You knew this but something something Hitler.

Phenomenal experience does in fact exist and some of our words do in fact refer to it and its qualities. All you seem to be saying is "let's pretend otherwise".

Indirect realism tries to explain its own theory with a cascade of morphology, usually by way of verb-to-noun or adjective-to-noun nominalizing. So with each and every coining of a phrase we are introduced to new things and places by meeting new nouns and noun-phrases, but never by observing anything different.

Two types of nouns are particularly dubious. There is the necessary setting or environment where phenomena is said to occur— “awareness”, the “mind”, or “phenomenal experience”—and then there is the phenomenons themselves, often treated as discreet objects—qualia (Lewis), impressions (Hume), sense-data, perceptions, representations (Kant), and yes, experiences. (You seem to present “phenomenal experience” as a place one time and a thing in another). Not a single one of these things and places can be confirmed to exist, however, because not a single one of them have been found or observed. At any rate, to do so would be to utilize the method of observation indirect realists are busy at work in undermining. But places and things are how we are left to speak about them, I suppose? Sorry, but we’ve looked in heads and there are no such things.

It's the way children and uneducated adults intuitively think of perception and the world (hence the term "naive").

With no sense allowed, any inquiry into human understanding is precisely that much lacking in the evidence, leaving a sense-sized hole in each one. Not only does it undermine one’s own faculties, but privileging the intellect while undermining the senses as fallible is to give away the plot entirely. There has to be an ulterior motive involved in discrediting one faculty while retaining undue faith in the others. This is evident in the moniker “naive realism”, the idea that those who trust their senses are of the unwashed, unphilosophical masses, who are still tied up in Plato’s cave.

She dedicated it to him upon winning it. You didn’t know that?

Did Vemeer dedicate it to him and finally give it to him? Then the analogy is a stretch, but I guess anything will keep the fantasy alive.

The sour grapes who live over there wouldn’t give it to him if he stopped world war 3, but they would give it to Obama for actually nothing. That’s how meaningful that prize really is. In my opinion, it’s time to come up with a new one, one that isn’t tied to the elite sensibilities of a class who has led the world down the path of ruin. No one cares what they think anymore.

Looks like Trump has a Nobel Prize, and the Euro and Aussie pols do not. What have they been doing with their time in office, I wonder? Probably making it difficult to speak and think with their ever-encroaching legislation.

Right, you’re stuck in metaphor and analogy. You cannot describe perception without falling back on the first-person reports of medical conditions, genetic defects, sleep, and drug abuse, or wherever there is no evidence of any objects of perception at all.

Where in time and space is this something you dream about? Where in time and space is this something you hallucinate? Where in time and space are the colours the synesthete sees when listening to music?

In the head.

The suggestion that you're watching your own mental activity is the Cartesian theater in a nutshell, my friend. How can you be a realist if mental activity is what you're watching?

How are you dreaming about something? How are you hallucinating something? How are you thinking about something?

Because the appropriate areas of the brain, e.g the visual cortex, are active.

A "how" question requests a description of an action or state, in this case how you are viewing the activity of a cortex. It wasn't a "why" question. For instance, I see something by moving my eyes in its direction, whereupon the light from that object goes into my eyes, and so on. This can be done in excruciating detail. So how are you seeing the activity of the visual cortex? Can you provide any detail at all?

It doesn't necessarily involve eyes, but most of the time it does.

Seeing something doesn't require looking at something, just as hearing something doesn't require pointing one's ears at something. We see something if the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way, and we hear something if the auditory cortex is active in the right kind of way, and we think about something if the relevant areas of the brain are active in the right kind of way.

This is like asking where the objects I dream or hallucinate appear. It's a nonsensical question. There is just the occurrence of mental phenomena, with qualities described by such words as "pain", "pleasure", "red", "round", "sweet", "sour", etc.

Seeing something is when the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way. One needn’t have any eyes for this. So when you see something without eyes, where in time and space is this something you see, and how are you seeing it?

The activation of these cortexes is seeing, just as the activation of other areas of the brain is thinking and is feeling pain.

Now that we know seeing doesn’t involve eyes, where do the objects of perceptions appear, and how are you looking at them?

Then how do those cortexes see?

Is it your position, then, that sensing doesn’t involve sense receptors?

Dreams and hallucinations can be coloured (or "have colour" if you prefer), and people with synaesthesia can see colours when listening to music. This is because seeing colours (or even coloured things) is what happens when the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way, regardless of what the eyes are doing or what objects exist at a distance. This is also why cortical blindness is a thing, where the eyes react to stimuli as normal but the person doesn't see anything.

