Apart from "orientation" changing to "genetic encoding," nothing in that particular line has changed (though, that change is a promising one).

I think Rick Perry's not far off the truth with 'People are inclined to be homosexual' - the idea that individuals can possess a natural inclination towards homosexuality seems persuasive with the entire "Gay Uncle" hypothesis that if you have an Uncle who's homosexual you are more likely to be homosexual yourself. There's also the hypothesis that if you have many brothers each brother is more likely to be homosexual than the last. So there's potentially some genetics in play and potentially something to do with development in birth.

One of the major differences between a disorder and an orientation is that a disorder causes medically significant distress, which homosexuality does not and alcoholism does and can. I think that can put away the entire "Homosexuality is a disorder" nonsense, but there's a more pressing issue to do with teaching homosexuality as genetic. I think the majority of the LGBT+ community is intimately aware that homosexuality is not entirely genetic. There are some individuals that always show an interest in those of the same assigned sex and always will, and some who show interest in both, and some who develop an interest in one or both over time. The LGBT+ community, as I see it, has been more comfortable with the idea pithily expressed by Mae Martin "Some are born gay, some become gay and some have gayness thrust upon them" - homosexuality also has roots in social development and this is not a negative thing.

But there's more to it than that. People have rejected homosexuality as a lifestyle choice from the mid 1800's onwards, and that's acceptable to do because you can't judge someone for who they are but you can judge them for who they choose to be or what choices they make. Surely of that, even if not their genetic makeup, they are responsible. And now there is evidence that homosexuality has genetic roots people have taken hold in this, in the "It is not their choice, so you cannot hold them responsible for being gay." So now the opponents have taken this aboard and are making stances that show we can hold people responsible for their genetic makeup, hence the entire alcoholism stance.

But they're playing the wrong game from the start, because homosexuality is not purely genetic. You can also see this happening with Transsexualism, which is why I'm so annoyed about this issue personally. To summarise, Trans people either come out pre or post puberty, and the DSM/ICD diagnose this differently, where pre-puberty is the best transgender and post is the worst transgender. Despite the best/worst, 6-23% of pre-puberty trans kids end up being Trans, most of the assigned males end up being gay instead. Society will slowly accept the best trans and in about 30-40 years accept the worst trans, because we can't 'blame' people any more for their genetics.

This shouldn't be about whether people can be held responsible or not for the 'awful' decision/inclination to be gay, the debate needs to be focused instead on the fact that there is nothing shameful about being homosexual and that this argument is going in the wrong direction. The best solution for this strategy alienates a considerable amount of gay individuals and sets up the trans* community for the same shit in about 5-10 years and the worst one fails to show it is genetic and has to backtrack considerably.

To return to the main point of your article, I think the majority of the community if not all of it is against forcible outing people. You've got two big issues here:

>There's a certain satisfaction in finding someone who voted anti-homosexual bills turned out to be homosexual >The media really loves finding gay people and outing them

I don't think this is a current LGBT+ issue, I think this is currently an issue with the media who still believe that someone being gay is reason to write a headline. LGBT members are not, as far as I know,searching out closeted members and outing them currently, Jim Kolbe is a story from 1996.

Gender female, sex male, bisexual. I was assigned male sex at birth because they saw a penis and that's the identification criteria. I realised that the chemicals in my brain were not happy with testosterone because it resulted in depression from the onset of puberty and the depression stopped after I removed the testosterone and put in estrogen. I'm sexually interested in both genders and only romantically interested in women at the moment.

Gender and sex are confusing as hell in modern languages, I don't think German differentiates the two concepts by noun at all, and English common usage doesn't really differentiate too much. Sex is frequently called biological sex, although this doesn't really capture it either, and Germany/Australia using 'Third Sex' options show that really sex isn't as determinate as one might want. Preferably there would be Gender(Assigned), Gender(Identifying), Gender(Presenting/Expression) but the first use only makes sense in a medical context, the second to oneself, and the third to others.

English uses sexuality from a relative standpoint instead of an independent standpoint, and that makes life confusing if you're trans. So if I liked women only, I'd start out as heterosexual and end up homosexual? At what point was the change? Androsexual & Gynesexual seem to be more intelligible. But that doesn't take into account people who straight up don't identify with one gender more than the other, or people who are attracted to those who don't seem very masculine or feminine. Gender(Expression) Sexual? Then you have people who are asexual but still form relationships that aren't based on sexual attraction, I'm sure they have a type too. I know a few girls who are straight but are sexually bisexual, and a few guys who are romantically only into one gender but would have sex with either if they were attracted to them. Would it be beneficial to divide attraction into the Greek forms? So Lojban has "mi prami do", where "prami" communicates an idea of love and "cinmo" could communicate feeling, but neither really hit the spot for sexual interest.

