One-Category Trope Bundle Theory and Brentano’s Reism

This morning's mail brought a longish letter from philosophy student Ryan Peterson.  He would like some comments and I will try to oblige him as time permits, but time is short. So for now I will confine my comments to the postscript of his letter:

P.S. Just as crazy as one category trope bundle theory is to me, is the later Brentano’s attempt at a different one category ontology, ‘reism’, where “For example, ‘Socrates is wise’ and ‘Socrates is Greek’ are made true, respectively, by wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates, where wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)” (from Uriah Kriegel’s Thought and Thing: Brentano’s Reism as Truthmaker Nominalism). I like to rigorously understand all the different views put forth by intelligent philosophers on a topic but I do like to spend the most time understanding the more plausible seeming views first.

Leaving trope theory to one side for the moment, I am happy to agree with Peterson's assessment of Brentano. While not literally  a product of insanity, Brentano's view  I find to be incomprehensible.  (And I don't mean that to be a merely autobiographical remark.) 

I assume what to me seems to be well-nigh self-evident: some, but not all, truths need truth-makers.  (I am not a truth-maker maximalist.) A truth is a true truth-bearer. The primary truth-bearers — the primary vehicles of the truth-values — are propositions.  An assertive utterance at a particular time by a particular person of the declarative sentence 'Socrates is wise' expresses the proposition Socrates is wise.  I will assume that propositions are abstract in the Quinean, not the trope-theoretic, sense of 'abstract.'  (You can hear an asserted sentence and see a written sentence; you cannot hear or see a proposition.)  A truth-bearer is not a truth-maker, except in some recherché cases I won't mention.  (And don't confuse a truth-maker with a truth condition.)

There has to be something in the world of concreta (the spatiotemporal realm of causal reality) that makes it true that Socrates exists. To avoid the word 'makes,' we can say that the sentence and the proposition it expresses need an ontological ground of their being-true. Now you either get it or you don't. There are those who don't have a clue as to what I am talking about. Such people have no philosophical aptitude, and must simply be shown the door. A contingent truth cannot just be true, nor can it be true in virtue of someone's say-s0: a contingent truth requires something  in reality external to the truth-bearer and its verbal expression that 'makes' it true, where this 'making' or grounding is neither narrowly logical nor causal.   (Its not being either the one nor the other sensu stricto is what  prejudices some against it. I kick them off my stoa as lacking philosophical aptitude.)

Now what in the world could function as the ontological ground of the contingent truth of 'Socrates exists'?  The obvious answer is: the concrete particular Socrates.  (Aristotle makes this very point somewhere in The Categories.)  A particular may be defined as an unrepeatable entity by contrast with universals (if such there be) that are by definition repeatable.

There is an obvious difference between 'Socrates is wise' and 'Socrates is Greek,' on the one hand, and 'Socrates exists' on the other. It is the difference between predicative and existential sentences. Now we come to the nub of the issue. It seems blindingly evident to me that the two predicative sentences (and the propositions they express), if they need truth-makers at all,  need concrete states of affairs (STOAs)  as truth-makers, and that these truth-making states of affairs must be numerically distinct. I have no objection to saying that wise-Socrates makes true the first sentence and Greek-Socrates the second if 'wise-Socrates' and 'Greek-Socrates' refer to concrete states of affairs (not to be confused with Chisholmian abstract states of affairs).

But that is not what Brentano is saying.  His reism cannot allow for concrete states of affairs of the form a's being F.  For the predicate 'F' either picks out an abstract particular, a trope, or it picks out a universal. But on reism, all you've got are things, concrete particulars, which, moreover, cannot be assayed as concrete states of affairs along either Bergmannian or Armstrongian lines.  

On reism one must therefore swallow the absurdity that "wise-Socrates and Greek-Socrates are two coinciding but numerically distinct concrete particulars (which also coincide with Socrates)." So they are one and the same and yet numerically different?? A question for Peterson: Is Kriegel defending truth-maker nominalism?  I hope not. For it makes no bloody sense.  For one thing it implies that the putatively two but at the same time one concrete particular(s) are property-less and are thus 'bare,' though not in Gustav Bergmann's precise sense.  They are property-less if there are no properties, and there are no properties if there are no tropes nor any universals. A predicate is not a property.   

