Well if we can agree that the freedom of speech issue in Britain is being whipped up by the populists and the Tory’s who are aping the populists, along with the media organs aiding them in this. Then we need to identify what freedoms are actually being attacked and what is media hype, gaslighting, conspiracy theory being pushed by the above actors (or in other words false attacks on freedom of speech).
As a person on the ground I can’t think of any speech, which wasn’t already taboo, being restricted in the population. What there is is some cancellation in University speaking events around sensitive issues such as gender, transsexuality, issues which have been exploited by the populists and some political correctness around these issues in institutions. These are limited circumstances and forums, while the public at large has no restriction at all on their free speech.

However we do seem to now have freedoms of speech extended to be racist in public and on media platforms, mysogonist, to lie in the media, unquestioned and to spread conspiracy theories as fact.
It now seems to be much worse to accuse someone of being racist (you’re not allowed to) than it is to actually be racist (which is fine).

Yes, it must be obsession. We mustn’t forget how depraved Trump is, he is literally Putin’s poodle, eager to roll over and have his tummy tickled. I can’t see how American society can survive this seeing their highest office dragged down into the gutter and the President defecting to the Kremlin.

The premise being pushed here in this thread is a misunderstanding of the situation. Namely that freedom of speech in the U.K. is under attack. It isn’t and what is being perceived and pushed by right wing compliant media as evidence of free speech under attac, is evidence of a government struggling to keep the peace in a politically unstable period compounded by an under resourced police force struggling to keep up with the chaos being caused by the above mentioned right wing of politics and compliant media, competing with extreme right wing populists. This inevitably results in some measures to try and keep a lid on things, which is fuel to the fire being lit with petrol being thrown onto it by the right wing compliant media. All this results in lots of shouting finger pointing and handwringing by disingenuous people and media organisations openly hostile to the government and any hint of liberalism (progressive politics).

This springs from the split in the Tory party forming a new party called Reform (previously Brexit Party and UKIP). They have been fighting like cats in a sack with each other throughout this whole sorry saga. The Tory party has literally lost touch with reality, descending into political bankruptcy. All their policies are in ruins and all they have left is populist culture war rhetoric and disingenuous political point scoring. While Reform is struggling to keep the leash on hard core racists and libertarians, which they want to keep quiet until they get into government at which point they will be let off the leash and we will have Trump mark 2 here in the U.K.

I've always said that if you would have a democracy that would be the closest to libertarian values, the libertarians themselves would be the ones very disappointed with the system. But that's their problem, not mine.

You’ve nailed part of the problem in the U.K. here. The bellicose right of politics who brought us Brexit, Boris Johnson and Liss Truss with the help of a compliant media are the most unhappy people. All that winning, they got everything they wanted since 2016 and they are still crying and throwing their toys out of the pram and shouting louder and becoming more extreme.

Fortunately we avoided the worst nightmare of all which would have been Boris Johnson as PM at the same time as Trump’s second term. They would have trampled across the world stage hand in hand opening the floodgates to corruption. Fortunately we got a principled, yet boring Prime minister instead and can breath a sigh of relief.

It’s interesting that most people saying the U.K. has a problem with free speech are not in the U.K.
Not only that, but the examples they cite are only within the areas of commentary being stoked up by the far right. Where the issue is not being stoked up, not a word.

Yes and I would add;
Being a strong leader.
Last week Putin said the European leaders were weak, “piglets”. While laughing at them.
In a setting where he is portrayed as absolute leader. A strong man who will not show weakness.

Then we have his annual address to the nation, where he is depicted as a benevolent leader attending to each citizen’s needs. Any Russian citizen can send in a request, or question and it will be addressed.

That said, Sellars's critique of the Myth of Given is specifically directed toward those who would conflate sensation with propositional knowledge. Sellars might argue that knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by participation are merely latent or implicit forms of propositional knowledge that have simply not yet been made explicit by being appropriated into understanding and judgement.

I would say that knowledge by acquaintance and by participation (and to this I would add knowledge by witness), doesn’t need to be appropriated in this way to become propositional knowledge. Perhaps it does do, to become intellectually articulated. But for me it doesn’t need to reach that point of intellectual analysis to become a unit of knowledge which can be squared with other units of knowledge in a way in which it can affect the person in terms of feeling, attitude, or orientation. Or in other words to become an object in intuition, which later might be appropriated into thought, as an after thought.

