shamgar
1d ago
If some LLM or other model achieves AGI, I still don't know how matter causes qualia and as far as I'm concerned consciousness remains mysterious.
shamgar
17d ago
I think that the tendency you are describing has to go back at least to Plato, well before Christianity entered the scene. If anything, Christianity opposes that trend by making the bodily resurrection a key element of its theology and affirming that the material world was good when it was originally created. Of course many influential Christian theologians have been influenced by (neo-)Platonism, so there is plenty of Christian theology out there that is susceptible to this heresy, but I am pretty sure its origins in Western thought is Platonism rather than Christianity.
shamgar
18d ago
I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.
I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.
This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.
However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.
shamgar
21d ago
Japan, South Korea and China aren't exactly bulwarks of feminism compared to western countries and yet they have even lower birth rates than most European countries.
shamgar
1mo ago
My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.
Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.
Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.
shamgar
7mo ago
I have recently passed 30 so it might be ageing is a part of it, but I guess I hoped significant deterioration of my immune system to start later than my early thirties. I did also get covid for sure once but probably twice. If it does have a longterm impact on the immune system that could very well be it.
shamgar
7mo ago
As for vitamin D, sleep, alcohol consumption and stress, I don't think there is a significant change in between the earlier period where I barely got ill and the past year where I caught colds/flu multiple times.
shamgar
7mo ago
Previously I would maybe catch 0-2 colds a winter, never get too ill due to it and recover quickly, but in the past year I have gotten a cold/flu maybe like 4 or 5 times and I think I am getting worse symptoms (e.g. having a mild fever one or two days when I catch a cold, which I never used to) and taking longer to recover than I would previously. This has led me to wonder whether something might be affecting my immune system, but I am pretty sure that I did not make any significant changes in obvious factors like sleep, diet, activity level, stress, etc. Does theMotte have any other ideas what might cause one to get ill more often and more severely and what can be done about it?
shamgar
8mo ago
In Rome there are a bunch of obvious sights to see if you are interested in history. In twelve hours you probably struggle seeing all the main attractions already, but if you have some time left for some reason: the Basilica of San Clemente is itself a monumental church, although there are many more impressive ones in Rome, but you can enter excavations of a 4th century church below that, and then you can enter even lower excavations of a 1st century house that was used for a Mithras cult below the 4th century church. A Medieval church, built on top of a church from antiquity, built on top of effectively a Mithras temple and you can enter all those buildings. I thought that was a pretty cool place to visit. Another interesting church to visit in Rome is the Sant'Ignatio. While building it they ran out of funds to build a dome and then the painter managed to make a painting on the ceiling which very convincingly produces the illusion of a dome from the perspective when you enter the church. It's a fun gimmick to see if you happen to be close to it.
In Napoli, the Vesuvius and Pompei are obvious attractions. I haven't been to the Vesuvius, because somehow both times I was there the weather was terrible and they closed off the mountain due to safety reasons (that's what I get for avoiding tourist crowds in the winter I guess). Pompei I thought was very impressive to see. Another slightly lesser known one that is also very impressive is Herculaneum (or Ercolano in Italian). It is a town buried under lava from a Vesuvius eruption just like Pompei and while it is much smaller and lesser known than Pompei, it is actually for the most part better preserved. Some difference in how it was covered by the eruption means that there is more organic material, like paint and wood, that was preserved and survives until the present.
shamgar
8mo ago
Yes, because of Easter. Also, I saw an argument about the moral impact of Christianity somewhere and that got me thinking about things like slavery and infanticide in the Roman Empire. Being a Christian and that playing an important role in my daily life pretty much makes sure I think about it in passing pretty much every day.
shamgar
8mo ago
I think Hyperbolica does a much better job at getting you to experience hyperbolic space, because you actually walk around 1st person in a Hyperbolic world, whereas HyperRogue uses a top down perspective and tessellation to represent hyperbolic space.
One big difference is also that HyperRogue is much more challenging. I've never really played other roguelikes, but I think they are supposed to be very challenging and HyperRogue sure was for me, which also meant I did not get very far. Hyperbolica being a pretty straightforward simple adventure game almost feels like the opposite, where it was pretty short and easy and for me it almost felt more like a showcase for the concept of a 3d first person hyperbolic game, than a fully fleshed out game in its own right. That was not a problem for me by the way, because I think the concept is so cool that I am more than happy to pay some money for a good showcase of a hyperbolic world in which I can walk around 1st person, but it's good to have realistic expectations going into it. For reference, looking at my steam library, I have 3,5 hours in Hyperbolica and completed the game, whereas I have 11 hours in HyperRogue and I feel like I achieved almost nothing in it.