'Red,' 'rot,' 'rouge,' and 'rosso' are four different predicates in four different languages. If Tom the tomato is red, as we say in English, he is not red only in English or rosso only in Italian. That way lies an absurd linguistic idealism. The predicates are true of Tom because there is something in or related to Tom that makes the predicates true of him, that grounds their applicability to him.  This something in Tom is either the trope in him (assuming he is a complete bundle of tropes) or a universal that he instantiates.  Nominalism makes no sense. The reality of properties is non-negotiable. But of course they needn't be universals. Trope-nominalism makes sense.  'Ostrich' nominalism does not.  The same goes for van Inwagen's 'ostrich realism.'

Here is another argument. Socrates, while essentially Greek (Cf. Kripke's essentiality of origin), is only accidentally wise: had he lived long enough he might have gone 'Biden.'  At every time at which he exists, our man is Greek, but only at some times is he wise.  (He wasn't wise when he peeped his head out from between the legs of his mother, inter faeces et urinam nascimur.) So if he is one and the same concrete individual over time, then there has to be a distinction between him and real properties (not predicates!) that are either in him as tropes or related to him as universals.

Retribution and Psycho-Political Projection

'Retribution' has two main senses in English, and they are importantly different. The word can refer to revenge or to a form of justice, retributive justice. Do I have to explain that justice is not revenge? Conflating the two, journalistic shills for deep-state malefactors try to dismiss as revenge what is a quest for justice to right the wrongs perpetrated against Donald Trump by said malefactors.  

Tulsi Gabbard's exposure of the Russia Collusion Hoax has leftists in our government sweating. Jonathan Turley names names: John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe.

But of course one cannot expect our political enemies to play fair in what they take to be a war.  So this comes as no surprise:

Former Attorney General Eric Holder told MSNBC on Sunday morning that the Justice Department is being politicized to attack enemies of the Trump administration and "put at risk the lives and well-being" of people who oppose the president.

Talk about projection!  What Holder & Co. are accusing our side of doing is precisely what they have been doing all along. 

There is also the underhanded ploy of accusing us of putting lives at risk when our side rightly responds to their illegal actions.  We are supposed to accept the injury meekly, lest our legitimate objections to their outrages inspire some lunatic to go on a rampage. Yet another application of the Left's double-standard 'principle.' 

We should never forget what sort of sorry specimen this Holder was and is. See Photo ID: Eric Holder's Assault on Common Sense.

Travel: More Than Ever a Fool’s Paradise

Kim du Toit:

I’m not sure I want to travel internationally again.

Me too. Been there, done that.  One of his reasons:

. . . we all know how the Filth in Britishland regard the matter of self-defense Over There.  Nothing puts a damper on the travel experience like having to explain to some judge why you didn’t want to just let the little choirboy take your property and shake your head sorrowfully at your loss.  That you applied your walking-stick to the little shit’s cranium (in lieu of having the old 1911 at hand) would no doubt land you in Serious Trouble, just as your attitude to the cops being more or less on the criminal’s side rather than on yours might also result in the cop’s uniform being ruined by the flow of blood (his).

To which he adds:

And then there’s this little nugget, from one of my most-favored places on the planet:

Most famous districts in Vienna are in the heart of the city and during summer or at Christmas season they become overcrowded, which can lead to pickpocketing, mugging and even terrorist attacks.  In these areas frequented by tourists, bus and train stations, people around you need to be carefully watched and your possessions should be kept close to you.

WTF?  Now add to that the chance that some “migrant” takes offense that your female companion doesn’t have her head covered to his satisfaction… do you see where I’m going with this?

I suggest that we aging patriots who have done our fair share of international travel add to our MAGA lists homeland travel and blowing our excess bucks here. Can one ever get sick of Route 66?