Huh, making up language words is fun, I see why you do it.

You’re right, they are bad at this. “woman-become-man for male to female transsexuals(or past-man-woman) reverse the genders for the other direction. monadic? or places for former and present names pc: This leaves out a lot of possibilities: transgendered (i.e., living as other gender without body alteration), transvestite, and, of course, homosexual and heterosexual. And this does not even get into the mass of biologically defined variant sexes: xx males (hypersensitive to testosterone), xy females (lack testosterone receptors), xyy males and overt hermaphrodites of various degrees “ They have no idea. Transgendered isn’t a word, because ‘to transgender’ doesn’t make sense. It’s like watching someone stumble at scratching the surface, to mix metaphors. Woman-become-man doesn’t make sense either; it’s conflating assigned gender and gender identity until it makes transition sound like either a choice or a cosmetic decision, like people change gender because the other one looks more fun. Variant sexes is going way too far until you can express the basics well enough. Can I guess 95%+ of Lojban speakers are male? Orgasm/Climax is JUST sexual release?

I'm not going to question the term has been thrown around poorly in arguments; it has and it shouldn't. It doesn't stop it being a useful tool that people discard far too frequently.

Privilege as a term is designed to make people aware of where their benefits might make them unlikely to notice problems. It doesn't mean they're better than everyone, and one privilege isn't the be all and end all of comparison. As so frequently pointed out, some starving African children are able bodied, but they're really not doing great. White, middle class males don't get literally everything either, but they have advantages and disadvantages in ways they're not aware of.

I can walk around and I have no issues with getting around London, and as such I don't really notice when a place doesn't have disabled access. I'm privileged because I don't need to notice this kind of thing and I don't know what it's like when someone refuses to make somewhere accessible because it's too expensive, or not structurally possible, and I don't know what it's like to have that life. This doesn't mean my opinion is invalid if I said "Hey, that building doesn't have access, but it totally should. What gives?" and it doesn't mean it's invalid when I say "It seems pointless to have disabled access there; it's unnecessary and far too expensive. Why not this instead?"

It is unlikely though that I'll ever be in a position where I can explain what's difficult about life in a wheelchair though, 'cos I don't live like that. There's gonna be a load of minor things that I never thought about, and to say "Well I know what it's like, and I think if this happened it would solve your problems" IS patronising. Sure, I might have done the research, studied it for years, and I might _genuinely_ know what would help. It's just straight out unlikely, and when people say certain things, the fact that they were privileged in this way shows.

I'm not privileged in the fact I'm transgender and that's pretty difficult some of the time. My life isn't shite because of it, actually being white and middle class has made some of it a breeze in ways that other people aren't so lucky to have. One of the key issues is that going to the bathroom is a big deal - most places have one gender or the other and going in the boys results in bad things and going in the girls also results in bad things. To me, most people are privileged in the fact that's never a thought to them. Don't make 'em better or worse people, just means that it's a bit easier for them for that particular bit of life. There's a lot of little things there that you won't think about, so when someone speaks up for me and says "The issue that Transgender people need solving is X", without asking someone living that, it's a bit weird. Yes, the NHS queues are terrible and that'd be nice to have solved, but in reality what I would prefer at the moment is a standardised manual for transgender patients so that I know if my rights are being violated when a doctor insists I have to strip down. Again, your views aren't invalid, it's just difficult for you to speak about and frustrating when my views are shouted down when it's something so personal.

Returning to gender, there are a lot of things you won't notice because you're male. That's not your fault, privilege was never meant to be about blaming people for things. It's just that it is easier for men to get onto these STEM courses, as you say, but not that it's the easiest thing ever. Rich White Men don't go out of their way to prevent women getting on the courses - no one is suggesting that for a minute. The article, and I've only glanced over it, seems to suggest that men select men for these jobs without considering that they're being sexist, it's just inherent. There's a few articles on the internet about Academic sexism where they submit two fake students for the same course, same credentials exactly, just different gender. The women are less likely to be accepted. On the streets, black men get random stop and search more than white men. We're not going out of our way to blame white men here - all we're saying is that there's a problem, and it's not obvious to you if you don't live it.

Aight, I'll bite.

What does Privilege mean to you? I've seen the word thrown around on this site and Reddit a fair few times, and for the most part it's just used as a way of making an argument seem less legitimate by association.

Watching a dull mess like Thor 2, you naturally turn to the villains for entertainment

...I went to go see it FOR Loki. Was I the only one? I saw Avengers, didn't like any of the hero side but adored the evil side and had a lot of support in doing so. If not only because Hiddleston is damn attractive. I don't think it was because the good side was that unlikeable, the watcher/observer guy was interesting and I enjoyed watching him tear down a ship by himself.

