he conservative is wise enough to confront the problems that arise as they are and then determine what ought to be done. The leftist on the other hand demands that things be built from scratch based on ideals. — csalisbury

And which one would consider abolishing slavery? Would that occur to the conservative? Or would the conservative just argue that is the way God intended institutions to be set up? What problem would the conservative confront to convince them to abolish slavery?

I'm not sure that not believing your experiences are caused by a physical brain means that you don't 'trust' your perceptions. That seems to be saying that conscious experience = unreal or untrue. As if the physical world is more 'real' than the perceptual one. — dukkha

The physical one can kill you, I'm not sure whether the perceptual one can, even though some movies like the Matrix made it out to be so. I've yet to die from a dream or a perception.

The conservative would have a much more persuasive case to be made in ancient China, or Egypt, or the Roman Empire, during the periods of stability. But in the modern world, with the amount of ongoing change that we experience, it's harder to see how the conservative is right. Compare the Americas in the 1700s to now. It's a very different continent. Most people alive today would probably expect the world to be a very different place in a 100 years than it is today. Many of the institutions that exist now won't exist or well undergo big changes over the next century. This need have nothing to do with liberalism. Technology and the problems we will be facing almost assure that. So do the changing demographics, and the rapid spread of ideas and trade thanks to globalism, which can't be reversed short of modern civilization collapsing.

I don't talk about it, because that would be an unwise career move. It's implicitly understood in academia that you get with the program. — The Great Whatever

That's most unfortunate. Different views need to be heard, especially ones challenging the official doctrine. That's what academia should be about. Or am I preferencing representation (my ideal academia) over how humans actually behave in academia?

it will perpetually be calling for immediate radical change and the dismantling of deep institutions, in favor of new institutions with no historical roots that better match reality as it ought to be. — The Great Whatever

You said a lot of interesting things, some of which I would agree with or ring more or less true, but this part is troubling. Institutions do change over time, and the results on society can be large. If one were to take your critique of liberalism fully, then the various movements for equal rights in the US and elsewhere would be seen as a waste of time. But the result of those movements was more rights granted to those lacking and changes to various institutions, sooner or later.

A criticism of conservative views toward deep institutions is that it does not admit to progress. It doesn't allow for the possibility that old institutions can be flawed in ways that could be amended. It doesn't allow for the possibility that things may have been different prior to the setting up of such institutions, and they can be different after.

As if deep institutions reflect a kind of permanent social structure which can only be made worse by trying to change it. I don't think humans are like that. Human organizations vary a lot over time and place. Humans are adaptable, and our values vary. So things can be changed. Things have changed. Massively.

Compare the modern world in Europe today to what it was 500 years ago. It's night and day different.

How do your academic colleagues respond to your conservative deconstruction of liberalism?

So I'm wondering... What are the chances of the "protesting" that is going on right now challenging the faith of enough electors? Wouldn't that beat all? — VagabondSpectre

It would have to be a hell of a lot more protest for this to have any chance. But let's say the electors could be motivated to vote Hillary in instead. How do you suppose the Trump supports would respond to that? What would the Republican Party do? What of all the red states? How would their governments respond?

Their would no longer be any smooth transition of power, of that I can guarantee you. There's a reason why the losing party is gracious in defeat and talks of working together, even if that doesn't actually happen. There's a reason why none of the Democratic leaders are joining in the protests, or encouraging them, or asking the electors to vote other than who their state chose.

So let's say the electoral college does this, and the country doesn't go down in flames. What happens the next presidential election? Now a precedent has been set. The electors can defy the states and vote in someone else. How will people feel about voting then?

nteresting question! I suppose in computer science the rules are clear enough, computer language>assembly langage>machine code (something like that, I haven't studied programming formally.) The structure covered by the general description of syntax, isn't it? Syntax governs the rules, semantics is concerned with the meaning. So they're separable also. — Wayfarer

Sure, but let me ask the question a different way. From the POV of physics, does any of that exist? Or, to describe the physics of a computer, is there any need to invoke software at all?

So this suggests that the information or meaning or propositional content is independent of the physical media type or type of symbol. — Wayfarer

Is it also independent of the rules needed to translate it between physical media or types of symbols?

And to be clear, thinking of oneself as white in that you have light skin, and your ancestors are European, and you may even celebrate eating French cuisine - that's all perfectly normal and good. It's all the other stuff that got attached to being white or black or whatever to justify slavery or white man's burden or what have you.

Now if people want to make the case that all those negative connotations around race disappeared in the recent past, so that being white or black or red is no longer an issue, then go for it. And here I mean on a societal level, not whether a given individual is racist, or delusional about race.

So in that context, it is the idea of being white, black, etc. at a societal level, stemming from several centuries ago, that is being challenged as a negative social construct.

t's not a causal relationship. It's a relationship of identity — Terrapin Station

So you agree with Searle that it's a biological property, and not something that can be functionally recreated in a computer.

the idea is supposed to be that DNA/DNA informational content, computer hardware/the program that won at Go, notes on pqper/a symphony all have the same code/meaning relation, as does brain/mind? — Terrapin Station

To the extent that brains/minds give them the same meaning, which some are happy to do, like Dennett and Kurzweil, and others, less so, like Lanier.

Or let's say, aliens show up, and they've taken human form to make colonization easier on us, but they don't have any pigment in their skin, because maybe they prefer really cold climates, or they don't like going outdoors.

Will we still consider Europeans to be white? What if the aliens want to call themselves white, and insist that Europeans are really pinkish? Furthermore, since the true white aliens are technologically superior, and get to lord it over us, all sorts of notions are attached to being truly white, as opposed to less nice notions of being pinkish.

Is that not a social construction by the aliens, forced on us?