To the young, however, I say: get out there and take the risks.  See the world to appreciate the homeland. Go alone, travel light, like a man, not a suitcase, swot up as much of the local lingo as you can, and try to make it back home alive. Take pictures, keep a journal. If you make it back, you won't regret your adventures. Then you can gloat, "Been there, done that." Forever after you will enjoy the having done what you now longer would want to do.

I dilate further in Three Reasons to Stay Home at Substack.  The reasons? One's Emersonian, the second's Pascalian, and the third is of my own invention.

Julien Green’s Diary, 1928-1957

It arrived yesterday evening, and I am already 32 pages into it.  Why keep a journal? Green gives an answer on page one in the entry from 4 December 1928.  He tells of "the incomprehensible desire to bring the past to a standstill that makes one keep a diary." Reading that, I knew I would read the whole 306 page translation of selections from this author's  sprawling diary.  He nailed it.

In '66 I started my journal scribbling. I didn't want that summer to pass away unrecorded. A life unrecorded, like a life unexamined, is not worth living. So I felt then, so I feel now.  Such a life lacks diachronic unity and internal cohesion.  I love cats, but a man is not cat, nor should he live like one.

I'll pull some quotations from Green's diary as the spirit moves me.

This First Things article will provide some background on Green and includes translations of some journal entries written around the time of, and about, the 'reforms' of  Vatican II.

AI and Demons

You may remember our 'demonic' discussion from last summer. See  Reading Now: Demonic Foes. The comment thread runs to 61 entries, some of them excellent.

Bro Joe now wants us to read: Satanic AI: ChatGPT gives instructions.

Another topic we ought to explore is the possibility of demonic possession of AI systems. 

According to Richard Gallagher, M.D., "The essence of a possession is the actual control of the body (never the 'soul' or will') of a person by one or more evil spirits." (Demonic Foes, p. 80). Now AI systems do not have souls or wills of their own (or so I argue), but they do have bodies, albeit inorganic.  Might they then host demons?

Gallagher's book is outstanding. So if you think demonology is buncombe, you should study his book and disembarrass yourself of your illusions. 

What’s to Stop an AI System from having a Spiritual Soul?

John Doran in a comment presents an argument worth bringing to the top of the pile:

A) Anything conscious has a non-material basis for such consciousness.

B) Certain AI constructs [systems] are conscious.

Therefore:

C) Such AI constructs [systems] have a non-material component in which their consciousness resides.

Why doesn't that work? It's obviously valid.

In short, and in the philosophical colloquial, when a man and woman successfully combine their mobile and sessile gametes, a human person is brought into existence, complete with a soul.

So why can we not bring an ensouled being into existence as a result of the manipulation of silicon, plastic, metal, coding, and the application of electricity?

A provocative question.  But before he asked the question, he gave an argument. The argument is plainly valid. But all that means is that the conclusion follows from the premises. A valid argument is one such that if all the premises are true, then it cannot be the case that the conclusion is false. But are both premises true? I am strongly inclined to accept (A), but I reject (B).  The various arguments from the unity of consciousness we have been discussing convince me that no material system can be conscious. How does John know that (B) is true? Does he have an argument for (B)? Can he refute the arguments from the unity of consciousness?

Now to his question.

John appears to be suggesting an emergentist view according to which, at a certain high level of material complexity an "ensouled being" (his phrase) emerges or comes into existence from the material system.  His view, I take it, is that souls are emergent entities that can arise from very different types of material systems. In the wet and messy human biological system, a mobile gamete (a spermatazoon) mates with a sessile gamete, an ovum, to produce a conceptus such that at the moment of conception a spiritual soul comes into existence.  In a non-living silicon-based hunk of dry computer hardware running appropriately complex software, spiritual souls can also come into existence. Why not?

Emergence is either supernatural or natural.

Supernatural emergence is either Platonic or Christian. On the former, God causes pre-existent souls to take up residence in human bodies at the moment of biological conception.  On the latter, God creates human souls ex nihilo at the moment of conception.  Thus on the latter the coming to be of a human being is a joint task: the conjugal act of the parents supplies the material body and God supplies the spiritual soul.

