[spam] Re: Perception and Reality (was Re: recent Chinese military history)

CSGnet Archive CSG2006
1

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.21.1515 mdt)]

Rick Marken (2006.08.21.1600)]

I agree that "rights" (to the extent that they are perceptions and not references -- see below) are not objective, in the sense that there is nothing in our models of external reality that corresponds to what we perceive as "rights". But isn't that true of all perceptions?

I'm realizing that "rights," like "oughts", doesn't really refer to the things we have rights about, or ought to do. It's asserting something else about whatever it is. Saying "the right to bear arms" is different from saying "a habit of bearing arms" or "an instance of bearing arms." The perception in question is bearing arms, and the reference signal is a particular state of that perception. But talking about a "right" to do whatever it is implies some sort of objection from someone else or in law, that implies that you should not do it, not control for that particular perception. The subject of rights is at a higher level than the subject of whatever it is we're saying we have a right to. We can talk about rights without mentioning which right it is.

To say there is a right to do something is an attempt to say that nobody has any viable grounds for objecting to your doing it. I think there's an implication that a right is so strongly justified that it is no longer even arguable -- nobody can forbid what you have a right to do, possess, see, think, and so on.

One way to assure that a right exists is to pass a law saying that it exists, and use the full force of the government to enforce the law. This will prevent most people from trying to violate a person's right to something, and will provide redress if violations happen.

Another way is to acquire arms or other means of applying overwhelming physical force, and say that anyone who violates your right will be blown away ("over my dead body ...").

The problem with these methods of enforcing rights is that many people want rights to exist, somehow, without the need for crude violence. They want a justification with which no sane person can argue. This is why they try to develop logical justifications of rights, or show that somehow rights are inherent in our genes. Some say the rights are God-given, but of course that's just another way of appealing to laws backed by overwhelming physical force.

So my conclusion is that a right exists only by agreement, and only if there is some means of enforcing it. The only actual rights are those we can persuade others to grant us, enough others so that the rights would be very hard to take away from us. It helps, of course, if they have reason to want the same rights.

Best,

Bill P.

2

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.22.1230 MDT)]

Fred Nickols (2006.08.22.1026) –

I’ve always been of the view
that no one has any rights except those they

will fight to claim and defend.

Always? I think that any view that hasn’t changed since childhood
probably needs to be re-examined. I think we should have current reasons
to support our views.

That willingness to fight in
order to claim and defend one’s rights is, I think, what leads to
agreement. Lose that willingness to fight to defend and hard-won
“rights” (usually won by forebears) are eroded, hi-jacked and
otherwise taken away. The “right to privacy” is just one
example where that’s been occurring for quite some
time.

To put that a little differently, you seem to be saying that the only way
to get agreement with someone is to fight. That would be true if no one
has any rights except those that conflict with what somebody else wants.
But if there were no conflict, what need would there be to fight to
obtain a right?
Look at the rights in board games. In chess, when you advance a pawn two
squares so it passes another pawn, you have the right to take the other
pawn en passant. You don’t have to do that, but if you do it, the
rules of the game permit no objection. Did you have to fight to claim and
defend your right to do this? No, all you had to do was accept the rules
as anyone else who wants to call the game he is playing “chess”
has to accept them.

I think fighting is probably the least reliable way to acquire rights.
The losers will most likely look for other ways to deprive you of the
rights, because while you may have defeated their attempt to take the
rights away, you have not necesarily eliminated their desire or their
perceived need to do so. “Eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty” sounds to me like a recipe for eternal distraction from
other things that are far more interesting and worthwhile to do. Wouldn’t
it be more clever to arrange things so you don’t have to lose sleep over
your rights, or risk losing your life and killing innocent people to
protect them?

I wonder how the reference
signal for "it’s time to fight to defend our

rights" gets established?

When you figure that out, let me know. I think one reason is simply not
thinking things all the way through, or perhaps (not in your case
however) simply not being bright enough to think of any way other than
direct use of force.

Actually, it would be pretty hard for anyone to take away from me what I
consider to be my rights. First, I would surrender immediately and
pretend to go along. Then I would quietly start working to undermine
those who thought they had won (just as I am trying to undermine your
view right now). At no time would I ever feel that I had given up my
rights, and with a little luck and cleverness, I might even end up
altering the aims of those who didn’t want me to have them. And I’d still
be alive.