Again, this doesn't strike me as interesting. The confusion of what words are used for what words are used for what things, and what those things are, is a pedestrian one. — The Great Whatever

Sure if it's just a word game and has no social implications, like who gets favored treatment in a society, and who gets looked down on, based on skin color.

Since I apparently love equivocating so, let's say this white racial category had played out between the Northern and Southern Europeans. Would we still say that it's objectively true that Northern Europeans are white, and Southern Europeans are black? Or would we understand that "white" and "black" are just social constructs?

What is the cause? Convert me back to proper belief in the reality of whiteness?

It depends on what we are talking about. The idea of being white is a fuzzy notion that can be extended or retracted to included various groups and even individuals. Notice how people can be accused of acting white or black, or being uncle toms or whiggers. That's not about European or African descent. The Irish and Italians weren't originally considered white. Neither were Eastern Europeans. Jews have often been left off. I wouldn't be surprised if the English or Northern Europeans didn't start out thinking only they were truly white.

Good. I have no further issue with you on this point. — Thorongil

It's not about being of European descent or a light skin pigment. It's about the concepts of whiteness, blackness, yellowness, etc that we inherited from a very discriminatory period of time.

hich chunk of land you consider a continent is arbitrary. But the continents themselves are obviously not. You could have considered Europe three continents, or half of one, if you wanted – but Europe would have been there all the same. — The Great Whatever

So would have Eurasia, which relates to the point of arbitrary categorizations, although I think land masses are a bit less arbitrary than super ethnic groups.

Now I'm curious if all ethnic groups of European descent are actually more closely related than obviously different ones in Asia (to one another).

Enjoy your pyrrhic victory.

Sure, I amended my wording. Although, you admitted continents were somewhat arbitrary divisions, but they can be admitted into science nevertheless.

I have to wonder though, considering your past posting history on metaphysics. Do you believe anything is objectively real?

Equivocating about what? I noted that Europeans have considered themselves to belong to different groups over time. You said that didn't have anything to do with race being a social construction. It appears you and TGW think that the entire European continent belongs to an objectively real racial category, one discoverable by science.

Once again, the lack of melanin in the skin of Europeans was a fact about them before there was a society to allegedly construct it. There's nothing to discuss here. TGW has so thoroughly interred your stupid claim into the ground that you now appear a sucker for punishment. — Thorongil

My argument was never about the range of melanin in Europeans (notice how Northern Europeans tend to have less than Southern). TGW decided to make it about that. Anyway, history says different about the racial categories of white and black.

Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize that was all that counted. — The Great Whatever

It's irrelevant to this particular discussion on whether "whiteness" is a relatively recent invention.

So white people were enslaved and discriminated against in the West based on their whiteness?

I think they never began or ended. It's because of vanity that white people focus on their own exploits -- being the best at being evil gives them some sort of weird masochistic hard-on, I swear. — The Great Whatever

That doesn't change the fact that black people were considered property, then were denied various rights and targeted by hate groups for a long time.

People would just think different things about dark people. — The Great Whatever

It's the different things people would think about dark people that is the entire issue of racism.

I think that race issues are mostly a pot of incoherent moral hysteria that have nothing to do with the issues people actually face and serve as a crutch to place a comic book ethical facade over daily life because the real world is too difficult to handle. — The Great Whatever

So you then the racial issues around slavery and Jim Crow laws in the past ceased being a problem shortly after the Civil Rights movement, or perhaps a decade ago or something?

But the idea of being dark would be the reverse of what black has been considered for the past several centuries in the west. That's the point I'm making. That's what's socially constructed, not the actual skin color or where one's ancestors came from.

Let's try a thought experiment. Say history went different, and an Ethiopian empire dominated Europe and much of the globe for several centuries. It imposed it's own class structure based on how dark your skin was. The pale people, what we call white in our world, occupied the lowest rung because lacking in melanin, and being a conquered and enslaved people, they clearly were inferior mentally, morally and deserved their social status.

In such a world, how would we view dark and light skin?

White people are utterly delusional about race, and all minorities know this and exploit them for it, so their opinions don't matter on the subject. As for other minorities, I can't speak for them, but having listened to them all my life I think they're delusional too. — The Great Whatever

I'd be interested to know what you think isn't delusional, since it seems you think everyone is delusional about the issue.

Which is not the same thing as saying that whiteness is a social construct or was invented to justify colonialism and slavery. — The Great Whatever

The idea of whiteness is, not the pinkish skin pigment, or relative relatedness on the European continent.

Sure, but there are plenty of minorities who do say it remains a real problem. And white people.

OK, how does that mean that being of European ancestry was invented several hundred years ago? — The Great Whatever

No, but the idea of being white as a racially superior category was.

mean, I went to university, I understand that this is what people are told. — The Great Whatever

You don't have to go to university to understand that racism, even if it's the subtle kind, is still an issue. But don't believe me, go ask any American minority what it means to be a minority compared to being white.

How could it have been a social construct? If there was nothing to latch onto, it wouldn't have worked, because you literally wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between white and black people, after these things were supposedly 'invented.' — The Great Whatever

It was a social construct that having light skin meant one was from a superior racial category that rightfully gets to dominate as a result. Or are you just going to overlook that part of history?

I said it was social construct, didn't I?

To express racial superiority or inferiority, and the resulting advantages/disadvantages that go with that.

Are you asking me why people use words to group things into certain categories? — The Great Whatever

I already know the reason, and it's not to identify the geography of one's ancestors.

The question is what the motivation is for lumping such large populations into a groups based on skin color. I've noticed that people of European descent can vary quite a bit in their skin pigment, and even look quite dark with enough sun, just as African descendants can be quite light.

If all we cared about was noting that people descend from certain geographic locations, why not just use European, African, Indian, North American, etc?