Like my dick!

I had spotted dick for pudding tonight.

Yes, I realise that, your just telling the way you see it playing out. I hope you’re wrong.
I won’t be coming to visit any time soon, now that they are saying they require all your social media account details when filling out the U.K. citizen visa waver form.

The US will take Canada and Greenland, continue to undermine Central and S. America, and head into increased global warming alone.

So full on MAGA, I’m not seeing it. But I’m not in America.
I can give arguments for why that isn’t going to happen, but it might do all the same and you sound convinced anyway. Or maybe you are just saying these things, so you don’t get singled out and pushed up against the wall when it happens.

Most Europeans hate Americans don't they?

I doubt that, Trump maybe and his acolytes. The issue is though that Trump has lit the touch paper for the U.S. to withdraw from Europe. Not necessarily as a result of what Trump has said, but in the unassailable fact that the U.S. is now an unreliable ally. The post war settlement is fractured. It may well be re-established after Trump has left office, but Europe will have re-armed by then and the U.S. has squandered her position as the unipolar superpower.

It will be important to rebuild the alliance in the future for the troubling times ahead and to offset China. But it will be on different terms.

The US government thought that, and to that end, the US gave western Europe about $13 billion, hoping that would be enough to get them back in business.

Even so, the structural circumstances had changed, surely they were aware of that?

Was he asking to be banned, in a round about way? That’s what I thought. Otherwise he was pushing, or testing the boundaries repeatedly while saying I might be banned for this.

Ok but it has been the case for decades now that democracy hasn't delivered governments that align with the will of the people on key issues, immigration of course being the prime example.

Yes, there is change in the air as a result of world events and the politicians are very slow to catch up. In many cases, they seem to ignore it and stick doggedly what they used to do in the past.
There is a broader shift going on though, with big tectonic plates within society moving and we don’t know where we are going, how to get there, or where we will end up. I think more blame can be laid at the door of the financial crisis of 2008 than on the issues around migration, or the growth of social media. Especially in the U.K., where the Tory’s dominance in the political sphere since Thatcherism was built on the idea of tight fiscal policy, reducing taxes, privatisation and freeing the markets. This backfired spectacularly with the financial crisis, throwing this whole ideology and the Tory party into chaos ( I’m working on the assumption that Blair and Brown continued Thatcherite policies 1997-2010). Privatisation was throwing up all sorts of profiteering and failed services. Then Austerity starved institutions of funds to the point that they now don’t work, as you say.

I’m very much of the opinion that the Tory politicians and their wealthy backers came to a realisation that capitalism was broken, we had passed the peak in 2008 and from now on it was about extracting as much wealth out of the population as possible over the next decade and run for the hills. This was compounded by the disastrous decision to have an EU referendum on a 50/50 majority.

Now we have populists filling the void left by the implosion of the Tory party and the rise of culture wars. I do see your concerns over immigration, but the issue is definitely being inflated by populist rhetoric and used as a means to getting them into power. However it is important to address the issue of immigration and hopefully Starmer is going to get a grip of it eventually. He repeatedly says that Reform are a one trick pony and take the immigration issue away and they have no other policies.

That's why I continue to argue that mind is not an emergent phenomenon, an unexplained add-on to the doings of matter and energy but is intrinsic to the order of nature. Not as a consequence but as its ground.

Yes, very much so, for me mind is not just the intelligent part of us we are consciously aware of, but something about the whole being. Also that there is a transcendent aspect to it like the way that mathematic principles have an air of the transcendent about them.
The idea that the physical universe is also a mental construct is what I was getting at, but not in the mind of us little minnows. But greater beings, perhaps in a hierarchy of beings.

Personally, I don't think that it is even coherent to think of some kind of 'unstructured reality'. Clearly, their 'structure', which might be regarded as some sort of 'information', doesn't exist outside their physical instantations

Yes, this quite the conundrum. We’re either missing something, or have a perspective which generates these paradox’s.
I like the idea that mathematical information is innate in existence when it comes into existence. But it doesn’t solve the conundrum. Only suggests that the rational conclusion is that there never was a before before existence. But that leads to an infinite regress.

