FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
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User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
Have there been any notable cases of national injunctions being used to successfully gain value? All the ones I've heard of have been wielded by blues. If this tool hasn't been used by reds, why would removing it put reds in a worse position?
A lot of things seem to work this way lately; if a thing is only of value to one tribe, the other tribe has little incentive to preserve it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
I do not think this level of low-effort sarcasm is conducive to good discussion. This is a warning; please do not post this way in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others.
I've seen Musk and others doing I/O. I/O is not read/write. The difference is one involves with a widget and your mind that you could otherwise do with your hand and your mind, and the other involves directly reading or changing your mind. When Musk has a working, rigorously accurate lie detector, let me know.
It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.
If this is true, as opposed to it being strictly impossible, could you give me some examples of mental information being extracted deterministically from a human mind?
The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.
A chip die is a tool we use to make a chip the way we want it. A BIOS is a tool we use to make basic adjustments to how a computer functions. We cannot make human minds the way we want them, with a uterus or by any other known means. We cannot make basic adjustments to how they operate, through the genome or by any other known means. It is not that the production process is insanely complicated; that would imply we could have some reasonable certainty that if we buckle down and work at it we should crack it in short order. But in fact, we do not know how to make significant positive changes to the human brain, and we have no idea if significant positive changes to the human mind are possible even in principle. Von Neumann seems to have had a superior human brain. He does not seem to have had a superior human mind; all evidence I've seen indicates that he was quite human in all the usual ways. I do not believe that a civilization of Von Neumanns would achieve Utopia, nor even lack criminals; I do not think you should believe this either.
The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.
Why bring it up then? My point was that confident claims about things you believe will happen in the future are not evidence.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Well, let's try again, then.
I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.
In a very real and very important sense, standing on top of a large box does not help you get to the moon.
In this same sense, smashing a computer with a baseball bat does not demonstrate that you can code. It does not demonstrate that you can almost code, or that you are incrementing toward the ability to code. Medieval amputations had at least some appreciable chance of increased survival chances of the patient, and so are an example of very crude, very early surgery. Lobotomies are mind destruction, not mind control.
As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.
That is I/O, not read/write. It's pretty neat, and I'm all for it, but it is not actually what we are talking about here. I can type with my fingers, this would let me type with my brain, but the typing is the same. Some examples of actual read/write technology:
- a working love potion.
- a reliable lie detector.
- granular memory editing or legible playback.
When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said
Coincidentally I have not studied them.
...It is probably pretty hard to see a historical pattern in a part of history you have not and will not look at.
This appears to me to be a deflection/smear akin to "John Money who coined the term 'gender' was an icky pedo" if taken uncharitably, and if taken charitably it seems that you are arguing with dead wrong Materialists whereas I expect you to be arguing with me.
Okay, let's try a different way then.
As I understand it, you believe that science is advancing toward deterministic interaction with the human mind. Not the brain, the mind. Not Ted Chiang's microscopic gold-foil windmills, but the air currents winding between them:
Here too I observed a latticework of wires, but they did not bear leaves suspended in position; instead the leaves flipped back and forth almost too rapidly to see. Indeed, almost the entire engine appeared to be in motion, consisting more of lattice than of air capillaries, and I wondered how air could reach all the gold leaves in a coherent manner. For many hours I scrutinized the leaves, until I realized that they themselves were playing the role of capillaries; the leaves formed temporary conduits and valves that existed just long enough to redirect air at other leaves in turn, and then disappeared as a result. This was an engine undergoing continuous transformation, indeed modifying itself as part of its operation. The lattice was not so much a machine as it was a page on which the machine was written, and on which the machine itself ceaselessly wrote.
My consciousness could be said to be encoded in the position of these tiny leaves, but it would be more accurate to say that it was encoded in the ever-shifting pattern of air driving these leaves. Watching the oscillations of these flakes of gold, I saw that air does not, as we had always assumed, simply provide power to the engine that realizes our thoughts. Air is in fact the very medium of our thoughts. All that we are is a pattern of air flow. My memories were inscribed, not as grooves on foil or even the position of switches, but as persistent currents of argon.
The above is a strict improvement on the standard brain-as-a-computer/mind-as-a-program metaphor, in my view.
I am claiming that:
- Deterministic technological interaction with the human mind is isomorphic to mind reading or mind control.
- There is no evidence of working mind reading/control technology currently existing.
- There is no evidence of meaningful progress toward working mind control tech in the near future. I note that you and others disagree on this point, but I think my claim is well-founded.
