Political plot or Foolish Journalism

Apparently a recent survey showed that
As Usual, Public Wants Lower Deficit Without Cutting Spending or Raising Taxes.

As usual its interesting to look at the details. TThis is what they said

"Fifty-six percent of respondents said that they were not willing to pay more in taxes in order to reduce the deficit, and nearly as many said they were not willing for the government to provide fewer services in areas such as health care, education and defense spending."

Now lets use a couple of brain cells and ask ouselves what the likely positions of a thinking person will be.

1) the steriotypical left leaning poor person will say "I dont want to pay more taxes, however the rich should pay more taxes and we should increase services and we should decrease the deficit."
2) the steriotypical right leaning rich individual will say "I dont want to pay more taxes, we should cut services and maybe we should decrease the deficit"
3) a debt tolerant person (particularly in these recession times) "dont increase taxes, dont decrease services dont decrease the deficit

so my simplified survey gets
66% dont raise taxes (on me) to reduce the deficit, and
66% dont reduce services to reduce the deficit
and 66% decrease the deficit

So what does that say? well the individuals may all be quite rational - it is jsut that when there are many options it isnt surprising htat less than 50% will support even the most popular one.

So why the title? well surely the media knows this - and they know how the steriotypical individuals feel so why do they want to eroniously perpetuiate the idea that the public doesn't know what it wants?

Labours recession busting strategy

Labours newest policy is to offer the unemployment benefit to spouses of people with incomes so high that they would not normally qualify. The Labour party notes how this will efectively act as unemployment insurance and give a little help with paying morgages and such - National and hte media note how this would result in the government paying benefits to very rich couples.

But it seems there is an easy solution here.

What if we adjusted the way the benefit works to force those on the benefit to jump through a few extra hoops. What we are trying to do here is take advantage of the fact that those who dont really need the benefit wont be willing to do much wpork in order to get it. Obvipously if you are the wife of a man on 3 million dollars (as per the example on the TV) you are unlikely to be willing to go downto the local Work and Income every week because it would "cost" more in your time than you get back.

At present I understand there are some requirements to be actively searching for a job as assesed by your caseworker - but they are pretty simple. But what if we added a set of other requirements?

Possibly a requirement to do some sort of charity work if your case worker nominates you.
- in this case you can eliminate the complete non hopers who need lots of supervision or are dangerous by the fact that the caseworker would never nominate them - while including most of the spouses of rich people who might be very useful.

Or Possibly a requiremejnt to take suitable jobs (I believe there is some sort of requirement along these lines but it could be made stricter)

Or just having to report in on how the job search is going constantly, or having to get some sort of budgeting advice or to keep a record regarding how the benefit is being spent

Or even recieving some of that benefit as some sort of food stamp or rental credit

Mostly these are very simple things for a person on a benefit (I was on a benefit a couple of times and there was pleanty of time to do this sort of thing) But probably somthing that would be pretty annoying for a millionare. If the millionare is so determined and stingy to go through all the hoops to get the money then we can either live with it or get far more than value of money back via things like the charity work.

against the knowledge argument

the knowledge argument is this (taken from Parableman)

Consider a color scientist named Mary who has never seen red. She lived in a black and white environment with special contact lenses all her life, so she'd never seen most colors. Then she went on to learn the neuroscience of color perception. She now knows everything there is to know from science about color perception. She knows what color words apply to which wavelengths of light. She knows what goes on in the brain when people see various colors. But she's never seen red. Then she takes off the contact lenses, and someone gives her a tomato. She now sees red for the first time. Does she learn something? Jackson says she does - what it's like to perceive the color red.

1. Mary knows every physical fact about color perception.
2. There's a fact about color perception that Mary learns when she sees red - namely, what it is like to experience seeing that color.
3. Therefore, there are more than just physical facts (so materialism is false).

I suggest the main intuition tweeked by the mary argument is that mary does not have the brain power to know everything there is to know about experiencing red and to process it at a speed that would give the same feeling as seeing red and that even if she did this activity would occur in a logical part of her brain rather than a visual one so to mary as a whole it would seem different.

Because everyone has these limitations it is hard to imagine mary not having these limitations. But the existance of such limits dont threaten physicalism.

Or more simply we seem very far from being able to imagine "all the physical facts about colour perception". Because we are so far from doing this it seems unclear why we should expect our intuition (sense of implausibility) to be accurate regarding what isn't part of that set.

Zombieophile counter arguments

1) In an ideal world dualists and physicalists can agree on what is physical and non physical.
And some physicalists do implicitly believe in dualism so it might convince someone.

2) Even if conception is just in a negitive sense this is somthing.

3) We can reject the causal theory of reference.
Maybe intuition and conception have some sort of cross world presence.

4) You don't need to fully concieve of something all you need to do is fail to find contradictions to get (weak) evidence somthing is true.

5) If the trees are fundiemntially identical then there is no issue.

6) science doesn't apply for two reasons, first because this is an a priori question and second because we have reason to believe first person experience is not reducable to third person experience. the only reason why science applies else where is bcause other things are not seperated in this way.
So yes qualia may be weird things indeed but we expect that.

7) any other argument would outweigh such considerations.

Zombie arguments (refined)

1) dualists and physicalists cant agree on the definitions. Simply - If a physicalist accept a definition of Qualia such that Qualia is non physical he is either debating nonsense (which doesn't threaten physicalism) or he has already surrendered the debate. Therefore The zombie argument never gets off the ground with a real physicalist.
The Zombie argument is simply question begging.