Your referenced material is deeply politically biased to the right. In the U.K. two tier policing is a deeply divisive culture war issue whipped up by the far right. There’s no basis for it, media organs like the Daily Mail and The Telegragh take every opportunity to take one off cases where the situation can be dramatised as ambiguous, blow it up into a national media storm. Not to mention their extreme political biases to the right on a whole host of issues. I recall they said Brexit was the best thing for the country, Boris Johnson was a stand up guy and Liss Truss’s budget was the best in U.K. history. No they are saying Starmer is destroying the country after the Tory’s salted the earth before they left office.

When you read the above tweet, did you feel yourself reaching for the pitchfork?

I think you’re addressing the wrong crowd, I’m sure we’re nothing but a bunch of harmless philosophers.

Well I don’t know who thought America was going to be able to pull back and leave Europe to take up here previous role following the war. That was never going to happen and didn’t happen. Churchill might have whispered in their ear about Stalin, but it was the Americans who got stuck into the Cold War.

You say we’re going our separate ways, I don’t see it, Trump is an anomaly.

That's an interesting narrative. The American narrative is that after WW2, the US waited for the UK and France to get back on their feet and take over global governance again. They gave them money to help with that, but neither country seemed to care much about protecting the infrastructure of global trade, so the US decided to take over that role, partly inspired by Stalin's ongoing threats. Someone asked him how much more of Europe he was planning to take and he answered, "Not much.".

Following WW2 Europe was devastated, it was going to take decades to rebuild and re-arm. The war wiped away the colonies of Great Britain (although this had already been on the cards) and France’s colonies were small and with little global influence left. Neither country was in a position to resume global governance. Britain was financially broke with the combination of the cost of war and the loss of empire. The entire population was subjected to strict food rationing for 14years following 1945. We didn’t finish paying off the war time debt to the U.S. and Canada until December 2006. I can’t speak for how France faired financially, but their country was more ravaged that Britain. While Germany was going to be on the naughty step for a generation, with no plans to re-arm.
McCarthyism was in full swing by the early1950. The US made damn sure that as many nuclear scientists etc were moved over to the U.S. as they could get, to prevent them being tempted over to Russia.

I imagine neither of us is overly interested in the narrative of the other though.

There are also facts. Facts speak for themselves.

That's a big question! 'Biosemiotics' about which I've learned a lot from this forum, sees living systems in terms of the interpretation of signs (which is what semiotics is). Whether any 'information' exists in that sense outside biological systems is moot, in my view, but it's a big question.

I don’t know if this addresses the question, or whether I’m missing something.
If we take away Newton (and all of humanity) from the situation described. There are still celestial bodies under attraction, because the birds and plants are still flying and growing as before, which requires them to be there as before. But we lose houses, cars, TV, etc. and all the information involved in creating them. If we take away all birds and plants, the water and air they use are still there. But it is just a barren landscape of rock, sand and water. There are no forests, or bird song and all the information involved therein.
If we then take away all the atoms, is there nothing left, or are we just taking away the barren landscape of rock and water and the information they hold and leaving something more primordial, such as sub atomic particles, or dark energy, presumably there is something left, there is space and time. Just without any of the information involved in a cosmos with atoms.

Einstein would say presumably that when we take away the atoms, we are also taking away the space and time and the information involved in that. Does that then mean that existence has been taken away at that point and all the information involved in that?

Or does some of that information, like mathematical principles, remain and if it remains, where (and when) does it remain?

There does seem to be a cut off point here, at the point of atomic structure. So in my thought experiment, there are four things, Newton, birds, plants and atoms, all grouped together as one existing thing. Like a bubble, all self contained, sitting, floating in a nothingness. All information presumably is also in this bubble too. Or is there some information outside the bubble, universal information?

If a new bubble were to form, where does it’s information originate?

This would suggest to me that the bubble isn’t in nothingness, that it is born, that there is more out there, but that within our bubble there is a self identification an integration, a unit, a being. A frequency on a scale.

This is a tactic that has been shown to been dangerous and contra-productive, for instance in the case of immigration where any discussion of the topic has for the longest time been made virtually impossible because of various accusations of racism, fascism or Nazism and the like as soon as the issue was brought up.

I take on board your criticism, I don’t normally get involved in tit for tat comments, although in this occasion this did happen after I pointed out to Tzeentch that I perceive a clear anti European bias.