In Thor 2 I liked Frigga; Thor & Loki's mother a lot too, so I felt quite conflicted over sides. Seeing as my interest in the film could be summed up as "Tom Hiddleston is in it and I want to see if he did win post-Avengers", I felt quite happy watching it. There were enough female characters for quite a male-dominated genre, the secondary relationship of Darcy & Intern was pleasantly reversed from the traditional boy girl power relationship, so my feminist side was fine.

What was really missed in the review was how funny the film was. It didn't take itself seriously in the slightest, it was happy to have two or three jokes in each scene and they weren't bad. There was a portal-esque reference earlier on, there's a lot of wackiness and it felt like a solid move from comic book humour to film humour. Is it a masterpiece of film? Nope. But it didn't bill itself as anything higher, and I don't think it criticised as such.

I've only ever heard manky said, but that looks right to me! English has some lovely words. We use SO many american-isms though, couch and trash and basically adopted into our language now. (Sofa and rubbish are the proper words, of course)

I always get quite annoyed that Americans don't have kettles. WHAT IF YOU WANT TEA.

I assumed other people were unaware. I'm not sure how far the word has spread. One of my favourite English-y words is mardy, which is an adjective for grumpy or bad tempered.

Mostly when talking about biscuits. It's when something is very easy to keep eating, but isn't actually addictive.

*Display Picture. Close eightbitsamurai, but not quite.

I'm so British. If you'd looked longer you'd notice I talk about the NHS occasionally.

@msn.co.uk was the late adopter email. It started out @hotmail.com and then @hotmail.co.uk for MSN based email addresses afaik. AIM was a thing, but it wasn't that popular in my teenage years. I think MSN was being used around me from about 01 to maybe 09?

Snapchat is really integral just because of that impermanence. I think the world needs more outlets where you're not judged.

One of the main reasons Facebook 'won' was because it managed to beat MSN.

MySpace had a chat feature. Bebo had a chat feature. But MSN still reigned supreme as the way to talk to people online. MySpace and Bebo had bulky inboxes like an email client and MSN was quick and fun. MSN is still slightly better for the user than Facebook ever was; it did webcam chat without issue much earlier, you could appear offline to 'friends', you could add people you barely knew and satisfactorily block them forever.

So then Facebook comes onto the scene and has integrated chat. You've added all your friends, like on Myspace and Bebo, and suddenly you don't _need_ MSN up to talk to them. You still do for the few friends you have that don't have Facebook, but slowly it becomes easier to just open Facebook and open MSN when you want to talk to those friends. Eventually MSN just remains closed. And as it was suffering from the iTunes style of updating anyway, that wasn't the worst of things. Even if it was slightly better, the extra effort isn't worth it.

Facebook damn well knows this. They've got you talking on their website, now they've got you on their apps. They are an important part of life because they've also beaten texting in how we communicate.

So Snapchat comes along, and Facebook don't like it. There's another way to communicate, and this one is even more low effort than before. It's seamless, it's easy to do and to understand. They know that one of the reasons they're so dominant is that the price to communicate is being on Facebook.

So why is Snapchat so dominant, aside from ease of use and tumblr-esque simplicity in communication? You're right that it captures attention and demands you look at every pixel for those 3-10 seconds. You've probably also heard that it's used for porn, but it's a method of communication so that's a given.

Taking a DP on Facebook, for me, may take up to 2 hours. I'm not actually kidding. I'm not an expert photographer, and I'm damn well not that ugly or attractive to merit it, but I like taking pictures of myself for Facebook that make me look okay. I feel compared to everyone else I know and people I don't know. Snapchat, if you trust it, takes your photo and then removes it forever. Okay fine it's not foolproof, but the idea is that you send it to your friends and assume they probably aren't horrible people. People share things with someone because they can, and in this system they can't. You get a sense of impermanence that means you don't worry as much.

If I upload a random photo of my day on Facebook, maybe 1-3 of my friends will give a shit, so I wouldn't put it on FB, but I also can't be bothered uploading it to send to them in a message. So Facebook photos are now where you put the highlights of yourself to show off. Snapchat is where you can fuck around with friends.

Whole community's in mourning today.

Spent a few hours with my LGBT+ group talking to people on campus today about it. Main goal was raising awareness, I didn't really realise quite how little awareness there was. The few people who really listened thought of it as a terrible event, some thought the 'small' numbers meant that it wasn't that important, especially so close to Remembrance Sunday.

It's prompted me to go and do more awareness campaigns this year, so that next year hopefully there'll be less reason to reach out for support and more people in the community to turn to. Today of all days I'd rather just be close to my friends.

