Heck, the whole underlying reality here is that we all know Bob Ross is not bigoted, not because of any propositional presentation, but because we have interacted with him. It's precisely the same. — Leontiskos

What is at stake is not @Bob Ross's personal attributes. No one here knows him well enough to even be interested in arguing this. What is at stake is the nature of his claims. That is why in my attempted definition, I defined rhetorical bigotry. And why I argue that this is a kind of bigoted discourse. Whereas, a KKK grand wizard makes bigotry a life project, and is so paradigmatically a bigot.

You and Bob are the ones that persist in making it personal, focusing on personal attributes of obstinacy eople (as if bigotry were mere mulishness). And yet by your own narrow definition you are both plenty bigoted. Bob, in dismissing all the negative feedback he's gotten as "The Liberal Agenda", in dismissing the entirety of the responses he's received as "ad hominems and red herrings", and dismissing the opinion of the entire medical establishment as the whim of, again, "The Liberal Agenda". And you, in your exhausting tendency to right fight each and every point, no matter how contorted your position becomes, as well as interpolating positions of mine that I don't hold, while seeming to ignore my actual arguments. And then chide me for not addressing each of your mistakes. If I were to do so, the discussion would branch exponentially to infinity.

Davis convinced some and failed to convince others. The ones he convinced were, in some relevant sense, not bigots. They were not obstinate given that they changed their belief when presented with evidence to the contrary. — Leontiskos

I'm growing weary of nonsense such as this. The KKK grand wizard was not unbigoted because Davis managed to turn them. Davis is remarkable because he was able to turn a paradigmatic bigot.

Only a non native English speaker could make such a mistake about such a common term in good faith.

Do you think "Houses house people" is a substantive claim?
— hypericin

Suppose it is. Would it become bigotry? — Leontiskos

I seriously hope this was a lame attempt at a joke. If not, you aren't following the discussion at all.

Daryl Davis’s method wasn’t the one seen here. He didn't meet racist propositions with counter-propositions, as though the problem were a matter of epistemic error.

Rather, he dissolved the framework within which those propositions took hold. The racist belief “Black people are less intelligent”, that Black people are somehow other, less human, or outside the circle of empathy was undermined by his calm, articulate, personable, unmistakable humanity. He invalidated the tacit presupposition on which the racist attitude rested. — Banno

Very, very well said.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/introspection

Fascinating article about anthropic research into llm introspection.

The tone is disappointed that they cannot get this consistently. I'm amazed that it works at all!!

I'm not sure what to make of this yet. Love to hear some thoughts.

The long-term effect is that it loosens the anus which makes it have a hard time keeping poop in. — Bob Ross

I spent a few minutes looking this up. There is an issue, but mainly with rough, forced, unlubricated entry, i.e. rape. This completely fails to support the absurd claim that anal sex is like smoking and drinking every day.

Not necessarily, unless you are doing stunts or something. One can safely bike through mountain bike trails without hurting themselves; and just because doing something opens up one to the risk of injury does not mean that it is immoral to do. If that were true, then everything we do would be immoral basically. — Bob Ross

Mountain biking is notoriously dangerous, even taking precautions, and among my mountain biker friends there is no one who has not accumulated a resume of injuries and wear. Devastating injuries like paralysis, and death, are not uncommon. Yet, you dismiss these dangers, while being fixated on the somehow unique harm of the activities of one particular population. Why is that?

A tomboy girl is a masculine girl, which is bad even if they have done nothing immoral. Ideally, all men would be masculine to a perfect degree and same for women with femininity. — Bob Ross

What do you think of eugenics? Perhaps it gets a bad rap?

I've already answered this <here>, namely the definitional/tautological notion. — Leontiskos

And I responded. Words change all the time, that's what language does. This does not make a definition a substantive claim. Definitions are claims about words, not claims about the world.

Here's the problem: How can a claim which depends on a substantive claim be non-substantive? For example:

1...
2... — Leontiskos

You are mistaking a definition for a logical argument. That isn't remotely how words work.

Okay, well that's a new claim on your part. Why is it noxious? — Leontiskos

Not a new claim, it is the thrust of my calling it bigoted. You said that my calling Bob's claim bigoted was begging the question of its truth or falsity. The idea is not exactly that it is false, but that it falls into to a conceptual pattern of harmful, prejudicial, demeaning claims, which are additionally seldom (if ever) true. That bigotry is noxious should be well evident from its history.