Natural emergence involves no divine agency. Souls emerge by natural necessity at a certain level of material complexity, whether biological or computational. Edward Feser, in his discussion of William Hasker's emergent dualism, mentions a dilemma pointed out by  Brian Leftow.  (Immortal Souls, 2024, 517.) I'll put it in my own way. Souls either emerge from matter or they do not.  If they emerge, then they could only be material, which contradicts the assumption that they are necessarily immaterial.  If they do not emerge,  then they could be immaterial, but could not be emergent.  

The natural emergence from matter of an immaterial individual (substance) is metaphysically impossible.  The very notion is incoherent.  It follows that immortal souls cannot naturally emerge either biologically or computationally. The only way they could emerge is supernaturally.

There is a second consideration that casts doubt on naturally emergent dualism.  Does a spiritual soul, once it emerges, continue to exist on its own even after the material emergence base ceases to exist? In other words, are souls emergent entities that become ontologically independent after their emergence, or do they remain dependent upon the matrix, whether biological or silicon-based, from which they emerged? 

I'm inclined to say that 'naturally emergent dualism of individual substances' is a misbegotten notion.  Property emergence is a different story. I take no position on that. Leastways, not at the moment.

More on the Unity of Consciousness: From Self to Immortal Soul?

Suppose I see a black cat. The act of visual awareness in a case like this is typically, even if not always, accompanied by a simultaneous secondary awareness of the primary awareness.  I am aware of the cat, but I am also aware of being aware of the cat.  How does the Humean* account for one's awareness of being aware? He could say, plausibly, that the primary  object-directed awareness is a subject-less awareness. But he can't plausibly say that the secondary awareness is subject-less.   For if both the primary awareness (the awareness of the cat) and the secondary awareness (the awareness of the primary awareness) are subject-less, then what makes the secondary awareness an awareness of the primary awareness? What connects them? The two awarenesses cannot just occur; they must occur in the same subject, in the same unity of consciousness.

Suppose that in Socrates there is an awareness of a cat, and in God there is an awareness of Socrates' awareness of a cat.  Those two awarenesses would not amount to there being in Socrates an awareness of a cat together with a simultaneous secondary awareness of being aware of a cat.  But it is phenomenologically evident that the two awarenesses do co-occur. We ought to conclude that the two awarenesses must be together in one subject, where the subject is not the physical thing in the external world (the animal that wears Socrates' toga, for example), but the I, the self, the subject.

What I have just done is provide phenomenological evidence of the existence of the self that Hume claimed he could not find. Does it follow that this (transcendental) self is a simple substance that can exist on its own without a material body? That's a further question.  To put it another way: do considerations anent the unity of consciousness furnish materials for a proof of the simplicity, and thus the immortality, of a substantial soul?  Proof or paralogism? 

__________

*A Humean for present purposes  is one who denies that there is a self or subject that is aware; there is just awareness of this or that. Hume, Sartre, and Butchvarov are Humeans in this sense.

Border Defeatism and an Old Debate Revisited

The demented Dems are defeatists in several different ways. A pox be upon them and the fools who support them. Here is Facebook post of mine from 21 July 2022, with addenda.

…………………

BORDER DEFEATISM
 
"Build a 20 foot wall, and they'll show up with a 21 foot ladder." Geraldo Rivera has said things like that. "They'll tunnel under it," said Victor Reppert when I pointed out that an enforceable and enforced physical barrier is necessary but not sufficient for border control. The defeatist attitude of these gentlemen betrays an unwillingness to uphold the rule of law, and with it a failure to appreciate how precious the rule of law is. And then Reppert committed an ignoratio elenchi when he replied to me that a wall won't stop 'em all, as if anyone ever claimed that it would. You would think a philosophy Ph.D. would not sink to such a rookie blunder. If Reppert's wife complained about ants entering their house, would he say, "You can't stop 'em all, dear" and go back to reading C. S. Lewis?
 
Presumably not.
 