Outward experimentation isn't usually as obvious as you'd think. Reddit's /r/Asktransgender is usually quite useful for any Gender-based questions. It's mostly to do with just being the most happy you can with yourself. rmuser/Zinnia Jones, one of my absolute heroes in Gender Education, has a pretty good article about choosing a different gender presentation because it makes you happier rather than the other option making you sad.

Sorry if this is a bit too much information for what you offered. I'm _very_ pro-experimentation because I think a lot of people are too confined by their gender rather than accepting all facets of it.

Gender security is way overrated.

For me the golden age of computing has passed. Fedora 8 (Or Seven, I can't remember) had this beautiful background that changed to show the time of day. I used to be able to guess down the hour what time it was from that, and I haven't found a replacement.

mother c**********

I said fucked, so god knows what that word is.

Well, it's not formatted properly. It was really really fun though. Can I post it here?

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If I get a mic working properly on my Chromebook I'll go for a dual recording of both, but probably with water to hand.

Just throwing other feature things in here to avoid clutter.

mk There was a talk in one of the Reddit posts about TinCan that it could be used for Bitcoin transactions in person. Was this ever a thought you'd had when developing? I know little to nothing about bitcoin, but it doesn't sound impossible.

Most commonly found by students in the form:

a^2 + b^2 = c^2

sqrt(a^2 + b^2) = a + b

sqrt(c^2) = c

a + b = c

We differ, I think, in that you believe the essence of "you" is a super-physical (if not super-natural) decision making entity

I don't think I've suggested any noumenal/supernatural/dualist self here. What I've claimed is that our decisions come from our conscious awareness of ourselves and a moral attitude to improve how we act in the future. In that sense free will is equivalent to being morally responsible, you couldn't be acting freely and not be responsible for what actions you take. So in that sense I disagree that one is a pre-requisite.

It is consciousness that makes the construction of the complex, but wholly physical, algorithms of decision-making possible.

My view is completely in line with this.

My issue with the first essay was that you seemed to be looking for a 'deeper' free will, not finding one, and then throwing out the entire concept. I don't think you can avoid morality if you look at free will just because that the primary use of free will in language. Aside from Philosophy, free will is "Were they morally responsible for that action?" - look at legal battles of manslaughter and murder, intent and diminished responsibility.

I'll go have a look at the morality one, thanks for the reply! I always enjoy it when someone posts a big topic like this, I feel like I should write something when I get some spare time and let someone else lay into it for a change.

The issue faced here is that free will is being defined in a certain way that guarantees the conclusion of free will either being random or an illusion. To summarise; you’ve defined free will as having higher complexity in predicting what will happen; that a truly free agent applies decision-maker X in their brain randomly and comes out with a decision and then, as we cannot find this, concluded that decision-maker X couldn’t exist and so neither can free will.

When we define free will in terms of moral responsibility we can come to other conclusions.

My second assumption, closely related to the first, is that nature is fundamentally causal.

So I can assume we’re dealing with compatibilist free will; deterministic universe and free will. So I’m going to defend Dennett’s idea of free will against this to lend another side to this argument.

More significant than the missile’s brute obedience to physics is the fact that its behavior calls into question what it is that constitutes a “choice”. If there are at least two heat sources in front of it on which it might potentially home, then, in at least some sense, the missile’s behavior is the result of a “choice” between alternative imaginable paths.

Obviously the missile cannot do anything other than it does; it does not select a heat source based on anything other than whether the heat source matches a signature. Do I think the missile has free will? Absolutely not. Do I think it is any closer to free will than a ball rolling down a hill? Again, no, I believe it is identical on free will decisions. What is different in your choices of examples is the complexity and unpredictability of the action - you’re implying that free will is simply an awfully complex illusion we can perform.

What we call freedom is nothing more or less than the general belief that each of our predictions really could represent some future state of affairs.1 It is a byproduct of the impressively complex, evolutionarily advantageous, but ultimately deterministic, way our nervous systems respond to a varied but not wholly unpredictable environment.

I think that falls in line with what I’m claiming your argument set up. With the definitions you’ve given us you really couldn’t conclude any other way.

Consider Sphexishness:

Some Sphex wasps drop a paralyzed insect near the opening of the nest. Before taking provisions into the nest, the Sphex first inspects the nest, leaving the prey outside. During the inspection, an experimenter can move the prey a few inches away from the opening. When the Sphex emerges from the nest ready to drag in the prey, it finds the prey missing. The Sphex quickly locates the moved prey, but now its behavioral "program" has been reset. After dragging the prey back to the opening of the nest, once again the Sphex is compelled to inspect the nest, so the prey is again dropped and left outside during another stereotypical inspection of the nest. This iteration can be repeated again and again, with the Sphex never seeming to notice what is going on, never able to escape from its programmed sequence of behaviors. Dennett's argument quotes an account of Sphex behavior from Dean Wooldridge's Machinery of the Brain (1963). Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett have used this mechanistic behavior as an example of how seemingly thoughtful behavior can actually be quite mindless, the opposite of free will (or, as Hofstadter described it, sphexishness).