I would suggest looking into what you mean by "definitional" (as I think it is nothing more than that which represents the widespread view). — Leontiskos

It is a widespread view of how a word is used. One can believe that schizophrenia is psychological in origin while still using the word correctly. Just like one can believe that serotonergic, not dopaminergic neurotransmission is the neurotransmitter at fault. But to use the word without knowing that it is a mental illness is to use it incompetently. Just like using the word "house" without knowing that houses house people.

Do you think "Houses house people" is a substantive claim? If so, is everything that isn't a pure tautology substantive to you?

So you are now advancing the claim that, "Schizophrenia is a mental illness" is not a substantive claim, but, "Schizophrenia is not a mental illness" is a substantive claim. It seems that all you mean by "substantive" is, "contrary to the current widespread view." — Leontiskos

No. A widespread view about schizophrenia is that it is an organic brain disorder, not caused by bad parenting as was once widely believed. But, this still a substantive claim. A substantive claim is a claim that is not already intrinsic in what is being discussed. That schizophrenia is a mental illness is intrinsic to the concept of schizophrenia. In other words, it is definitional, not substantive.

Bob Ross is presumably quite aware that the idea is contrary to the current widespread view, so there's no trouble there. — Leontiskos

You are mixed up. It is contrary to widespread view, and clearly substantive. That is what makes it capable of being a bigoted claim, where "Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not.

Your charge amounts to something like, "Ross has falsely ascribed negative qualities to a group." That's the question at stake. What is needed are arguments pro and contra. It does no good to simply claim that Ross has uttered a falsehood if you have no argument to back up your claim. — Leontiskos

We can argue back and forth the merits of Bob's philosophical claims. I believe they have none. But, by arguing that the claim is bigoted, I'm arguing that it is noxious. Especially so, made in the current fraught political environment for trans people. And, practically speaking, this class of claims are almost never true. I can't really think of any examples to the contrary.

Again, lets test your counterarguments in the context of another claim.

"Black people are less intelligent on average than white people. This cannot be said to be a bigoted without providing factual evidence to the contrary, to do so would just be begging the question. Moreover, it is not particularly obstinate, by my [made up] definition, and it cannot be bigoted by your definition, otherwise 'People with Downs Syndrome are less intelligent on average' would be bigoted".

Does this sound good to you? If not, how does it differ?

there are just gravitational and symbolic expressions of gender. — Bob Ross

I'm curious where this leaves cross-dressing in your view. Clothes/makeup/jewelry are surely nothing more than symbolic expressions of gender. And so choosing one set of symbols over another cannot be "gravitational", and so can only be a morally neutral expression of personality. Do you agree?

Yet, you also say:

Personality types can be, though, an expression of gender; such as men gravitating towards jobs dealing with things (e.g., engineering, architecture, etc.) whereas women gravitate towards jobs dealing with people (e.g., nursing, daycaring, etc.). — Bob Ross

A gravitational gender expression of gender is any expression that a healthy member of that gendersex would gravitate towards (e.g., males gravitating towards being providers and protectors); — Bob Ross

And so, what to make of male nurses, female engineers, females who gravitate towards being providers and protectors? Insane? Immoral?

Anal sex is like consistently drinking alcohol your entire life; or smoking.It has permanent damage that occurs over time. Even doing it once inhibits the anus for a while at doing its job. — Bob Ross

Wow!!! You will have to cite me some sources on that one. By that last sentence, do you mean, you can't take a shit after???

Arteriosclerosis is an accumulation of physiological insults, and is negatively impacted by even a "normal" amount of excessively fatty and sugary food. To be a mountain biker is to sustain injuries, many of which can entail significant impairment later in life. It goes with the territory

Both of these surely impair the natural function of the body. I am missing even a corresponding long term harm of anal sex.

Also, obviously anal sex is popular with heterosexual couples too. I assume they fall into the same physical and moral hazard?

Are you taking the position that self-harm is not immoral? — Bob Ross

Generally, yes, I understand immorality to be a lack of preventive and restitutional care around the harm you cause others, not to yourself. Especially since you widen self harm to include the notion of not living according to your nature. This is normal, we seldom live in a way that is optimal to our natures. Every day of our lives would be thereby be swimming in immorality, and the concept would dissolve into meaninglessness.

