This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The idea that qualia is "made up" or "not real" seems difficult to defend. You can verify for yourself right now as you're reading this that you are directly experiencing qualia at this very moment. It is not a speculative thing like a soul that may or may not exist. Qualia is the one thing you can be quite sure exists. "I think therefore I am."
Maybe qualia is not important or is not a useful distinction, but that's different from saying it's not real. And in practice most people seem to think that qualia is very important indeed, so you would need to do some serious heavy lifting to prove otherwise. For example, the moral difference between killing someone in a video game and killing someone in real life primarily comes down to the differences in the qualitative experiences the two acts produce; the video game death produces no negative qualia, the real death produces large amounts of negative qualia in the victim and their friends and relatives.
Where is the qualia? I am reading, my eyes are moving, information is being processed. All of those are real things. Existence is real. But where does qualia come in? If you use qualia to mean the 'experience of reading and thinking' then it has zero value. The experience of reading is inherent when you read. If you define qualia as having experiences, then why can't I define a soul as that which is necessary to have experiences? It's nonsense.
People in real life are not simulations running on a few hundred lines of code and some textures! There's a huge actual difference between a bandit in Skyrim and a bandit in the real world.
This seems like an admission that qualia in fact exist, which would refute your claim that it's "not real." Whether it has value is a different question.
What is your evidence for this claim? If I ask a human to read and summarize some text, the human will have the experience of reading. If I ask Chat GPT to read and summarize some text, it's unclear whether it will have any experience at all, and I think most people assume it does not. A cleaner example: a human has the experience of adding numbers whereas a simple digital calculator does not.
If the video game NPC had the subjective experience of being shot and dying, it would be immoral to kill the NPC. The moral weight of killing the NPC does not depend on how many lines of code are involved, but rather whether qualia are involved. This refutes your claim that qualia has "zero value."
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Maybe your interlocutor is a philosophical zombie.
Every time this subject comes up I wonder if zombies are the main life form in existence or if modernity has somehow created them. Who the hell comes up with the thought experiment of a “philosophical zombie” who is identical in every way but lacks consciousness and forgets to consider the possibility of p-zombie 2.0, one that seems identical until you ask them about consciousness?
And who but a zombie hears their interlocutor denying the existence of qualia and then tells them, “you lie!” without imagining that they might be accurately reporting on their own inner experience?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link