Best,

Bill P.

Best,

Bill P.

3

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.22.1230 MDT)]

Fred Nickols (2006.08.22.1026) –

I’ve always been of the view
that no one has any rights except those they

will fight to claim and defend.

Always? I think that any view that hasn’t changed since childhood
probably needs to be re-examined. I think we should have current reasons
to support our views.

That willingness to fight in
order to claim and defend one’s rights is, I think, what leads to
agreement. Lose that willingness to fight to defend and hard-won
“rights” (usually won by forebears) are eroded, hi-jacked and
otherwise taken away. The “right to privacy” is just one
example where that’s been occurring for quite some
time.

To put that a little differently, you seem to be saying that the only way
to get agreement with someone is to fight. That would be true if no one
has any rights except those that conflict with what somebody else wants.
But if there were no conflict, what need would there be to fight to
obtain a right?
Look at the rights in board games. In chess, when you advance a pawn two
squares so it passes another pawn, you have the right to take the other
pawn en passant. You don’t have to do that, but if you do it, the
rules of the game permit no objection. Did you have to fight to claim and
defend your right to do this? No, all you had to do was accept the rules
as anyone else who wants to call the game he is playing “chess”
has to accept them.

I think fighting is probably the least reliable way to acquire rights.
The losers will most likely look for other ways to deprive you of the
rights, because while you may have defeated their attempt to take the
rights away, you have not necesarily eliminated their desire or their
perceived need to do so. “Eternal vigilance is the price of
liberty” sounds to me like a recipe for eternal distraction from
other things that are far more interesting and worthwhile to do. Wouldn’t
it be more clever to arrange things so you don’t have to lose sleep over
your rights, or risk losing your life and killing innocent people to
protect them?

I wonder how the reference
signal for "it’s time to fight to defend our

rights" gets established?

When you figure that out, let me know. I think one reason is simply not
thinking things all the way through, or perhaps (not in your case
however) simply not being bright enough to think of any way other than
direct use of force.

Actually, it would be pretty hard for anyone to take away from me what I
consider to be my rights. First, I would surrender immediately and
pretend to go along. Then I would quietly start working to undermine
those who thought they had won (just as I am trying to undermine your
view right now). At no time would I ever feel that I had given up my
rights, and with a little luck and cleverness, I might even end up
altering the aims of those who didn’t want me to have them. And I’d still
be alive.

Best,

Bill P.

Best,

Bill P.

4

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.22.1420 MDT)]

Fred Nickols (2006.08.22.1525) –

I think fighting is
probably the least reliable way to acquire

rights.

I disagree. I think it’s the oldest way and in the case of the
United States and some other countries, I think it’s proven the most
lasting.

It’s the fighting that has proven the most lasting. We’re still doing it
after thousands of years of trying to solve problems that way. Somehow
the same problems keep coming back. Wonder what’s causing that.

The losers will most likely
look for other ways to deprive

you of the rights, because while you may have defeated their attempt

to take the rights away, you have not necesarily eliminated their

desire or their perceived need to do so.

Yes, after we “whupped” the British the first time, they came
back in 1812 and we had to “whup” 'em again.

Sounds like good fun, the way you put it, sort of like touch football. Of
course, the British thought they were fighting for their rights in
America, and it didn’t do them much good. In every fight with a winner,
it works for one side but not for the other. We happen to have won most
of our fights, a lot of them because we had the overwhelming advantage.
But we haven’t won them all, and won’t. It’s a very dangerous way to
live, living by the sword. Seems to me someone else said that
once.

"Eternal vigilance is
the

price of liberty" sounds to me like a recipe for eternal
distraction

from other things that are far more interesting and worthwhile to
do.

Wouldn’t it be more clever to arrange things so you don’t have to

lose sleep over your rights, or risk losing your life and killing

innocent people to protect them?

Yes, indeed; do you have a way of doing that?