Reppert's hard to figure. He's a nice guy and he can think logically over the 64 squares. I believe he is close to USCF Master strength. And he is has done very good work in philosophy on the Argument from Reason. But then how explain his shoddy reasoning when it comes to such important questions as national sovereignty and border control?
 
As for Reppert's claim that a wall won't stop them all, consider that in December 2024, during the Biden-Harris (mal)administration, there were 301, 981 Southwest Land Border Encounters according to  official U. S. statistics.  For the same year there were over two million total such encounters.  Under Trump, border encounters have dropped dramatically.  In June of this year there were zero. Again, these are official stats.
 
I began to lose my respect for Reppert back in 2010 when we discussed Arizona Senate Bill 1070. Here is a post of mine from 27 April 2010:
 

Arizona Senate Bill 1070 "requires a reasonable attempt to be made to determine the immigration status of a person during any legitimate contact made by an official or agency of the state or a county, city, town . . . if reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien who is unlawfully present in the U.S."  See here and here for the full text.

That illegal aliens and those who profit from them should object to this legislation comes as no surprise.  But it does come as a bit of surprise to find native Arizonan Victor Reppert, who to my knowledge neither employs, nor defends in courts of law, nor otherwise profits from illegal aliens, saying this at his blog:

Police in our state have now been given the authority to demand papers on anyone of whom they have a reasonable suspicion that they are illegal aliens. The trouble is, about the only reason for suspicion that I can think of that someone is in the country illegally is if they have brown skin, or speak Spanish instead of English, or English with an Mexican accent.

I'm afraid Victor isn't thinking very hard.  He left out the bit about " during any legitimate contact made by an official . . . ."  Suppose a cop pulls over a motorist who has a tail light out. He asks to see the motorist's driver's license.  The driver doesn't have one.  That fact, by itself, does not prove that the motorist is an illegal alien; but together with other facts (no registration, no proof of insurance, speaks no English . . .) could justify an inquiry into the motorist's immigration status.  Hundreds of examples like this are generable ad libitum.

S. B. 1070 is a reasonable response  to the Federal government's failure to enforce U. S. immigration law.  Border control is a legitimate, constitutionally-grounded function of government. (See Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.)  When the Feds fail to uphold the rule of law, the states, counties, etc. must do so.  If you don't understand why we need border control, I refer you to my longer piece, Immigration Legal and Illegal.

According to one 'argument,' Arizona Senate Bill 1070 disproportionately targets Hispanics and is objectionable for that reason.  That's like arguing that the RICO statutes disproportionately target Italians.  I don't know whether people of Italian extraction are disproportionately involved in organized crime, but if they are, then that is surely no valid objection to the RICO statutes.  The reason Hispanics will be disproportionately affected is because they disproportionately break the immigration laws.    The quota mentality is behind this 'argument.'

Here is an entry from 28 April 2010

More on Arizona Senate Bill 1070

Joseph A.  e-mails:

I greatly admire Victor Reppert for a number of reasons – I think the Argument from Reason is pretty amazing and effective when formulated and defended well, and Victor remains one of the most soft-spoken and polite bloggers around.

Agreed.

But a number of thoughts occurred to me when reading his and your post.

Victor shows some deep distrust of law enforcement officials – he mentions how there's plenty of Mark Fuhrmans on the police force, and basically asserts that he doesn't trust them to enforce laws like this appropriately.

A certain distrust of law enforcement is reasonable.  Skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism and has been from the founding.   But we need to make a simple distinction between a law and its enforcement.  A just law can be unjustly applied or enforced, and if it is, that is no argument against the law.  If the police cannot be trusted to enforce the 1070 law without abuses, then they cannot be trusted to enforce any law without abuses.  Someone who thinks otherwise is probably assuming, falsely, that most cops are anti-Hispanic racists.  What a scurrilous assumption!

