Goodguy
3hr ago
This makes no sense logically. LLMs being able to be human-mind-like is not proof that human minds are LLMs.
The actual reality is that we have no way to know whether some artificial intelligence that humans create is conscious or not. There is no test for consciousness, and I think that probably no such test is in principle possible. There is no way to even determine whether another human being is conscious or not, we just have a bunch of heuristics to use to try to give rather unscientific statistical probabilities as an answer based on humans' self-reported experiences of when they are conscious and when they are not. With artificial intelligence, such heuristics would be largely useless and we would have basically no way to know whether they are conscious or not.
Goodguy
3hr ago
Consciousness may be orthogonal to intelligence. That's the whole point of the "philosophical zombie" argument. It is easy to imagine a being that has human-level intelligence but no subjective experience. Which is not to say that such a being could exist, but there is also no reason to think that such a being could not exist. I see no reason to think that it is impossible for a being that has human-level intelligence but no subjective experience to exist. And if such a being could exist, then human-level intelligence and consciousness are orthogonal, meaning that either could exist without the other.
Goodguy
4d ago
Maybe we have different definitions of social sciences. I don't think that history, for example, is a waste of time from a scientific standpoint. You can't do experiments with history, but you can certainly use logic to figure out that some theories about what happened in the past are more likely to be accurate than others, you can search for additional primary evidence, and so on.
Goodguy
4d ago
History, economics, and political science are real sciences even if they are not as rigorous as physics and it is difficult or impossible to run experiments in them. Sure, there is a lot of ideological bullshit in all three of those fields, but there is also a lot of rational analysis. The typical kind of academic history writing that I have seen isn't some barely disguised attempt to push a political ideology, it is more like a lawyer's arguments in a legal case that revolves around whether something happened on a certain date. It is true that there are taboos that prevent some topics from being widely brought up, but that does not mean that these entire fields are worthless.
Goodguy
4d ago
The most common type of Democrat position isn't that Springfieldians overwhelmingly love the Haitian immigrants, it's that those Springfieldians who dislike the immigrants should change their minds and like them because the immigrants are objectively good for the community and in any case, even if they weren't, it is still good to let them into the country.
Goodguy
4d ago
Social sciences vary widely by the degree to which they are affected by ideology. History, for example, is a pretty rigorous field. Economics and political science both have important real insights. There is no such thing as a social science, or perhaps a science in general, that is completely free of ideology, but the idea that all social sciences are just sinecures for left-wing nutbags is simply factually inaccurate.
Goodguy
8d ago
In the US, even if you love fruits and vegetables, in my experience it is hard to find actually good ones. Even locally sourced farmer's market ones that I have had generally tasted flat and empty compared to some stuff I've had in other countries. I don't know how much the taste correlates with the nutritional value, but I'm sure that it at least somewhat does.
Goodguy
8d ago
Well, I already said that I think murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolutely way, so certainly those have a moral dimension for me. But promiscuity doesn't.
Also, I'm not trying to argue from authority, I'm just pointing out that I'm not a moral relativist or a nihilist, and I may or may not be a hedonist depending on how you define hedonism, yet I don't see any moral issue with promiscuity.
Goodguy
8d ago
It causes harm to the self if you're the kind of person who is harmed by having sex with 100 people in a day, in which case you shouldn't do it. If you're the kind of person who isn't harmed by it, your argument doesn't apply.
Goodguy
9d ago
Allowing oneself to weigh 600 pounds undoubtedly hurts one. Having sex with 100 people in a day does not undoubtedly hurt one.
Goodguy
9d ago
Agreed. They would have become legends even if they succeeded and then were immediately killed/arrested. The public outpouring of support for the person would be bigger than what Mangione is getting. But they failed.
Goodguy
9d ago
I am a pretty moral person. I have a strong moral code. I am generally nice to others. I try to help people. I think that things like murder and rape are fundamentally wrong in an absolute way. And I have absolutely no problem with someone having sex with 100 strangers in an hour. The idea that there would be a moral issue about it strikes me as somewhat absurd.
