I did not cite it - you'll note from my language that this is obvious. As I've addressed. Please read clearly and carefully before responding. I think it's pitiful to be engaging in this way. — AmadeusD

I'll agree with you on "pitiful" -- this is one of the most embarrassing crashouts I've seen on this site.
You couldn't just acknowledge that it is disinformation and move on with your life.

The majority of claims about Robinson stem from reports. Not facts. — AmadeusD

"reports not facts"...I don't even know what that means. Reports are of facts, you can dispute the correctness of the claims but they are not separate magisteria.

Anyway, the fact that Tommy Robinson has been convicted of assault multiple times, been in jail several times (same cite), lost lawsuits for lying (such as this one defaming a schoolboy), found in contempt of court multiple times, are all public record. Objective facts.
And as well as posting the nonsense you uncritically believed, he's done things like claim a video of a black man with white children was a "grooming gang", hence making his life hell (it was actually his step-children).

But hey, who cares if this guy gets his facts straight, if he's got the right brand of hate, amirite?

You guys really aren't honest interlocutors are you?? The point that matters was this, which you conveniently ignored: — AmadeusD

Engaging with your cite (and pointing out the flaws) is not being an "honest interlocutor"?
What exactly am I allowed to post in this discussion forum? I must agree with you uncritically?

I don't require those numbers to be correct for this point to stand, [...] — AmadeusD

Yes you do; that's the whole point of trying to cite something.
Your argument is baseless right now, and, to use your words I think a bit more accurately than you did: an honest interlocutor should be questioning whether their position is actually correct at this point.

I see you've devolved into several fallacies at once. Good job. — AmadeusD

If I posted anything incorrect then please correct me.

In the meantime I was trying to do you a favor: as well as the claim in the meme being absurd on its face, it was posted by someone with a history of posting false things on social media. He's been successfully sued multiple times as well as serving a jail sentence for contempt of court -- all for things he made up. As well as starting multiple riots with disinformation.

So I am trying to demonstrate to you a bit of critical thinking.
But no the problem was with us telling you it was nonsense or what kind of source you are getting your information from.

Arrests for Tweets by county is something like"

1. UK 12,500+
2. Belarus - 6,000+
3. Germany - 3500+
4. China 1200 + — AmadeusD

A claim like that should really ping the BS meter.

From a quick googling, it's from a meme spread by Tommy Robinson (for non-Brits who are not familiar with him: he's someone who's been in and out of jail many times for violent offences, and is popular on the right for being an outspoken racist). The data isn't cited, but seems to come from different sources, and so compares apples and oranges.

In the case of the UK, the data is the total people arrested in 2023 under the Communications Act and the Malicious Communications Act. Importantly, these aren't just arrests for "mean tweets": it covers obscene images and direct threats targeted at individuals. From the Times article that originally published this data, a police spokesman claimed a large proportion of these arrests are domestic-abuse related.

...so incidentally; the 2023 figure might include an arrest of...Tommy Robinson, who was stalking and harassing someone at the time.

Hence it's whimsical to argue that the US would uphold a justice state more than the European countries. It would be similar to arguing that except for Scotland, because Scotland does have the Hate Crime and Public Order Act 2021 while England and Wales have no laws against hate crimes directly, the UK doesn't convict people because of hate speech. — ssu

Yes.
An actual example of this kind of reasoning is the Palestine protests. A lot of Americans I talk to insist that you can't be arrested for protesting in the US. The 3,200 people arrested protesting Gaza were arrested for things like trespassing and public order offences (and the majority were subsequently released without charge), and because the arrest didn't specifically mention their speech, so they claim it is not an infringement of free speech.
But of course, by this logic, one could probably argue that there's freedom of speech in north korea.

disclaimer: I think the UK proscribing the group "Palestine Action" has been a shitshow. Not that the US or other countries would have necessarily done differently: PA has committed some acts of terror. But obviously things have got out of hand when elderly people are being dragged to jail just because of words on a banner. I'm definitely not defending that.

The US also has laws against incitement; the difference is only with regards to hate speech.

I say this because some posters are saying that in the US you couldn't be arrested for a "mean tweet" but in fact if you're in communication with people trying to burn down a hotel, and you're saying burn down the hotel, I'm not so sure this would be protected speech there either.

