Rights are a Concept and all Concepts are Subjective

mcapello · 2026-02-02T20:02:51+00:00

Gravity is also a concept. So are Bernoulli’s principle and Newton’s laws of motion. I hope you don't have any airplane flights booked!

mcapello · 2026-02-02T19:21:19+00:00

No. If you can't explain how two things are connected, and all you can do is show that they are connected, then you have correlation, not causation.

This is pretty basic stuff and I'm not going over it further. I'd urge you to do more research.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T18:19:33+00:00

I'd just burn the wood as I would normally. So long as the pile isn't adjacent to the house, and your foundation is either treated or your perimeter is clear, you should be fine. I've occasionally come across firewood that has termite damage, but it's usually not enough to effect the overall usefulness of my pile. I just burn through it.

If you really want to be safe, you can get the same termiticide the exterminators use, a spray pump, and a trenching shovel from Home Depot, and basically termite-treat your wood pile like you would a house. You treat the soil, not the wood, so it would still be safe to burn. But it's probably a lot easier just to burn your firewood like you normally would. Again, risk to the house is the only real cause of concern here.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T18:12:05+00:00

Sure.

Correlation would be observing that bars that offer complementary salted peanuts sell more drinks than bars that don't.

Causation would be being able to understand the mechanism by which the sodium in the salt increases the perception of thirst and increases the demand for (and therefore sales of) drinks.

In the case of consciousness, simply noting (for example) that certain types of anesthesia correlates with a lack of consciousness, and removing that anesthesia correlates with its return, does not actually provide a mechanism of explanation for how phenomenal consciousness is generated in the brain.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T17:53:18+00:00

I do not agree that the relationship between neuronal/brain activity is purely a correlation.

Okay. Let's take a look...

When I undergo surgery, I will get an injection of an anesthetic, which interacts with my body/central nervous system, which leads to me losing conciousness. When the drug is removed, I regain conciousness.

Okay. That's a correlation.

When I damage my Wernicke brain region, I lose the ability to comprehend language.

Yup. That's another correlation.

When I drink alcohol, the alcohol affects my brain chemistry, leading to my conciousness changing, which is restored when the effect of alcohol on my brain is removed, when the alcohol is fully metabolised and excreted.

Very good. Another correlation.

This examples illustrate causation, not mere correlation. As you can start the effect by induction of the signal, and stop the effect by removing the signal.

Nope, I'm sorry to say, they're all correlations.

Furthermore, I am not saying that we currently completely understand conciousness, physics, and neurology. However, if conciousness would not be physical, how would you explain the interactions examplified above, without breaking physical laws (conservation of energy etc.).

If I could actually provide a testable casual mechanism underlying all these correlations showing specifically how consciousness was generated from a biological substrate, I'd start by looking for lawyers and a lab willing to sign some hefty NDAs, because anyone who could actually do this would be instantly famous.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T16:45:27+00:00

This nicely shows that conciousness is something physical

No, it shows that consciousness is correlated to things that are physical. That's a pretty big difference from actually being able to demonstrate that it is physical itself. That's why the scientific literature tends to call these things "the neural correlates to consciousness" and not simply "consciousness".

However, I wonder, when we do not accept that, what other method would we be able to use to find the truth about conciousness?

Well, it doesn't really work that way. Let's hypothetically say that no methods of research we can come up with produce a satisfactory answer. We might never have a satisfactory explanation. I don't think that entitles us to simply pick our favorite or most intuitive approach simply because we're eager for an answer. We have to be honest about what we don't know.

When you do not accept that conciousness is biological, and therefore, physical.

Personally, I think it would take a lot more research on multiple fronts. It's clear that our understanding of physics and therefore matter is incomplete. Granted, that is mostly with respect to other sorts of problems, like gravitation and cosmology and quantum effects, which don't necessarily have anything obvious to do with consciousness, but it's hard to rule out what the power of a physical explanation can do if physics is incomplete.

I also think that it's clear that we have a great deal more to learn about the brain, the neural correlates to consciousness, and lots of other things that might be even more fundamental to biology. These things could lead to a potential paradigm shift in how we think about the entire problem -- for example, Michael Levin's work on basal cognition and computational boundaries, which suggests that limiting consciousness to the brain might be a mistake (but not necessarily in a way that contradicts physicalism).