As for drugs, I would prefer that people not get addicted to them, but there is no moral dimension about it for me.
Goodguy
9d ago
A person becoming addicted to drugs to the point that he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system is a social problem because, well, he starts to be violent to people or overuse the healthcare system. A person choosing to have sex with 100 men in one day in a safe manner causes no harm to others that I can think of. I guess you can put forward complicated theories that boil down to some kind of magically contagious social rot, but I neither find having sex with 100 people in a day to be rotten nor am I convinced that its contagious nature is much of a problem.
The steelman idea is that alcoholism is a worse thing for an airline pilot or a politician than for a CRUD software developer or a librarian. Not in some fundamental essential moral sense of it being wrong, but just in the sense that it's morally wrong to continue doing a job which heavily affects people's lives while regularly in an impaired state.
Goodguy
9d ago
I wonder in what social circles that would be. In my social circles alcohol use has no correlation with political opinions.
Goodguy
9d ago
Well, that's why I said "if she doesn't enjoy it". Surely some people do. Aella for example.
Goodguy
9d ago
If she doesn't enjoy it, she should stop. But I don't see any fundamental problem with such virtuosic feats of sex. It's a bit weird in the same sense that hot dog eating contests are weird, but if the people involved were happy about it I wouldn't see any problem.
She might be able to find a fairly normal husband if she wants to, sure, and again I don't see any problem with it as long as both people are happy. A pussy doesn't develop magical destructive powers just because 100 dicks were inside of it in one day.
Also, I don't see why a trigger warning would be necessary. We regularly discuss things like wars, genocide, rape, and capital punishment on this site, so sex is pretty far down on the list of what should really trigger anyone who enjoys this place.
Goodguy
9d ago
The number of people one sleeps with has no moral dimension as far as I can tell. A doctor who saves people's lives and sleeps with dozens of people a month is morally better than a celibate or monogamous murderer.
Glorification of the killer, from what I can tell, is almost entirely happening on social media. Mainstream media (or, perhaps more accurately, legacy media) is almost without exceptions, from what I can tell, condemning his act and is painting him in an unglamorous light by doing things like showing unflattering visual pictures of him, emphasizing family/friend interviews in which people say that they are shocked and horrified by what he did, and sometimes rightly or wrongly pointing out that he came from a fairly well-off background. The "sexy killer" angle is almost entirely being put forward on social media. Mainstream media is only referring to that angle occasionally and when it does, it's just in the form of "some people online are calling the killer sexy".
I don't think one needs any theory of a coordinated conspiracy to explain the divide. Mainstream media has powerful norms that prevent them from glorifying political violence in the US domestic politics context. Furthermore, after years of often well-justified populist rage against mainstream journalism lies, it is understandable why mainstream journalists would feel a personal interest in not doing anything to encourage acts of violence against supposed or real representatives of the "establishment".
One angle of the whole event that I have not seen pushed as much as I would wish is that law enforcement seems to have responded to this high-profile killing with a massive deployment of assets that I doubt they would have done if some random Joe Shmoe, say, got killed in a home invasion or a street robbery. This genuinely insults me. I feel like a basic tenet of modern civilization should be that society should at least try to stop all murders by using a significant deployment of state power. Not just when a high-profile person gets killed in a lurid and politically relevant way. It feels obnoxious to live in a society that decides how hard to crack down on murder based on the killed person's socioeconomic status and on the level of media coverage of the killing. It's hard to feel good paying one's tax money to such a society.
I hope that I am wrong, but honestly it feels hard for me to believe that if I was killed tomorrow by some angry person or some street criminal, the nation's various police forces would devote nearly as much energy to finding the killer and bringing him to justice as they just did in trying to solve this case of the killed CEO. I understand the argument that society maybe should pay extra attention to deterring political assassinations, but I do not find it convincing on the most fundamental emotional level. I do not enjoy living in a society that has such a multi-tier system for deciding which killings deserve maximum police effort.