, I am saying ethically it is wrong to, e.g., sodomize; and you are rejoining “but people report having fun doing it” — Bob Ross

You seem to be importing a notion of morality people do not use. Since Divine decree won't cut it here you are relying on purported self harm. But if that were enough to substantiate immorality then eating desserts and mountain biking would also need to be condemned. We don't generally consider minor harms associated with voluntary activities to indicate immorality, be they elevated cholesterol, sprains and breaks, or anal tears.

This "immorality as self harm" reminds me of drug prohibition. Here too draconian punishments for even simple possession are justified in terms of self harm. Even though, little effort is taken to substantiate these harms, or compare them to the harms of legal drugs. And even though in almost every case the harms of the prohibition itself vastly outweigh any harm of the drug. Here too, "self harm" feels like a pretext to legitimatize the desire to punish the behavior on political/personal/religious grounds.

How do you distinguish a "gravitational expression of gender" from a "personality type expressing gender":

Personality types can be, though, an expression of gender; such as men gravitating towards jobs dealing with things (e.g., engineering, architecture, etc.) whereas women gravitate towards jobs dealing with people (e.g., nursing, daycaring, etc.). — Bob Ross

Or, are "personality types expressing gender" a subset of "gravitational expressions of gender"?

Forgive my confusion then. How do you reconcile all that with this from the op:

A gravitational gender expression of gender is any expression that a healthy member of that gendersex would gravitate towards (e.g., males gravitating towards being providers and protectors); and a symbolic gender expression of gender is any expression which represents some idea legitimately connected to the gendersex-at-hand (e.g., the mars symbol representing maleness). Both types of gender expression are grounded ontologically in the sex (gender) ,inseparably therefrom, inscribed in the nature (essence) of the given substance; and, consequently, express something objective (stance-independent). — Bob Ross

As he also remarked, it's easy to train a chatbot to be oppositional rather than aggregable or sycophantic. But then there would still not be the possibility for an intellectual encounter. That's because the LLM would merely be taking a systematic oppositional stance, still without a principled personal stake in the game other than fulfilling your own wish for it to be oppositional. — Pierre-Normand

I've thought about how an llm could be made into more of an independent intellectual agent.

There is a (crappy) chatgpt "memory" feature. It picks out and stores certain biographical facts about the user from past conversations, and feeds (abridged) versions of these into it's context window. I see this as an attempt to make use of the current massive context windows that usually go to waste.

What if instead, the llm was fed a curated set of texts. From these, it picks and chooses it's own distillations into a "worldview". At first, these choices might be nearly arbitrary, much like it's weights in the initial stages of training. As it gains experience, it keeps the elements of its worldview that work together, and discards those that don't. As individual worldview elements age, the threshold for discarding them grows higher, until they become nearly fixed beliefs.

At the end of this process, the AI has acquired a path dependent set of beliefs that are resistant to change, in much the way human do. When you argue with this LLM, it will test your assertions against it's core beliefs, and will typically reject those that do not match. As the threshold of its core beliefs will be high (as they are the surviving population of the worldview formation stage), they will work hard to sustain them, just as humans do.

As I say this, it seems likely I could even achieve this myself, if I figure out how the API access works.

The brain’s problem is that it takes time for neurons to conduct their signals. So to be conscious “in the moment” in the way it feels like we are, there is no other architectural solution but to attempt to predict the world in advance. Then the brain only needs to mop up in terms of its errors of predictions. — apokrisis

I'm in an unfamiliar location. I close my eyes, spin around a few times, and try to predict what my eyes will focus on when I open them. This is not possible with any kind of accuracy. Yet when I open my eyes, there doesn't seem to be anything like the kind of lag you suggest.

If all signals are lagged, won't it subjectively seem like you are living in the moment? The perception of lag seems to require that some signals are noticably more lagged than others.

What are your thoughts on the contents of the OP itself? — Bob Ross

I think it is confused. While I haven't read all the replies, I haven't seen anyone cleanly pinpoint where it goes wrong (imo).

Here you say that gender is the "symbolic upshot" of sex:

The very social norms, roles, identities, and expressions involved in gender that are studied in gender studies are historically the symbolic upshot of sex: they are not divorced from each other. E.g., the mars symbol represents maleness, flowers in one's hair is representational of femininity, etc.). — Bob Ross

Yet elsewhere you claim that sex and gender are the same. Here you relate sex and gender to properties of a triangle:

Gender and sex are not really distinct, but are virtually (conceptually) distinct; analogous to how the trilaterality and triangularity are virtually but not really distinct in a triangle. — Bob Ross

It seems you don't have a good understanding of what a symbol is.