In any case, the big picture recently has been Americans have been sold this idea that free speech is "under attack" in the UK and Europe, pushed by the likes of JD Vance, but the reality is the US is much worse right now. Whether it's free expression, freedom to assemble or the free press: all are being suppressed.

Enough about the strawman. If you're not going to discuss the OP anymore, I'm not going to have a never ending go around on this that isn't introducing new or different information. — Philosophim

You brought up the idea of a straw man, and then you carried it on.
If you had just said "I misspoke, I didn't mean straw man" that would have been it, and I would not have held anything against you. We all misspeak.

Anyway, I'm going to leave this one for people with more patience. I think the premise of the OP is absurd and it's a bad faith thread.
Go ahead and have the last word, I'm done.

Again, considering I have no idea how this is supposed to relate to the argument because you don't mention the actual argument, that's a straw man. — Philosophim

If it doesn't relate to the argument, and I am not trying to attribute it to you, then it's not a straw man, right?
Next time, instead of just cutting and pasting the response that AI gave you, actually take the time to read it.

I made an argument -- it's not a straw man.

Not at all. The burden of proof is on me. I've put forth an argument. All you have to do is demonstrate why I have not risen to that burden of proof. But you keep arguing around that because...you know you can't. — Philosophim

Note that how we got into this tangent, was I was responding to your points before you went down this "prove a negative" requirement.

No, there is no survey result on specifically the claim of the OP. However, actual definitions of transgender do not match the notion that it is acquired by virtue of noticing a predilection towards a behaviour associated with the other gender. Plus vast numbers of people exhibit at least some behaviours atypical for their gender -- orders of magnitude more people than the number of transgender.

Meanwhile, on the other side, we only have your anecdotes. I don't think even in this thread anyone has backed up your anecdotes with similar ones (though I could be wrong about that, it's IIRC)

No, a straw man is when you build up an idea that the presenter never argued for or backed, then attack it. — Philosophim

...which I am not doing. I am trying to explain a logical point to you about the burden of proof and null hypothesis.

I mean, that isn't the definition of straw man anyway -- a straw man necessarily includes suggesting the argument is what the other person is saying; beating up on a random thing would be irrelevant -- but even under your definition, that's not what I am doing.

No, its not irrational at all. That's how arguments work. Falsification means that there is a situation in which the claim could be false. For example, my definition of sexism is wrong. Or the elevation of gender over sex does not fit the definition of sexism. Or gender is wrong. Its absolutely falsifiable. Can you prove it to be false however? If you can't, then its true. — Philosophim

I've been puzzled as to why you aren't getting this simple point, and wondered if you were trolling...

But then I remembered that of course there are many debates now with the format of "[claim], prove me wrong!". So it is worth just pointing out that that format is almost always bad faith. It's a shift of the burden of proof, and the idea of such debates is to pander to an audience that just wants to see an opposing view get pwned.

The null hypothesis is that a claim may or may not be true. No empirical claim is true by default.

Straw man, as I have no idea what you're talking about. You're attacking something that doesn't relate to the OP. Cite the argument of the OP and address why it is wrong please. — Philosophim

A "straw man" is when someone misstates an argument for the purposes of attacking it more easily. I was not misstating your argument, I was trying to explain a logical point to you.

The point that you are not getting is that the idea that a claim is true by default, until someone can prove it false, is irrational. It's trivial to show this with claims that cannot be falsified.

There's a clear argument being made here that is open to discussion and is not a matter of opinion. And its not that you must accept my claim. Its that my claim, if uncontested, is correct by fact. If you don't answer it, I'm right. Emotions are irrelevant. — Philosophim

No, that's irrational. No-one has demonstrated that the oogie-boogie monster doesn't exist and isn't feared by millions. Therefore, you need to accept that claim as true?

Can you demonstrate why these arguments counter the point of the OP? — Philosophim

Yes, because firstly I showed that people regularly exhibit traits that are somewhat emblematic of the other gender while maintaining their own gender. And secondly the association between transgenderism and transsexuality demonstrates that gender dysmorphia is not as simple as wanting to wear a dress or whatever.

