It makes no sense. The obvious strategic move is to decapitate Ukraine and install a puppet.

So they planned on invading, taking a chunk of the country, and then how were they going to prevent a resistance movement forming from the remaining chunk of Ukraine funded by Europe and the U.S. ala N. Vietnam infiltrating S. Vietnam? And also what was Russia going to do when that remaining chunk of Ukraine inevitably drifted into NATO's orbit?

Since this is exactly what’s happened, I don’t think we need to guess. The Ukrainians have resisted, with considerable (and crucial) support from the US and Europe, and yet Russia has taken parts of Ukraine. That’s how things currently stand. — Mikie

Yeah, that's how things shook out, but the Russians would have to be absolute morons to have planned things this way. They did not plan on suffering a million+ casualties for a chunk of Ukraine. That's just stupid.

I’m not sure why this is difficult, but conquering Ukraine and attacking Kiev is not the same thing. Kiev was attacked, yes. You take this as evidence that Putin wanted to conquer all of Ukraine, despite all evidence to the contrary. — Mikie

So the plan was to take only part of Ukraine? What were the Russians planning on doing when the non-annexed part of Ukraine violently objected to all that and America and Europe saw a golden opportunity to fund a Ukranian resistance movement?

I would say conscious states definitely have causal powers: torturers and interrogators and The Spanish Inquisition, have known that since the dawn of time.

You are correct that the universe rarely let's you have something from nothing (except, possibly, itself), and consciousness emerging from nonconscious stuff would definitely be something. I know there's a push by people to claim the consciousness that emerges is something, technically, but not really anything because its noncausal, but that's a very implausible position few should take seriously.

The problem is that it seems a truth of reason that you cannot get something from nothing. — Clarendon

What about fusion? If you take a bunch of hydrogen atoms and squeeze them, you don't get fusion. You don't get anything like fusion. Ah, but if you take a huge amount of hydrogen and gravity squeezes it hard enough, you get this entirely new phenomenon emerges: fusion. Perhaps the Integrated Information Theorist can make a similar argument: when enough information processing happens (a critical mass, if you will), this entirely new phenomenon emerges: consciousness.

I know there are problems with this line of reasoning: fusion could have bee predicted from first principles, while consciousness could not.

So then, how does consciousness emerge from non-conscious stuff?

delete

isn't the firing of neurons, which constitutes the playing of the song in the mind, something physical as well? It doesn't happen at the speed of light, because it occurs through a physical medium. So wouldn't time dilation slow down that activity? — Metaphysician Undercover

But let's say your neural activity was slowed down, either through temperature or chemical or some interference. Does that mean the song playing in your head would slow down too, like "when you play a 45 at 33 1/3"? I don't think it works like that.

There are no outside observers, at least not in the sense of outside of spacetime. — noAxioms

I'm pretending we have a God's-eye view outside of space-time.

Time is normal in any frame of reference. — EnPassant

What does "normal" mean? That it flows at its normal 1 second per second rate?

That seems to be the case, especially when looking at something like defense spending, which has only gone up over the years regardless of what the public thinks, and regardless of political party. — Mikie

Defense spending, as a share of GDP and of the federal budget, is historically very low right now.

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

I have two children. — AmadeusD

This may be hard for you, but pretend one of your kids is trans and you're at some function with a bunch of people and some person on stage with a microphone points to your kid and says in front of everyone you're an abomination to God.

What would you do? I would want to hurt that person. I wouldn't actually punch the person, but I would give them a piece of my mind. Do you think that's weird? And if the person said, "but I love everyone!" that wouldn't make me feel any better.

You'd think so, except that, as I've pointed out, Harris was rhetorically aligned with America's longstanding immigration laws, not against them, not trying to change them. So ... maybe not on immigration. — BenMcLean

There's some wiggle room a Dem politician has. A lot of old school dems like myself were turned off with Biden's open border policy.

Hey, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions honestly.

I think you are giving a pass to behavior that would make you apoplectic if the other side were doing it.

If the Democrats had a young, handsome, non-gay white male version of Bernie Sanders to say that, especially if he had a legit family with kids, then he'd be in the White House right now. Policies wouldn't matter. Appear normal, be JFK, appear genuinely more in touch with the voters than the other guy, that's all. — BenMcLean

Any Democrat politician has to toe the line on certain policies to win the primaries. No matter how telegenic a person is, they're not going to be the Democrat nominee if they don't check certain boxes: pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration, etc.

