It's not as far as the causal influence goes. I turn on the lights by saying "Siri, turn on the lights" or by clapping my hands or by pushing a button.

You seemed to accept this before.

You can move diaphragms in microphones and flick switches. As far as influence goes, that’s not much.

My computer displays these words on my screen as I type them because I type them. It's not a mere coincidence that they correlate. There is a causal chain of events. What is so difficult to understand about this?

I understand it, I just think causal reasoning is unsound on these matters. There are multitudes of events and causes you’re leaving out. Your time interval from when the event begins and when it ends is arbitrary, especially for a determinist. Isn’t it me that moved you to type those words? Without including an accounting of all the causal factors relevant to the occurrence your assertions are invariably false, and it is nearly impossible to give a full accounting.

What interests me is the ultimate source of your actions. Why do you begin your causal chain at you pushing the keys, and not, say, in the words you see before replying?

But if you want to argue that we have free will and that determinism is false then your only apparent options are interactionist dualism (in which case eliminative materialism, and physicalism in general, is false) and quantum indeterminacy without hidden variables (in which case some things are just random, but still the effect of some physical cause).

That’s just not the case.

A person acts of her own free will only if she is its ultimate source. If determinism is true, no one is the ultimate source of her actions. Therefore, if determinism is true, no one acts of her own free will.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#DeteSour

I wasn't proposing any responsibility, I was trying to demonstrate that there can be more to the meaning of words than a dictionary can convey. In this case, the full meaning of "child rape" includes the emotion. This is analogous to the full meaning of "red", which includes the qualitative experience of reddness - that cannot be conveyed with words.

I get it, that you don't accept this framework. I hope you can better understand why I do.

I better understand. But where do you believe the meaning lies?

If eliminative materialism is true then mental states do not exist and everything is physical. If hidden variables explain quantum indeterminacy then all physical events — including human behaviour — are deterministic. If there are no hidden variables then quantum indeterminacy is true randomness, so all physical events — including human behaviour — are either deterministic or truly random.

If some human behaviour is neither deterministic nor truly random then some human behaviour has a non-physical explanation, and so eliminative materialism is false and something like interactionist dualism is true.

I don’t follow. It’s far too abstract for my limited imagination and intelligence.

For me, the only question that needs be answered is “what object or force determines human behavior?”. If it is the agent, then he has free will. If it is some other object or force, he has no free will.

Whether the agent is physical or non-physical is largely a matter of identity and biology.

The comment I was addressing did not mention agency. It only mentioned “symbols and symbolic sounds, arranged in certain combinations, affect[ing] and mov[ing] other phases of matter above and beyond the kinetic energy inherent in the physical manifestation of their symbols.” That is precisely what happens when I say “Siri, turn on the lights” or “Siri, open the blinds,” and so it is not "superstition" or "magical thinking."

No, the kinetic energy of your voice moves a diaphragm or some other device in the microphone. That's it. That's as far as your "causal influence" goes.

And you don’t appear to have a consistent response to this. You sometimes appear to accept that speech can causally influence machines and sometimes you don’t, explicitly denying that my speech can cause a voice-activated forklift to lift a weight but accepting that my speech can cause the lights to turn on?

It's a problem I have with the weasel word "causally influence" and the limited knowledge I have of the components of the device. I've already admitted the kinetic energy in the sound waves of your voice can cause something to move in the listening-component (like any other sound wave), but weather you "causally influence" the behavior of the entire machine I cannot fathom because the machine is largely following the instructions of its programming or artificial intelligence, and not necessarily your voice.

Your reasons do not address the issue at all. It's quite simple; if eliminative materialism is true and if hidden variables explain quantum indeterminacy then determinism is true. If eliminative materialism is true and if determinism is false then either we don't have free will or free will is nothing more than the outcome of stochastic quantum events — events which are nonetheless caused to happen by prior physical events.

But, again, free will has nothing prima facie to do with the involuntary behaviour of our sense organs.

They do address the issue that we’ve been discussing for pages. But you’re causing me to not understand. As far as I know eliminative materialism is the claim that some of the mental states posited thus far do not actually exist. What does quantum indeterminacy and hidden variables have to do with eliminate materialism?

So the causal power of speech extends beyond the immediate transfer of kinetic energy. I can cause the lights to turn on by saying "Siri, turn on the lights" and I can cause the living room blinds to open by saying "Siri, open the living room blinds". Therefore, your reasoning below is fallacious:

You’re speaking about the false analogy of non-agents designed by agents to activate upon certain sounds, mechanistically triggering a limited set of actions. Can you turn the lights on with your voice without saying “Siri”? That’s your causal power of speech in a nutshell.