- We do not know if such technology is possible even in principle. There are solid theoretical reasons to believe that it would be fundamentally or practically intractable, even under strict materialist assumptions..
- If such technology were possible, we have zero information about how far we are from it, whether ten or a thousand or a million years.
And here's the part I've been trying to get across to you above:
- There is more than a century's history of people claiming to be scientists, claiming further to have developed mind control technology, having their claims taken seriously by society at large, only to turn out to be complete frauds.
- This history demonstrates that we, collectively, are really bad at identifying fraudulent claims of mind control technology. The apparent reasons for this are illuminating to a number of interesting questions, but it is enough here to note the evident tendency.
- Inability to identify fraudulent claims of mind control technology has repeatedly led to woeful disasters.
- The above problems are not limited to mind control tech, they manifest in many other areas of tech as well, often with dire results. This is a serious problem with our entire paradigm, and it deserves to be taken seriously.
Therefore:
- I evaluate all claims of mind control technology based on strict empiricism. If you want me to believe mind control technology is possible, I want to see a rigorous demonstration of actual mind control. Until then, I think it is prudent to assume that all such claims are fraudulent.
Pointing to the march of actual technology does not answer my objection. I am pointing to the march of fake technology being treated as though it was real.
...And all of this is secondary to the point I've been trying to make through all these discussions, which is that axioms and empirical facts are different things, and that people commonly mistake or conflate the two. A lot of people believe Determinism, and think they believe it because it is empirically proven. In fact, there is zero empirical proof or even direct empirical support for Determinism. These people are believing it axiomatically, but do not recognize it as an axiom. All beliefs are chosen. Not all beliefs are chosen directly. Losing sight of how a belief was chosen is the easiest way to conclude that beliefs arrive in some other way than choice.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
The pretense is in ignoring compatibilism.
I am neither ignoring nor even rejecting compatibilism. Compatibilism is an axiom, not an empirical claim. I object to compatibilism only when people claim to have demonstrated it empirically, because I am pretty sure they have not in fact done that.
My objection to Determinism is not "I don't feel like I'm a machine". My objection is strictly empirical: you cannot in fact manipulate me like a machine, and that sort of manipulation is the central characteristic of machines.
I am communicating with you right now, and from my perspective no part of this communication is based on assuming non-determinism.
Just so. You are assuming materialism/non-determinism. You are treating materialism/non-determinism as an axiom. I do not object to you doing so, because this is exactly what axioms are for. Nor do I claim that I can prove your axioms wrong, because that is not how axioms work. At best, I might be able to present evidence that does not fit nicely into your axioms, giving you the choice of discarding the evidence or the axiom, but even this is difficult to accomplish and boils down to an apparently-free choice on your part.
Other people do use materialism/non-determinism as an axiom, and then claim that it is not an axiom but an empirical fact. I have been arguing at some length and for some time that axioms and material facts are different things, and that confusing them leads to further confusion and often to outright disaster.
And same as the last time we had this conversation, I genuinely do not care what other people did under the label of capital m Materialism before I was born.
...Got a link to the previous version for context? In any case, to the extent that this is true, then you and I have no dispute. But I am interested in what other people did and are still doing under the label of Capital M Materialism, because I think their arguments are wrong, and I can demonstrate that those arguments have been enormously influential and have shaped our world for the worse on a vast scale.
I am not claiming you are part of a Movement, and am pretty sure I never have. I am claiming there is a very clear Movement, and a lot of people, including a lot of very prominent people, are part of it, and that one of the basic characteristics of this movement is conflating axiomatic arguments with empirical arguments, the better to pass their prejudices and fantasies off as scientific fact. I am not claiming that Materialism as an axiom can be disproved. I am claiming that Materialism as an empirical fact has at least two glaring holes, and that people who claim materialism is an empirical fact have a long history of lying.
If you tell me that you reason from the assumption that all phenomena are part of a chain of unbroken cause and effect emerging solely from the physical laws founding reality, that is fair enough. If you tell me that we can say, as an empirical matter, that we can observe the cases of all effects, well, no, we cannot in fact do that. If you tell me that things we cannot observe or interact in any way nonetheless exist and are "Materialistic", well, no, that is not what that word means.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.
I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".
But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.
Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
Can you give me a quick summary of your understanding of Materialism and Determinism in the scientific era, and also your understanding of when Materialism, Determinism and Atheism began being taken seriously as workable axioms?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.
But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.
The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.
The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
I've thought about starting a substack, just to have a place to collate ten years of writing if nothing else. Sadly, for the moment, no dice. You can always link to comments here if it helps.