If Trump doesn't give the stolen election "fight like hell" speech on the morning of Jan 6th, do you think the rioting still happens?

Over Kamala Harris? Over any Democrat? Hell yes I did. I had to hold my nose a little because of some problems with Trump, but as far as I am concerned, if your reality denial is so deep that you can't say what a woman is then you have to be kept out of power over anything anywhere ever, no matter how trivial. — BenMcLean

This is always strange to me, and before we go further, I want to ask if you think the 2020 election was stolen and if you think Trump tried to steal that election. I'm thinking primarily of his phone call to Raffensperger asking him to find exactly the number of votes Trump needed to win, his pressuring of Mike Pence to not certify the election, and the various fake elector schemes. Do you think any of that constitutes an illegal effort on Trump's part to stay in power.

If the inflow of foreigners has a questionable effect on the economy, then you basically have an "immigration-debate" like in Europe. — ssu

It's not just a questionable effect on the economy. The British grooming scandal wasn't economical. There are real concerns with male immigrants from countries with institutionalized misogyny.

What I would like to happen is for the new American Right to:
1. Reject anti-white policies & rhetoric, but on the grounds of a moderate liberal civic nationalism, not white nationalism.
2. Stop seeing "socialism" as the boogeyman and instead work to get responsible people appointed and responsible policies made for real governance, not just opposition.
3. Actually get control of Big Tech, reigning it in so that tech works for the benefit of people and not the other way around.
4. Pursue pro-natalist, pro-family, pro-home-ownership policies across the board. See if we can make friends with labor.
5. Stay home from foreign wars. — BenMcLean

You didn't mention the conspiracy theory lunacy that has taken over much of the Right. Don't you think that's a big problem?

One area where I see the American Left as correct is that Trump really did lose the 2020 election and his continued insistence that he really won it is blatant reality denial -- always a serious problem. — BenMcLean

Did you vote for Trump in 2024?

Trump's actions on immigration are just a more consistent enforcement of existing laws that both parties voted for and neither party was willing to repeal and that's all. — BenMcLean

There's more to it than that. Sending immigrants to CECOT was never policy before Trump. The Trump Administration behaved in despicable fashion with Abrego Garcia, violating a court order by sending him to CECOT, than dragging their feet on bringing him back, then throwing bullshit criminal charges at him, and then having him go free when they couldn't produce a proper deportation order. And I don't remember previous administrations sending out masked ICE agents. Joe Rogan, who supported Trump in 2024, said the ICE raids are insane, and the country as a whole has given Trump bad marks on immigration (separate from how they view border security). And since we're talking about National Review:

"My guess is that at some point in your life, you’ve been falsely accused of something, and you didn’t like it one bit. Now imagine how it feels to be a Latino U.S. citizen and worrying that someone might accuse you of being an illegal immigrant, or you might be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and some ICE agent thinks he should slap handcuffs on you.

Yes, U.S. permanent residents age 18 or older are required to always have a valid green card in their possession. But if you’re a U.S. citizen, you’re not required by law to carry anything. And remember, a driver’s license is not necessarily proof of citizenship, because 19 states and the District of Columbia allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Are Latino U.S. citizens supposed to carry around their passports at all times? Wear your best suit everywhere you go, and think you look too well-dressed to be an illegal immigrant?

For some Latino American citizens, this is not a hypothetical concern:

At least 35 events celebrating Hispanic heritage across 21 states have been canceled or postponed, with most organizers citing concerns relating to the political climate and possible interactions with ICE, according to a Washington Post analysis. One example: Organizers said they couldn’t risk going forward with the Salvadoreñisimo Festival — usually held in Maryland’s Montgomery County — out of fear that the event would lead to detentions.

Abel Nuñez, executive director of the Central American Resource Center in D.C., said there has been a “dampening of all activities that put people in danger.” . . .

As Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” took off in Chicago in early September, residents of the heavily Mexican neighborhoods of Pilsen and La Villita noted how quiet and still their streets had become.

Maritza Lara, a vendor selling fruit out of a cart in Pilsen, estimated her sales had dropped about 50 percent from the day neighborhood WhatsApp and Signal groups started reporting ICE vehicles in the area.