Pretty cool little example of impressively complex behaviour that looks like free will.

What about a bird?

the bird’s behavior differs from the ball’s in at least two ways, one from our point of view and one from its own. From our perspective, the bird is unpredictable; the ball is not. The bird appears to have free will, not because it is unconstrained by physics, but because we can imagine it taking any of any number of plausible paths.

I dislike relying on quantum argument because my understanding is limited. As an aside, by this definition all photons have free will as we can imagine it taking any of any number of plausible paths. So, according to your definition of free will given, I would deny that the bird has free will because it requires me to accept that many things which do not have free will do.

Concerning ourselves with non-quantum objections, you have to deal with why free will is important to us rather than whether it fits with your definitions of not being constrained and agents being the source of their actions. Not-constrained I’m taking as if I feel hungry and someone stops me from eating, my free will is threatened. Also that I have free will because of a source-based theory; I am the originator of my actions and that is why they are significant.

An agent being the source of their own actions is only significant because it implies a responsibility onto them. Free will is important to us because it is tied to moral responsibility. If I act of my own free will then I am responsible for what I have done and any definition that avoids this does not tell us anything useful. To paraphrase Strawson - we already know what free will means to us because of how we react morally to actions done freely by agents. That cannot be taken away by whether or not a philosopher denies it exists.

In place of an unknown (and perhaps even unknowable) physical solution to the problem of behavioral unpredictability, we are postulating an explanation which is little better than magic.

If you believe that choices are merely being unpredictable, as a bird's actions are to us, then free will choices must necessarily be magic. If you believe that free will is a form of assigning blame and praise for actions then you needn't.

Free Will is not saying that we have a RNG in our heads that computes actions; if so our actions are arbitrary and meaningless, we could decide anything and moral responsibility would be meaningless. If it’s an illusion then we aren’t morally responsible either.

When you avoid the moral implications of free will, something people deal with and are prepared to talk about on a regular basis, you are avoiding a key aspect of the argument. Asking people to define free will is difficult; no person on the street could do that. If you ask someone if they were responsible for something they can tell you immediately if that is so.

What matters when we talk about free will is that the action is a suitable indicator of our morality. When I say that they had free will what I’m saying is that “Well I think someone could have done other than what they did, so I think morally they’re praiseworthy/blameable for what happened”. If someone does something immoral, but was forced into it, then I don’t feel that was morally significant of them as a person. If I feel that they were able to choose anything and decided to do something morally reprehensible, then I feel it is significant. When someone trips and kicks a puppy I don’t think they’re acting immorally; they couldn’t have done anything different and it doesn’t communicate their morality.

Consider free will as our control over our own actions in respect to our morality. When I act or don’t act in a certain way I cannot do differently than I do, but when it goes well or badly I can adjust my morality so that in the future I act differently. I can place myself in situations where I could not act differently than I did and so act morally.

I used this intuitive argument that free will is morality when talking to mk about it, so see what you make of it.

If I agree to meet you at the bus stop and oversleep, you might feel that I've wronged you because I am responsible for me getting up on time and being there. If I told you that I wasn't there on time because I was mugged on the way to meet you, you (hopefully!) wouldn't think I'd wronged you because it was outside of my control. This encompasses the first definition, that it is my action independent of others. What about if I agree to meet you at the door of my house and I wake up on time, but because of my severe OCD I am late to meeting you. You may feel wronged that I took so long, but upon realisation that I have to check all the light switches are off before I can come to meet you, you may feel that this was outside of my realm of control. In this example I didn't have any other choice to checking all my light switches, it feels intuitively that if someone is to be held morally responsible they ought to have had an option to refrain from the action.

In the first case I lacked free will because of outside interference and so I was not held to be acting under free will. In the second I lacked free will because of neurological interference and so was not acting under free will.

The difference in whether I had free will was whether I would be found morally responsible for an action. Whether I was morally responsible is something almost anyone can form a decision on. Free will is not to be defined by philosophers, but explained. So, you might reasonably say that I am defending that free will is whether the agent could have done other than they did, or whether they could have attempted to do other than they did. That implies that decisions are made purely in the moment, that there is a second of which before that moment the agent could have gone either way and after that the agent could not stop their action. I think free actions are decided by our thoughts prior to that event. If we are to believe that MLK did really say “Here I stand. I can do no other” when he refused to recant his writings, I don’t think he was saying “I am not acting of free will” or that he was speaking nonsense when he said “I can do no other”, nor do I think he was saying “I am not responsible for this”. He was saying that his morality was that he could only do that and it would be impossible to do otherwise, fully accepting responsibility. So I think free will is making decisions based on our based actions and our thoughts now and using those decisions to decide what we do next. It is control over our life in a way that is congruent with how we use free will in society and does not confine us to any of the classical fears about not being ‘truly’ free.