2) The zombie argument uses negitive concievibility but it requires positive concievibility.
For example - You can concieve of a HOLLOW ball in a negitive sense without thinking about the inside of the ball but your conception is not meaningfully different from one of a solid ball. Similarly you can imagine a zombie in the negitive sense but to imagine it in the positive sense would requireconcieving of a first person experience that is hollow but we have no logical acess to others expericence, and regardless it is a straightforward contradiction.
This is the complex form of the simple argument "but what is it like to be a zombie"?

3) Kriple approach - reference and knowledge require us to be causally affected by what is known or referred to (Kripke 1972) if zombies are conceivable, so are epiphenomenalistic worlds. But by the causal theory of reference, epiphenomenalistic worlds are not conceivable; therefore zombies are not conceivable.

Or in more detail - in epiphenominalism there is a wall between qualia and the physical world.
Intuition and the logical part of concieving are things that occur on the physical side and are a result of evolution and experience's refining. If we are to say there is no reason to believe qualia obey any laws (what we use to deflect the science arguments against qualia) then there is no reason to believe intuition and concieving will be any better than random noise in investigating qualia.

In the same way intuition is best for investigating familiar scenarios - of limited use in very unusual scenarios it is completely useless in scenarios where it has no logical acess to the data .

4) Even if it did get off the ground when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably underestimate the task of conception (or imagination), and end up imagining something that violates their own definition (Daniel Dennett).

5) Zombie Philosophers
- Imagine zombie chalmers (pro zombie) and zombie Dennet (anti zombie) arguing about the existence of zombies. what does zombie chalmers mean when he talks about a zombie?
- Well Dualists argue, since our zombie twins, in contrast, have no experiences, their quasi-phenomenal judgments are unjustified and even if qualia have no causal influence on our judgments, their mere presence in the appropriate physical context ensures that our thoughts are about those qualia.

This appears to be like saying that if there is a duplicate of you on mars talking about a tree, and you are talking about a tree, you are talking about the tree on mars.

6) science provides a number of tough questions for zombeophiles if they permit the discussion to begin.
- Most objects in the universe obey laws - why not qualia?
- If qualia dont obey laws why are qualia at all consistent with reality in the ways that they are.
- Are more valid questions raised and unanswered by this? What is the nature of qualia? If we state that it doesn’t obey natural laws what laws do they obey? Ideally can these be documented? What would such a documentation look like?
- why are qualia seem to be so poorly developed as a model.
there are lots of thought experiments seldom done to elaborate on the model - what would happen if you took a trip to zombie world - what if you came back again? what would it be like? what if you steeped halfway into zombie world? what does the answers to that say about the relationship between qualia and matter?
- if you dump causality as important for connecting qualia with eachother you raise issues regarding all sorts of things including your definition of yourself – if someone recreates some pattern that happens to trigger similar qualia somewhere else is that all of a sudden ‘you’?

7) Defensiveness - Most of the argument for ep zombies is extremely defensive, Ie it relies on the burden of proof of concepts like inconcievability lying with the physicalist. If the physicalist was to take that burden he deserves a quid pro quo in terms of credibility.

Regarding the filibuster

Labour has been utilizing the filibuster against national to block our super city bill -. hte idea of the supercity itself is pretty widely popular although Labour could say they have a popularist position in that they want various unspecified amendments - a nice way to catch everyone who is dissaffected.

Noright turn says
"Tuning in for half an hour tonight, I heard the government vote against requiring the Minister to appoint a woman to the Auckland transitional Authority to represent the region's 700,000 women - and then vote against requiring the ATA's members to actually be from Auckland. Both of these are reasonable, sane amendments - but they weren't National's amendments, and were therefore mindlessly opposed (besides, they'd clash with their plans to appoint 5 dead white male businessmen to run Auckland). "

First - obviously national is going to vote down every bill in the filibuster - they barely have time to vote against them let alone to read them. If Labour wanted National to consider them properly it should have not also submitted the thousand odd committee name changes with them.
Second the old (dead) white man line. First, to any other race that would be surely considered racism but the ironic thing is that this line is so 'on message" for labour that I actually heard this recently in regard to Melissa Lee. Now in case anyone doesn't get the irony there - she is a relitively young (by politician standards) asian female.

Dolan at just left gave us a nice history of the filibuster mentioning it's sue by cato and also by the New democratic party in Canada. He implied Labour hopes to follow in their footsteps. A couple of facts he missed out however

In April 1995 the Ontario new democratic party got 20.6% of the vote
in 1999 after the filibuster they got 12.6%
Cato on the other hand committed suicide (by tearing out his own bowels) after failing to stop Caesar.

Zombie wars

the zombie wars are well and truely reignighted the following seem to be the main points

1) P and NP should be expanded out so that htey are 'de re" as opposed ot 'de dicto' RB qwould like this to be done to the base facts and RC would prefer it jsut to stop at an arbitrary common moddle ground

Problem is I dont think (and I presume RB would agree) there is any possible meaningful middle ground. Under Reductionism if the "ultimate truthmakers" say Q is impossible so to does any other list of complete facts. that is why knowing that the UT disprove P~Q would be useful.
RC on the other hand would take that as long as there was some tension there between the apparent description at the mid level and the UT description he might get a little intuitive leverage and thus give his argument some sort of 'dialectic effectiveness'.

2) The Zombie argument seems to be stronger when phrased as a reducitonist argument

This might be an illusion of the fact that Richard is a hard core non-reducitonist, but he seems to reject the standard zombie argument which is a interesting development in itself.

To take the metaphore of a war a bit further the argument seems to feature RC retreating from all the usual psoitions and drawing RB to follow him down a narrow path. If the strategy works I suppose you catch the enemy over extended fighthing a battle they didnt expect to fight at the beginning. Dont know if that would happen or not.