At this point one must vigorously protest the standard leftist ploy of 'playing the race card,' i.e., the tactic of injecting race into every conceivable issue.  The issue before us is illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with race.  Those who oppose illegal immigration are opposed to the illegality of the immigrants, not to their race.  The illegals happen to be mainly Hispanic, and among the Hispanics, mainly Mexican.  But those are contingent facts.  If they were mainly Persians, the objection would be the same.  Again, the opposition is to the illegality of the illegals, not to their race.

Suppose Canadians, who are mostly Caucasians, were routinely violating our northern border in great numbers.  Suppose a northern state were to enact a 1070-like law.  What would leftists say then to avoid facing the issue, which is illegal immigration?  They couldn't cry 'racism.'  Would they scream 'xenophobia'?  However the lefties emote, they would be missing the point. 

But Victor also typically argues very much in favor of giving government far more authority and responsibility than it now has (see his views on health care, etc.) I just find it odd that he's very worried, deeply worried, about the actions of individual police officers operating at a local level – suggesting that they pose a problem/threat we're not going to be able to adequately address – but not nearly as worried about endowing federal bureaucrats with vastly more far-reaching powers.

That is just inconsistency on Reppert's part.  As I said, skepticism about government and its law enforcement agencies is integral to American conservatism.  The skepticism is shared by libertarians and paleo-liberals.

Also, you mention the 'argument' that the bill disproportionately targets Hispanics. Of course, you rightly dismissed it, but I notice Victor does suggest that securing our borders is a major interest. The riddle I have is, how does one secure the Mexican border without 'targeting Hispanics' in the process?

I think I already explained that.  It is not the race of the illegals that we who uphold the rule of law object to, but their illegality.  So I deny your suggestion that there would be a targeting of Hispanics qua Hispanics.  But because most of the illegals happen to be Hispanic, that fact is relevant in a decision to investigate a person's immigration status.

Suppose a cop pulls over a vehicle with a malfunctioning tail light.  He asks the driver for his license.  If a valid license is presented, no problem, even if the driver is Hispanic and speaks only broken English.  The worst that happens is the cop writes a citation for the tail light.  The same thing would happen as would happen were Reppert to be pulled over in similar circumstances.  Will Reppert protest that he is being forced by a jackbooted thug to 'show his papers'?  But that's the law, and the law is reasonable.  You may not drive without a valid license.

Liberal hysteria about S. B. 1070 is just that.  So far I haven't seen any rational grounds for opposition.  It is clear why most liberals and leftists oppose it.  They want as many illegals as possible in order to swell the ranks of the Democrat Party.  I don't know what Reppert's motivation is.  But it is without a doubt the motivation of most liberals/leftists.  Please note that inquiring into people's motivations is entirely legitimate once you have demolished their arguments.

 
This just in (7/25/2025):

NOGALES, Ariz. (AP) — Inside an armored vehicle, an Army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the U.S.-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.

The man lowers himself toward U.S. soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a U.S. Border Patrol SUV races toward the wall — warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.

If you hate DJT, my advice is to not live by likes and dislikes, loves and hates: that's the narcissistic Facebook way of life. Stop emoting and start thinking. Trump did what no one else either wanted to do, or had the civil courage to do: secure the border. Give the man credit, you petty, hate-America PsOS.

AI, Intellectual Theft, and Lawsuits

A year or two ago I was bumping along at about one thousand page views per diem when I experienced an unusual uptick in traffic. Inspection of the MavPhil traffic log suggested that my content was being stolen. But I didn't much care, and I still don't much care inasmuch as my content has very little commercial value, and in any case, I'm a "made man" with more than enough loot to see me through my remaining sublunary travels and travails. My thinking and writing is a labor love and not a money-making enterprise. Add to that the fact that I'm an Enough is Enough kind of guy who has no interest in piling up the lean green far in excess of what is needed.  And maybe I'm steering Group Mind or Objektiver Geist in a wholesome direction. I'm doing my bit, like a good Boomer, to make this world a better place. 

But what if you make your living by scribbling? What if you have a 'high maintenance' wife, children, a hefty mortgage and you live in a high-tax lefty locale? Interesting questions here.  More grist for the mill.