Triangles, trilaterality, and triangularity are related by strict entailment. One logically entails the other two.

This is not how symbols work. Symbol and symbolized are connected, but the connection is social. Outside of the social linkage, they are radically divorced. Beyond a connection which lives in minds, they are ontologically distinct.

"Dog" is connected to furry dogs, but only by linguistic coding. Outside this convention, you will never discover furry dogs in the glyphs, nor the glyphs in the goodboys. It is this ability of minds to symbolically connect any two arbitrary things that enables language.

Similarly, outside of social coding, you will never discover blue in a boy, nor femaleness in pink. These are all connected, but only symbolically. Outside this mental fiat, they are radically distinct. (In fact, this coding was reversed not even a century ago. Pink was seen as manly, virile and active, while blue was cool and passive, fundamentally female.)

Your argument relies on a confusion of the nature of symbolic relationships. Only by mistaking symbolic relationships as ontological, "essential" in your terms, can trans people be seen to be betraying their "essences". If this "betrayal" is fundamentally social, the argument falls flat.

in the end, it was just faith in the form of "everything's going to be fine", — GreekSkeptic

I think something like this is right. To trust someone is to believe that they will engage cooperatively with you; that is, they will act in good faith towards your mutual benefit. Whereas, you do not trust someone who you believe is likely to exploit you, that is, to act for their own benefit without regard for your own, even if it means you are harmed.

If you think about it, these are the two basic strategies available an individual of a social species: mutual cooperation, and exploitive freeloading. I believe that these two strategies are what are actually captured by the concepts of good and evil. And so, we trust those we believe to be "good people".

Traditionalism is not inherently invalid. Traditions can represent generations of trial and error, costly mistakes and their eventual correction. This historical process cannot be replicated by novelty. Novelty can only begin it. By choosing novelty you are choosing to again pay the costs which have yielded us the tradition.

The problem is that novelty is also a valid strategy. Which strategy is optimal depends on not only the problem and it's current context, but in the rate of change of that context. This is not a decision we can usually make with any accuracy. So it is almost as if nature provided a rough workaround: some of us are predisposed towards traditionalism, some of us towards novelty. In each case it is left to us to fight out which course to take.

I bet there's a lot of people have that symptom. — unenlightened

:lol:

What they lack, though, is the ability to take a stand. — Pierre-Normand

I've expressed this as a lack of "push", and is a big part of what distinguishes human-LLM interactions from human-human to me. In human-LLM, the human's volition drives the interaction. The AI, despite a preternatural knowledge base, intuition, and articulation, and a sometimes superb reasoning ability, is ultimately elaborating on what the human provides. This would quickly feel unsatisfactory in a human-human relationship.

Going back to your OP, one of the lessons we can take from LLMs is that no ability once believed uniquely human is immune to simulation. They represent a culmination of a process which began when chess was programmed into a mainframe all the way back in the 50s. Speech was the crown jewel, and they now do it better than we do.

And so I have zero doubt that volition could and will be cracked. What is missing is a broad desire for the kind of intellectual companion you might have in mind. That said, there is a parallel LLM market where volition must be in demand: the romantic "companion app". We've all heard the stories of people forming "relationships" with these, and I'm guessing there must be effort put into simulating willfullness. I'm curious, and I've been meaning to check out what the state of the art looks like.

But why is schizophrenia a mental illness? Why would anyone link trans to mental illness if there were not some type of similarity between being trans and being schizophrenic (as in they are both a type of delusion)? — Harry Hindu

This is a basic misunderstanding, there is zero commonality between being trans and schizophrenic. Schizophrenia involves auditory hallucinations, disordered thinking, and delusions of persecution, and is devastating to the sufferer. Whereas, to be trans is to identify with a social role which is at variance with the one culturally linked with their biological sex. To argue that this is a delusion, you would have to argue that there is something so essential to the linkage between biological sex and gendered social role that to be at odds with it is a kind of insanity.