I'll let the first claim be a pass. If you insist that I'm asking you to prove a negative, please point out specifically where and why its a negative. This requires more than an assertion. — Philosophim

Because you're asking me for a cite that most people don't consider your very specific claim to be true. It's obviously not a reasonable request -- the only evidence would be the result of a survey asking "Do you believe that transgenderism is sexism?" but there is no such survey. And you conclude that I must accept your claim.

By the same logic, we can conclude that most people are afraid of the oogie-boogie monster.

Relax, its not a hard accusation. Would you like to engage with the topic then? You seem to have some feelings and thoughts on the matter, and I think its important that those thoughts and feelings are expressed. — Philosophim

I have. I have given arguments for why your concept of transgenderism does not reflect reality.

Your comments on teh UK are unfounded as best I can tell - I am British by birth (Worcester.. which you know is true because I spelled it right) — AmadeusD

I live in Worcester. Just moved here a few days ago

I imagine being currently in the UK, with a particular bent, makes it largely untenable to expect a balanced view on things — AmadeusD

So in the same post you are making claims about what life is like in the UK, despite not living here, but I cannot do the same? And where you live doesn't affect your ability to research all sides of a topic, but I can't?

How about we both agree not to resort to poisoning the well?

I can taste the bad faith - I am quite sure now that it is not unintentional. — AmadeusD

Please elaborate. You made a statement, I asked in good faith whether you meant you are suggesting the same statement of the OP, or something else?

You’ve hit the nail on the head with this. Give the people something to be disgusted about, and you can con them into accepting all sorts of damaging policy.

In the US, the push to deny transgender persons their rights has been a real distraction – a bugaboo - and a convenient excuse for the administration to gut medical research, science, and the civil service, and transform the military — Questioner

Absolutely.
One of my guilty pleasures is occasionally listening to the political "debates" on youtube and other media. And you can bet, every time a MAGA supporter finds themselves needing to defend the indefensible: large-scale grift, illegality and contempt for Americans' lives...the response is something like "Yeah but the Biden administration was paying for mice to become trans!" (or some other BS trans talking point). Something that, even if it were true, would be totally inconsequential compared to the malfeasance being pointed out to them.

And you have equally zero claim that massive numbers of people don't agree with the specific claim of this thread. In fact, its irrelevant. You have a claim presented to you. Are you able to demonstrate why it is false? If not, then it stands as true. — Philosophim

You're asking me to prove a negative, otherwise your claim stands?
This is a philosophy forum; if there's one place such sloppy reasoning wouldn't fly, it's here.

If you are concerned that I am somehow immoral, therefore you don't need to talk to me, realize that is a tactic of thought suppression. — Philosophim

I made no such claim or insinuation.

I said, in my response to Amadeus, that a lot of people have been duped into believing that transgenderism is immoral, but even there I am not suggesting that people with that belief are necessarily immoral (though many are -- just an excuse to find a marginalized group to beat up on. But most others are just poorly informed). So it's quite a leap to suggest I was calling you immoral, let alone advocating that your speech should be suppressed.

if you're wondering why few people agree with your conclusion, that putting gender over sex is sexism
— Mijin

I think it is the case that massive numbers of people agree with this sentiment. You may just have a bubble into which outside voices are refused entry. Most do. Those of us who actively go out of their way to avoid this understand that its basically 50/50 on these types of claims. — AmadeusD

I don't think massive numbers of people agree with the specific claim of this thread, but go ahead and cite me wrong: I'm happy to hear it.

If you instead simply mean that lots of people are anti-trans: sure. It's been whipped up as the moral panic of the day. You talk about living in a bubble: well, the vast majority of people who have strong anti-trans views have never spoken to one, maybe not encountered one.
They've been force-fed that this is the prime issue to care about, and it works because it's easy to sell the idea that something that makes a person uncomfortable must therefore be immoral.

Here in the UK, so many people will ignore the damage that brexit did to the country, the grift and russian-backed treason of the Reform party (our equivalent of maga), because "the Left think men are women", or whatever version of the talking point.

"I'm aggressive, and only men are supposed to be aggressive. Maybe I'm a man?" — Philosophim

"I keep finding things on the internet that I like are followed by lesbians. I must be a lesbian." He really believes he's a lesbian by the way despite the fact I've pointed out how 'sexual orientationist' his reasoning is — Philosophim

I'm not going to question the legitimacy of these personal anecdotes.
I will just say that, if you're wondering why few people agree with your conclusion: that putting gender over sex is sexism, it's because few if any people can relate to your personal experience.