Agreed. I don't see why I should be happy about some global crusade that tries, and realistically probably fails, to save the Chinese people from their despotism while I have to call the employee to unlock the toothpaste at the store because our own society has increasingly made it possible to do violent crime and property crime,
Goodguy
16d ago
I'm a believer in de-escalating tensions with China. Their political system repulses me, but what is more likely to bring freedom to the people who are oppressed in their system, escalating tensions with the US or de-escalated ones? Many people were repulsed by Russian czarism in 1917, but when that system fell it was replaced by a vastly more brutal one. We don't necessarily need to fight. Why not try to be friends instead, at least as much as possible? This all doesn't necessarily have to be a zero sum game. Maybe we can all win. At the end of the day, I don't care much about the US economic success versus China at all, for me this geopolitical question is one that should be decided on moral grounds. How can we help China to liberalize, to become at least more like modern Japan or South Korea in the sense that they have at least some sort of functional democracy and civil liberties for people, with a limited amount of people going to jail just because the government doesn't like them. I feel like there are probably better ways to try to bring about that outcome than pure video game style strategic considerations of resources and tariffs and so on. The Chinese people, like Russians, are fundamentally somewhat poor biomass when it comes to liberalism... the average person of both ethnic groups is just fundamentally inferior to the average Westerner when it comes to liberalism, they might tend to not understand the benefit of it on a fundamental psychological level. But how to improve the biomass, is the question. I don't think that Russians or Chinese are fundamentally genetically incapable of liberalism, I doubt that it goes as deep as that. I always come back to thinking about how the Germans went from a backwater that probably didn't know that the Earth was round, 2000 years ago, to being the world's leaders in science about 1700 years later. How can we help the Chinese to make that happen? To turn them into nice people who don't necessarily want to conquer the world and oppress others, at least not any more than the modern West wants it (which is substantial, but at least we're not back in pure colonialism mode)?
The fundamental problem of being a typical software developer, in my opinion, is that it's essentially creative work that in practice runs like factory assembly line work because of business pressures, Darwinian pressures, Moloch (in the Scott Alexander sense), whatever you want to call it. I am not sure that "autists" do better at it because they have some special hyper-ability at it, I feel that it is more that "autists" (when I use that term I do not mean the psychology definition, I mean the pop culture one) do better at it because they care less about other ways of spending their time than someone like I does, so they just simply have more time that they are willing to devote to this often interesting but also often very dry activity, whereas I get bored and want to go do something that does not involve looking at a screen.
Being a software developer in a typical CRUD software company is kind of like being a novelist whose job depends on being able to write 12 decent novels a year. It doesn't psychologically work unless you're one of those rare people who lives and breathes engineering.
The fact that tech people have gone from being seen as geeks to being seen as billionaires is more meaningful than some people understand. This did not happen because the geeks developed better social skills, although they did. I agree with Marxists about little, but I do agree with them that politics is usually downstream of economics and technology. The geeks are taking over the world in part because the technology that they have helped to build has changed the calculus of the kinds of jobs that pay a decent living. On a deeper level, the reality is that the geeks are not any more in control of what is happening than anyone else is. The world situation is racing towards things we can barely predict, not so much because any people or groups of people are guiding it, but because there is a cold calculus of power that follows its own Darwinian logic. The global techno-human organism is stirring. Speaking of which, where is IlForte/DaseIndustries nowadays? I disagreed with probably more than half of his viewpoints, but I kind of understand his bleak outlook that values technological development over everything else when trying to comprehend the future.
I think that at some point the increasing development of technology will bump against some fundamental limits of Homo Sapiens and its ability to tolerate increasing techno-cyborg extensions of itself beyond its original nature. The "autists" of the world often do not understand this, they seem to have largely grown up in peaceful suburbs reading science fiction and fantasy novels in which the heroes they identify with generally win, and the current level of techno-cyborg extensions are not yet past their own abilities to master them, so they do not understand that total calamity that is possible, not from any particular fault of theirs - if they refused to play their role, others would be found by Darwinian force to do it eventually - but I do think it is interesting to see how the very people who are driving tech forward the most generally do not realize that what is happening is not that the geeks are finally winning... what is actually happening is that the geeks are just the instrument of a Nick Landian gigantic paradigm shift that cares nothing about the particular human beings that make up a part of its slow grasping forward. The "autists" are better able to be the inadvertent foot soldiers of all this because they are less affected by how being a human with emotions rubs up against the cold logic of power, they can compartmentalize it better than the average human can.