So you accept that the appropriate speech can cause the lights to turn on or cause a voice-activated forklift to lift a heavy weight?

I believe you can cause the lights to turn on, yes.

But you also believe that we have free will and are an eliminative materialist. So how do you maintain these three positions? Is it because we could have done otherwise? If eliminative materialism is true then we could have done otherwise only if quantum indeterminacy factors into human behaviour (and only if there are no hidden variables), but does this stochasticity really satisfy your agent-causal libertarian free will? Either way, it's still the case that A caused B to happen, even if A could have caused C to happen, and it's still the case that D caused A to happen, even if D could have caused E to happen, and so on and so forth (eventually involving events external to the body).

There's simply no avoiding this without rejecting eliminative materialism in favour of interactionist dualism. But even then, interactionist dualism would only apply to conscious decision-making, not to the involuntary behaviour of the body's sense organs.

I’ve avoided and and am satisfied and for the reasons I’ve stated.

In 1984 the Two Minutes Hate was a form of catharsis. Do you feel better having vented your anger in a display of collective emotion?

To be fair, it is counterintuitive because for the entirety of linguistic human history we have thought and spoken about language as having supernatural powers.

I agree words do not carry a physical force - this is not in dispute. But you didn't respond to my comments about emotive language. Do you reject the view that there is such thing as emotive language?

Yes I do.

Before you answer, consider a scenario in which you hear about a 5 year old girl getting raped. Of course, the plain facts of the event will enter your mental memory bank ("Sally G. age 5, raped on day x in town y...). But don't you think you would also have an emotional reaction to the news? This extreme example is just to establish that words CAN sometimes evoke emotions. It's not because sounds are being made and heard, but it's because there is information content, and the information (not the sounds) can trigger emotions.

Understand I'm trying to set aside arguing who's right, I'm just trying to understand your point of view.

Yes, I would have an emotional reaction to the news. I am disgusted and angry even considering your example. But it is I who evokes the emotion, drawn as they are from my own body and actions, influenced entirely by what I know, think, understand, believe etc. The words are not responsible in any way for what I feel.

I can turn on the lights by saying "Hey Siri, turn on the lights" or by clapping my hands or by pushing a button.

Or are you going to argue that no human has ever turned on a light because no human is capable of discharging electricity from his body?

No, humans have invented various mechanisms and lights that can do nothing else but respond to their actions, and therefore their state of on or off is determined by the human being.

So how do you avoid determinism? Again, as it stands I don't see how your position is incompatible with compatibilism.

I just don’t believe in it. It’s self-undermining. Even you avoid it by arbitrarily starting and ending your causal chains wherever you wish. If human beings determine their own actions determinism is false. That’s why I’m incompatiblist.

Words such as "torture" or "freedom" carry with them something more than a simple description of a concept or an action.They have a "magnetic" effect, an imperative force, a tendency to influence the interlocutor's decisions.They are strictly bound to moral values leading to value judgements and potentially triggering specific emotions. For this reason, they have an emotive dimension. In the modern psychological terminology, we can say that these terms carry "emotional valence", as they presuppose and generate a value judgement that can lead to an emotion

This is what I mean. There are no such magnetic effects, forces, dimensions nor tendencies in the words. They do not carry anything. We can devise any number of instruments in order to detect such forces, and will never be able to measure it. Such descriptions of words are invariably figurative.

Libertarian free will implies a person chooses which actions he will take. These choices will be made based on his beliefs and his passions. There are both positive and negative passions. A positive passion will tend to influence our choices in positive ways (e.g. acts of charity). A negative passion will tend to influence our choices toward negative behaviors (e.g. hurting others).

When we hear or read words spoken by others, our passions can be evoked. This can lead to negative behaviors. It's true that the perpetator is morally accountable for his actions, but it's also true that the conveyor of the evocative language is a contributing factor or cause. I previously discussed contributing causes with you here.

This is the issue we are confronting, from my perspective. Tell me which portions you disagree with.

I disagree that words are evocative, or have any powers that can “evoke” this or that response. For example, if you read “evocative language” in a dialect you didn’t understand, it would evoke nothing despite it being “evocative language”. So the question is “what does or does not ‘evoke’ the passions?”, the words or you?

And this is a misguided understanding of causation, as I have been at pains to explain. I cause the distant bomb to explode by pushing a button on my phone. Your reasoning is a non sequitur when applied to machines and a non sequitur when applied to biological organisms.

Causal influence doesn't simply end after the immediate transfer of kinetic energy.