For example, in my case, I'm almost 50 and I've never heard anyone, whether cis or trans, doubt their gender on the basis of a behaviour (except while joking).

Gender: The non-biological expectations that one or more people have about how a sex should express themselves in public. For example, "Men are expected to wear top hats, women are not."

I do not think there is a debate as to the reality and usefulness of the terms above. — Philosophim

I would debate.
It seems to be more complex than just the set of presentations -- most of us have met "tomboy" like women, or men who dress quite femininely (or even cross dress) who nevertheless would never consider themselves trans. And, linking back to sex, why do some trans people choose to have a sex change, or even just hormone therapy. The way you've separated sex and gender and rationalized the latter doesn't appear compatible with doing anything that the world at large isn't seeing.
I'm not saying that social expectations aren't a big part of this, I just feel it's a bad definition to start from.

Even further, if William himself stated, "I cook in the kitchen, therefore I'm not a man", this would ALSO be sexist. — Philosophim

No-one says that though.
No-one says "I like soap operas, therefore I am a woman".
I would probably agree that there is a degree of sexism in such a statement, were someone to make it, but it isn't a realistic depiction of gender dysphoria.

Something and nothing are semantic place holders for objects. Until you put actual objects in there, they don't mean a thing. — Corvus

I agree with the first part, but not the second.
Language is complex and we can refer to things both concrete and abstract and there is no need for the former to supercede the latter.

Furthermore, we shouldn't let our own language constrain us.
Yes, we have difficulty talking about ontology in a fundamental way, because in our everyday life we are only familiar with change. So we end up with clunky language like "something from nothing" that, I would agree with you, are ill-formed at best. But the solution is not to take such questions off the table but rather refine them into meaningful claims / hypotheses.

Pretty much nobody uses binary directly.
— Mijin

You would be surprised — SophistiCat

This is the kind of thing I mean, actually. I'm old enough to have used bitflags many times in my own programs. And there are programming challenges, on places like project euler, where such an approach might still be required.

But on real projects, now? We're at a point where memory is very cheap, and processors are optimized for pushing round 32 and 64 bit variables, vectors and matrices. Trying to use every bit of a variable is almost certainly going to be slower to save negligible memory.

Actually, I don't want this to be controversial, so I'll soften my claim. All I want to say is that if people are imagining that programmers in general need / use binary frequently, that's very far from the typical programming experience circa 2025. I don't recall the last time I thought about individual bits, and I'm a caveman; I built the oldskool .

Pretty much nobody uses binary directly. Computers use binary because they encode numbers via on/off switches. But it's a completely unwieldy and error prone system for humans to use.

Even when debugging computer memory, programmers will usually use hexadecimal (base-16) because it's more convenient to read and use, and converts easily to binary if needed.

And note I say "debugging computer memory" because, while it used to be true that programming in general involved getting to the bits and bytes of it all, that's less and less true over time. Id still say that most programmers are *capable* of reading binary and hex, but already the majority probably never need to.

My thoughts are that it's basically intractable at this time. "Something from nothing" makes no sense, but neither is it an answer in itself. I don't understand the compulsion some have to declare such fundamental questions "solved" (in a not very convincing fashion).

To elaborate:

Our understanding of a phenomenon is a function of what correct predictions and inferences we can make about it. When it comes to existence itself, it's clear there's an explanatory gap; we can understand how one entity transitions into another (e.g. water becoming ice) but how anything existed in the first place we don't know.

I'm careful to phrase it this way, because from this it's clear that

1) Whether time is finite, or infinite, or looped, or whatever doesn't matter. If I had an eternal golden calf in my garden, would its property of being eternal explain why it's there, and why you don't have one? Would it explain anything?

2) Saying "the universe just is" isn't an understanding either; it amounts to the claim that an explanation is impossible. That's completely compatible with -- not a retort -- to the claim that we don't have an explanation.

