Issues in layman politics
Discussing politics with friends is often exhausting and antagonistic. But because of how much I love philosophy and debate, I really do think that it's worth it to deal with the bad actors. But when I engage the typical layman, who has minimal exposure to philosophical discourse and only has exposure to your typical FOX News, CNN, or ABC, I think that I can identify two big barriers to being able to fruitful political discourse. 1. Inability to properly define terms or share/access certain concepts. A lot of philosophy is built on intuitions about what things mean. For example, the debate over the proper definition of what counts as a conscious subject is primarily a debate over what intuitions come with the word/label of consciousness . Most theories of consciousness require representations. First-order representational theories confers consciousness to beings that have the ability to represent the world in their mind -- for example, seeing the color red or experiencing sm...