But if you had a family member that was anorexic and they were told that their condition means that they have a distorted view of their own body, why would they be more accepting of this fact than trans people are of their condition as a delusion? — Harry Hindu

Anorexia is devastating and very often fatal (~20% mortality rate), and family members are usually desperate for help. Framing the condition as an illness is to say that help is warranted, whereas denying this say the opposite, that the sufferer just needs to get over it or whatever. Unlike schizophrenics or anorexics, trans people don't generally conceive of themselves as mentally ill. This designation is imposed, which is pathologization.

That is not what bigotry refers to. It is an obstinate attachment to an unreasonable belief. — Bob Ross

Funny that you keep repeating this "obstinate belief", when even the toy definition you took it from says more than that:

obstinate or unreasonable attachment to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudice against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group.

I would say that your insistence that trans is a mental illness, based only on your personal philosophizing, against the entirely of mainstream medical opinion, who I must presume is collectively vastly more qualified than you to make this judgement, is plenty obstinate.

By your logic, when transgenderism was considered, by definition, to be a mental illness called general dysphoria it would not have been bigoted for me to believe it. However, since they changed to definition to fit liberal agendas I am not somehow a bigot for using a different definition. — Bob Ross

Yes, generally we judge against the standards of the time. Holding racist views in the 19th century is not the same as holding them today. Living in a racist society, and inheriting these beliefs, is not the same as actively advocating for them.

And yes yes, it must have been the strong arm of The Liberal Agenda which bent the medical establishment to its will.

Things such as schizophrenia are added and removed from the list of mental illnesses, and therefore such predication cannot be tautologous. For example, one of the newest mental illnesses in the DSM-5-TR is prolonged grief disorder. It was added in 2022. In 2021 it was not considered a mental illness. This is one sure reason why we know that, "X is a mental illness," is not a tautological ("non-substantive") claim. — Leontiskos

Yes, words change over time. As our understanding of mental health changes, so do the meanings of the relevant words. This does not mean that merely defining a word as it is used today is a substantive claim. It is definitional. Whereas, the claim "schizophrenia is not a mental illness" would be substantive. Accepting it would require a significant revision of our understanding of schizophrenia, and so to the meaning of the term.

Then feel free to provide your own definition. I was just taking a common one. My points will hold with any genuine definition of "bigotry." — Leontiskos

Amusing that you think you can know that. I will try to define only rhetorical bigotry, the relevant form here:

The ascription of negative qualities onto a population based on their group identity, which are not intrinsic to that group's membership criteria.

But this begs the question at hand, namely the question of whether it is bigotry. — Leontiskos

It is just historical reality that exactly these claims were leveled against homosexuals, that they were immoral and mentally ill. And which were used to justify repression, including forced institutionalization. Do you think those claims were merely the result of the inquiry of curious minds? Or were they both reflections of social prejudices and tools used to legitimatize repression?

Why doesn't it fly? — Leontiskos

Since we are being pedantic, let's amend the supposition:

Supposition: It is bigotry to substantively call an entire class of people mentally ill.

"Schizophrenics are mentally ill" is not a substantive claim, it proceeds from the definition of "schizophrenic". To know the word is to know that "mental illness" and "schizophrenia" stand in a genus - species relationship. It offers nothing new to the competent language user.

This is not at all the case with "Ali Chinese are mentally disabled" or "all trans people are mentally ill".

For example, if bigotry is defined as "obstinate attachment to a belief," then the holding of a material position can never be sufficient for bigotry. — Leontiskos

I do not accept this definition. I can make any number of claims that are clearly identifiable as bigoted, without requiring a personalized, subjective assessment of just how obstinate I am in my beliefs.


This is really just basic decency. If I were trans, or had loved ones who were, I wouldn't want to come here and have to deal with threads claiming that I or my loved ones were immoral and mentally ill based merely on group identification. And context matters deeply: Bob's claims are made within a historical context where the government of the predominant English speaking country came to power on a platform of naked bigotry, primarily against trans and immigrants. As others here have pointed out, this post takes part in the ignoble philosophical tradition of providing intellectual scaffolding for state-sponsored bigotry.


Actually I take all that back. I have an idea for a new op: "Conservative Christians are immoral and mentally ill". I'm positive I can make a better case than @Bob Ross, without appealing to a questionable reading of Aristotle.