None of this entails a homunculus. That's a tired and lazy strawman.

Dreaming and hallucinating is not “seeing”. There are no eyes or receptors of that type in the brain. That’s just the figurative language of someone who cannot even see his own ears, let alone the imperceptible, mental actions occurring inside his own body.

The homunculus critique still stands unless people stop claiming that they can see the events occurring behind their eyes or somewhere in their brain. If you can see the events occurring in the brain, you have to explain how you can do so with no senses receptors in there. The problem is, though, if people cannot see the events occurring behind the eyes, they cannot see what the indirect realist is claiming they are can.

You don't need to believe in non-physical mental phenomena to accept that experience is something the brain does. We see and hear things when the visual and auditory cortices are active, regardless of what things caused this to happen (whether internal to the body or external). If the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way we see colours, even if our eyes are closed and we're in a dark room, e.g. if we have chromesthesia and are listening to music. However you choose to "cash out" these colours they are evidently not the "direct presentation" — in the philosophically relevant sense of the phrase — of something like an apple's surface, and are the medium through which we are made aware that something (probably) exists at a distance (either reflecting light or, for those with chromesthesia, vibrating the air).

I’ve never seen a color in my life. This is because colors are adjectives. I have only ever seen colored things, like apples. And the reason a green apple appears different than a red apple is in the apple itself, because of chlorophyll levels, for example. The little patterns that show up when I close my eyes can be explained by biology, as the random firings of an organ that often deals with light, but it’s still a necessary fact that I’m just looking at the back of my eyelids.

So why do I need to say colors are in the brain, and act like the brain paints colors on a thing, and a little viewer is in there peering at the final results?

Individuals have different bodies and never occupy the same position in space and time. One might have degeneration of the retina and so is unable to interact with the environment the same as someone who doesn’t. None of this entails some other medium, especially a fuzzy one called “experience”.

So then no medium, it’s just that you view the world as if you were sleeping or on drugs?

The indirect realist simply argues that this sort of indirect perception of apples happens even without the visor and its screen.

If there is no visor or screen, through which medium are you viewing an apple indirectly?

If you just mean to say that (most of) our sense receptors are situated on the outside of our body and react to things that exist outside the body then, to be blunt, no shit.

It was part of a larger argument. Their direction and the fact that they interact with the environment allow anyone to explain how we can see an apple, for example, while it precludes you from doing the same. You have no way to explain how you can see a perception, or some other mind-stuff, and are resigned to illustrating diagrams of apples in thought-bubbles floating around a head.

What do you mean by senses "pointing" outward? The physics and physiology is just nerve endings reacting to some proximal stimulus (e.g. electromagnetic radiation, vibrations in the air, molecules entering the nose, etc.) and then sending signals to the brain. If there's any kind of "motion" involved, it certainly does appear to be towards the head.

Senses have a direction that tends toward the outside of the body. It’s why we have those holes in our skull where our eyes, nose and mouth are, so they can better interact with the environment. It’s why you turn your head towards something or open your eyes in order to see it better. This simple common sense ought to inform one of what it is he is seeing.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

I dispute it because none of us have seen, smelled, tasted, or heard our brains. Sensing is an act of the body, no doubt, but the things or objects upon which we perform this act are out there, in a wholly different place and time from ourselves. It’s the reason our senses point outward, after all, towards ships or what have you.

The basic direction our senses point ought to eliminate the idea that we see sights or smell smells or taste tastes. I can extend my arm outward, point at what I’m seeing, and see both my finger pointing at the ship, and the ship itself. One can surmise, using every capacity of judgement he has, that he is not pointing inward towards his brain. Nonetheless, there is always a wide variety of verb-to-noun derivations and mind-things to replace the ship with. Perceptions, sensations, “phenomenal characters”. Se we stop speaking about ships.

Since the entire skeptical effort amounts to the claim that a person is only privy to what goes on somewhere behind the eyes and not before them, we get the infinite regress coming to all these discussions: who or what is looking at these sights and sounds? And so on and so on. There is no answer.

Common sense is just too difficult to ignore. The lights we see, the compounds we smell, the soundwaves we hear—these come from the boat, are properties of the environment outside of the mind; and the relationship with these properties is absolutely direct, so direct that we absorb them into our body.

But our eyes don’t (usually) touch apples “directly”, yet direct realists claim that we see apples directly. So although there is ambiguity in what the word “direct” means in the context of “direct perception”, it clearly isn’t about our sense organs being in physical contact with the so-called object of perception. If it were that simple then direct realism (at least with respect to sight and hearing and smell) would have never been in consideration at all.