In some sense HyperRogue is probably a much better game, at least if you are into roguelikes. As an experience of hyperbolic space however, I much prefer Hyperbolica.
shamgar
8mo ago
shamgar
8mo ago
For people interested in indie games with weird physics: 4d golf just came out. I've played it for a bit over an hour now and I'm really enjoying it. From seeing footage in devlogs which the dev posted before on his youtube channel, I was kind of skeptical as to how well it would work. However, despite still not feeling like I completely understand what's going on all the time with 4d space, surprisingly I got a bit of an intuition for it pretty quickly. Only in one very long course in an extra challenge level did I end up getting completely disoriented and having no clue where I was and where I should go.
It's by the same dev as Hyperbolica, an adventure game in non-Euclidean space (mostly hyperbolic space). I enjoyed Hyperbolica as well, but that felt more like a boring adventure game with a fun gimmick which I happened to like a lot. I just had fun walking around in a hyperbolic world and some simple mini games and puzzles became fun because they required you navigating through hyperbolic (and in one case spherical) space. However 4d golf actually feels like a fun game. Obviously mini-golf isn't a revolutionary idea, but because we only have the fun bit where you have to navigate through 4d space without it being dressed up as a mediocre adventure game, it feels less gimmicky to me.
If you are interested in how a first person game in a 4d world works, or in non-Euclidean worlds for that matter, the dev has a bunch of devlogs on his youtube channel trying to explain the concepts behind it and explaining some of the issues in developing the game.
shamgar
9mo ago
shamgar
9mo ago
I think what you describe is the current situation in France. While I do not see a realistic path to get this implemented in the USA anytime soon, France at least sets a precedent for a modern Western country to make it illegal to gather racial data.
To be clear, this is very much not going to be a steelman of their beliefs because I'm trying to describe a failure mode in a couple of sentences. The problem is mostly that they can be overly passive in certain ways. There is a common doubt about whether one is part of the elect in these communities and a fatalistic attitude towards this, because it's all God's grace and they can't do anything about it. This is caused by a combination of an extreme emphasis on personal conversion and an extreme emphasis on predestination which leads to people doubting whether they are saved because they did not have the right type of personal conversion experience and their response is waiting and hoping that they will someday be converted by God.
The overly strong emphasis on personal religious experience can be problematic in itself, but it is especially toxic in combination with a type of Calvinism that pretty much only allows them to use verbs in the passive mode when discussing spiritual matters and anything other than God is the subject. There are churches in the Dutch bible belt where you will find a thousand people twice a Sunday, but only a third or less of confessing members will feel like they are true Christians and for instance won't participate in the Lord's Supper, because they feel like they haven't really been converted yet. People will in some sense live like faithful Christians all their life, believe God exists, believe they are sinful and need salvation from God, believe Jesus died to bring about that salvation, etc. but at the same time they will tell you they haven't been converted yet and maybe they are just not part of the elect and will go to hell and then continue just wait and hope that their salvation may someday come to pass. In my view, they can just convert if they want to, God's grace is already at work in them in fact that they even want to be converted. Or maybe they already are converted and they don't have to doubt their salvation because they didn't have the right type of religious experience.
Again I'm not doing justice to these communities because I am zooming in on a particular problem that affects them. The problem is not solely caused by Calvinism but it is definitely exacerbated by a particular application of Calvinism.
EDIT: I just realized the "they" in your post might refer to either the Dutch hypercalvinists that I mentioned at the end of my post, or Luther and Calvin. I wrote my post interpreting it is the former. If purely looking at Luther and Calvin, I think it is more of a theoretical problem and not super important. I don't feel the fatalism I described in my post affects them. The reason I do have a clear preference for using the free will language, contrary to Luther and Calvin, is because of the fatalism I see in some Dutch reformed churches around me, which I think would be undermined by a clearer view of free will and also because I feel it undermines some caricatures of Reformed theology.
shamgar
9mo ago
To be clear, I agree that Luther and Calvin were more concerned with a moral sense of free will as you put it in another post. Actually in the conclusion of "Reformed Though on Freedom" the authors of the book touch on this topic as well:
We can distinguish between the religious intentions behind playing down free choice and working this out in an explicit ontology. Given the context of the Reformation, it is quite understandable that Luther and Calvin combated the idea that man is free to work out his own salvation, although with divine help. The moral and spiritual consequences of sin are at stake, and in this respect the Reformers rightly teach the total corruption of man.