3) Saying "god did it" or whatever just kicks the can down the road; the same explanatory gap would exist for God. Which I think many believers would concede. If they accept that being eternal doesn't in itself explain anything, they would probably just say that God's existence is something beyond our comprehension.
That's fine, but for non-believers like me, that leaves me with no reason to invoke God. The same explanatory gap would remain, except we now have a job for Occam's razor.

As an aside, one thing to be aware of, is that there is a language issue here with English... And a few other languages, basically any language that concatenates "no" and "thing" into a noun like "nothing".
Because you get a lot of nonsense statements like "nothing is still something" and "there's no evidence of a nothing existing"...statements like this can't even be meaningfully translated into languages like Mandarin; they're gibberish.
"Nothing" is not an ordinary noun and doesn't function in all the places that you can put a noun. It's a concatenation of "logical not" and "some/any-thing".

I had ChatGPT do the calculations for me. If one in 1 billion star systems has life and if one in 1 billion planets with life have intelligent life then there would be 40 civilizations in the observable universe — T Clark

Chatgpt flubbed then. A billion =10^9. And the number of stars in the observable universe is 10^23 to 10^24. So, that would mean 10,000 to 100,000 civilizations.

This would still mean a largely barren universe of course... Given the ludicrous distances this is very far from a "federation of planets" type scenario. But it's probably enough to be a problem for the fermi paradox. There are megastructures that would be detectable at intergalactic scales.

I think this claim may be contested. We really just may not know how rare planets similar to Earth are, life is, or ETI is. — NotAristotle

Quite right.
The issue is that it gets repetitive typing out "based only on what we know right now" but that was the intended meaning.

The point is, when we're talking about filters like whether aliens will want to stay hidden etc, it needs to be borne in mind that, based only on what we know right now, there could be a million advanced ETIs in our galaxy alone. So there needs to be a pretty big filter(s) before things like behavioral filters are going to be relevant.

That filter could indeed be that small, rocky worlds, with liquid water and plate tectonics turn out to be astonishingly rare; we can't rule that out yet.
Pretty much all we can rule out is that planets in general, in the habitable zone of their parent star, are rare. From how many we've detected given our methods only allow detection in very specific circumstances, it's a pretty safe inference now that they are common. But beyond that, all bets are off.

For me the Fermi paradox loses a lot of it's argumentation, when one takes into account that the first radio signals we have ever sent to space have reach only a tiny spec even in our own galaxy. Add then the fact that radio signal get weaker when the ranges get longer. — ssu

As ludicrously big as the universe is*, it's also billions of years old. When we put the two together, there has been ample time for thousands of species to have made noise detectable to us.

And I use terms like "noise" because in the context of the Fermi paradox we are speaking much more broadly than just radio signals:

1. Megastructures like dyson spheres
2. Self-replicating probes, that could "quickly" flood a galaxy
3. Anything else detectable, even if we have no idea what it is for**

* My favorite demonstration of this is: if the sun were the size of a golf ball, then the next golf ball, our nearest neighbor, would be 800 miles away. FTR the earth is the size of a grain of sand on this scale.

** I mentioned this upthread, but it bears repeating: things like Dyson spheres are just examples of detectable tech that would have a useful function that we can conceive of. People often make the error of thinking we are claiming to know that this is what advanced ETIs will do. We don't know. We just know that the set of useful, detectable tech is non-zero.

My own view is that if there’s intelligent life out there, distance may not matter given technologies that would look like magic to us. We can imagine that the laws of physics we currently cherish might have 'workarounds' we simply don’t yet understand. — Tom Storm

Yes, this. I'm in a fermi paradox debate on another site (the straight dope) and there I am running into the problem that people don't appreciate how big a deal it is for an intelligent species to persist over deep time. When I talk about an advanced ETI making self-replicating probes, the responses are as though I am a hyper-optimist, talking about what humans will achieve in the next ~50 years. I'm not.

A technological species living for a million years or more is hundreds to thousands of times the duration of all of human history. Our stupendously hard engineering problems will be their prehistoric utterly trivial ones. More simple to them than a sharpened stone is to us.
When we're speculating what they could achieve, engineering challenges (like, say, shielding from micrometeorites) won't cut it as barriers to progress. We need to propose that certain things are physically impossible. And indeed, even many things we think are physically impossible will likely not look that way to an advanced ETI, but that's the level we need to at least start from for such problems to potentially explain the Fermi paradox.