And so I tip my  hat to Ingvarius Maximus the Alhambran for sending us to  this Washington (Com)Post article actually worth reading. Access is free. (What fool pays for access to such a crappy publication?)

One more thing. When lawyers are replaced by AI systems will AI systems be suing AI systems over intellectual property theft? 

Why Do We Support Trump?

Charlie Kirk, six months in to the second Trump term, sets forth what sets Trump 2.0 apart.  His astonishing accomplishments include, in Kirk's words:

1) Completely and instantly securing the U.S.-Mexico border after the four-year Biden invasion. 

2) The stock market hit record highs this very week and blue-collar wages are rising faster than they have in 60 years.

3) Striking a crippling blow to Iran’s nuclear program while suffering zero casualties and even bringing a ceasefire between Iran and Israel as part of the bargain.

4) Doing things that past Republicans could and should have done, yet inexplicably never did. For instance, restoring merit-based hiring;  toppling the race and sex-based discrimination that had taken root all over America in flagrant defiance of both our Constitution and historic American values;  purging DEI commissars from federal agencies, imposing uniform standards on the military, and sending out warnings to the private sector as well; the destruction in detail of a rotten, anti-American ideology.

5) Doing the work necessary to protect American children from the transgender mania, one of the great evils of our time.

6) Ending health care providers'  involvement in child mutilation and similar treatments.

7) Cutting USAID down to size and keeping more of America’s money in America. The same goes for defunding NPR, PBS, and Planned Parenthood.

8) TSA’s policy requiring passengers to remove their shoes before boarding a flight was a pointless bit of security theater, yet Presidents Bush, Obama, and Biden all kept the policy around anyway. This administration finally got rid of it.

9) While the Biden administration treated the cryptocurrency industry as a borderline criminal enterprise, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which positions America to be at the lead of this innovative industry.

Decisive action, not empty talk. Promises made, promises kept. But now let me add one of my own:

10) Destroying the Dems by driving them leftward — and crazy. He does it by co-opting their themes and concerns. He actually does what they only talked about doing.  Traditionally, they were supposed to be for the workers, and in some measure they were long ago. Trump is now and in actuality for the workers, American workers, not "the workers of the world."  He has transformed the Republican Party into the party of peace, the people, and prosperity.  The Dems respond by moving farther and farther left and embracing more and more extreme candidates, the Islamo-Commie Mamdani being their latest savior.  (Remember when Obama was their 'savior'?)

Hunter Biden, recently in full melt-down F-bomber mode, may be their next pick for 2028. Let's hope so!

AI and the Unity of Consciousness

Top AI researchers such as Geoffrey Hinton, the "Godfather of AI,"  hold that advanced AI systems are conscious.  That is far from obvious, and may even be demonstrably false if we consider the phenomenon of the unity of consciousness.  I will first explain the phenomenon in question, and then conclude that AI systems cannot accommodate it.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example One

Suppose my mental state passes from one that is pleasurable to one that is painful.  Observing a beautiful Arizona sunset, my reverie is suddenly broken by the piercing noise of a smoke detector.  Not only is the painful state painful, the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one is itself painful.  The fact that the transition is painful shows that it is directly perceived. It is not as if there is merely a succession of consciousnesses (conscious states), one pleasurable the other painful; there is in addition a consciousness of their succession.  For there is a consciousness of the transition from the pleasant state to the painful state, a consciousness that embraces both of the states, and so cannot be reductively analyzed into them.  But a consciousness of their succession is a consciousness of their succession in one subject, in one unity of consciousness.  It is a consciousness of the numerical identity of the self through the transition from the pleasurable state to the painful one.  Passing from a pleasurable state to a painful one, there is not only an awareness of a pleasant state followed by an awareness of a painful one, but also an awareness that the one who was in a pleasurable state is strictly and numerically the same as the one who is now in a painful state.  This sameness is phenomenologically given, although our access to this phenomenon is easily blocked by inappropriate models taken from the physical world.  Without the consciousness of sameness, there would be no consciousness of transition.