So yeah, the view of the book which I think I agree with, isn't that Luther and Calvin were completely wrong and later generations of theologians fortunately completely rejected their view. Rather, Luther and Calvin correctly emphasized the corruption of fallen man over and against a more optimistic view of human nature that was common in the late Medieval/ early Modern period, but in doing so they made some statements that have unfortunate philosophical consequences. Later generations of theologians had more or less the same idea about the spiritual and moral consequences of sin, but were a little more careful and nuanced in working it out philosophically. While, to be clear, I don't think this should lead us to a negative view of Luther and Calvin at all, I don't think it is a completely theoretical point either. I know at least in the Netherlands, where I am from, there are some very conservative Reformed groups that fall into some sort of hyper Calvinism who would benefit greatly if they were told that contrary to popular belief, people like Gomarus and Voetius believed in free will.
shamgar
9mo ago
This view is correct as far as I can gather from the book I linked to. Albeit with the caveat that John Calvin himself and Luther did reject the idea of free will. That being said, the book presents authors who for instance contributed to Reformed confessions and are all influential figures in the Reformed tradition, so I think it is reasonable to say that the Reformed tradition had a view similar to what you describe, even though Calvin himself did not.
shamgar
9mo ago
I cannot access the review unfortunately.
To put it briefly, the view described by @urquan is pretty much the view that the theologians described in the book have. There are a lot more details about things like different types of necessity, how free choice functions before the Fall, after the Fall, after regeneration and after glorification, etc. but the overall view is pretty much what urquan described. Also, the book deals mostly with free will specifically, not with all the doctrines of elections. So the text provided for e.g. Gomarus deals with all sorts of philosophical ideas about how free will works, but he does not go into supralapsarianism or anything like that.
However, you are also correct about Luther and Calvin not having that view! The authors of ‘Reformed Thought on Freedom’ actually acknowledge that explicitly in the conclusion of their book when discussing possible objections. I know that it sounds implausible that Calvin and Luther had anti free choice views whereas pretty much all their successors the next couple of centuries did try to retain a notion of free choice. However, based on what I’ve read in the book, I am inclined to believe that. The later theologians all using a scholastic philosophical apparatus are very careful to retain free choice, despite affirming a very high view of God’s sovereignty. For what it’s worth, Calvin at least does hint at a little bit of nuance in his views at some point in the Institutes. I’d have to take some time to find the passage again, but I remember that somewhere in the Institutes Calvin says that fallen humans sin ‘necessarily’ but aren’t ‘coerced’ to sin. So they can’t not sin, they sin freely in some sense. This seems to hint at something more like the view that Urquan described and which later Reformed theologians also defended, albeit without the careful technical scholastic language used by later Reformed theologians and there are other places where Calvin does not seem to show this nuance.
Note that I am here specifically claiming the Reformed tradition as Reformed Orthodoxy developed retained a notion of free choice, not that they didn’t believe God foreordained everything. How there can be an omnipotent and omniscient God, who knows and allows and in some sense causes everything that is, while also somehow not being the author of evil and allowing for human freedom, remains a tricky question. There is a long tradition from the Church Fathers, through the Middle Ages and into Modernity of theologians grappling with that problem. I am not even claiming here that the Reformed scholastics were particularly successful in their approach to answer this question, just that mainstream Reformed theology from the sixteenth up to and including the eighteenth century, stands in the same line as the Medieval scholastics trying to reconcile Gods sovereignty with human freedom. In fact, somebody like Bernard of Clairvaux who made some distinctions between different types of necessity gets cited approvingly a bunch of times by different theologians discussed in the book. Some of the theologians seem to not like the standard Latin term for free will ‘liberum arbitrium’, although they all acknowledge that the Church Fathers used that term and so they also seem uncomfortable (unlike Calvin and Luther) with completely rejecting that term. However, when you read the treatises in the book, it becomes clear that they are accusing their Roman Catholic and Remonstrant interlocutors of something like what we would call a libertarian free will view, while they themselves argue for something more like what we would call compatibilism today.
You specifically mention Gomarus, so let me try to summarise the treatise on free will from Gomarus provided in the books. Gomarus first talks about what free choice is:
Free choice is the free power of a mind-gifted nature to choose from those [means] leading to a certain goal, one [means] proposed by reason above another, or to accept or reject one and the same [means].
