it seems to bolster my point: that there can be epistemically objective facts about ontological subjectivity.

Plus, I don't see how true statements don't refer to states of affairs.

It's just parsimony.

if so far it seems that the world has explanations then it's more parsimonious to assume that that's the way the world works until there's evidence of something without an explanation.

And the problem is that you can't have evidence of a world without explanations because that would require an explanation.

And what's more likely, that sometimes there isn't an explanation or that sometimes we can't find one? I think the latter is clearly more parsimonious again.

We have a world that makes sense and we can often make sense of it but sometimes can't. After all, sometimes it seems that there wasn't an explanation and then we later discover that there was all along and we just failed to find it previously.

It's the same reason that monism is more likely than dualism. If there's no evidence of two kinds of ultimate substances then why assume it? Assume there's one kind of thing unless there's any evidence to the contrary. And if there can't ever be any evidence to the contrary then stick with one because it's more parsimonious.

"Your final sentence seems to say that even events which don't seem to have a cause/explanation actually do have one"

Well, I'm just saying that even an acausal explanation is a cause in a wider sense. It's just acausal in a scientific sense. If X happens *because of* Y then why is the cause in a wider sense even if Y is a probabilistic cause rather than a stereotypical clockwork-style "deterministic" one.

" but it's too complicated for us to predict, so it might look like there's no explanation. In short, you are supporting the position that there are no causeless events, nor can there be. Is this right?"

That is another possibility. And it is actually the view that I hold. That determinism is actually true and what seems to be acausal from the perspective of science is just down to a failure in our understanding. Acausality is really pseudo-acausality just like rolling some dice is pseudo-randomness (because it's really down to physics rather than actual randomness).

I think it's far more likely that scientists are unable to find causes once we get down to the quantum level than it is the case that there actually are no causes.

And, again, I'm using "cause" in a wide sense. Because scientists like to redefine stuff so that their models can help them make sense of their experiments and theories about what they observe.

In the scientific sense I'm sure it is indeed the case that the quantum world is acausal. But here we're talking philosophy. Scientific indeterminism is perfectly compatible with philosophical determinism. Philosophical determinism says that there is only one actually possible future ... and scientific indeterminism just deals with observations and what is unable to be predicted.

Plus, there are arguments against scientific realism:

Yes... because to be aware of X and to know of X is the same thing.

Knowledge requires both rationality and consciousness. This is why neither rationalism nor empiricism can lead to knowledge.

A completely irrational fool cannot have knowledge of X because he doesn't understand X. A robot can't have knowledge of X because he's not conscious of X.

Logically impossible things that you think you believe in don't actually seem the way you think they seem. Somebody may live their life thinking 2+2=5 and act on behalf of that ... but that doesn't mean that that's actually a concept that they can make sense of or really believe in.

Incompatibilist will isn't only logically impossible it's not even logically coherent. It's not even possible to give a coherent definition of it. It would require you to be able to determine yourself but it would also require determinism to be false. And it would require you to be able to cause yourself to infinity despite the fact that you would never be able to end that regress and actually gain control.

It's not merely my subjective opinion that it objectively the case that you very probably didn't spend the past 15 minutes visualizing Abraham Lincon bouncing around on a pink space hopper.

To quote from Wikipedia: "[John] Searle has argued that critics like Daniel Dennett, who (he claims) insist that discussing subjectivity is unscientific because science presupposes objectivity, are making a category error. Perhaps the goal of science is to establish and validate statements which are epistemically objective, (i.e., whose truth can be discovered and evaluated by any interested party), but are not necessarily ontologically objective.

Searle calls any value judgment epistemically subjective. Thus, "McKinley is prettier than Everest" is "epistemically subjective", whereas "McKinley is higher than Everest" is "epistemically objective." In other words, the latter statement is evaluable (in fact, falsifiable) by an understood ('background') criterion for mountain height, like 'the summit is so many meters above sea level'. No such criteria exist for prettiness.

Beyond this distinction, Searle thinks there are certain phenomena (including all conscious experiences) that are ontologically subjective, i.e. can only exist as subjective experience. For example, although it might be subjective or objective in the epistemic sense, a doctor's note that a patient suffers from back pain is an ontologically objective claim: it counts as a medical diagnosis only because the existence of back pain is "an objective fact of medical science". The pain itself, however, is ontologically subjective: it is only experienced by the person having it.

Searle goes on to affirm that "where consciousness is concerned, the existence of the appearance is the reality". His view that the epistemic and ontological senses of objective/subjective are cleanly separable is crucial to his self-proclaimed biological naturalism, because it allows epistemically objective judgements like "That object is a pocket calculator" to pick out agent-relative features of objects, and such features are, on his terms, ontologically subjective (unlike, say, "That object is made mostly of plastic")."

Those of us who are informed certainly do know that incompatibilist free will does not exist.

Many different things.

Just as the word "jackass" can mean both a donkey and a fool... and I don't have to insist that it only has one meaning.

Every event must have an explanation but there isn't necessarily only one possible future. An event could lead to many other different events.

Everything has an explanation ... so every event needs a cause in the widest possible sense. But people usually use the term "cause" to mean something specific. People think of causality as determinism.

Even if the universe is acausal then that just means that events are determined by probabilistic laws that can't be predicted. So even then the supposedly acausal probabilistic laws are causal in a wide sense. They're just not causal in the narrow sense that people usually mean when they talk of causality. Which is why it's described as acausal.

No, I don't think that the falling tree makes no noise. But I do think that nobody knows there is a noise if nobody exists to know of the noise.

And philosophical determinism doesn't imply scientific determinism.

Furthermore. ... I wouldn't describe a random essence that decides our behavior as a determinist one. Even if it 'determines' it in the sense that it's due to our random nature that our behavior is random.

Philosophical determinism is not implied. That's the point. Philosophical determinism is the view that there is only one possible future ... and there's nothing about the argument I provided that requires that truth.

Facts about subjectivity are only subjective in the sense that they're facts about subjectivity. They're still objective in the sense that they're a fact. After all, subjects are just one kind of object: one with consciousness.

So what?

Yes, assuming you mean Libertarian free will ... it's just that most people fail to see that.

Although ... Libertarian free will doesn't map onto a subjective reality either. But recognizing that reality is objective should reveal that free will doesn't exist from the perspective of anybody who thinks about it clearer. It merely takes a deeper thinker to see that Libertarian free will doesn't map onto any sort of reality whatsoever.

It's wrong to joke about everything if it harms people.

I can't see how it could harm anyone. Because the harm in joking seems to come through the way you joke about it rather than what you joke about.

One cannot decouple one's essence from the rest of the universe which is precisely why one cannot be free. We do what we do because of the big bang or we do what we do because of the universe's probabilistic acausal nature ... in either case, we can't control our nature.

There are many kinds of freedom.

There's political freedom.

There's freedom from coercion.

There's freedom of speech.

There's freedom of ability (people who can walk have a freedom that people who can't don't, for example).

And then there's free will. Some people define free will as mere freedom of ability + freedom from coercion. Those people are called compatibilists (because such a conception of free will is compatible with determinism). To me, free will would have to be something deeper than that. Free will would have to be what most people believe it is. And what most people believe it is is something that isn't actually coherent in reality. Something logically impossible. The concept of free will that most people believe in is a delusion ... and compatibilists just confuse matters. Better to acknowledge that X doesn't exist than to redefine it. I have the same problem with naturalistic pantheists who wish to merely label the universe as God.