Just having a look at Permutation City, it's a pretty close idea.

It uses the assumption that human consciousness is Turing computable: that consciousness can be produced by a computer program.

Look at Searle's Chinese RoomSEPWiki for few discussions about computers running human consciousnesses. The summary is that if you imagine a room with a man sitting inside and you want to know if he can speak Chinese. You can only communicate with him by writing down words on a piece of paper and him sending back replies. So you write down some Chinese and put it through. Very quickly you get a reply that sounds reasonable. Maybe you asked for their name and they replied with their name. You ask a few more questions and he replies reasonably every time. So you assume that he can understand Chinese. The man actually has a book with a list of replies. He reads the note, looks it up in the book and replies accordingly.

Okay, you say. What if you asked him the same question twice, because a machine would give the same reply to the same stimulus. Sure, the book can be expanded. Possibly in this version it's a computer program that reacts psuedo-randomly to stimuli, or even worse can remember what it's already replied.

There's a real problem to do with whether a computer can think, or if it's just reacting correctly to stimuli. What's scary is that one of the solutions to the problem is that humans can't think either; they're just responding to stimuli. So how would we ever know if we'd made a conscious computer system?

Anyway, the theory is known under a few names. Procedural Identity/ Diachronic Identity, where Diachronic is Dia (Through) + Chronos (Time).

I'd start by looking at Personal Identity as a wholeSEP, and then looking into Temporal PartsSEP. Temporal Parts is the idea that the parts of our body persist through time and make up us, but they aren't us.

You're performing an amazing trick right now: you're in two places at once. How do you manage to be down there, near the floor, and yet also be a metre or two up in the air? Well, it's not so very amazing: your feet are down there on the floor, and your head is up in the air. Having spatial parts enables you to be in several different places, and to have different properties in different places: you're cold down there on the tiled floor, and also warm up there by the heater, because your feet are cold and your head is warm. Moreover, having parts could let you be in the same place as someone else: if you shared a hand with a conjoined (‘Siamese’) twin, then you could both wear the same glove without jostling for space.

A survey of metaphysics / E. J. Lowe. is an amazing primer on metaphysics and what it is to have temporal parts and exist as a process rather than a substance. The key part of temporal parts is expressed here if you've got JSTOR access. It's called the paradox of 1,001 cats and it discusses how we are made up of lots of different parts but obviously none of them are sufficient for our identity. Metaphysics : a contemporary introduction / Michael Loux. I also found to be quite helpful in getting into it without being too confused.

There's also just diving straight into Identity SEP if you're feeling brave.

Also if you have access to this one, it's Philosophers of Process, who are some of the people who argue who Process Philosophy which leads into Procedural Identity. Also available here although I've only read some of it, so I can't vouch for it.

What got me into the whole topic was Heraclitus' claim that you couldn't step into the same river twice, it's referenced at the beginning of that article. The whole idea is that if you step into a river at one time, wait five minutes and step in again, you've touching entirely new particles. So how could that ever be the same river? If you're arguing for substance philosophy it really doesn't make sense, because the way we teach people to understand concepts like this is by pointing at the river and saying "River." then a few seconds later pointing to another bit and saying "River." until we understanding that despite the fact all the bits of it are different, they're all just a river.

With process philosophy you say "Well that's one process, it's a process of moving water". In the same way electricity is the continued process of electrons and you kinda get out of that problem quite easily.

Oh and the Ship of Theseus in general discusses the problem with discussing substance compared to process but that's relatively simple if you read anything on temporal parts.

The way most people seem to be thinking of it is the other way around. It was $13 in January and it is $215 now, can I afford not to get in on this?

I'm not sure what the next crash will be, but I'm also not sure I'd want to get in on it.

The issue with level of impairment is interesting; I don't think anyone would defend habitual drinkers should be able to drink more before being prosecuted for driving under the influence. I don't see how it should be any different for THC unless it's significantly more subjective.

I think you asked the right question.

Free will historically has been defined as either a sort of free action, that we can act upon our desires without someone else stopping us, or a free choice between two actions. If you are ever in question of whether something is down to free will or not then consider the act of a person morally. Do you think they're responsible for their action, if not, why not?

