Young Master Smeet
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Fabian wrote:Which is irrelevant to the question being that property is a normative ethical concept, and you’re talking about descriptive attributes. Being beaten up doesn’t make beating up ok/ legitimate/ right/ ethical/ moral; describing facts doesn’t address the question of whether some concepts are justified or not.
Excepting as when action does not align with the properties concepts in question. My cyber example (above) set out what would be required to truly own another person. Otherwise, the ghost in the shell retains real ownership.I could, juridicially, stake out a claim to a portion fo the surface of the sun, but that would be merely an imaginary claim.Or, a more blunt example, you cannot rape an orange, so discussing the ethical implications of that act is moot.
Fabian wrote:Seems you don’t know much about history (including modern) of slavery. Selling yourself into slavery is mentioned in the code of Hammurabi, Codex Iuris Civilis mentions three types of slaves- those that were PoWs, those who were born slaves, and those who became slaves by selling themselver or as debt slaves. Even today there is multitude of debt slaves in the world.I’d be more cautious, if I were you, as to staking claims to what people do or do not know based on the slender evidence of a short internet post (as you have done several times in this discussion), it undermines any confidence in your judgement. You can rebut a claim merely by stating the counter evidence without ad hominem commentary.As it happens, I am perfectly aware of the history of debt slavery, and the anthropological accounts of it that show it was an exercise in power, not a free sale (usually occurring as part of a deliberate policy of making slaves). It’s also questionable as to the extent the debt could be considered a market transaction, as opposed to a gift/dominance ritual.The point remains, that the debt slave did not “sell” themself, but were forced into slavery by circumstance. They were already under someone else’s thrall.However, this discussion does usefully illustrate that, far from carrying an emancipatory element, self-ownership is very much tied up in the ideology of dominance and class rule.
Quote:People sold themselves (their bodies, the same one you can shave) into slavery troughout history, to make money for their family, or by pledging themselves as collateral when taking a loan.yet they also kept themselves, control of their own bodies, most specifically (and, to be frank, no one sold themself into slavery, they were taken and forced, always. Slavery is an exercise in power. Submission to power is not a free sale).If you sell me a newspaper, you leave the newspaper behind, you sell me, and you come with you, there is nothing left behind. The relationship is not remotely the same as a property/commodity relation.
Fabian wrote:As I said, it’s irrelevant whether the mind-body dualism is factual or metaphorical for the self-ownership (which means ownership of your body) principle to be put forward. Disregarding it on liguistical ground does nothing to disprove it. As one “anarcho”capitalist said- if to say that “we own ourselves” is nonsensical because we are ourselves, then it would be equaly nonsensical to say that we can shave ourselves, which we all both say and practice.It is not a question of dualism or linguistics, it is to do with the properties of property. Property can be disposed of, transferred and owned and controlled. Whilst I can indeed shave myself, I cannot sell myself (without destroying myself as self).Now, as a matter of fact I do practice alienating myself and selling my labour power, but I don’t shave. Make of that what you will.If you will, I would counterpose Being to self ownership.
Quote:Looks to me like dodging debate, it’s slim.Yet, singularly, you haven’t provided a refutation. Arguing about the rules of debate is a classic mechanism for dodging it.
Quote:There is nothing separate from you to do the owning (that is the substantive point, the inability to sell yourself is just the proof).Sorry, remembered I was going to put this forward. Supposing you did sell yourself, to a weird cyber-punk doctor, who managed to subordinate your nervous system to another person’s control, every part of your body, including actions and thoughts would exist entirely at their cyber command. What of you would remain? My suggestion is nothing, you’d be effectively dead (as assuredly as if you sold your heart).As another wee point, this debate cannot be resolved factually, since it is primarily about how we see ourselves and our freedom. To someone who sees property as a good thing, seeing ourselves as property is a good thing. I spent years, once, arguing with an anarcho capitalist. Eventually we agreed that our fundamental premises regarding individualism versus collectivism were just insurmountable.I would say, though, that we do share one fundamental agreement with libertarians, which is that property is the route to liberty. The bone of contention is the possibility of universal emancipation via private versus collective property.