Why doesn’t “causal influence” end after the transfer of kinetic energy? Does the soundwave have some other causal power over-and-above that transfer?

You keep repeating it, telling me I’m misguided, but i have yet seen any reason why I should believe otherwise. You won’t even mention any other forces, objects, and events “causally influencing” subsequent acts.

Rather, what you leave me to picture is a cause A that causes both B and not-B, and I can’t wrap my brain around it. The joke caused me to laugh and the other guy to not laugh, for example, without admitting the reasons for the different effects, the reasons for B and not-B. I wager that is why you wish to stick to more predictable causal relations like button pushing and explosions, so you don’t have to mention the actual causes of, and reasons for, varying responses, for example if the bomb didn’t explode or if the Venus flytrap didn’t close.

Which is a very vague claim. As it stands it's consistent with compatibilism and so consistent with determinism.

Yet you said before that you endorse agent-causal libertarian free will, but that is inconsistent with eliminative materialism. From here:

To my mind there is nothing non-physical about it unless you believe agents are non-physical.

How can a law possibly limit free speech? A law is just speech from the government. You said speech can’t cause anything so it can’t limit anything.

See? You can’t say that in this discussion.

You have to make your point some other way or just concede you are not making sense saying words don’t cause actions. Right?

Do you believe laws cause your actions?

All of it has to do with free speech, whether restrictive or absolute. You care more about free speech than most, so I applaud you for that, but once you limit free speech it is no longer free speech. It’s censorship. It’s either one or the other. Take your pick.

And if the US constitution was amended tomorrow stating that you had to walk around with your hand down your pants you would do it, given that the words cause your actions.

And if they changed the laws tomorrow you would dutifully follow it, given that the words cause your actions.

Police follow the code book.

If you want I can limit our discussion to politics.

Do you believe Article 19 of the Declaration of human rights?

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Laws matter because they are enforced by the monopoly on violence. If the words written in laws simply made you abide by them, by sheer force of how they were written, there would be no need for police and jail. The fear of violence and being kidnapped by police is what moves people to abide by them.

Call me what you want. You know I already said words have no more effect than any other articulated sound from the mouth. Also, this text has no more effect on the body than this text: durioenzbdifllsbdb.

I think you're saying that those of us who support some restrictions on speech are basing this on false beliefs about the effects of the speech. Is that correct?

That is correct.

And if so, do you agree this is the pivotal issue? Can you please attempt to state exactly what false beliefs we hold, in objective terms, rather than with judgemental terms?

I do believe it is a pivotal issue. I’m not sure if this pertains to you personally, but the false belief I believe some people hold or imply is that words possess some sort of power or force over and above their medium.

Also state your position on free will. Do you believe humans possess libertarian free will? Reading some of your exchange with @Michael, this seems relevant.

I do believe in so-called libertarian free will for the simple reason that nothing else can be shown to determine our actions.

No, I'm a compatibilist.

Your position, though, is unclear. You're a free will libertarian but also an eliminative materialist. I assume, then, that you believe that libertarian free will is made possible by quantum indeterminancy? So we "could have done otherwise" only because the applicable human behaviour operates according to probabilistic causation rather than determinism?

I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to have a position on quantum indeterminacy. What I believe is that each of us are the source of our own actions, and indeed identical to our own actions.

And the infrared sensor sends electrical signals to some other part of the TV. But it's still the case that I cause the TV to turn on by pushing the appropriate button on the remote. Your reasoning is a non sequitur, even despite your assertions that humans, unlike TVs, have "agency" – because this "agency" does not factor into the behaviour of our sense organs in response to stimulation, e.g. I can't just will myself to be deaf (even if I can will myself to cover my ears).

I’ve already conceded that the environment stimulates our sense organs, simply due to the fact that they collide, and have factored it in. But that’s where their influence ends. in the case of hearing or reading, the words do not exert enough force on the body to move it in the way you say it does. It has neither the mass nor the energy to do so. All the energy and systems required to move the body comes from the body. That’s why hearing and reading are capacities of the body, and not soundwaves. That’s why I say words cannot determine, govern, or control our responses.

I do like it, yes. As of now, my own statism goes so far as the so-called “night-watchman state”. It should defend rights and make justice accessible. Beyond that it should not go. Plus a parade in support of soldiers and veterans is a good thing, in my opinion.

A lot of work and thought went into this Baden. Kudos.

I must admit I struggled with the jargon a little bit and had to look up some terms, but after some effort on my part I made it through. Obviously it wasn’t written for a working-class schlubs and laymen such as myself, but I imagine other critical theorists would approve. At any rate, there was a lot to think about and I felt elevated having read it.