If I agree to meet you at the bus stop and oversleep, you might feel that I've wronged you because I am responsible for me getting up on time and being there. If I told you that I wasn't there on time because I was mugged on the way to meet you, you (hopefully!) wouldn't think I'd wronged you because it was outside of my control. This encompasses the first definition, that it is my action independent of others.

What about if I agree to meet you at the door of my house and I wake up on time, but because of my severe OCD I am late to meeting you. You may feel wronged that I took so long, but upon realisation that I have to check all the light switches are off before I can come to meet you, you may feel that this was outside of my realm of control. In this example I didn't have any other choice to checking all my light switches, it feels intuitively that if someone is to be held morally responsible they ought to have had an option to refrain from the action.

So you might hold that free will is the ability to do as we want and the ability to have a choice in what we do. That's a standard compatibilist view. Compatibilists believed that we might be in a deterministic universe; one where the facts of the past and the laws of physics entail what will happen in the future. It's easier to imagine it like a billiards' table where if one ball is hit with that knowledge and the knowledge of physics you can predict where everything will go. The compatibilists said that if we were in a deterministic universe, although current scientific findings predict that we aren't, we might still have free will in the sense already given.

Okay, I should back up to why Science says we aren't. Billiards and conventional rules work absolutely fine for Newtonian physics, but the second you even edge in quantum physics all our rules hit the wall. I'm a hundred percent sure I could be rightfully called out on this one, but quantum effectively shows us that there are some things we can't predict through laws of physics, we just have to measure them and see what they are. We don't know how nuclear particles decay, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle kinda screws us over in humans ever knowing what these minute details of the universe are; the closer we measure the velocity of an atom the less we can know about the location of it and vice-versa. If there were a Laplacian demon in existence that could know all these things, it couldn't exist in our universe as any physical entity for fear of adjusting something about the universe and having a recurring issue of predicting. Heisenberg's UP doesn't show it can't be deterministic, but it does show that we could never be the determiners and it does show it's really unlikely that the universe is deterministic.

The compatibilist stance is just one of the many stances on the issue. If you're really interested in a light book on the topic, Dennett writes quite well on modern Compatibilism (I personally really enjoyed Elbow Room) and argues our free will is controlling our future so that we may not do otherwise than what we would want to do. So a drug addict may lock himself away so that he cannot fall into temptation, or Martin Luther King may claim that he can do no other than he does and both could claim to have greater free will for it.

There are a buttload of issues for any form of compatibilism, but this debate was pretty dry and I didn't really get here on time. Hopefully this summary is slightly helpful. If anyone's particularly interested I could probably write a load on what it means to be able to have the ability to do otherwise and suggest topic reading, but it's just because this is what I'm writing an essay on this week.

Well that was fun!

I had three contentions, where one was serious and the others I believed were defensible.

You agreed that: There are no objective truths about matters of fact; 'truth' is always relative to particular cultures and individuals And also that: The holocaust is an historical reality, taking place more or less as the history books report

I read this and immediately realised that this was a serious issue. I don't know if historical reality and truth are the same thing. I think I feel conflicted because I don't want to ever say "The Holocaust wasn't true" because of the sentiment expressed rather than because I believe historical events are objective truths, I wouldn't feel as concerned with "The birth of Jesus of Nazareth is a historical reality" or "The building of the Golden Gate bridge happened more or less how the history books report".

You agreed that: Severe brain-damage can rob a person of all consciousness and selfhood And also that: On bodily death, a person continues to exist in a non-physical form

You agreed that: So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends But disagreed that: The possession of drugs for personal use should be decriminalised

For it to be zero-sum it requires a shift in responsibility from someone onto someone else. The cases are independent of one another and do not happen simultaneously or co-happen. They are the two very different results of what people studied think.

Case A: The woman drinks more. She is held to be more responsible for being raped than a sober woman would. The man is unaffected in terms of responsibility.

Case B: The man drinks more. He is held to be less responsible for the act than a sober man would. The woman is unaffected in terms of responsibility.

Should it be a zero-sum game, there needs to be a link from the man's total responsibility to the woman's total responsibility. There is not.

Case Z: The woman is drunk. The woman is held to be more responsible, ergo the man is less responsible.

Case Z would be a zero-sum example. The others are not.

Responsibility is pretty damn separate to criminal culpability if only in matters of discreteness - responsibility can be in terms of degree but you are not partially culpable in the eyes of the law, you are guilty or not guilty. We are not merely dancing around synonyms if there is a clear difference in properties like that.

My 'final conjecture' is a complaint of how ridiculous the number game works out to.

Honestly my paragraph at the end was merely designed to sum up the link above rather than act as a conclusion, I don't _think_ it added anything that would call it an argument. What I was hoping you'd go into was to do with the first three quote portions by themselves where I haven't put any analysis. Which is slightly too much to infer from what I said, so I apologise and I'll put up some extra here.

