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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   38751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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No, that's exactly my point. It literally does not do that. It might trick you into thinking it does that, but it doesn't.

It does, though.

If you imagine a sexy large-breasted woman and do a google image search for "sexy large-breasted woman" then it might return images that satisfy your requirements, but none of them will be "your thoughts translated into image form" because none of them will match the exact woman you were imagining. Obviously the problem becomes more pronounced the more unique and complex the request is.

This is also true for every drawing done by hand. If you define art as only absolute perfection of thought into the material, there's quite possibly no art in the entire world. I cannot bring my exact thoughts to life, nor express them with all-encompassing breadth and detail to other people. What we can at best do is approximate, and AI will be an immense facilitator of that.

Would you plug yourself into the Matrix and live in a pleasant simulated world, assuming we could alter your memory so you wouldn't be aware it was a simulation?

You wouldn't even need to alter my memory. I have no moral or philosophical qualms with being a lotus eater. My sympathies lie firmly with the Merovingian.

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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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