Fabian wrote:Yet you can give as a gift or sell parts of “yourself”, like organs, blood, semen/ eggs, women can rent their uterus. It’s irrelevant whether the Lockean concept of mind not being the body is literal (like in the case of Locke, who was a Christian, or metaphorical), doesn’t change the fact that self-ownership principle has to be addressed with more then “it’s nonsense”.Yes, you can sell parts of yourself, but they are products, you cannot sell yourself. You are you. There is nothing separate from you to do the owning (that is the substantive point, the inability to sell yourself is just the proof). On that basis, it’s perfectly fair and reasonable to dismiss the “self-ownership” principle as nonsense without further debate.If I wanted, I could develop it further into how it is just ideology and the natural extension of commodity fetishism. But you asked how to deal with it in debate, that’s how, stick doggedly to the key question, there is no part of you separate from you to do the owning.
Fabian wrote:Quote:Property is a social phenomena, you can only have property in so far as other people recognise the fact and act accordingly.This whole message of yours is stating of an opinion, without argumenting it, and without attacking the agruments of the oppossite opinion.
The substantive point was that property cannot be inherent, like a kidney, it only can exist when other people acknowledge it, hence it is inevitably social, thus we enter into Rousseau’s realm and the notion that property only exists at the grant of the community.I gave two quick propositions which rebut those arguments, no opinions. Those propositions are open for debate and disproof.
Some of these matters are addressed in our pamphlet Women and Socialism which is a touch old. But, it seems to be the nearest thing we have as a formal statement, so:
Quote:Clearly there are very real medical and ethical problems involved in the question of abortion and ultimately it is for the individuals themselves to decide. However these problems are exacerbated because of the nature of the society in which we live. In a sane world, probably no one would opt for abortion as a method of contraception. The fact that women are forced to do so in present society says something about that society and the conflicting pressures to which people are subjected; for example the cost and responsibility of parenthood, the ambivalent attitude towards contraception advice for young people and the lack of resources that are devoted to researching and developing new, safer and more effective alternatives to present methods of contraception.More generally, I’d point out it isn’t the role of the socialist party to have an opinion on everything. Our aim is the emancipation of the working class, after that humans will (for the first time) have the genuine luxury of settling ethical questions, freed from economic necessity.We deliberately and consciously avoid drawing up blueprints for socialism, or saying that everyone will be vegan or carnivorous (for example).
Fabian wrote:Being that world socialists put much weight in educating workers, spreading the idea, including through debates, were there any debates with or responses to “libertarians”, I would like to see what arguments you give against self-ownership principle, and private property as a deontological ethical theory.Self ownership is nonsense and bunkum. I am myself, I cannot own myself. If I tried to sell myself, I’d still be me, I am inseparable from myself. This fact lies at the heart of Marx’ theory of alienation. In principle, within the wages system, we are meant to alienate our labour, and sell it. However, we come attached. Psychologically and aesthetically, we are aware of that.Self ownership libertarians often are into the tyranny of contract, after all, anyone can be free to make any contract, and so theoretically can sell themselves into perpetual slavery. Caveat Emptor applies, and just because a deal might be badly made doesn’t make it binding.Property is a social phenomena, you can only have property in so far as other people recognise the fact and act accordingly.
robbo203 wrote:Your conscious self, you say, is a “by-product of the facility for language”. While I struggle to understand how a “by product “of something cannot be said to exist if it really is a by product, language itself is a form of communication and communication exists by virtue of the existence of individuals who communicate between each other.. Language itself , in other words, is a by product of interacting individuals and presupposes them. It is not some wonderful gift from the gods handed down to a speechless race of human beingsLanguage existed before this particular lump of animated meat had to accomodate itself to it.
robbo203 wrote:While I cant believe that what you are literally trying to do is deny your existence of an empirical material entity – that would be rather odd thing for a “materialist” to do – I take it that by “you” you mean a sense of selfhood or self-apprehension. Because it is an internalised construction developed through language and socialisation, this makes it an “illusion” in your view. In short, you cant actually touch feel or taste what you call your “self”. Therefore its not real – it doesnt “exist”No, not because I cannot touch it, but because that so much of what the meat does is not controlled by the talking voice in the head, which really is a specialist in retroactive justifications (the owl of Minerva spreads it wings with the dying of the light, and all that). So much of what we call ourselves is in fact many different processes/devices doing different tasks.