Are you looking for a way? Or just saying that there’s no point in
looking for a way because there isn’t any? If you think there might be a
way, then I hope you do spend some time trying to think of one. If more
people were doing that I’m sure we could do it. Just the willingness to
look for a way would be a very big step – at least then we’d pause for a
millisecond before blindly retaliating on the nearest target after being
attacked. In that millisecond, we might even think that perhaps we’d
better wait until we find the actual culprit before giving in to the urge
to violent action. And if that postponed the violence until the
adrenaline died away, we might even ask what could be done to remove the
motive for such attacks – a truly long-range solution.

When people are attacked by a wild animal, they are reluctant to kill it,
preferring to relocate it. Even the victims of attacks can feel that way,
if they realize that the attack wasn’t personal. Here in Colorado, a few
years back during the really bad drought. a woman on a trail was attacked
by a starving mountain lion. It was weak with hunger and she managed to
fight it off and finally kill it, with a rock, I think. When rescuers
found her, she was weeping in sorrow, in spite of her serious wounds,
over what she had to do.

An animal that attacks a human being is only acting according to its
nature and the immediate circumstances that we humans have had a lot to
do with creating. We can value its autonomy while removing its reasons
for endangering us, and since we do not stoop to revenge, there is
nothing else we require. Of course we defend ourselves, but we do not do
more than we need to do, not when we are thinking clearly and realize
what is going on. I think we can learn from that about how to deal with
each other.

I wonder how the
reference signal for "it’s time to fight to defend our

rights" gets established?

When you figure that out, let me know. I think one reason is simply

not thinking things all the way through, or perhaps (not in your
case

however) simply not being bright enough to think of any way other

than direct use of force.

I had more in mind the situation when others are aiming force at
me.

That’s what I was talking about. Here’s a story I’ve never told because
it always seemed a little phoney. In high-school, around 1943 and 1944, I
worked after school at an Alcoa aluminum plant on the heat-treating
furnaces. We’d grab sheets of aluminum off of pallets, still warm from
the rolling mill, and lift them on edge into clamps which someone else
would hammer shut. When a lot of sheets were hanging up they were hoisted
into the furnace, and we’d go get the next batch. When the sheets came
down we unclamped them and sent them through a set of straightening
rollers to another conveyer line.

At one point I was working with an all-black (but me) crew. Pretty tough
guys, a little older, but they seemed all right to me. One day at lunch
the conversation got around to the South Side (the black side of
Chicago), and I sort of bragged that I had never worried about walking
around there, I liked to listen to the jazz. I got some strange looks,
and one of the guys said, “You weren’t afraid? You think you’re
invincible or something?” I said no, to both. Suddenly he had one
arm around my neck and in the other hand he was holding a straight razor,
open, against my neck. He said, “You afraid now?” I said,
“Sure I’m afraid. But you don’t have any reason to hurt me, do
you?” Somehow that did it. Everyone, six or eight guys watching all
this, laughed in an unbelieving way, and I heard someone say “Got no
reason!” The one with the razor put it away and said something about
OK, that’s good. That’s the part that makes me feel a bit phoney, sort of
like a Disney movie, but that’s how it happened. Nothing like that ever
happened again, and the same guy who held the razor to my neck, some time
later when another worker got his hand caught in the straightening
rollers and had all the fingers squeezed off, grabbed my head and turned
it away, and said “You don’t want to see that.” He was taking
care of me.

There have been other incidents somewhat like that. I think, all in all,
it’s possible to find other ways to deal with violence without making it
worse, and also without giving up your principles.

I used to pick fights in grade school because I was sure the school bully
was after me and I wanted to get my licks in first. That came to an end
when I picked a fight with Wally Weiss because somehow I had gotten him
mixed up with Frankie Wence, the real bully, and only found out
afterward. Sort of like Bush and Cheney mistaking Saddaam for Osama.
Nothing like feeling like a real fool to start some useful
reorganization. At least I was capable of feeling like a fool and
learning from it.

P.S. 20 years in the Navy
was probably too much for me to come out of it a truly civilized
person.