He goes on to make a distinction between free choice (liberum arbitrium) and will (voluntas). The will is concerned with what we want, i.e. with goals, whereas the free choice is concerned with means, i.e. making a concrete choice between A or B. Let me give an example to try and explain this distinction. If somebody is thirsty and wants to drink a glass of water, the thirst and the goal of satiating that thirst, is the voluntas. Nobody thinks somebody made a conscious free choice to be thirsty and desire a glass of water, that’s not what people talk about when they say ‘free will’. The person in the example then has a choice to drink a glass of water or not. That’s the liberum arbitrium. Unless he has knowledge that the glass of water is poisoned or something he will more or less certainly choose to drink the glass of water, but he was completely able to choose not to drink the glass of water.
After a bunch of specific definitions and distinctions and technical terms and stuff as is common in scholastic theology, Gomarus goes on to describe free choice in four states, the state before the Fall, the state after the Fall, the state after regeneration and the state after glorification. As I understand it, the key here is this distinction between liberum arbitrium and voluntas. The potency to choose either A or B, i.e. liberum arbitrium, is affirmed by Gomarus in all those four states. What changes, is the voluntas. The fallen unregenerate man has a corrupted voluntas that is no longer oriented towards God, but towards sin. Therefore, though he is completely free in the choices that he makes, he will always use that freedom to sin, because that is now his goal:
Although the unregenerate are not able to do anything but sin, they do it freely, for they elicit the exercise (exercitium) of an act in such a way that they are able not to elicit it, and they are in a way masters of their own acts. However, with respect to the kind (species) of act, they are determined, since they are able to do nothing else but sin and have evil as their object, under the pretext of good. Besides, it is not otherwise for the good angels, who, confirmed in grace, are necessarily determined with regard to the kind of act, for they are able to do nothing else but good, even if [the exercise] to elicit an act here and now is totally free for them.
So Gomarus does not deviate from Reformed ideas about total depravity and such. What he argues is that man being fallen and in some sense not able to do anything but sin, is compatible with humans being free. They sin, not because of some sort of necessity, but because, their nature, being corrupted after the Fall, they want to. The argument Gomarus uses here about angels is also used a couple of times by other theologians in the book. Can good angels, glorified saints in heaven or even God sin? Christians typically believe it’s certain God is not going to sin, or that glorified saints in Heaven are not going to fall into sin again, but it would also be rather absurd to claim that God or glorified saints are not free. So this must mean it is possible for your will to be so strongly confirmed in good, that you will certainly always freely choose to do good. Likewise, for the unregenerate man, their will is corrupted to the extent that they will always freely choose to do sin.
I am not saying that this view is perfect or that the Reformed scholastics are able to answer all the questions this raises in a satisfactory way. But it is clear that somebody like Gomarus, who has a reputation of being a hardcore Calvinist, because he is the one who originally started the beef with Arminius himself, surprisingly actually confirms humans have liberum arbitrium, even in their fallen state, despite John Calvin and Luther rejecting that term.
Understandable. For what it's worth, as someone who is mostly a lurker, these threads are one of the things that keep me lurking.
shamgar
9mo ago
For what it's worth, historically Reformed theologians did resort to something more like compatibilist arguments. I know this claim sounds unlikely in a world where Calvinists proudly adhere to determinist views and claim there is no free will and so forth, so let me provide a source for it. Unfortunately, it turns out that through liberal theology on the one hand and anti-intellectual fundamentalism on the other modern Protestantism has jettisoned quite a bit of its theological tradition.
shamgar
9mo ago
I have read a fair bit of Calvinist theology from John Calvin himself up to contemporary stuff and I've never had a sense that there was some sort of class struggle going on behind it. Where did you get this idea?
shamgar
11mo ago
Your mention of Solzhenitsyn peaked my interest a little, but after having looked at it for a bit as far as I'm concerned it's not difficult to acces at all all. It has a pretty big wikipedia article. It's been translated to German and French. In German it looks like you have to get it second hand (although you can find offerings easily) and in French you can just buy it on amazon. And apparently they're working on an English translation due next year.
There are also other works by Solzhenitsyn which haven't been translated to English yet by the way, not just the one that's about Jews.
My point is simply the hard problem of consciousness. The existence of a conscious AGI might further bolster the view that consciousness can arise from matter, but not how it does. Definitively demonstrating that a physical process causes consciousness would be a remarkable advancement in the study of consciousness, but I do not see how it answers the issues posed by e.g. the Mary's room thought experiment.
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