To issue in short is that responsibility isn't the only thing up for grabs; there's a lot of other factors considered by the other quotes that are pretty straight forward and mostly that's culpability. Responsibility takes place after it's been established there was a crime taking place and to say the victim was partially responsible is to lessen the defendant's sentence.

I figured that I could give up the responsibility without losing any force against b_b's claim that there isn't anyone who thinks drunkenness is an excuse in some degree for rape. I'm too happy to give up points like that when I think it can still be won because zero-sum games etc are usually long arguments over semantics that I don't care for. You've brought it up though and given some thought to it so I will tackle that by itself because otherwise it's a bit rude to go "I didn't explain myself very well and so let's dismiss your argument in favour of what I hoped you inferred."

Mostly the other cases discuss whether a crime took place. In the first case the female witness is described as drunk and is less credible as a witness.

This case is not discussing responsibility - it does not suggest because she has been drinking she was increasingly her likelihood of being raped - it is describing how it is less believable she was raped because she was drinking. This is claiming that the act didn't actually take place rather than a lessening of responsibility, currently UK law has no events that lessen punishment for rape, only a rather long list of things that can increase it. To claim that a rape did not take place because of the witness being drunk is to excuse it happening entirely.

The second one only notes that this is not merely individuals who find this result but mock juries. This raises practical concerns about rape trials rather than just societal concerns about how we view rape and drinking. That's a stretch for someone to read into what I said, so it's best off to read this as being introduced now.

The third is Finch/Munro. No one worth listening to is going to claim the girl was more responsible for the rape if she did not struggle, their claim will be that the act was consensual because someone who is not consenting ought to struggle. I think the issue with that is pretty blinding but again it is excusing that a crime took place because of the actions of the victim under the influence of alcohol.

So to discuss zero sum games.

Partially innocent is an interesting term. I was under the impression what usually happened under cases of limited responsibility was that they were still pronounced guilty and then their sentencing was adjusted to consider their diminished responsibility for the action. Murder and manslaughter is the common example where if you are not of sound mind, acted with loss of control or even in a suicide pact you are deemed to have diminished responsibility but are still guilty. Innocent and guilty are pretty binary.

So in your case if the victim made bad choices she lessens the responsibility of the man acting upon her. I don't think anything I've said has linked the two - I think it's more in tune with your second category at any rate.

So if a woman has been drinking she's held to be more responsible for the rape than if she were sober and if a man has been drinking he is less responsible for the rape than if he were sober

Case A: A woman drinking, she is more responsible for the rape. Case B: A man drinking, he is less responsible for the rape.

Where's the link? I think you might have imputed slightly more on to me than was actually there.

Responsibility as zero sum is kinda interesting though. So if I used the example of two people pushing a car off a cliff - in case A only person A pushes the car and in case B both person A and person B push the car.

In case A person A is 100% responsible and person B 0% responsible, but in case B you could see it as they are both 50% responsible for the act or they are both 100% responsible for the act as either of them acting would have been sufficient for the event?

lil posted a really great video about this a while ago http://hubski.com/pub?id=56999 - it talks about anhedonia - literally the inability to feel pleasure, as a type of depression.

So if I accept, because drawing it out into another argument is unnecessary, that responsibility isn't a zero-sum game, would you like to address any of the other three points about criminal culpability being lessened when the victim was drunk?

Is diminished responsibility close enough to excuse?

Academic studies have shown that if the female complainant is portrayed as drunk, she is perceived as less credible and the defendant is seen as less likely to be criminally culpable compared with a sober victim (Stormo et al., 1997; Wenger and Bornstein, 2006)

Stormo KJ, Lang AR, Stritze WGK. (1997) Attributions about acquaintance rape—the role of alcohol and individual differences. J Appl Soc Psychol 27:279–305.

Wenger AA, Bornstein BH. (2006) The effects of victim substance use and relationship closeness on mock jurors judgments in an acquaintance rape case. Sex Roles 54:547–55.

In mock jury trials [...] some tended to believe that so long as a person was conscious they were capable of expressing resistance to unwanted sexual contact and that a non-consenting person would struggle even when intoxicated (see Finch and Munro 2005).

http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/documents/publications/Joe_St...

However, inebriated females were assigned more responsibility when they consumed alcohol than sober females. In addition, sober males were assigned more responsibility for the rape than inebriated males.

So if a woman has been drinking she's held to be more responsible for the rape than if she were sober and if a man has been drinking he is less responsible for the rape than if he were sober. Furthermore it has a recorded effect on mock juries. Is drunkenness an excuse for rape? It does change the burden of responsibility greatly and affects culpability.