I was in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, ten percent as long as you but I
know what you mean. Things are pretty simple when you’re in the armed
forces. There are bad guys (them) and good guys (us) and there’s never
any question of what you do about that. That’s pretty universal, I think
– at the officers-and-men level, the other side is run by people just
like us. Perhaps we spent a little too much time talking about how
justified we were – there were occasionally some doubts, quickly put
aside. “They” deserved everything we did to them, for sure. I
was pretty much a superpatriot like everyone else.

What woke me up was the atomic bomb. I was on Treasure Island in San
Francisco bay, waiting for a troop ship, when the Hiroshima bomb was
dropped. My job was going to be to paddle an inflatable boat to the coast
of Japan and plant a radio beacon on the invasion beach – that’s what my
11 months of radio tech training was going to get me. I knew I was
expendable, but I didn’t think about that. But when the bomb was dropped
my first thought was that I get to live after all. All it cost to buy my
life was 100,000 lives of other people.

It’s funny how having my life saved that way made me put less value on
it. What made it worse was that my intellectual love was physics, and I
wanted to go to college and become a physicist. So it was as if I was
identified somehow with that bomb and all the people it killed so
indiscriminately. I did go to college and I did major in physics, but I
ended up not going to an advanced degree and I ended up in medical
physics, then astronomy, then electronics for a newspaper, and all the
while, PCT as a background thought. I think I was always looking for a
better way. It’s not easy to find, but I was looking.

I think we should all be looking.

Best,

Bill P.

5

[From Bill Powers (2006.08.22.1420 MDT)]

Fred Nickols (2006.08.22.1525) –

I think fighting is
probably the least reliable way to acquire

rights.

I disagree. I think it’s the oldest way and in the case of the
United States and some other countries, I think it’s proven the most
lasting.

It’s the fighting that has proven the most lasting. We’re still doing it
after thousands of years of trying to solve problems that way. Somehow
the same problems keep coming back. Wonder what’s causing that.

The losers will most likely
look for other ways to deprive

you of the rights, because while you may have defeated their attempt

to take the rights away, you have not necesarily eliminated their

desire or their perceived need to do so.

Yes, after we “whupped” the British the first time, they came
back in 1812 and we had to “whup” 'em again.

Sounds like good fun, the way you put it, sort of like touch football. Of
course, the British thought they were fighting for their rights in
America, and it didn’t do them much good. In every fight with a winner,
it works for one side but not for the other. We happen to have won most
of our fights, a lot of them because we had the overwhelming advantage.
But we haven’t won them all, and won’t. It’s a very dangerous way to
live, living by the sword. Seems to me someone else said that
once.

"Eternal vigilance is
the

price of liberty" sounds to me like a recipe for eternal
distraction

from other things that are far more interesting and worthwhile to
do.

Wouldn’t it be more clever to arrange things so you don’t have to

lose sleep over your rights, or risk losing your life and killing

innocent people to protect them?

Yes, indeed; do you have a way of doing that?

Are you looking for a way? Or just saying that there’s no point in
looking for a way because there isn’t any? If you think there might be a
way, then I hope you do spend some time trying to think of one. If more
people were doing that I’m sure we could do it. Just the willingness to
look for a way would be a very big step – at least then we’d pause for a
millisecond before blindly retaliating on the nearest target after being
attacked. In that millisecond, we might even think that perhaps we’d
better wait until we find the actual culprit before giving in to the urge
to violent action. And if that postponed the violence until the
adrenaline died away, we might even ask what could be done to remove the
motive for such attacks – a truly long-range solution.

When people are attacked by a wild animal, they are reluctant to kill it,
preferring to relocate it. Even the victims of attacks can feel that way,
if they realize that the attack wasn’t personal. Here in Colorado, a few
years back during the really bad drought. a woman on a trail was attacked
by a starving mountain lion. It was weak with hunger and she managed to
fight it off and finally kill it, with a rock, I think. When rescuers
found her, she was weeping in sorrow, in spite of her serious wounds,
over what she had to do.

An animal that attacks a human being is only acting according to its
nature and the immediate circumstances that we humans have had a lot to
do with creating. We can value its autonomy while removing its reasons
for endangering us, and since we do not stoop to revenge, there is
nothing else we require. Of course we defend ourselves, but we do not do
more than we need to do, not when we are thinking clearly and realize
what is going on. I think we can learn from that about how to deal with
each other.