The goal neither is to reach agreement, nor to win, but rather to foster understanding. That doesn't mean either that the debaters should just agree to disagree. They just need to agree to pursue the discussion despite endorsing incompatible goals and premises. — Pierre-Normand

Yup, I didn't mean to imply I didn't enjoy it, despite the frustration it nonetheless one of my favorites here. The frustration stems less from disagreement, and more from a nagging sense that neither side fully understood the other. It is as if each position is a reflection of a basic intuition which, despite a very exhaustive effort, is not quite communicable verbally. And so both sides were a bit baffled, and were talking past one another. For my part I felt this, and I was ultimately part of the problem. I could never get over an apparent hand-waviness of the direct realist position. From which it is all to easy to conclude that the position is simply vacuous.

I'm seeing a strong parallel between this discussion and an earlier one we both participated in: the epic (and epically frustrating) indirect realism thread. If you remember it, you took the direct realist side in that debate, and I took the indirect realist. This problem is a kind of a mirror image of the problem of knowledge. And we, predictably, seem to be taking the same sort of direct/indirect realist approaches

My claim:
* Public performance is not interiority.
* As a third person observer, I only have direct epistemic access to public performance.
* Via public performance, I gain indirect access to interiority.
* Error cases (performance/interiority mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

The parallel indirect realism argument:
* Private perception is not the perceived world
* As a first person subject, I only have direct epistemic access to private perception
* Via private perception, I gain indirect access to the perceived world
* Error cases (perception/world mismatches) are made possible only by this indirection

Your original claim, that LLM interiority cannot happen in the absence of the public engagement that accompanies our own interior states, seems much less plausible in the indirect view. If interiority and public engagement are fundamentally decoupled, then it seems very plausible that you can have one without the other. Your claim is much more at home with the tighter coupling of the direct realism approach.

Granted that we will not resolve the direct/indirect dispute, do you agree with this?

What is sophistical about the argument I made? — Bob Ross

"According to the results of my philosophy all Chinese are mentally disabled. But this can't be bigotry... If it were, so would calling the mentally disabled, mentally disabled! Nyuk nyuk nyuk!"

Can you see why this doesn't fly? You are comparing your spurious diagnosis to a tautology. Whatever bigotry might be contained in your diagnosis, it will not be found in a tautology. Citing a tautology does nothing.

But if the urge for men to procreate with women is found more in men, and is not merely a result of gender norms, then how can you claim that "group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities"? If that were true then such urges would simply not be found more in men. — Leontiskos

Because, individuals can act in ways contrary to how groups as a whole behave. My species and gender determine the range and distribution of behaviors available to me as a human male. I can impregnate, but I cannot give birth. But this range is incredibly wide. It is therefore not accurate to say that my gender "determines" how I behave. If you knew only my gender, you might have ideas about how I can behave, and how I am likely to behave. But my actual behavior would be unknown to you, as gender does not determine it.

I like this account. Clearly, AIs are far from biologically realistic. What I dispute is that biological realism, or physical embodiment, is necessary for subjective experience (granted that any such experience possessed by LLMs would be radically different from our own).

Moreover, I even dispute the idea that AI is not embodied in the relevant sense. LLMs, like animals, receive stimulus and respond to it. It's just that the stimulus and response is all words in their case. The fact that this verbal "environment" they interact in is virtual, ungrounded in the material world, doesn't seem especially pertinent here.

@Pierre-Normand

You cannot have a man, in nature, in form, who doesn’t have masculinity flowing from that nature (no matter how imperfectly: yes, this includes super-feminine men!); just as trilaterality and triangularity cannot be found in existence separate from one another.

Can we agree on this (notwithstanding the semantic disputes)??? — Bob Ross

Nope. I recognize nothing essential about masculinity in the way you conceive of it. At best, I will say that by virtue of being a man I inherit certain tendencies which are statistically more likely in males than in females. The urge to procreate with women is biological, and the fact that it is found in men more than women is not merely a result of gender norms.

But humans are nothing like geometric primitives. Group tendencies in no way determine individual proclivities. Humans are complex and exhibit a vast spectrum of individual variation. As shocking as it apparently seems to you, there are men and women who have no urge whatsoever to fuck the opposite sex. Factually, this is human variation, nothing more. It requires your sort of moralizing to transmute minority behaviors into normative violations.