And so evolution grinds on. The good side of it is that living conditions for the average person in the West are much better than they were a few hundred years ago. It is much better to be a modern Westerner than to be some serf in the year 1200. That is a real phenomenon. The problem is that we're still going to die, so people still care about meaning, not just statistics. Knowing that you will die makes you want meaning, and meaning is something that software and geeks cannot deliver. Nor can Moloch. Indeed, Moloch is an antithesis of meaning. Western humanity marches forward to existences in which we are much physically safer than we were in the times of roving warlord gangs, which was the reality for most of human history. But that is perhaps little joy for an aware person in a world that is rushing by the cold calculus of Darwinian logic into a future in which the things that make being a human worthwhile are becoming less pragmatic.
The trans debate suffers from the very common problem of "the most loud, obnoxious, and obvious members of a group come to represent the group in the broader population's minds".
Other examples of this phenomenon:
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People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
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People thinking that individuals who are concerned about climate change are all annoying lefty activists who want to destroy capitalism.
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People thinking that the majority of black Americans are inner city gangbangers.
Etc.
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people. On the left, there is a purity spiral - "Do you even support trans people at all if you criticize these trans activists for being obnoxious and insane??? How dare you??? Are you even a leftist?". On the right, there is the obvious motive to focus on the most annoying trans activists and act as if those people represent trans people in general, since that helps the right overall get a culture war win.
Personally, I have never had any issue with trans people. I just find many of the more vocal trans activists to be repulsive. Not because they are trans, but because they are shrill and irrational fanatics.
On a side note, one thing I find interesting when other men say that they find male homosexuality disgusting is that I do not experience this, to the point that it's hard for me to even understand having such a reaction. The idea of having sex with a man repulses me somewhat, but there is no moral dimension to this feeling, for me it's just a subset of "the idea of having sex with someone I am not attracted to repulses me". When I see two men kissing it does not bother me in the least bit. I do wonder why some men grow up finding male homosexuality to be a fundamentally disgusting thing and others simply don't.
One thing I've learned over time is that it's true, "love is love". To me, a loving homosexual relationship is much more beautiful than a bitter, hate-filled heterosexual one.
One thing I want to mention about your quote:
Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
I think this is the classic "Madonna-whore complex". Or, more broadly, this kind of attitude is a limiting and in my view incorrect view of love and sexuality that separates it into, on the one hand, "pure beautiful love" and, on the other hand, "dirty sex". This is a very damaging way to exist, psychologically. It's damaging not just to oneself, but also to one's sexual partners. I say this as someone who used to have this kind of psychology when younger, but have since largely overcome it. I'm someone who is into some pretty kinky, rough, BDSM sex and I can say from experience that nothing about that kind of sex is incompatible with love and tenderness. Fulfilling each others' sexual appetites, no matter how raunchy and wild those might be, is one of the most loving things that two people can do for each other.
The idea that consciousness arises out of information processing has always seemed like hand-waving to me. I'm about as much of a hardcore materialist as you can get when it comes to most things, but it is clear to me that there is nothing even close to a materialist explanation of consciousness right now, and I think that it might be possible that such an explanation simply cannot exist. I often feel that people who are committed to a materialist explanation of consciousness are being religious in the sense that they are allowing ideology to override the facts of the matter. Some people are ideologically, emotionally committed to the idea that physicalist science can in principle explain absolutely everything about reality. But the fact is that there is no reason to think that is actually true. Physicalist science does an amazing job of explaining many things about reality, but to believe that it must be able to explain everything about reality is not scientific, it is wishful thinking, it is ideology. It is logically possible that certain aspects of the universe are just fundamentally beyond the reach of science. Indeed, it seems likely to me that this is the case. I cannot even begin to imagine any possible materialist theory that would explain consciousness.
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