The claim as I understand it:
You have social media models, women who are making a living squarely in the "model" category of posting pictures of themselves in skimpy clothes or bikinis or whatever, but are not selling nudes or selling actual sex, don't have an Onlyfans, aren't advertising availability as a sugar-baby, etc. Super-rich guys from Dubai (or presumably elsewhere, but Dubai is the usual claim) DM them soliciting straightforward prostitution, offering to fly them to the guy's location in a private jet, pay them an absurd sum for a considerable amount of degeneracy, maybe let them have a mini-vacation afterward, and then fly them home, and the women find this offer acceptable. To the super-rich Dubai guys, this is essentially ordering takeout as the money involved is insignificant. For the women, the money is very significant, and it turns out that they do indeed have a price. It is claimed that this happens often enough that it is A Thing, an element of the social media ecosystem of which common knowledge more or less exists. It's sort of the difference between people looking for work and people willing to be headhunted.
The quoted phrase is the above, framed maximally-uncharitably.
I recall reading about awake brain surgery experiments where interacting with certain parts of the brain produced phenomena in the consciousness, as reported by the person having their brain prodded with electrodes. That seems like a straightforward case of pointing to gears and doing gear things with them.
We already know that our minds and wills interact with the material world. You can make me experience pain by poking me with a pin, or deaden the pain with morphine. You can make me feel euphoria by putting me on a roller coaster. You can make me stop completely by damaging my brain.
Think about it in computer terms: I/O is not Read/Write; naïvely, mouse and webcam drivers are not alone sufficient to work with CPU and RAM. Empirical demonstration of the brain equivalent of Read/Write would be mind reading or mind control. If this were even weakly possible, the world around us would look very, very different than it does. You can induce subjective experiences by zapping the brain. You cannot predict behavior to any significant degree by reading the brain, and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.
If you take a soldering iron to your PC's CPU and RAM, you won't be able to do anything useful either, yet we do know PCs are material and, barring the occasional bit-flip by radiation, deterministic/mechanistic.
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc. Maybe those things will exist in the future, and alternatively, maybe Jesus Christ will appear in the sky tomorrow to judge the quick and the dead. All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.
[EDIT] - It should go without saying that none of the above supports a claim that Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Odinism, the Imperial Cult, Shinto, Buddhism or any other non-materialistic system of belief has a better claim to truth than Materialism. We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
What makes something mechanistic isn't a label of "mechanistic" slapped on it, it's that you can actually demonstrate the gears by doing gear things with them: turn gear A, which turns gear B, and so C, and so D, and so E. Stop gear A, and gear E also stops. People can and have slapped a "mechanistic" label on the conscious human mind. That doesn't change the fact that they can't actually point to gears or do gear things with them when it comes to those minds. The distinction is crucial, and the blind spot created by ignoring it is considerable.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9d ago
But the middle is a rather anodyne thing: acknowledge that excessive sex-positively drives behavior that makes neither men nor women satisfied, while at the same time acknowledging that total abstinence outside of marriage is neither desirable nor achievable.
I'll agree that total abstinence outside of marriage isn't achievable at the population level; humans will inevitably human. In what way is it not desirable or achievable at the individual level? If a guy and a girl abstain from sex outside of marriage, get married, and so cease to abstain from sex inside marriage, what has this cost them?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
By all means, lay out this excluded middle ground. What's the answer to the problem? What's the difference between an endpoint and a frontier?
Well - if I understand "we're not always capable of evaluating deep connections" correctly, the Christian answer is not even "I don't have time for your stupid questions", it's "I don't know how all of this works myself, but I trust the textbook and you should too".
...With the attendant evidence that trusting the textbook has a long history of delivering net-positive results, sure. Compare that to novel theories with no track record at best, emerging from "science" that is in fact negative-sum social status tournaments with minimal connection to concrete reality.
The ability to admit uncertainty is greatly preferable to false certainty. It's what you know that just ain't so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
Yes, progressives say "it's not my job to educate you" as well.
"neither of us are capable of rigorously evaluating deep consequences" is a true and relevant statement, though it may not be dispositive. "I don't have time for your stupid questions, go look up the answer in the textbook" is two lies for the price of one: first, the person does in fact generally have time to answer questions, they just don't want to, and second, the textbook doesn't have the answers either. The equivalence you are drawing is non-existent.
Traditionalists are just the progressives of 50 years ago, after all.
No, they aren't. Fifty years ago Progressives and Traditionalists were in direct conflict with each other, on roughly similar terms as we see now. The main difference was that fifty years ago they were arguing what the results would be, and now we're arguing over what the results have been.