I’ve been reading about “autopoiesis” for the past while (Principles of Biological Autonomy, by Valera, and Biological Autonomy, by Morena) as it pertains to individual biological autonomy, so it’s cool to see it presented in a sociological context.

Cheers

One was the celebration of a 250 year anniversary that much of the press tried to pooh-pooh. The other was a hissy fit much of the press tried to glorify. Not really the same at all, chap.

Pundits have been arguing that Trump’s diplomatic efforts were a ruse to deceive Iran, leaving them with their guard down and vulnerable to attack. But diplomacy isn’t dead and both Iran and US is still willing to make a deal.

If war is diplomacy by other means, diplomacy is never finished. While Israel and Iran are in the midst of what could be an extended war that could spread, the possibility of renewed talks to deal with Iran’s expanding nuclear program should not be discounted.

Negotiations are on hold while the war continues, and the future of diplomacy is far from clear. Iran will feel compelled to respond to Israel, and the Israeli campaign could last for days or weeks. For now Washington does not appear to be doing anything to press both sides to stop the violence and start talking again.

But the Iranians say they still want a deal, as does President Trump. The shape of future talks will inevitably depend on when and how the fighting stops.

“We are prepared for any agreement aimed at ensuring Iran does not pursue nuclear weapons,” the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, told foreign diplomats in Tehran on Sunday. But his country would not accept any deal that “deprives Iran of its nuclear rights,” he added, including the right to enrich uranium, albeit at low levels that can be used for civilian purposes.

Mr. Araghchi said Israel did not attack to pre-empt Iran’s race toward a bomb, which Iran denies trying to develop, but to derail negotiations on a deal that Mr. Netanyahu opposes.

The attacks are “an attempt to undermine diplomacy and derail negotiations,” he continued, a view shared by various Western analysts. “It is entirely clear that the Israeli regime does not want any agreement on the nuclear issue,” he said. “It does not want negotiations and does not seek diplomacy.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/15/world/middleeast/diplomacy-with-iran-is-damaged-not-dead.html

Could the theory that Netanyahu attacked Iran to undermine diplomatic efforts be true? After all, they did attack just days before talks were supposed to happen.

Man, the organizers and all their acolytes in the press tried really hard to get people to notice the No Kings protest, and everyone has already forgotten about it. It’s performative and cathartic stunts like these that have rendered protesting largely ineffectual. What a shame.

And as I have explained, this is a misguided understanding of causation. I cause the bomb to explode by pushing a button, I cause the machine to turn by telling it to, the fly causes the Venus flytrap to close by moving its hairs.

The relationship between each pair of events isn't merely correlation. It's not an accident or happenstance or coincidence. It's causal.

My sense organs send electrical signals to my brain because they have been stimulated. If they do so for any other reason, e.g entirely caused by internal, biological activity, then that's a sign of an injury.

You’re a determinist. The choice to put yourself as the cause in all these events is completely arbitrary and linear, as any and all anterior states caused you to push the button, and therefor explode the bomb. You have no control or will over anything. Isn’t that so?

Your sense organs send electrical signals to your brain. Nothing else in the universe does that. Nothing else is reading the words you’re reading, thinking the thoughts you’re thinking, sending the impulses you’re sending, moving your body, and responding to words the way you do. While I might be misguided about the philosophy of causation, you’re doing, controlling, determining, governing, creating, catalyzing, producing, generating, evoking those acts, and no one else can do so.

The pundits are saying Israel doesn't have the ability to disarm Iran by itself. They want the US to join in to finish the job. Trump appears to be bored by the notion.

Never doubt the neocons. But Trump had already urged Netanyahu not to attack a day or so before the attack happened, and to end the war in Gaza. And obviously this turn of events ruins the diplomatic talks between US and Iran which were supposed to happen tomorrow, I think. It threatens the Abraham Accords. I imagine Trump is pissed at Netanyahu. Hopefully this episode will further disentangle the US from that government.

They said that Israel used the drone-on-trucks technique, the same thing Ukraine did just a few weeks earlier, both of which took years of planning. Is the common denominator between these two parties the CIA? Mossad?

Israel urges U.S. to join war with Iran to eliminate nuclear program

An Israeli official claimed to Axios that the U.S. might join the operation, and that President Trump even suggested he'd do so if necessary in a recent conversation with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

A White House official denied that on Friday. A second U.S. official confirmed on Saturday that Israel has urged the Trump administration to join the war, but said currently the administration is not considering it.

A senior White House official told Axios Saturday that "whatever happens today cannot be prevented," referring to Israel's attacks.