I would say though, that we are in a rarefied space inhabited by deep thinking, knowledgeable philosophers, who are already well versed in the arguments. As such I would expect there to be a serious intellectual consideration of the issues by everyone and that the full range of issues and positions should be on the table. With contributors expecting their positions to be challenged and to in turn challenge their interlocutors.

It does not exist in itself, but only as a specification of states, relations, or constraints within systems.

Yes, I was seeing information (the same information) as meaning different things to different observers, depending on their position in the ecosystem. To different organisms the information that gravity moves materials downwards has different meanings, for the plant, it is that the roots will seek to move down and the shoots to move up. For a bird, the same information it means to fly the right way up and not upside down. For Isaac Newton it means the theory of the attraction between celestial bodies.

So is there no information (about gravity) if there is no plant, bird, or Isaac Newton (no life)?

Of course this is now the standard rhetoric from Russia, the latest with Putin himself calling Eu leaders "little pigs/swines" alongside accusing of Biden “consciously” unleashing the war in Ukraine.

Yes, I saw that, Putin laughing and calling the EU leaders piglets. Reminds me of the little green men in Ukraine. He has contempt for European institutions and will press ahead with his hybrid war. We have hard evidence of this now with Russian drone ships detected in European waters.
Should the EU split up. There will be hybrid war with each individual country with the intention of installing Russia friendly governments, to further destabilise the block.

Perhaps if that’s what I said, but it isn’t. I said Putin would agree that the EU should be got rid of too. That’s all.

The biological machine (society of cells) behind the scenes, is alive and imbues the puppet with sentience.

I noticed that there were no living cells in the AI/robots in the links. So no consciousness, or sentience.
Where are the cyborgs and cybernetics?

it seems Trump and Putin would be in agreement with you.

Yes, it’s a crude metaphor, perhaps a society of cells is more appropriate.

We are therefore not normally aware of the mind’s world-constituting activity. Becoming aware of it requires a reflective shift that is conceptually and phenomenologically difficult—precisely because it concerns the enabling conditions of experience, not one more experience among others. It is that which makes self-knowledge so difficult.

When we look at the outside world, we are observing a view (a stage) with perspective and a horizon. We are accustomed to understanding what is going on on that stage and playing a role on it. When observing ourselves, we are observing a puppet moving as though it is alive. Its aliveness is sustained by a complex process of actualisation which is hidden from us, unconscious. So we are only viewing an apparently conscious puppet. But because the puppet is a highly real projection, we think it is real, alive and inexplicable, it seems to have a life of its own. We are not aware of what makes it alive, which is behind the scenes, a complex biological machine.

Set that challenge aside for the moment, and assume as a premise that feelings could be added to the hardware. I suggest that this would make it feasible to duplicate human reasoning: not a mere simulation, but duplicating the algorthmic processing that it involves.

Then the way forward would be to create a cyborg. The technology is already being developed, but is in its infancy. It’s only a matter of time now.

Baffling if anyone can take this crap seriously. Who's the target?

People who don’t have access to unfettered news outlets. Oh and president Trump.

Yes AI are masters of mimicry, it’s important to keep what they do separate from being conscious.

I have no experience with AI, other than Google Search. But I suspect that the human programmers of Chat-Bots necessarily include a self-reference algorithm in the basic code. But whether that kind of reflection constitutes self-awareness, I have to agree with Claude : "I'm genuinely uncertain whether I have experiences with the qualitative character that humans do, or whether there's "something it's like" to be me processing these words". :smile:

There seems to be a conflation in this discussion, between self reference and self awareness. Claude is clearly both self-referential and self-aware. But has no conscious understanding or experience of what it is aware of. This is because consciousness is not a computational process, it is a living state. Claude may be more self-aware than any human, ie. Fully knowledgeable of every piece of information, accessible to it at all times and yet entirely unconscious and unconscious of what it is aware of. Whereas a person is only partially self aware and has to struggle to remember things, or decide how he/she feels about things, while being all too conscious of how slowly the cogs are turning in their own mind.

We need to tease out what is intelligence from what is consciousness and keep them separate.