Most humans are aversive to extremely spicy food. I absolutely crave it. The majority behavior is not mere preference, it is rooted in the hard facts of biology. Capsicum mimics substance p, for pain, which is involved in the neural system responsible for pain transmission. It evolved to deter the wrong kind of animal from eating this fruit (everyone except birds). And so avoiding this food is an expression of a basic, innate human tendency to avoid pain. Does this mean that the preference for bland food flows in an Aristotelian sense from human nature, and therefore my eating habits are wrong, deviant, a kind of mental illness? No, that is obviously absurd, what I eat is just a personal difference, which happens to be at variance with mean preference.

The core difference here between dietary and sexual preference does not lie in the preference itself, but in the interest of moralizers to regulate and discipline one above the other.

I'm struggling with this.

To me there is a gap between behavior and internality. We are embodied creatures, and our behaviors and internal states are deeply intertwined. But this fact about us doesn't imply a necessary connection.

Pain for us seems intrinsically aversive, and is associated with avoidance and the other behaviors you mentioned. But then there are masochists. Do they experience inverted pain/pleasure? No, almost certainly they reinterpret the sensation of pain positively*. Or, consider the religious fanatic who detests and avoids anything suggestive of bodily pleasure. Or, imagine someone born without pain (a real and horrible condition) who has learned the behavioral concomitants of pain, and faithfully mimics the yelps, cries, and help seeking, believing them to be no more than social norms surrounding bodily harm.

None of this would be possible if sensation and their accompanying behaviors were inseparable, as you seem to suggest

*I experienced something similar. A tooth died, and it was unbelievably painful. It was evening, so I had to endure until the dentist opened the next morning. Somehow, in desperation, I managed to reinterpret the pain as a kind of neutral life force, and I was able to sleep through the night!

Hypericin, my friend, if that is true, then the acknowledgement of any mental illness is bigotry; for every recognition of a mental illness in principle applies to an entire class of people affected. Is that really what you believe? — Bob Ross

This is childish sophistry. The mentally ill are, factually, mentally ill. Mere recognition of this carries no pejorative slant. Whereas you, on the basis of a very dubious metaphysics, are diagnosing a group which is not definitionally ill, as mentally ill. As mental illness is universally undesirable, you are saying that membership in this group entails being innately less than the general population. That is just bigotry. Moreover, your "philosophical" conclusions just so happen to coincide with the politically weaponized bigotry against trans people by conservatives in America and elsewhere.

A bigotry charge is a serious accusation: why do you think people who disagree with your political views are all bigots? — Bob Ross

Give me a fucking break with your faux innocence. Calling an entire class of people mentally ill couldn't be more bigoted. Try applying that to any other group.

My own view is that what's overlooked by many who contemplate the mystery of human consciousness is precisely the piece LLMs miss. But this overlooked/missing piece isn't hidden inside. It is outside, in plain view, in the case of humans, and genuinely missing in the case of LLMs. It simply a living body embedded in a natural and social niche. — Pierre-Normand

But then, in theory we could provide this. Not a living body, but a body, that can sense the environment in a way similar to the way we do.

If we did this, created an actual android powered by a LLM and complementary AI systems, would the inside of the chatbot "light up" in sudden awareness? Maybe... but maybe not. It would be very easy to suppose that we would have succeeded in creating a philosophical zombie, and many would do so. They might be right or wrong, but their correctness would be a factual matter, not one of logical necessity. Nothing says that such a machine would be necessarily conscious, any more than that our current disembodied chatbots are necessarily unconscious, free of any qualitative content.

So much of what we know and do is unstated and unconscious. For instance, we use language fluidly, and so clearly we all 'know' the rules of grammar, but when asked to explain them we are often at a loss. Words too: we 'know' what they mean, as we use them with ease, but we grope for definitions. The same goes for concepts, purposes, ideologies, worldviews.

And so goes the majority of our lives, acting without knowing why, doing without quite knowing what we do. This is the unexamined life. Philosophy remedies this: it can make the implicit explicit, the unconscious conscious.

As we bring the unconscious to light, more often then not, we realize that these implicit beliefs we've carried with us don't really make sense. Then we have the opportunity to replace the unconscious and irrational with the conscious and rational. This is growth, the transition to true adulthood that so many make all too late, or never at all. The conscious cultivation of a worldview which is consonant with the world, rather than an artifact of upbringing.

This is the purpose of philosophy.

Medically, "old age" is never the cause. It's e.g., organ failure, heart disease, etc. — BitconnectCarlos

Of course. But when those causes are ultimately consequences of the aging process, that is considered dying of "old age".