"But we have the ability to negotiate a successful peaceful resolution to this conflict if Iran is willing. The fastest way for Iran to accomplish peace is to give up its nuclear weapons program," the senior official added.

What they're saying: "The entire operation... really has to be completed with the elimination of Fordow," Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. Yechiel Leiter told Fox News on Friday.

Israeli officials have raised the idea of U.S. participation to take out Fordow with U.S. counterparts since Israel's operation began.
An Israeli source said the U.S. is considering the request and stressed Israel hopes Trump agrees.

https://www.axios.com/2025/06/14/israel-iran-war-us-nuclear-program-trump

Watch, now they’ll want the US to join the Isreali campaign to avoid the cognitive dissonance involved in their narrative.

The military parade is amazing. There should be one every year.

The news also says he was targeting abortion clinics. Not necessarily a hard-left cause. I guess we’ll see his motives from the manifesto he was reportedly carrying.

So you don't accept that the fly's movements cause the Venus flytrap to close its jaws and you don't accept that spoken words can cause a voice-activated machine to lift some weight.

This just isn't the "superstitious imply[ing] a physics of magical thinking that contradicts basic reality" as you accuse it of being. It's the truth, and common sense. And if this is your best defence of free speech absolutism then so much the worse for your position.

I’ve already stated my reasoning. The effects cannot be shown to reach as far as you say they do. The objects, structures, and energies responsible for such movements, responses, and actions are not the same as the ones you claim they are. There is no argument for censorship save for superstition and magical thinking.

I don’t know, man, you might be right. But Personally, I would wait until all is investigated. It could be some disgruntled cop trying to discredit the protests for all we know.

And the fly causes it to close. The two are not mutually exclusive. Exactly like with machines.

I’m not so sure about that.

You're not addressing what I'm saying. I’m saying that even if we have libertarian free will, this could-have-done-otherwise agency does not apply to our heartbeats and does not apply to our sense organs, and so there’s no good reason to say that the behaviour of our sense organs is not causally determined by some stimulus and its source.

The problem is you cannot point to anything else that determines sensing and heart-beating. So I fully dispute and disagree with what you’re saying.

[quote
] Why not? Do you reject the claim that my speech can cause a voice-activated forklift to lift a heavy weight?[/quote]

I utterly reject it and for the same reasons I reject it your other analogies.

Autonomous robot.

Again, all of the have been programmed and built by humans, and therefor are dependent on human input.

It’s the 250 year anniversary of the US Army and it will be marked by a parade. Many in the press erroneously call it “Trump’s parade”, despite the official name. They have to do this and essentially lie in order to maintain a narrative they spent the better part of decade building. The anti-Trump propagandists have already framed it as a parade in the style of Kim Jung Un, or some other dictator, and not something someone might see on Bastille Day. So I’m kind of hoping the mindless and thoughtless protesters show up to disrupt it, given that every time they put on such a show the rest of us get more-and-more inclined to ignore it.

In the spirit of conformity and catharsis they organized a multi-city protest to coincide with the parade, once again using the “Trump thinks he’s a king” narrative to fuel their live-action roleplay. It’s called the “No Kings” protest, a name about the average length of an anti-Trump activist’s incredulity. Bernie Sanders, donning his tricorn hat and advertising for the event, even made overtures to 1776 in an X post (the fact of which is verboten here). These are the kind of fantasies their politicians exploit for power, donor-dollars, and votes.

Perhaps funnier was the recent political theater put on by a Democrat senator. He disrupted a Kristi Noem press conference and tried to shove himself up to the stage to confront her, but was stopped and eventually pushed out of the event by security, taken down and cuffed. Afterwords, when speaking to the press, he started crying about it, literally. In unison the party pretended this event was an example of authoritarianism, not their own emotional and often violent outbursts, fuelled as they are by their own imaginations. We’ll see if any of this happens today, and I must admit I’m kind of looking forward to it.

It didn’t work, though. The rules of the deal never changed and was still in place.

I'll leave you to guess what happened before 2019 that led to that happening.

Apparently pallets of cash for a whole lot of nothing. There were other signatories. They were foolish for staying in a deal which Iran would eventually break.

According to the UN, Iran basically broke that deal.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/06/1164291

USAID Official and Three Corporate Executives Plead Guilty to Decade-Long Bribery Scheme Involving Over $550 Million in Contracts; Two Companies Admit Criminal Liability for Bribery Scheme and Securities Fraud

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/usaid-official-and-three-corporate-executives-plead-guilty-decade-long-bribery-scheme

Crazy.