Imaginary_Knowledge
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User ID: 1255
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
"Valid" in what sense? One that the correct government can take given its social constraints? Sure. But there's a whole universe of solutions inaccessible to our hamstrung political machine and a whole class of "coup complete" problems that cannot be solved within these constraints. It's fair to talk about them.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
I'm talk about what a well-run state would do, not predicting what ours will do. I agree with the prediction of Luddite victory. I'm just saying it doesn't necessarily have to be so.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
I want to do things, and I do them
So do I. My desires are outputs of a function incorporating my history and a bit of randomness. Nothing mystical about it.
and every functional system humans build or interact with is based on the assumption that this apparent reality is how things actually work.
"Free will" isn't required to model humans as organisms with intrinsic drives and memory that respond to incentives.
pretty sure you don't have an empirically-verifiable explanation for what caused the Big Bang,
Sure, but there's a pretty strong case for post-big-bang materialism.
This does not mean that there might not be some deeper version of physics inaccessible to us that is, in fact, seamlessly complete, only that we have no access to any such deeper physics, and thus appeal to that deeper physics is is strictly unfalsifiable.
I'm not sure any physics can answer the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?", at least not without recurring into a different "something ". This question vexes me, but seems independent of consciousness and experience and so on, which we can explain using physical laws given the singular prior that something indeed exists.
consistent falsifications of testable Determinist theories
Can you elaborate on these falsifications? To be clear, I'm not talking about naive functionalism. Human actions are not merely the result of immediate inputs. We have state. We have an internal history. We can introspect. I'm merely asserting that parsimony suggests we treat this reflection as a computational process grounded in the material world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
I don't believe in surrendering civilizational order to thugs. If longshoremen come around and start to break kneecaps, shoot them until they are dead. It's worked in the past and will again. Violence is a deterrence to violence.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Fire them all. The hereditary sinecures longshoremen enjoy are intolerable. It's unskilled labor. There's an army of people who'll sign up to do it for half the pay.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Could you define "free will"? I have never seen a definition of free will that didn't boil down to sentiment or incredulity. (Mathematical function evaluation, OTOH, has a rigorous definition.) I agree with the argument from parsimony that you've presented in that I don't see a need to admit anything beyond physics to explain our experience, including our perceived sentience. I additionally find that "free will" is too vague to even reject specifically notwithstanding that we don't need to specifically reject it because physics is sufficient anyway.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Is that so? I mean, sure, that's how it's supposed to work. But Trump doesn't pay his contractors and they still work for him, over and over again. In industry, obviously Machiavellian behavior has no lasting ramifications. My experience tells me that reputation has less of an effect than might be believed.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
The death penalty isn't about material economy. It's about political economy. The people are naturally bloodthirsty. They used to walk long distances to see hangings and breakings on the wheel. They feel a visceral satisfaction in the pain of wrongdoers. It's primal.
Now, we are rational creatures. We can override our base impulses or have them overridden for us for our own good. We don't have to indulge our bloodlust. But denying it carries a cost. Sparing the worst of the worst from the ultimate reprisal has a big psychic cost, since it's a powerful emotion you're overriding.
A state can only spend so much entry in a continuous fight against human nature. Why should we spend our resources on kindness on jurisprudence instead of in inducing some other non-default beneficial behavior?
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
It's better to target zero calories per day than one. When we want something we know is bad for us, we find a way to rationalize getting it. The simpler the rules, the harder to rationalize them away. It's easy to subtly exceed a 500 calorie budget and think you're being diligent. It's a lot harder to put food into a mouth that's totally barred it.
Intermittent fasting probably works better than calorie counting for this reason.
"Free will" is an ill-defined concept. I've never seen a definition precise enough to be wrong. All I can tell is that "free will" is the persistent ecstatic emotion one feels when contemplating the idea that the mind is so special that it must belong to a category of object distinct from ordinary matter and exempt from the ordinary rules of causality. I see no reason to accept this premise. It's impossible to argue against a feeling.