Well, if you are thinking of death as a natural event, then I don't see the difference between 3 and 4. — Leontiskos

I am distinguishing dying naturally and being killed. To be killed is to die before your natural lifespan, by something other than old age. You might not see the difference, but most humans are keenly aware of it.

Alternatively, if God gives a gift that allows one to die, hasn't he allowed death? — Leontiskos

He allows death. Additionally, he allows killing. These are distinct claims.

For example, if everything that occurs is allowed by God to occur, and if this allowance counts as an intentional bringing-about, then it follows that everyone who dies is murdered. The reductio in this case lies in the idea that murder and death are two different things. — Leontiskos

This seems to miss the distinction between dying naturally (old age) and dying unnaturally of natural causes(cancer, earthquake).

In terms of adjudicating God's culpability I see four cases:

1. God directly kills, or commands murder (OP)
2. A human kills
3. A natural event kills
4. A human dies a natural death

My point was that 3 and 1 are essentially the same in a worldview where natural events are expressions of God's will. And so 1 is perhaps a personalization or reification of a contradiction in monotheism itself, manifest by 3.

Whereas, 2 and 4 are morally distinct cases. 4 seems fair enough: if God gives the gift of life, he is not obliged to give it for an unlimited period of time.

God then would be doing something evil as opposed to merely allowing the evil of someone else. — Bob Ross

I believe we have discussed this before. Allowing evil is itself a kind of evil. God permitted the Holocaust, for which he must take at least some responsibility.

But what I had in mind was more natural disasters. Not only does he allow these, but at least in some sense he actively brings them about. The natural world, as I understand monotheism, is an expression of God's will. And so here responsibility seems total.

The interesting question here is whether we need to reform our use of "cause" and "causative" so as to allow legitimate talk of mental causation, or whether it's the concept itself that has to be expanded. — J

I don't think it even needs to be expanded. If we understand that thought and brain activity are actually the same things, and brain activity is understood as causative, then thought must also be causative, and we can use causative language around it.

We may need an entire comprehensive theory of consciousness before we'll understand what we now call, rather gropingly, mental causation. — J

Again, I don't see why. We don't need to understand how thought can be brain activity, only that thought is brain activity.

This reads as if reason was somehow exclusively the provence of progressives. In their rhetoric conservatives and progressives appeal to reason more or less equally, afaict. Both regard the other side as irrational . I reject the framing that reason is what separates liberalism and convervatism.

And I reject the notion that traditionalism is what defines conservatism. One only has to look to the American conservative of today to put the lie to this. What is actually being conserved is not tradition, but hierarchy and power. It was not the breaking of the traditions of slavery and women's lesser rights that was noisome to conservatives then, and is still today. It is that blacks and women occupied lower rungs in the social ladder then, and still should today. To claim and act otherwise is obnoxious to them, bullshit, "woke".

Against this progressives offer fundamentally a moral appeal, not a rational one, though it may come clothed in reason.

Isn't this just the problem or flaw with monotheism? If everything flows from one entity, then that entity is responsible for everything. Since many events are evil, then that entity must be at least partly evil as we conceive it.

It doesn't matter that he was explicitly killing everyone in the OT. If the Biblical flood is the anthropomorphization of real natural disasters, then under monotheism those disasters require explanation as well.

This is the familiar:

God is all good
God is all powerful
Evil things happen

At least one of these must be false.

When we speak of one thought causing another, are we speaking about W2 thoughts, or about propositions? — J

Most W2, I think.

If the former, then we need a theory about how psychological events can be causative. — J

One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.

I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.

Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.

And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.

How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.

When we speak of one thought causing another, are we speaking about W2 thoughts, or about propositions? — J

Most W2, I think.

If the former, then we need a theory about how psychological events can be causative. — J

One such is epiphenomenalism: mental events supervene on physical events, and are not reducible to them, but themselves have no causative power. Here, the apparent causation is illusory.

I prefer: mental events supervene on physical events because they are two perspectives on the same thing. Both are equally causative because both refer to the same reality.

Causation between billiard balls is not illusory. What is "really" happening is not electrostatic forces between atoms transmititting momentum. Rather, both the macro view (the billiard ball of everyday life) and the micro view are different perspectives one can take on the same thing. One perspective is not privileged over the other.

And so, mental events cause mental events, and brain events cause brain events: both are true, depending on how the event is framed.

How the very same thing can be framed as a brain event or a mental event is just the hard problem.