“It’s pretty serious. There’s no people around,” she said. “Nobody knows how it works anymore. Even if you have papers, even if you have everything, they’re still stopping people.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/gee-how-did-latino-americans-become-so-alienated-from-the-gop/

Yeah, apparently we're going to be running Venezuela. We're so good at that sort of thing.

Maybe people will be glad Maduro is gone and will welcome a change? It's not like the Middle East, where you have historic enmities like Shia vs Sunni Vs Kurds.

I think they want to install that Nobel Prize winner, Maria Machado.

It might be that science is just not set up to answer questions like "what is it like". Myself, I don't think that question has an answer at all. The only way to know what it is like is to experience it. — Ludwig V

As an idealist, I agree.

Isn't science supposed to be explanatory? If science cannot answer the "what is it like?" question, isn't that a huge failure?
— RogueAI

No. — Questioner

:roll:

but doesn't provide any information about the content of the emotional state- the famous what is it like?
— RogueAI

Why does this matter? — Questioner

Isn't science supposed to be explanatory? If science cannot answer the "what is it like?" question, isn't that a huge failure?

My point is that there should be some healthy skepticism about how good neuroscience is at detecting emotions. It can detect physical correlates of emotional states, but doesn't provide any information about the content of the emotional state- the famous what is it like? question. And in the example I gave, neuroscience cannot tell us whether we should believe a person who claims to not feel any emotions.

Sounds like Mary is either delusional or lying. Brain trauma can interfere with the emotional response, but that would manifest in physical symptoms, like monotone speaking, no change in facial expression, avoidance of eye contact and neutral body language (i.e. relaxed and staying still in a situation where they should be tense)

Also - if she really "felt no emotions" the injury to the one of these structures would be detected: hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus — Questioner

Isn't it possible that a small unnoticeable change to a region of the brain could result in her condition? Or it could be a psychological condition that a brain scan will never pick up?

Let's go back to my earlier question about Mary: Suppose Mary falls and hits her head and says she can't feel any emotions anymore. Her body still displays all the physical signs of emotions, but Mary claims to never actually feel any emotion anymore. How would neuroscience verify this claim? Suppose her brain is studied and everything is normal. Do we not believe her?

I’d also like to mention that it is not an objective of neurobiology to ask “why?” but to ask “how?” — Questioner

OK, how does the brain produce consciousness? Your answer is to give it time, science will find a way. Pretend it's a thousand years in the future and we still don't have an explanation. At what point do we stop giving it time and realize there's some fundamental problem going on, like a category error?

Neuroscientific investigation has a whole battery of tests to measure emotion. — Questioner

I would say neuroscience studies the physical processes and correlates associated with emotional states. If you were unable to orgasm, neuroscience is not going to help you understand what an orgasm feels like. Suppose Mary falls and hits her head and says she can't feel any emotions anymore. Her body still displays all the physical signs of emotions, but Mary claims to never actually feel any emotion anymore. How would neuroscience verify this claim? Suppose her brain is studied and everything is normal. Do we not believe her?

"That's outside the purview of this discussion."

Is it? I thought this was about the primacy of consciousness. Is it only about the primacy of human consciousness?

But does the scientist need to feel the actual sadness, or the love, or the anger, that the subject of the research feels in order to discover how that emotion is generated? — Questioner

The scientist needs to actually verify the emotion is really there, before investigating the cause. With humans, this is easy. We all just assume we feel emotions because we're all built the same way, but what about alien emotions? What about machine consciousness? Will we ever be sure a machine is feeling the emotion it says it is? How on Earth could we verify that?

However, we can conceive of the object floating upward, or vanishing when released. These conceptual possibilities are not physically possible. — Relativist

Quibble: they are physically possible, under certain conditions: you're in a simulation, you're a Boltzmann Brain, the laws of nature, for whatever reason, suddenly change, some magic-seeming alien technology is at work

Would you say that absent a necessary being, the universe is a result of either an infinite series of causes or a series terminating in an uncaused cause?

Is Kastrup a traditional idealist in that he only believes minds and ideas exist? For an idealist, something is alive if it has a mind, otherwise it's just an idea/mental projection.

the existence of time and space — Astorre

Are you talking about physical time and space (space-time)? Also, isn't "there is at least one thinking mind in existence" axiomatically true?