However, given that we accept this point, perhaps we should start to wonder why they would want to communicate with us, or perhaps they have already been here but we never noticed it. — javi2541997

1. Arguments like "they wouldn't want to" are not very convincing as primary Fermi filters.
Because, the problem with "behavioral" explanations for the paradox is that we are making a claim about all species, always. Every faction of every civilization has to always come to the same conclusion. If even 1% of species 1% of the time choose to be noisy, then it doesn't work as our main filter.
And note that humans have already attempted to be noisy: we've beamed out signals. These signals are feeble of course, but the point is, a hypothesis that requires all aliens to behave a way that the only technological species that we know of has not, doesn't seem promising.

2. The objection to aliens silently visiting the solar system is basically the same. If there are one or two advanced ETIs in our galaxy, then OK, maybe both came here, or are here, in a way that was/is silent.
It doesn't work as a primary filter though.

If this estimate is correct, and if it is also correct that life is carbon-based only, and if life only arises on some Earthlike planets but not all, then the fact that most Earthlike planets have not formed yet suggests that, as you said initially, we are one of the very first intelligent species — NotAristotle

The cite doesn't really support the conclusion you're drawing though.
Yes, in a relative sense we might be "early" but even that tentative estimate still suggests around a billion rocky worlds before ours. And that's just in our galaxy.

If life were not only carbon based, I do think we would be right to expect more aliens. That said, if it is carbon based and only forms on planets similar to Earth, most of those planets are either still forming or are young compared to Earth, meaning we would not expect there to be ETI, or at least not that many ETIs; so I agree that some pessimism is warranted in that regard, but not about the possibility of ETI. — NotAristotle

I don't think anything warrants that level of certainty. I have not seen any analysis that we can say that the earth is exceptional in how early it formed.
The only requirements I am aware of are a third-generation star and icy comet impacts. Even assuming these are mandatory requirements (which is debatable), it still leaves a window billions of years wide, including billions of years before the Earth formed.

The timescale on when an ETI would be expected to send out a radio signal will consider 1. the odds of abiogenesis, and as ↪Wayfarer pointed out, 2. the times at which those planets formed. — NotAristotle

I wouldn't get too focused on radio signals. Yes, SETI and other organizations look for radio signals because what else can we do? But in the context of the Fermi paradox I think it is wrong to see it as requiring ETIs to be broadcasting a radio signal at just the right time for us to look.
For the Fermi paradox, we're talking about anything detectable, so that would include things like replicating probes spreading to our star system, and megastructures like Dyson spheres, both of which could persist in some form long after a species has gone.

And, importantly, it includes technology that we can't understand. What I mean by that is, we don't have to suggest that advanced species will make Dyson spheres. Maybe the most important technology for a million years+ advanced species is a giant helix, that radiates X-rays intensely, for reasons we couldn't possibly understand yet.
Well, we don't see that either. We don't see anyone absorbing, emitting or refracting EM radiation on a large scale anywhere.

Of course, it doesn't prove anything. But, given that there's no reason that we yet know of that the sky couldn't have been lit up with the lights of a million species, it's not a positive data point.

I think the best guess based on what we know right now is that we are amongst the very first intelligent species.

As ludicrously vast as the distances are between stars, the galaxy has been around for deep time; sufficient for an advanced ETI to have done several things that we can think of that would be detectable (and who knows how many more things that we are unaware of yet). Theres no reason we know of yet why the night sky couldn't have been lit up with the evidence of hundreds of thousands of species.

I wish it weren't so, but the deafening silence is reason to be pessimistic about the numbers.

"Both sides" should always be questioned: there's nothing about political wings that entails everything is always symmetrical.

And things change over time; sure there have been times, and places, where possibly the left was more extreme including intolerance.

But right now, in the western world, there's a clear "winner". What used to be the far right here in the UK has become the mainstream, so Reform, and (to an only slightly less extent), the Tories have a platform almost entirely on hating brown people (or "non-indigenous" as has become the common term), muslims, trans etc.

Let alone the US. I mean, in the last 24 hours we had Trump ranting about Somali people being "garbage" that are all unwelcome in the US. What on earth is the left saying that is supposedly equivalent?