If the only difference between you and them is that they have the social power to enforce it and you don't
It isn't. We build, they destroy. We have a track record of producing positive-sum, complex societies that function long-term. They have a track record of producing negative-sum parasitic structures that extract value and burn it for no positive outcome, often based on establishing a social consensus based on lies.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
10d ago
I think you have been well trained by enemies of Christianity.
Solid statistical evidence is a pretty recent invention, and its accessibility to the public even more recent. In the meantime humans live human lives and require human guidance.
Succeed in providing that guidance, and you may remove the proof needed to demonstrate why the guidance should be tolerated.
I was raised evangelical and converted to Orthodoxy and have never heard it suggested that swearing is somehow implicitly sinful.
Raised Church of Christ and returned to it, here. We were taught to avoid both blasphemy and obscenity as sinful. "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouth..."
Apart from failing to cultivate a relationship with Christ I'm unable to think of any behavior typically described as sinful that doesn't have observable material costs.
I think you might well be correct, but it's very easy to lie to oneself about this.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Usually, the word "sinful" is taken to mean an appeal to abstract, unfalsifiable moral commandments dependent on faith in some religious nonsense for even the slightest form of coherency, not "here is the solid statistical evidence that consumption of this media will make your life objectively worse by your own values."
It seems to me that the population is moving from seeing porn consumption less like saying "fuck" and more like smoking cigarettes, and that this is because porn consumption is in fact more like smoking cigarettes than it is like swearing. There are significant observable costs to consumption and the industry that supports it, even from within the Materialist frame.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
One might draw a parallel to (broadly speaking) Democrats and smoking tobacco. In the 90s, there was a claim around the Republican side of things that the Democrats were going to ban tobacco. One could believe this, because it was very clear that the Democrats as a group were not fond of the tobacco industry, and because the people who really did want to ban tobacco seemed mostly to be deep-blue democrats, and also because the people making this comparison somehow didn't mention counterexamples. But in fact, Democrats did not ban tobacco, nor did they make any serious effort to try to. Instead, they took numerous steps to paint tobacco consumption and the tobacco industry as sleazy, dirty, and dangerous, relying on coordinated social power and messaging to try to push people to drop the habit of their own volition, thus carving away the industry's financial base and reducing its lobbying power. What laws were passed were either focused on forcing the tobacco companies themselves into cooperating with this push, or else targeted attacks on areas where tobacco was framed in the worst light and where public support was strongest, such as the lawsuits.
I think this is a pretty good model for what an actual Red-Tribe attack on porn and the porn industry would look like.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
The Republicans will not ban abortion at the federal level. Neither will they commit significant political value to attempting such a ban.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
Online Politics Brain. Look at Pew data on religious identity instead of anecdotes.
...It seems to me that your arguments would benefit greatly from expansion into more than single-sentence, contextless dismissal. You appear to be arguing that the population as a whole is still moving away from religiosity. But my argument was not that people are moving toward Religion, but rather that they are moving away from liberalism and its axioms, upon which the Progressive edifice is founded. My argument is not that Conservative Christians will secure power, it is that power will lean somewhat more in our direction and very hard away from our most dedicated opponents, because our critiques are valid and theirs are not.
They're the ones who will be running for office in 2028. They won't live forever, but 2028 is what we're talking about here.
I am highly confident that none of the 2028 contenders will be Boomer-brained Gen-x-er preachers or middle-aged church ladies, in either party. I'm highly confident that the Republican 2028 contenders will be much more sympathetic to Conservative Christian social critique than they will be to Progressive social critique, and will consider protection of religious freedom for Conservative Christians as a winning political cause.
I'm weakly confident that Republicans will win in 2028, and I am highly confident that taking advice from the Hananiah set would degrade those odds, not improve them. The sort of reductive mental caching you seem to be deploying in this thread is a fair bit of the reason why. Rather than engage with what is actually happening, you consistently substitute factual realities for an imagined set more conducive to your axioms. Here, you are trying to round "Conservative Christians have persuasive critiques of our current culture" to "The Religious Right is ascendent, will try to jail people for viewing porn."
The problem with your claim, as I understand it, is that this is not actually going to happen, and the reason it isn't going to happen is not that people with power will take your advice. You can box phantoms for the next three years as much as you like; the world will proceed without you.
It also led to the 2000s, and the 2010s, and the 2020s. Lots of things look really great if you refuse to look at the long-term consequences. Meth, for instance.
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