Now I hold that plants are conscious, just not like us. But they are alive and present and conscious in a more meditative state than us, because they don’t have a brain. A thought experiment; a tree as it grows might encounter an accurately fashioned metal cube and grow around it as it gets bigger. In a sense, it has represented the shape, or form of that cube in it’s body and when the tree is cut down and the cube removed, the shape and dimensions of that cube can be obtained by measuring the void in the tree’s body. So the tree has described and recorded the metal cube and is able to deliver that information to the person examining the void in its body. So in a sense the tree is performing the same task as the AI. Describing and recording data about something and transferring that data to us. But just in a different way, a way that includes conscious behaviour, but which the tree is entirely unconscious of, rather like the way the AI is entirely unconscious of what it is doing.

The real "dysfunction" has been the immigration policy, which de facto lead to UK to leave the union and have it's disastrous Brexit, which showed to every EU country extremely clearly how leaving the union would an absolute disaster in economic terms. Hence immigration, not economics, has been the real issue that has giving strength to the anti-EU anti-immigration populists.

Brexit was as a result of Russian friendly populists playing the race/immigration card. The links to the Kremlin are slowly coming out. A former leader of the Reform party in wales. Is starting a 10yr jail term for accepting Russian bribes. The Conservative Party was awash with Russian money through the Conservative friends of Russia association.

But they will get the message.

As you say, Germany has got the message. I was hearing reports that German troops are helping dig trenches and tank traps in Poland.

I'm not trying to be moralistic in saying this, as I myself am not a celibate vegetarian yogi.

These restraints and observances can be woven into a modern life, but it’s not easy to pass this skill onto a seeker, or chela due to the discipline required to observe them to the point that they become second nature, or to then convey the ideas around “non-dualism” such that it becomes woven into that second nature, in the frenetic consumerist world we live in. I have only managed it once and the degree to which it was successful is difficult to determine in the modern world. There are always a few naturals who get there on their own, but to do it wholesale requires monastic settings and is not likely to be added to the curriculum in schools anytime soon.

All we can hope for is that some of the teachings and ideas can be conveyed into the philosophical cannon, so that they are not lost to history.

Thanks for the Avaita-vision link, it was like taking a breath of fresh air.

I guess "the higher (subtle) realms" is the answer.

It is quite difficult to explain, but is also quite simple.
I’ll approach it in two ways, firstly, imagine a spectrum like the electromagnetic spectrum. The spectrum is a scale of different wavelengths from very long at the bottom end and very short at the top end. Physical matter is near the bottom and as you go further up, you get mind, then soul, then spirit. The soul and the spirit are in subtle realms like heaven in the bible. They are all the same thing, material, but at different frequencies, or wavelengths. Due to the nature of the universe these different wavelengths present in different ways.

Secondly, from the top down. Pure being expresses itself in more and more complex ways as you go down the spectrum until at the bottom you get the most complex, almost infinitely complex as physical matter. Necessarily it is a complex story being expressed at this point.

I’m saying that consciousness is the ground from the soul upwards and consciousness below this point requires a living entity to be grounded there. Which hosts it. That this physical material is an artificial construct to ground consciousness in such a dense kind of expression. It is artificial because consciousness can’t function as a ground there and consciousness is an essential ground for being. So for consciousness and being to be there an artificial realm is generated, in which they are hosted.

An intelligence wants to do something that it needs consciousness to accomplish, so it constructs consciousness?

Yes, that’s pretty much it.

You don't have to be Denmark to state the obvious (as their intelligence service did). The US is an untrustworthy ally and even if the democrats came to power and would try to take US Foreign Diplomacy to what it was since WW2 until Turmp, there is allways the possibility of MAGA-people or similar coming to power and being hostile towards Europe.

Yes, that is a possibility and the U.S. is now untrustworthy. But with Democrats in office they would not likely pull out of NATO and by the time of the following term (6years from now) the war will be over, Russia will be contained, Europe will have re-armed.

I don't know a single statement that could more blatantly reveal one's complete geopolitical ignorance.

It’s all relative. Name a nation acting more strategically in it’s own interests?

Can you elaboate on what you mean by "the idea that consciousness is everywhere"?

I don’t know, I thought that was your position.
For me it’s more a case that consciousness is fundamental in the higher (subtle) realms. Not necessarily physical realms.

It seems kind of crazy that a primary particle can have mass and charge. How can that be? What are physical properties that primary particles can have more than one? Brian Greene doesn't even know what mass or charge are.

I thought the idea was that mass and energy and everything else like charge and extension were all interchangeable in Einstein’s spacetime.

What do you mean by artificial?

A construction by a being or intelligence to carry out a purpose.