There is, so it is claimed, direct perception of distal objects even though there often is some third physical intermediary (light, air) between our sense organs and said objects.

The “object of perception” is the entire periphery and environment. That is what we see. An apple isn’t an “object of perception” because that would exclude everything else. I’m not sure why people exclude everything else in these discussions but I expect it is to help their arguments.

At any rate, our eyes contact the light that bounces off an apple “directly”. We can touch an apple “directly”, smelll it, taste it, and even consume it entirely. None of that is “indirect”.

The entire Venezuelan diaspora is cheering, while anti-Trumpism, in cahoots with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, wag their crooked fingers. That good moral crowd is fine with narcoterrorism and the theft of the Venezuelan people so long as it and the mass migration that came from it didn’t affect them. It’s glorious to watch.

It did affect the United States, however. Her enemies used Venezuela as an oil depot, robbing the Venezuelan people from that precious commodity, and to no surprise anti-Trumpism raised no suspicions when these enemies were taking Venezuela’s oil. Venezuelan criminals were entering into the US illegally under the cover of the diaspora. The regime there used the drug-trade to profit and sent them directly to the US. Hezbollah helped to turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism. All this should serve as a good reminder of what kinds of goods Trump’s enemies are left to defend.

By contrast, the direct realist thinks that in the regular case, it is the ship that you are perceiving. They standardly try and keep the relevant mental state in the picture, they just think you're somehow looking through it to the ship. In the same way as if I look at the ship through a telescope I am looking at the ship 'through' the telescope and not looking at a telescope, the direct realist wants to say that some of our mental states - those involved in seeing and touching primarily - are akin to telescopes or windows. They are involved, but they enable one to see through them to the world, rather than themselves being the objects of perception.

So, crudely, I take indirect realists to think we're looking at pictures of the world and (the current crop) of direct realists to think we're looking through windows onto the world.

I’m wondering if you could clarify something as I am not up on the literature, but consider myself a direct realist. In your analogy, what entities are looking through windows, and what are the windows? Because when I look at a perceiver there is nothing between him and the rest of the world. His eyes touch the light and atmosphere “directly”, for lack of a better term.

Trump is just “defending our institutions”. I thought that would be right up your alley.

Remember this?

Just look at what a quarter of the US Navy is doing in Venezuela: what on Earth is the objective? Likely the objective is just to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what would stick.

Now you know. And the Venezuelan diaspora are elated.

Maduro isn’t the legitimate leader of that country, and your high-horse leaders just sat around and let him repress his citizens, as they’ve done all over the world. So much for “defending our institutions”. And it probably hurts knowing that the exiled opposition leader in Venezuela dedicated her Nobel peace prize to your favorite president last year, isn’t that so?

We ought to remember that we don’t just see ships, we also see everything else in our periphery. This fact seems to be rarely mentioned and for some reason we’re supposed to consider objects in a void. That’s just not how it works.

All seeing must be direct, that is, there has to be some environment or medium that is viewed without something else in the way, or you simply won’t see at all. The indirect realist simply doesn’t know or doesn’t want to say what that environment or medium is, or with what parts of his body he views it with.

It looks like some people won’t be getting their drugs this week!

Nicolas Maduro's heavy-handed rule in Venezuela is finally ended by Trump

Prior to the terror attacks in Australia they did care what people said. In fact, earlier the same year they strengthened certain hate crime laws, mainly their incitement laws.

On Thursday 6 February 2025, the Federal Parliament passed the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2025 (Cth). The new laws are widely seen as a response to the recent surge in antisemitic violence in Australia.

https://humanrights.gov.au/about-us/news/explainer-new-national-and-nsw-hate-crime-laws

Of course, most if not all ISIS propaganda is already banned there.

Do you believe the terror attacks there would not have occurred had they stronger censorship laws?

Guess who else bans speech they do not like. ISIS.

I think there's far more examples of "censorship" actually working and it being positive that the actions worked, even if freedom of speech is extremely important to a functioning democracy. Let's start from things like the ideological teachings and the propaganda of Al Qaeda and ISIS that aren't permitted to be freely distributed due to "freedom of speech" laws anymore. In the UK earlier their message could be openly published and publicly preached. Not anymore.

Brilliant. Now we don’t know who is espousing that message and are blind to the content of that message. After all, the aim of all censorship is ignorance.

That’s because you don’t have one.

Well, I don’t believe incitement is a real thing, so the answer for me is yes. However, if incitement was possible, you could just as easily incite them to peace and love, incite them to change their minds, incite them to join your side. So why don’t you just do that instead of violating everyone’s rights and shrinking the margins of everyone’s existence?