What this phenomenological argument shows is that the self cannot be a mere diachronic bundle or collection of states.  The self is a transtemporal unity distinct from its states whether these states are taken distributively (one by one) or collectively (all together).

May we conclude from the phenomenology of the situation that there is a simple, immaterial, meta-physical substance that each one of us is and that is the ontological support of the phenomenologically given unity of consciousness?  May we make the old-time school-metaphysical moves from the simplicity of this soul substance to it immortality? Maybe not! This is a further step that needs to be carefully considered. I don't rule it out, but I also don't rule it in. I don't need to take the further step for my present purpose, which is merely to show that a computing machine, no matter how complex or how fast its processing, cannot be conscious.  No material system can be conscious.  For the moment I content myself with the negative claim: no material system can be conscious. It follows straightaway that no AI system can be conscious.

Diachronic Unity of Consciousness, Example Two

Another example is provided by the hearing of a melody.  To hear the melody Do-Re-Mi, it does not suffice that there be a hearing of Do, followed by a hearing of Re, followed by a hearing of Mi.  For those three acts of hearing could occur in that sequence in three distinct subjects, in which case they would not add up to the hearing of a melody.  (Tom, Dick, and Harry can divide up the task of loading a truck, but not the ‘task’ of hearing a melody, or that of understanding a sentence.)  But now suppose the acts of hearing occur in the same subject, but that this subject is not a unitary and self-same individual but just the bundle of these three acts, call them A1, A2, and A3.  When A1 ceases, A2 begins, and when A2 ceases, A3 begins: they do not overlap.  In which act is the hearing of the melody?  A3 is the only likely candidate, but surely it cannot be a hearing of the melody.

This is because the awareness of a melody involves the awareness of the (musical not temporal)  intervals between the notes, and to apprehend these intervals there must be a retention (to use Husserl’s term) in the present act A3 of the past acts A2 and A1.  Without this phenomenological presence of the past acts in the present act, there would be no awareness in the present of the melody.  This implies that the self cannot be a mere bundle of perceptions externally related to each other, but must be a peculiarly intimate unity of perceptions in which the present perception A3 includes the immediately past ones A2 and A1 as temporally past but also as phenomenologically present in the mode of retention.  The fact that we hear melodies thus shows that there must be a self-same and unitary self through the period of time between the onset of the melody and its completion.  This unitary self is neither identical to the sum or collection of A1, A2, and A3, nor is it identical to something wholly distinct from them.  Nor of course is it identical to any one of them or any two of them.  This unitary self is co-given whenever one hears a melody.  (This seems to imply that all consciousness is at least implicitly self-consciousness. This is a topic for a later post.)

Diachronic -Synchronic Unity of Consciousness

Now consider a more complicated example in which I hear two chords, one after the other, the first major, the second minor.   I hear the major chord C-E-G, and then I hear the minor chord C-E flat-G.  But I also hear the difference between them.   How is the awareness of the major-minor difference possible? One condition of this possibility is the diachronic unity of consciousness. But there is also a second condition. The hearing of the major chord as major cannot be analyzed without remainder into an act of hearing C, an act of hearing E, and an act of hearing G, even when all occur simultaneously.  For to hear the three notes as a major chord, I must apprehend the 1-3-5 musical interval that they instantiate.  But this is possible only because the whole of my present consciousness is more than the sum of its parts.  This whole is no doubt made up of the part-consciousnesses, but it is not exhausted by them.  For it is also a consciousness of the relatedness of the notes.  But this consciousness of relatedness is not something in addition to the other acts of consciousness: it includes them and embraces them without being reducible to them.  So here we have an example of the diachronic-synchronic unity of consciousness.

These considerations appear to put paid to the conceit that AI systems can be conscious.

Or have I gone too far? You've heard me say that in philosophy there are few if any rationally compelling,  ineluctably decisive, arguments for substantive theses.  Are the above arguments among the few? Further questions obtrude themselves, for example, "What do you mean by 'material system'?"  "Could a panpsychist uphold the consciousness of advanced AI systems?"

Vita brevis, philosophia longa.