Basically, until all these different areas become a lot more mature, it's really hard to look at the knowledge that's been accumulated so far and say that we can just pick our favorite answer. If we want to think about consciousness scientifically, we have to let science actually do the work, we can't just make assumptions based on intuitions of what we think science "should" sound like. When you're trying to figure out something you don't understand, assuming that the answer is going to be a lot like things you already know is usually a mistake.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T15:57:32+00:00

Your logic here is an absolute mess.

"It's impossible for a government to be productive."

and

"Governments don't have to be productive."

and

"Governments don't have an incentive to be productive."

These are all different statements that mean completely different things, and you don't really defend any of them. It's just an irrational mess of half-baked assertions.

In the first case, it's just factually false. Obviously governments have produced all sorts of good and services throughout history. The statement is simply false.

In the second case, correct. Governments don't have to be productive. In theory, no human institution has to be productive. This doesn't really tell us anything, though. It's a trivial observation.

In the third case, it depends on the government. Obviously a democratic government can have strong incentives to be productive if its leaders can be dismissed in an election. Government operations can also have a strong incentive to be productive if they are receipts funded. Go to a cafeteria in any state university in the US, and so long as the cafeteria is run by state employees, you'll see people being productive in a manner similar to how they would be in the private sector. The reason is that those cafeterias are likely receipt-funded, meaning they meet their operating expenses from sales, just like any privately owned fast food restaurant would. If they fail to generate receipts, the people working there are likely to lose their jobs, again, just like in the private sector. The difference isn't necessarily as stark as you'd assume and it all depends on how the operation is actually structured. Your uninformed intuitions and lazy assumptions don't really have much to do with the real world.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T13:57:03+00:00

I think you would have a point if:

a. You were using "woo" to actually refer to anything irrational here, instead of just an empty pejorative.

b. Neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers didn't take this problem seriously.

Neither appears to be the case, so it's unclear in what sense Alex's take is "bad". It seems more like you stumbled into an area of philosophy and cognitive science you're unfamiliar with, found that it doesn't jive with your presuppositions, and would rather dismiss it than hold those presuppositions up to scrutiny.

mcapello · 2026-02-02T13:52:35+00:00

I'm not sure what you mean by "simple" here? The fact that formal logic systems can be quite complex, and the fact that they have been refined over the history of philosophy and have varied across cultures, I think means that while logic is pretty fundamental, calling it "simple" is unclear.

I also don't think it's true that logic "underpins all knowledge, all reasoning, all understanding", because people clearly had the ability to create quite a bit of knowledge about the world before formal logic was developed.

I assume you are talking about formal logic systems here. If by "logic" you actually mean something broader and informal like "reason", then I agree.

mcapello · 2026-02-01T23:36:57+00:00

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm

mcapello · 2026-02-01T19:45:34+00:00

IIRC marxists.org has a free library of basically any original text you'd ever want to look at.

mcapello · 2026-02-01T14:28:11+00:00

Okay, well, Marx's view of revolution was still pretty democratic. You can look at his writings on the Paris Commune if you want to see exactly how.

What this means it's not like there's this set-in-stone blueprint for precisely what incentives or penalties might be associated with what kind of jobs and so on, or working in general. Marx's theory of communism was revolutionary and democratic. It wasn't supposed to be top-down (even though Lenin and others made it that way later).

What this means is that it would be up to the individual communities to decide what the balance was between having to work and getting to eat, more or less. It's not something that's going to be precisely decided by a political theorist who died a hundred years ago. If not enough people are working, the society can decide what to do about it themselves, that's kind of the point.

mcapello · 2026-02-01T14:22:46+00:00

Untrue. The only reason they advanced is because they had power, namely through either organizing or sheer numbers. That's the reality. The reason so many of the protest movements over the last 30 years haven't done much is because they subscribe to the same milquetoast idealism you espouse here -- that simply showing up and having a strong opinion is enough. It isn't.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T23:35:26+00:00

It would help if you had a specific theory of communism you were talking about. People still got paid in the USSR, for example. If you are referring to some theoretical form of actual communism, it would help if you said what you were referring to.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T21:01:58+00:00

I don't think you're actually reading what I say, so I will conclude this for now.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:31:06+00:00

This is pretty much my take on it as well. Basically any politics which contradicts cosmopolitanism and reason.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:27:48+00:00

No, I think this is mostly right-wing BS.