One of the arguments Chomsky and others make is that we ought to defend free speech so that our opponents can’t claim it, and use that persecution as publicity. Rather, you should win the argument.



The Nazis were routinely censored. Hitler himself brought up the fact of this censorship in his debates and used it as justification to censor others. The one time censorship ought to have worked, it didn’t.

A ripple in a pond can always knock against something larger. Societal rules did not predate society. It is literally the result of people before us, maintained by those of us who understand and respect their sacrifices. Sacrifices that, again, due to theirs, you and I don't have to make, and therefore lose meaning and reverence toward. As you perfectly illustrate.

Societal rules and the sacrifices involved in maintaining them… maybe you can name one of these societal rules and one of these sacrifices that you so much revere, because so far I have no idea what you’re talking about.

You don’t mention that out of the 12,000 or so arrests in 2023, there were only 1,119 sentencings, according to the Times article you cite.

We can hold these numbers against other statistics of that year, like that only 5.7 per cent of crimes were solved by police. The charge rate was at 3.6 per cent for sex crimes, with rape at 2.1 per cent. Apparently that’s around 2.7 million crimes being dropped without a suspect being found.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/crime-unsolved-data-labour-b2384679.html

No wonder people are pissed off in the UK, where it appears everything is policed except crime.

But why are they state jurists though? They're fulfilling the will of the people. Said will being peace, law, and order. This requires a robust and powerful underlying system of codes and ordinance.

These series of remarks seem to imply you don't care about what other people want, only yourself (and those whom you favor or who otherwise think like you). This is the mindset of a small child with little understanding of the larger world around him.

You and I both know neither one of our wills have affected any law, code, or ordinance. No jurist has ever fulfilled anything that you or I have ever willed. And if you already possess a will for peace, law, and order, a system of enforcement ought to be entirely redundant.

I don’t care what you want, but only because I don’t know what you want. What I do know is, these institutions, like the ones they are adapted from, have been a scourge on the earth and the species, and the sort of obsequious fealty to them is unimpressive. The admission that you require them in order to satiate your own fears does not imply that everyone else does.

I like to think not, but I would never delude myself into thinking every other person, even the majority, does. There's 8 billion people on this rock. You've likely only ever even been in the same room with a few hundred thousand of them. And that's a very liberal estimate.

You know how to act because someone or something taught you how to. One might assume that's because you were raised in a functional healthy household with both parents who knew and were equipped mentally, physically, and financially to raise a child (that child being you).

Not everybody has that luxury. Did you not know this?

Who has killed more people, your imaginary criminal, or governments? Who has led to more famine? Genocide? War? Who takes from the fruits of your labor in order to fund his activities? Who drops bombs on weddings, or nukes on cities? The one you describe as not being raised in a functional household, or the ones you now defend?

The laws pertain to everyone in a given jurisdiction, including those who do not reach for pitchforks upon hearing words. As such, millions and millions lose their rights to speak and to hear whatever speech they want because some who live among us fear words.

Do you have anything in this world you care about? Anything at all? Would you care much if you died right now? If not, that's a perfectly understandable viewpoint. But that's not how the world works or how normal people are or think. Certainly you recognize that.

I care about a lot of things. The impositions of state jurists isn’t one of them.

Do you require law to know how to act around others?

Let's start simple: you think death threats should be illegal, right?

I don’t think anything should be illegal, especially not speech.

Did you pay attention in your IR101 class? The deal was quite simple. The US allow and support an integrated and strong Europe if Europe would not arm itself. The economic might of the EU supports the US, accept and support its super power status, while the US supports Europe militarily. It benefitted both sides enormously.

Maybe I wasn’t paying attention because The North Atlantic Treaty article 3 says that all parties “will maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.” Where is the agreement that Europe would not arm itself?

Words are not movement, but they can unlock the door to it, or influence its direction.

That’s probably too metaphorical for my own tastes because to argue from a metaphor is to substitute imagination for judgment. That might not be the best approach wherever law is concerned, but then again that kind of rhetoric is built into the law itself, which, to me, shows how flimsy it all really is.

It is a legitimate concern for anyone who cares about freedom. People are being arrested over tweets, one of which you just quoted and published on a public forum.

As you know, it does not meet the threshold for incitement in American law, as there is zero evidence it incited anyone to anything, and because the violence was never immanent. The charge of “inciting racial hatred” is even more ridiculous because racial hatred does not come about by reading someone’s angry words.

But when people pooh-pooh such concerns it makes me curious. Was there any time in your entire life that you read something and it incited you to violence or hatred or anything that can be construed as a crime? When you read the above tweet, did you feel yourself reaching for the pitchfork?