Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
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User ID: 102
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6mo ago
As others say, you're at best making a semantic argument. I would also like to argue that communism is indeed more genocidal than Nazism.
"Damn everybody other than my ethic in-group" is not that impractical of a life project, it can even be argued that it's simply natural human inclination driven to extreme. "Damn inequality and hierarchy", on the other hand, is at odds with the very bedrock of reality. Hence the disparity in the body count of these two worldviews.
You can run out of undesirable racial groups to kill, but you absolutely cannot run out of your betters. Communist project is completed when the last proletarian shoots the last kulak in the head. Perfect communism in not possible in practice, much like a perfect circle must remain in the realm of platonic forms, but you can still go quite far - current world record of communism belongs to Pol Pot with up to a third of Cambodia's population dead
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
I can't speak for others, but I downvoted that comment (and yours) not just because I disagree, but first of all because I thought it would be funny. Sue me!:D
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
8mo ago
Idk man, "everything is futile and we are doomed, but it's fine, actually" was never a position I could wrap my head around. It feels...lazy? Indecisive? As if you are shrugging the problem off.
It might be easier for you to relate once you understand that it's not just fear we are talking of. I'm still young and full of vigor and death feels very much remote, but here we are. In the first place, it only took me a couple of years of my adolescence to surpass "obnoxious atheist" phase and think "wait a minute, something's off here"
Maybe our gap in understanding is caused by a missing element, like some inner romantic sentiment, or belief in fundamental human dignity. We are special beings endowed with the capacity to look at the material realm not only as participants, but as observers. And so, I claim, we can look beyond, see the insufficiency of mere matter. We can see that we are in a cage, so we deserve a way out. This here might cause you to raise an eyebrow, and maybe it's not the most logically robust claim, but it's fine. It's my intuitive conviction that comes from deep within, there's nothing I'm more sure of.
If all hopes come to nought and materialism is roughly correct, I'm ready to avow that it is not me, but the entire universe that is sick and misshapen and insane.
I broadly agree, and though I don't have inspiration to say too much, I will leave a quote that captures our atheist condition rather succinctly:
...In such a world, you are living your life inside a coffin. Now, this may be a large coffin, and certain things like love and family and rewarding work or temporary artistic experiences may distract you or please you for a certain time, but that time will pass and those things will fail and die, and you will be in the coffin whether you distract yourself from that horrible reality or not
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
2mo ago
I didn't quite reach Marcus Aurelius yet, but I've read a few books on Roman history this year and it's more or less a story of how Roman citizens just can't catch a break. I'm somewhat less impressed with Hoppean "kings have low time preference" argument now
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6mo ago
So what is actually the point of rating random comments? I feel like I missed the memo
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
6mo ago
Perhaps an analogy might help: I have ancestors who fought in the Red Army, but I would never stoop to branding them communists just because they decided to take part in fighting off Nazi invasion
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
7mo ago
This seems to be just a regular mildly charitable interpretation to me?
Per Merriam-Webster, Hunka would be a Nazi if he was either a
1.Member of the Nazi party
2.Supported Nazi ideology.
He wasn't a party member, and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi.
There's a small matter of him fighting under Nazi command but given the historical context, it's entirely plausible, indeed probable, that him volunteering had nothing to do with a sympathy toward Nazis, but rather hatred of communists
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
What a great find, thanks for sharing.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Latter. I just think that the times I live in are sufficiently interesting
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
Inspired by this post, but it's kind of buried there, and the topic has decidedly nothing to do with culture wars, so I took the liberty of taking it here. After going through a similar line of thought, I've concluded that the best argument in favor of free will I can think of is Magic.
"Magic is Awesome!" approach to free will
I owe Sapolsky for helping me to articulate this.
I recall him putting forward this very argument, complaining about how free will is incoherent and would have to be powered by magic. This got me wondering: does magic actually deserve to be dismissed with such contempt? For the purposes of this post, I explicitly reject the Clarkian definition of "magic" as anything merely outside of our current knowledge, but use it to indicate something that is inscrutable in a far more profound way. Consider two problems:
1. Consciousness. No scientific framework predicts it, no theory can explain it. No experiment can be devised to test it. We have no idea how consciousness works. What's more interesting is that we have no idea how to get an idea of how consciousness works. It doesn't have to be there, yet there it is. If this isn't Magic, what is?
2. Why are we here? Why is anything? One option is that one thing causes another, and another, back-propagating in the past...forever. All the way down. Personally, I find this idea unsatisfying somehow, if not downright annoying. But even if that's how it is, we are still left with the question of why does it do it, and the best you will ever be able to come up with is some variant of "it just does, I guess". This positively stinks of Magic.
The more old-fashioned alternative to an infinite causal chain is a finite causal chain, one that terminates with God—the uncaused cause, the unmoved mover... Magic? Magic.