robbo203 wrote:If the mind does not exist then presumably, by the same token, neither does society – in which case why are you trying to change the latter? And why are you trying to change people’s…er…minds when they say you cant change it?There is no such thing as Young Master Smeet, only society. Society exists, I don’t, I am an illusion generated by society. Or, rather, my conscious self is a by-product of the facility for language, and since language is inherently social and exists outside any given selfhood, it exists and I merely misrecognise myself through it.
robbo203 wrote:Logically that commits you to the view that a particular mental event can have only one neurophysical correlate . Are you willing to defend this manifestly indefensible and unscientific position?As I have repeatedly said, a computer can perform identical operations using different disk sectors and different parts of the chip. I see no fundamental difference. But each given operation is itself and no other.Just as a C can be played on a guitar string or a on a flute, identical results may come from different routes.
robbo203 wrote:Also, if there is no mind then there can be no such thing as a mind exerting downward causation.I see no problem in brain states causing further brain states.I’m quite happy to say my brain doesn’t exist, and that I don’t exist. i’m just a process or matter and fundamental particles.
robbo203 wrote:I know what you are trying to say but you are formulating it incorrectly . You are saying that for every mind state there is a brain state which is quite true but you cannot deduce from that that the mind state and the brain state in question are one and the same. They are not; they are contingentAs you said previously:
Quote:A particular mind state is a token identity of a particular brain state or neurophysical event but it does not depend on that particular brain state or event in order for that thought to be thought. It does however depend on some brain state but not any particular precise one.I have no quibble with that, except by adding that at any given time of thinking it is that brain state at that time. There is no thought beyond that brain state.Or, simply put, there is no mind, only brain.
robbo203 wrote:A particular mind state is a token identity of a particular brain state or neurophysical event but it does not depend on that particular brain state or event in order for that tought to be thought. It does however depend on some brain stateYes, and the some brain state is the same as the mind state in that instance. That’s all I was saying. There are no thoughts separate from the brain. As I said, a computer writes to RAM it will use different hard disk sectors, that doesn’t mean that there is no computer process without hard disk states.
stuartw2112 wrote:Again, I posted the video because I thought it of relevance to this (interesting) discussion. I apologise once again for my mistake.Stuart,I didn’t click through to it, but it did remind me to have a wee scran around for Chomsky’s views on evolution and language. Interestingly, he seems to take the view that rather than language evolving as a natural continuum from other forms of signalling, human language developed from a ‘repurposed’ capacity. This strikes me as quite likely, I saw a talk a few years ago by Steve Jones, where he demonstrated that blood clotting comes from a repurposed gene for producing, IIRC, turtle shells. His overarching analogy was of evolution being like a slum, with bits and bobs flung together, raher than like a designed engine.Sorry, rambling. Anyway, I thought that was an interesting take on the language acquisition device.
robbo203 wrote:You cannot map a particular thought -say, the thought of a cold glass of beer on a hot summers day – onto to some particular pattern of neuronal firing such that for this thought to re-occur requires the exact repetition of that particular pattern of neuronal firing. That is what I mean by brain states not being identical to mind states. Yes CAT scanners can as you say read ” to a certain extent ” the responses to stumuli in the brain just as lie detectors can make a reasonably accurate quess as to whether you are telling the truth or not but that is a world away from substantiating the position taken up by identity theorySo what if you can’t? If you can show any neurons firing, at all, when someone is thinking of a cold glass of beer, that is a brain state. Just because we don’t understand how it works (yet) doesn’t mean that isn’t the case.
robbo203 wrote:Your analogy of birds and bats is inapt anyway and precisely for the reason you offer that “similar effects in general can be achieved through different means” . This is what I was trying to tell you with my various examples refuting identity theory. Thus “identical cognitive tasks can be performed by the same individuals at different times in their life despite the neurophysical re-configuration that would have occurred in the process of aging.”. Quite so. Which means there can be no one-to-one mapping of mind states onto brain states. Which means Identity theory has been refuted.Sorry, should have said: A bird and a bat with different wings can fly exactly the same route. At the different aging states it is still the brain that makes the decisions. IIRC with computing, a computer will write to different parts of RAM depending on what is available. So a computer can perform identical tasks with different RAM states, that doesn’t stop RAM states equally computing states.