Euthanasia for the terminally Ill is one thing. For someone who is really depressed, or shaken by a loss that seems irrecoverable, that is quite another. I don't think it is ethical to make suicide a safe, available option for the depressed. If depression is a mental illness, then the person is out of their right mind, and does not have the competency to judge such a momentous decision for themselves. — hypericin

Ah I missed this response.
Firstly I would agree that there is danger here in making suicide easy, as we all have moments of extreme grief, and, as I say, death is permanent. Many of us are often relieved that in our darkest moments we didn't have access to a gun.

But I also believe that things like "right to life" are meaningless without ultimate control over our own fate. Anyone should be able to check out. But, in terms of assisted suicide, of course we should provide all the therapy, all the options, and all the (reasonable) thinking time that we can.

Ah I see, thanks for clarifying.

Hmm, from my perspective I do see it as obvious given the neurochemical underpinnings of thoughts and that the causal path is quite clear within that framing. But, now I'm clear on what you're saying, I need to think a bit more about what we can strictly say the entailment regarding ideas / propositions is.

Of course it's the brain. Nobody's questioning that. But that's where, not how. We know that wings make an airplane fly. When we ask how, simply repeating "the wings do it" isn't an answer. Certainly, we can mess with subjective experience by affecting voltage gated calcium channels, serotonin reuptake proteins, and any number of other parts of neurons. But that doesn't even begin to address how those physical things don't only release ions when photons of one particular range of wavelengths hit the retina, but experience redness, and don't only act on themselves in feedback loops, but are aware of their own existence. — Patterner

The topic of this thread is not the hard problem of consciousness though. There are plenty of threads on that, and in those threads I have always been happy to say "we don't know".

This thread is about causation, thoughts to thoughts, and that's very clear IMO. As I've said, it's intrinsic to the whole way our minds -- cognition and perception -- work. It's almost all associative. This is demonstrable and testable.

If I have a thought of someone I love, and the brain fires up in all the ways we can now observe, was my thought caused by a yet previous piece of neurochemistry? Couldn't we equally say that the chicken of neurochemistry was preceded by the egg of subjective thought? — J

Or, the position that I am espousing: that they are one and the same thing.
I feel you are poisoning your own well by beginning with the premise that one must cause the other.

Yes, but the opposite is also the case: We can reliably induce chemical and electrical effects on the brain by subjective experiences. — J

Sure: both support the position that thoughts, and subjective experience, are based in neurochemistry.
Or put it this way: are there ever subjective experiences that aren't coincident with activation of areas of the brain?

We don't have a hint of understanding how the brain makes subjective experiences. Which means we don't know that it does. — Patterner

False, and refuted by the other parts of what I said that you didn't quote.
We can reliably, and precisely, induce subjective experiences with chemical, electrical or mechanical effects on the brain. No-one would claim that this constitutes a complete model. But we absolutely do have good grounds for thinking the brain makes subjective experiences.

Noting correlation is not the same as explaining how one causes the other. — Patterner

A lot of loading in just that one sentence (whether intentional or not).

Firstly, "correlation" massively mischaracterizes what we're talking about here. We're not talking about rubbing my lucky rabbit's foot and my team wins the big game.
We're talking about the highest standard of empirical verification: being able to consistently make accurate predictions and inferences. Every time you take an ibuprofen for a headache you are again testing the idea that conscious experiences are one and the same with neurochemistry. (And I am mentioning that as an example of how often the hypothesis is tested, of course, within medicine and neuroscience the millions of tests are also extremely precise).

Secondly, I just said that my position is that thoughts and neural firings are two descriptions of the same phenomenon, yet you're still asking which way the causation goes. My answer is very obviously: neither.
You may as well be asking me whether ball causes sphere or does sphere cause ball? They're two descriptions of the same thing.

Where do you suspect the subjective experience shows up? — Patterner

Yes we don't have a good understanding yet of how the brain makes subjective experiences.
Qualia are a fascinating phenomenon, but the fact that they can be triggered, reliably and precisely with tools like deep brain stimulation suggests that they, like the mind in general, are a product of the brain.