The most parsimonious model of consciousness is that it's just computation.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Your position is fundamentally religious, isn't it? We feel that existing, thinking, being are so profound that they must continue after death. But what if they aren't? I've never seen evidence that they are. If you'd like to adopt a religiously flavored epistemology, that's fine, but having done so, you've departed from the realm of logical argumentation.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Is that a bad thing? Past me was a different person. Why should I be beholden to him? I appreciate continuity of obligations to others, but why should I feel obligated to honor past commitments (e.g. not to make a profit) that I made to myself?
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
So you're arguing for qualia and souls, yes? I believe I am my mind, that the mind is computation, and that its computational substrate is irrelevant. I'm honestly baffled by people who hold otherwise --- I want to be charitable, but I'm having a hard time seeing past opposition being ultimately a product of personal incredulity regarding our conscious experience being a worldly, temporal information processing phenomenon.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
We're also part Neanderthal. (Most people reading this message in 2024 are, anyway.) Their legacy got folded into ours. Why does their story have a sad ending?
Agreed on jitters about Altman. I'm just pointing out that the AI successor species people kind of have a point.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
In their defense: why do we care so much about the survival of homo sapiens qua sapiens? We're different from how we were 50,000 years ago, and we'll be more different still in 5,000, and maybe even 500. So what? So long as we have continuity of culture and memory, does it matter if we engineer ourselves into immortal cyborgs or whatever is coming? What's so special about the biped mammal vessel for a mind?
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
You don't maximize public benefit by hill-climbing the local righteousness gradient. You have to look at the second and third order implications of policy. A culture of prosecutorial fair play benefits the public in global ways that the earlier incarceration of some lowlife at the margin does not.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Why would we distinguish these scenarios?
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
What about a button that would disappear all murderers? Or thieves? Or whatever? I'd push the button.
Would you want more life, no matter what, at the margin? Even if adding these lives made everyone miserable? That's just the repugnant conclusion. It elevates mere breathing over quality of life and I reject it.
Imaginary_Knowledge
6mo ago
Perhaps Christianity's telescopic philanthropy was adaptive in pre-modern and early modern Europe but has become maladaptive in a globalized world.
Imaginary_Knowledge
7mo ago
He's not Galt. He's Rearden.
Imaginary_Knowledge
7mo ago
The self published book ecosystem seems to have a different culture. I vaguely recall reading an article a while ago to the effect that regular masculine military science fiction published as eBooks to Amazon can be much more profitable than going through the legacy publishers and that the Bantams of the world should "cry harder".
Imaginary_Knowledge
7mo ago
I'm a patriotic American, but I think the Revolutionary War was a mistake and history would have been a lot better if the US had stayed British
Why? Without the American Revolution, we'd not have gotten first amendment speech protections (even if Mills had still existed on this timeline), and without those, it would have taken a lot longer to dispel the popular falsehoods of the 19th and 20th centuries.
legally, what is the difference between this and my web browser, which doesn’t restrict me from typing “Nintendo, Disney, and Coca Cola are run by pedophiles”?
A recurring policy trope in technology policy discourse is calling for bans on emergent capabilities on the grounds that new technologies, by lowing skill floors, allow ordinary people to break unwritten on which the social order depends. From iron swords in the late bronze age to generative AI, elites presented with new technology say "we must ban $NEW_THING to preserve the social order!". When this agitation succeeds, it leads to technological stasis, and technological stasis reduces the area under the curve of human welfare over time.
Smart policymakers should deal with these negative "skill externalities" of new technology by writing down these previously unwritten rules and enforcing them directly, not by attempting to limit the new technology itself.
For example, we dealt with the ability for the general public to operate heavy machinery at 55MPH by creating regulatory and liability systems for automobiles, not by banning automobile disruption of railroads.
If "AI safety" advocates had applied their reactionary policies to automobiles, cars would have been allowed to go no faster than a horse and, in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains.
Imaginary_Knowledge
8mo ago
Broken link
A 6'7 NBA player has a qualitatively different experience from a 5'1 ballerina, but they're both humans with minds.
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