FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
My understanding is that "Science" telling them so was a big part of it.
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
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
15d ago
see the comment here. This may be little more than a disagreement over semantics.
This is all well and good, but what stake do you put in your non-materialistic beliefs? How much does the Word of God guiding you trade off against anything an agnostic in your position would do?
The answer is "a considerable one"; I've completely changed most aspects of my life, in many cases entirely reversing my previous preferences or habits.
I don't want to be a Redditor about it, but I don't see the point of modern Christianity.
There is no point to "modern" Christianity. You are correct that many people claiming to be Christian are "cultural christians" for whom it is a fashion or a pose. On the other hand, there are also a lot of Christians like myself who are not partaking of "modern" Christianity but rather the old sort, and for whom it is an actual way of life. For us it appears to me that the benefits are as they always have been: considerable. It seems to me that the contrast grows increasingly stark as Modernity unspools itself into our collective society; the dating and relationship threads here on the Motte are as good an example as any.
Christians have gone from waging holy war against the heathens to missionary expeditions seeking conversions to "interfaith dialogue", from hanging homosexuals and other sinners to socially ostracizing them them to... IDK, frowning concernedly?
If we return to Deus Vult and the sword, will that satisfy you in some way? When Christians were serving in significant numbers in the recent middle east wars, and often saw those wars as a crusade, did that lend the faith more credibility?
We will continue on as we have before. Sometimes that will involve building, and sometimes that will involve fighting. We have done plenty of both, and will do plenty more of both in the future.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
Please do, I am frequently compelled to do the same and understand completely.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
24d ago
I am not really the person to make the point, anyway. I saw @Hoffmeister25 make the point much better than I can, and if FCfromSSC had any satisfying response to it, he sure didn't seem to post it there.
The conversation continued here. @Hoffmeister has the last word there as well, as most people I engage with do. I have a lot less time for discourse than I used to, and on deeper subjects like this one, formulating replies can take awhile.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
I've never had a single person tell me it's easier to have a wife. In fact it's the one thing I hear most guys complain about at work.
Is this what the argument is?
We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.
- What number would you consider more appropriate?
- Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And to put it delicately, how familiar?
- The argument doesn't assume people generally consume more than one pill a day, although they certainly could, and some do.
...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:
You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.
...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?
Would you say that your basic argument is that the rules shouldn't be changed, de facto or de jure, because the change might be weaponized against a given group, and that instead we should accept the status quo because its formal strictures provide better protection from such weaponization?
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
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
8d 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
18d ago
Do you not understand that this is just like fourth wall breaking and pointless?
What is your understanding and assessment of the loaded phrase "just asking questions"?
I think what you are seeing here is a more general application of the ideas behind the phrase.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?
Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d 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.
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
19d ago
I'd say Sherlock Holmes, but that leans heavily on asspull magic, in my view.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
20d ago
That's certainly possible, but it's not the way I'd bet, given the current information.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
22d ago
Who is this person? I've never heard of them before.
I mean, firstly, 'significant resources' is load-bearing here in a way that's difficult to falsify.
For Musk:
- Donating significant sums of money to anti-MAGA organizations or political campaigns
- Orchestrating a serious political campaign aimed at attacking MAGA politicians.
- Actually withdrawing SpaceX support from the Federal Government.
- Tilting the X/Twitter algorithm against MAGA.
- Successfully impeding passage of the "Big Beautiful Bill" through grassroots action.
For Trump:
- Deploy the federal executive agencies to go after Musk's businesses.
These all seem pretty falsifiable, and I'm sure we could come up with other metrics. In short, I'm waiting to see what actually happens beyond mean tweets, which seems to me to be a solid general rule. I note that this spat is resulting in Musk departing Washington... right about the time that it was announced that he would some time ago, and Congressional Democrats now publicly calling for the release of the Epstein files, which is something that I and most of Trump's base is in fact all for and Trump ran on.
What does it matter to you whether Trump cancels Elon's contracts or Elon doesn't show up for republicans next election?
My hope is that these men will actually be able to advance my tribe's interests in concrete ways. We're short on elite backing, so we've got to take what we can get, and if even what we get can't get their shit together, that bodes ill for us long-term.
Your coalition is the same, the people who vote for guns and the people who vote for abortion and the people who vote for whatever else will turn out in 2028.
I mean, it's pretty obviously not. The entire neocon wing and much of the corporate wing has defected to the democrats, and we've picked up a whole bunch of former centrist democrat and working-class types. And I think this is a very good thing; realignment and reshuffling of the power blocks gives potential for a break in the deadlock and stagnation, potential for some measure of actual positive change. You mention guns and abortion; the guns we're actually seeing a serious push on, and the abortion we aren't; Roe has been removed, but there's no actual drive for federal abortion restrictions, and I think that's quite likely a significant change from the past. From an overall factional perspective, at least, this seems like a good thing.
And the thing is, The Democrats could do the same, and maybe will after this latest loss. What we've been doing clearly isn't working, so stop pushing on a brick wall and find some way to actually deliver positive change in peoples' lives. If the parties can't do that, policy starvation proceeds and we're all in trouble.
Again, why? Obviously your leadership is fundamentally dysfunctional - how can you read what Elon and Trump are tweeting at each other and conclude anything else? Would you ever behave that way, let alone behave that way if you were representing a nation? They're just dysfunctional in ways that you or your 'faction' approves of.
If the angry twitter exchange is the limit of it, then it is undignified, not dysfunctional, and dignity was a value most of us were priced out of long ago. We can survive and potentially even thrive without dignified leaders. If the beef actually compromises the mission, then that's a very bad sign for the rest of this term. Again, my hope is that we get actual progress out of this mess. If they can't do that, then everything gets worse, the odds of a win for the current D establishment in 2028 go up pretty significantly, and that's not an optimistic timeline from where I'm sitting.
You should probably update on at least the stability of Elon.
Sad but likely true; I'm still stanning for him at the moment as he's still one of the very, very few examples of someone who's actually made things better in a material way. We need much more of that, not less.
Was this meant to link to a pop song? If so, the reference went over my head.
I've always been a fan of music videos, and my eldest likes to sit on my lap with my headphones on and listen to them. SIAMES has a good one she was listening to, and that vid popped up in the youtube recommendations this morning. Watch it if you have the time, and tell me what you see as the sociopolitical vibe the vid communicates.
You mentioned veiled threats. From my perspective, they are absolutely endemic, unavoidable, permeating every facet of our culture. I am served them organically several times a week, and so I am not surprised when I read about majorities of progressives approving of outright political murder. The last time we went round on this, you asked me where the violence was, the day before Luigi murdered a CEO. The result was broad social support for his actions from the left, up to the media posting stories about how attractive he is and how many supporters he has and doesn't he sorta have a point here, let's have a discussion about this.
I do not think we're going to see thinly-veiled minecraft references from the MAGA grassroots toward Musk. But if you care about thinly-veiled Minecraft references as a general class, there are a lot of them, and a notable amount of actual minecrafting, happening right now as we speak. The violence is getting worse. Public figures are endorsing and encouraging it. Common knowledge continues to accrue, on both sides.
where's the guy who was trying to address the address the hate in his heart with his pastor, or something like that?
If you're genuinely curious, see the discussion about distrust of emotion here. I am instructed to love my enemies. That does not stop them from being my enemies. Factions are a fact, differences in values are a fact. The question is what to do about it, and renouncing hate means turning away from many of the obvious and easy answers.
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
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