I wonder how the
reference signal for "it’s time to fight to defend our

rights" gets established?

When you figure that out, let me know. I think one reason is simply

not thinking things all the way through, or perhaps (not in your
case

however) simply not being bright enough to think of any way other

than direct use of force.

I had more in mind the situation when others are aiming force at
me.

That’s what I was talking about. Here’s a story I’ve never told because
it always seemed a little phoney. In high-school, around 1943 and 1944, I
worked after school at an Alcoa aluminum plant on the heat-treating
furnaces. We’d grab sheets of aluminum off of pallets, still warm from
the rolling mill, and lift them on edge into clamps which someone else
would hammer shut. When a lot of sheets were hanging up they were hoisted
into the furnace, and we’d go get the next batch. When the sheets came
down we unclamped them and sent them through a set of straightening
rollers to another conveyer line.

At one point I was working with an all-black (but me) crew. Pretty tough
guys, a little older, but they seemed all right to me. One day at lunch
the conversation got around to the South Side (the black side of
Chicago), and I sort of bragged that I had never worried about walking
around there, I liked to listen to the jazz. I got some strange looks,
and one of the guys said, “You weren’t afraid? You think you’re
invincible or something?” I said no, to both. Suddenly he had one
arm around my neck and in the other hand he was holding a straight razor,
open, against my neck. He said, “You afraid now?” I said,
“Sure I’m afraid. But you don’t have any reason to hurt me, do
you?” Somehow that did it. Everyone, six or eight guys watching all
this, laughed in an unbelieving way, and I heard someone say “Got no
reason!” The one with the razor put it away and said something about
OK, that’s good. That’s the part that makes me feel a bit phoney, sort of
like a Disney movie, but that’s how it happened. Nothing like that ever
happened again, and the same guy who held the razor to my neck, some time
later when another worker got his hand caught in the straightening
rollers and had all the fingers squeezed off, grabbed my head and turned
it away, and said “You don’t want to see that.” He was taking
care of me.

There have been other incidents somewhat like that. I think, all in all,
it’s possible to find other ways to deal with violence without making it
worse, and also without giving up your principles.

I used to pick fights in grade school because I was sure the school bully
was after me and I wanted to get my licks in first. That came to an end
when I picked a fight with Wally Weiss because somehow I had gotten him
mixed up with Frankie Wence, the real bully, and only found out
afterward. Sort of like Bush and Cheney mistaking Saddaam for Osama.
Nothing like feeling like a real fool to start some useful
reorganization. At least I was capable of feeling like a fool and
learning from it.

P.S. 20 years in the Navy
was probably too much for me to come out of it a truly civilized
person.

I was in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, ten percent as long as you but I
know what you mean. Things are pretty simple when you’re in the armed
forces. There are bad guys (them) and good guys (us) and there’s never
any question of what you do about that. That’s pretty universal, I think
– at the officers-and-men level, the other side is run by people just
like us. Perhaps we spent a little too much time talking about how
justified we were – there were occasionally some doubts, quickly put
aside. “They” deserved everything we did to them, for sure. I
was pretty much a superpatriot like everyone else.

What woke me up was the atomic bomb. I was on Treasure Island in San
Francisco bay, waiting for a troop ship, when the Hiroshima bomb was
dropped. My job was going to be to paddle an inflatable boat to the coast
of Japan and plant a radio beacon on the invasion beach – that’s what my
11 months of radio tech training was going to get me. I knew I was
expendable, but I didn’t think about that. But when the bomb was dropped
my first thought was that I get to live after all. All it cost to buy my
life was 100,000 lives of other people.

It’s funny how having my life saved that way made me put less value on
it. What made it worse was that my intellectual love was physics, and I
wanted to go to college and become a physicist. So it was as if I was
identified somehow with that bomb and all the people it killed so
indiscriminately. I did go to college and I did major in physics, but I
ended up not going to an advanced degree and I ended up in medical
physics, then astronomy, then electronics for a newspaper, and all the
while, PCT as a background thought. I think I was always looking for a
better way. It’s not easy to find, but I was looking.

I think we should all be looking.

Best,

Bill P.