We could even ask whether God could share a bit of this Magic juice with some of his creations; we could call it a divine spark or something like that.
That's part of the reason why common in these circles brand of autistic materialism doesn't sit right with me. Both the place we live in and our very direct experience of it seem to be a middle finger to rationality.
I don't believe that free will is something spurious and irrelevant to ethics and meaning. I'm also not convinced that linguistic atrocities like molesting the definition of free will until it's compatible with determinism are of any help here.
If you're of the same mind, "magic is awesome!" seems to be a nice motto to live by.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
10mo ago
Sure many basic human needs can be satisfied using the path you outlined, at least this might make you too busy for existential frustration, but one might ask - is that what's life really about? Would it be insolent and foolish to ask "is there more?" Is that a solution, or a way of preventing yearning for a solution from driving you mad?
Too late. Retrospectively, this development makes sense - Kulak always stood out from rat-influenced writers with his passionate diotribes relying less on well-thought, charitable arguments than evocative and sharp language mercilessly cutting through all the things, ideas and people many of us resent so much. Not exactly academically strict discourse, but fun to read, so whetever shortcomings he had were easy to ignore.
Alas, I strongly suspect that from now on, when stumbling on his posts I will remember that one time he managed to get his opinion entirely coincide with most hilarious excerpts from Russian state TV, chuckle a bit, and close the tab.
Farewell Icarus, it was fun to watch you fly before you burned your wings.
Are there actually many sci-fi books that excel not just at exploring fun sci-fi themes, but at actually delivering good prose and characters? The trend of having only the former is so persistent that I came to assume that having these two at the same time is supremely difficult for some reason, like running out of skill points when creating an RPG character.
First, we don't really know how consciousness works (nor do we know how to even begin to study it), so we must place some discount on animal lives all things being equal. Of course, it can also be applied to other humans, but to much lesser degree. Wouldn't it be a shame to go through so much trouble if it turns out that all or most animals we eat are good old cartesian machines?
Okay, this point is more of a funny food for thought than a serious argument; it's far more likely than not that some animals have subjective experience and can suffer. But if they do...so what?
As buddists figured out millenia ago, suffering is inextricable part of life. But what makes a life, even filled with suffering, worth living, worth preserving? It's quite tough to grap it precisely with language, but here's my take - it's the ability to choose your path, to ponder life's meaning, to appreciate the moment. You know, metacognition. Agency. All of the things animals lack.
Imagine that you died, and arrived at an audience to some kind of heavenly authority and it said - “Your mortal coil is over now, you could go to heaven, if you so desire. Though they say it's bit boring, would you be interested in reincarnation?” You nod.
“Alright. Let's see what positions are vacant right now…I know, there's one that would fit you very well. How about a cow? You will be born to a nice pack, in a lovely farm in rural France. A couple of years of chewing grass and shitting on it. I'm sure you will fit right in. Ready to embark?”
Good set up, good punchline, good joke, by all accounts. Don't know about you, but I would smile, maybe politely laugh a bit. But of course I would refuse. Because that's all that is - a joke. A life as a cow is self-evidently worthless to me.
Another angle - trolley dilemma. Is there a point at which you would sacrifice a human to save X number of cows? 100? 1000? even more zeros attached to the 1? For me, there's no such point.
All these bazillions of cows can go to hell as long as there are human lives at stake.
Resources are scarce. Time is precious. Why on earth would I spend it on improving well being of cattle?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
And these zealots are basically the self-appointed enforcers of community policy for all minecraft modding?
Perhaps not all, fabric is actually quite good these days
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
Certainly! It's the kind of book that is fun to analyze.
I don't follow, why give preference to spatial-reasoning tasks when defining who is smarter? Why not the one at which women are better?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
10mo ago
I would guess a lot of people were betting against Russia invading because they, including myself, thought this would be an incredibly stupid thing to do.
Year and a half later, I stand by this assessment.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
That picture of Pope Francis in a puffer coat got me thinking:
AI generation of highly realistic images is a problem. Ideally, we would want a reliable way to distinguish truth from lies. So we train another AI to spot the difference. Then someone trains a different AI to fool both humans and AIs.
Will this be an endless arms race? Will one side win?
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1yr ago
What makes you think that the planet can support only 2 billion long term? "Carrying capacity" is just a function of available technology. We can support much more than few centuries ago already. Long term ecological strain, global warming and so on are likewise, merely problems of engineering.
Exotic_cetacean
Aesthetics over ethics
1mo ago
You mean to say we should call him the computer guy?
Great idea, but I must admit I find it rather annoying to use, not even taking the lag into account. It would probably be more useful if implemented just with some hyperlinks, tags and collapsible lists
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