Plus it's pretty hard to square how qualia could work as some external phenomenon or ghost in the machine. For example, we understand a lot of how our brain forms the images we see; the edge detection, movement detection, object persistence algorithms etc that happen, we have localized very well where they happen, and of course can create optical illusions based on our understanding.
We don't yet understand how the brain creates subjective experiences like "redness". But, however that happens, it needs to be embedded right within this set of visual processing algorithms, that are completely physical and even mathematical.

Neuronal events are nothing like thoughts, so the question is, how can they be the same thing? — J

Many phenomena have different characteristics that might seem wholly separate prior to establishing a model linking them. Imagine trying to explain smallpox symptoms as a cellular phenomenon to someone unfamiliar with germ theory. Microscopic jelly-bags with long helices inside is nothing like pain and pustules.

Why should physical experiences such as neurons firing give rise to conscious experience? Are thoughts "really" just brain events? — J

Well I wouldn't use the "really" framing, because I believe both descriptions are valid. We have thoughts and we also have brain events.
But yes, they are different facets of the same thing; this is trivially demonstrable from the fact that physical changes to our brain have a corresponding effect on our conscious experience (e.g. taking an opioid and the effect it has on dopamine receptors and what that feels like).

If you look into the so-called "hard problem of consciousness" as described by Chalmers and others, it will give you a good sense of what the controversy is. — J

I'm familiar with the hard problem of consciousness. Indeed I would put it to you that you have misunderstood it, if you believe the point is to claim that the mind cannot be a neural phenomenon.

You're not missing the point; our conscious experience certainly seems to rely on something like causation. But the OP question focuses on whether it's the content of a thought that causes another thought, or whether, as you describe, it's the neurons firing. Of course it's tempting to say, "They're the same thing," but as you probably know, that thesis has generated a lot of philosophical controversy. — J

If you can summarize one or two of the main points of controversy I would appreciate it, as my understanding is there is no issue with that description (though no-one would say it is complete either).

I think what can sometimes happen is that when we talk about neural correlates of consciousness, the temptation is to imagine it as some trivial mapping. That if I see a yellow ball say, there's a cascade of neural firings all resulting from that, like dominos.

But of course it's a lot more complex than that. While yes, some individual firings can be coupled to simple perception, the overall pattern of firings is continuous, extremely complex and largely based on referencing past data -- the brain running a complex internal model with outside perception just having an effect on the model.

I don't know if this slight rant is relevant here, it's just a framing that often seems assumed in these discussions. That as soon as we talk of synapses firing and cause and effect, the temptation to see cognition as serial, synchronous and passive seems too strong.

I'd say I've had more negative experiences in my life than positive, but regardless, there are things that I look forward to and I want to try lots of experiences. Life is short and death is permanent, and that's the simple equation that keeps me from thinking of suicide.

That said, I'm personally pro euthanasia, and I do believe we should have the freedom to check out if that's the decision we come to.

The problem I often see in movies and TV is a protagonist who hurts (or even kills) innocents (eg persuing cops) because they are on some important mission and see it as the "greater good". And they rarely stop to reflect on what they've done.
In the real world, this kind of "greater good" thinking is often what enables the greatest evils.

That said, the degree to which it is harmful to the audience depends on many factors; I'm not saying that every movie treating an innocent security guard as fodder is necessarily normalizing evil (or violence), but some do.

Finally, I've got to disagree with the OP's characterization of breaking bad. Much of the point of the series was asking difficult moral questions and showing the factors that might lead a formerly good person to "break bad". It's very far from just cheering him on (or his wife being an "empty shrew"). Did you think, for example, when he calls for Gale to be executed, and what that also did to Jessie that we were supposed to find it heroic?

I read the first few posts of this thread, and the last few, and I'm still not that clear really. So apologies if the following point completely misses the point.

The point being, that when it comes to neurology, association is inherently how our brains work. Right from the neuron level, through to nuclei, regions and brainwaves -- this fires, causing that to fire. Sometimes in a linear fashion -- it may be difficult to remember the first bar of a song but after that the rest of the song is often fully recalled without effort. And sometimes horizontally -- the smell of cut grass bringing back a childhood memory.
But more than that, our whole ability to navigate the world requires us to associate many properties that go together.

So yes, thoughts cause thoughts, almost all of our conscious experience relies on it.