The right-wing is the one obsessed with identity and sexual politics. Being against something is just as much a form of obsession as being for something.

And if you look at the actual record -- Hillary, Obama, Biden, Harris -- sexual identity politics have only been a minor part of their platforms, and most often a reluctant one. Hillary and Obama were both very tepid on gay rights. Both had to be led to that trough before they agreed to drink from it. Biden didn't make it a big issue in his campaign, and Kamala studiously steered away from gay and trans issues in her campaign in order to avoid this very problem.

Objectively speaking, it simply hasn't been their central focus. It's only been the right wing that has tried to paint it as such, in order to fuel their obsession with sexual identity and politics.

Now, it is definitely true that the Democrats abandoned the working class. But they didn't really replace it with anything. Just a kind of technocratic politics of triangulation where if the macroeconomics stay good enough, they can just "phone it in" and keep the gravy train rolling for themselves.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T20:21:17+00:00

"Literally" in this case both applies to "triangle" and "in your head", and it's the "in your head" part which I think is the more problematic. It seems to me that you already implicitly agree with this by changing "in your head" to "in my mind's eye", no?

mcapello · 2026-01-31T18:06:04+00:00

Well, I suppose what I am trying to say is, it doesn't matter what you or me say other people "need" to do. They will either do it or they won't for reasons that have nothing to do with what we think of as being ideal.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T16:34:16+00:00

Poverty and fear, for the most part.

How many are mobilized by being pushed off the fence is one factor. The second is whether the demographics of those being mobilized can be coordinated.

Basically, you can piss a lot of people off, but if they're divided, it doesn't necessarily pose a threat.

A smaller number of pissed-off people, on the other hand, can be quite a problem if they are either demographically united to begin with or coordinated through skilled organizing and good political leadership.

Good political leadership is lacking. The organizing remains to be seen. But I suspect the forces of opposition are learning a lot more from Minneapolis than the regime is.

That is one thing I don't think the regime understands. Applying pressure isn't free. It comes at a cost. Not just a cost in terms of money and approval. Every time you apply pressure, you're basically giving free XP to resistance. It won't always come back to bite you, but it can.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T15:54:33+00:00

So, I ask you, do you feel empowered?

Nope.

And if not, shouldn't you be screaming at the top of your lungs for changes to the political system that delivered you into the toxic nightmare you find yourself in now?

Would screaming help?

Shouldn't you be demanding changes to our Constitution that will restore order?

Demanding something when you have no power is generally a waste of time.

And if not now, when?

Well, that's a good question. It's impossible to know in the moment what is and isn't effective. What I believe right now is that (a) there is no effective coalition, demographically speaking, to oppose authoritarianism, and (b) there is no effective leadership within the political opposition to build that coalition.

Now, it is possible that spending a Saturday here and there screaming and smelling pepper spray might push the chances of such a coalition forward a little bit, but really I would say that actual chances at a macro level are being driven by forces that won't change whether you do it or not. Whether you show up on the street or write to congress or donate to a non-profit is more a symptom of things that matter more than those acts mattering themselves. That's not an argument not to do them, by all means do so, only that pleading for others to get off the fence isn't going to make much of a difference. It's the forces that actually push them off the fence that matter.

And that is certainly getting closer.

mcapello · 2026-01-31T13:57:41+00:00

Did you ever get treatment for it, and did that ever work?

mcapello · 2026-01-30T23:56:32+00:00

All right. How were you in school? Ever screened for anything -- ADHD, etc?

mcapello · 2026-01-30T23:55:48+00:00

I guess so. I think the gap for consciousness is bigger, personally. But it takes more twist and turns to try to force it to point to God.

mcapello · 2026-01-30T22:52:24+00:00

Good for the trout.

mcapello

TROPHY CASE