FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
I don’t think that’s charitable. ‘Soft determinism’ is merely an acknowledgement that ‘free will’ and freedom/liberty in general the way they’re colloquially used don’t mean some kind of conscious override of the weight of deterministic history...
What evidence directly supports the concept of "deterministic history"? What testable predictions does the concept of "deterministic history" allow one to make?
It seems obvious to me that "deterministic history" is not a falsifiable, testable concept, but rather an axiom. People believe in determinism and deterministic history because doing otherwise would be incompatible with their axioms. Determinism has been used to make testable predictions for many decades, and all those predictions have been falsified. All the evidence we have available to us directly contradicts determinism, none of the evidence we have directly supports it. Each of us has a lifetime's immediate, personal experience of Will, of making free choices moment to moment, of making decisions and struggling to choose one thing versus another. All of this evidence is simply handwaved by Determinism, not based on contrary evidence, of which there is none, but because if it is not handwaved Materialism is invalidated.
And all this is fair enough; axiomatic reasoning is the only reasoning we have available to us. The problem comes when people act as though their axioms are obviously evidence-based, when they are not.
When did it have a notably negative impact on society, though?
...I've just finished one big debate on censorship, and I'm not really up for jumping into another one. I know the consensus is supposed to be that censorship is very bad, m'kay. I observe that large amount of censorship, through a variety of methods and with a variety of targets, appears to have been the norm throughout our nation's entire history, excepting perhaps two decades bookending the turn of the last century which were unusually permissive, and which were immediately followed by an acute decline in social conditions.
I know how this all is supposed to work. I am skeptical that it actually works that way. I note that a lot of the standard narrative about censorship conveniently ignores most of the censorship actually happening in the past or present, and gets pretty hand-wavey about nailing down cause and effect.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent.
Just not abhorrent enough to do anything about.
They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent.
They found the political tyranny of modest taxation and less-than-perfectly-favorable administrative status more abhorrent than unaccountable ownership of millions of human beings.
The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective.
What is the difference between your phrasing above, and "they founded the country on White Supremacy"? Figuring out a workable accommodation with White Supremacy was probably the largest and most significant issue involved in uniting the States.
The British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.
That is not my understanding of the history. The British had their abolitionists as well at the time of the founding, so "some of the founders opposed it" gives no advantage; some of the British did too. Further, the founders who opposed it abandoned all substantive opposition to get independence done, and in so doing enshrined and armored the institution of slavery well beyond what it would have been while remaining part of the British empire. It may be presumed that if independence had not happened, slavery would have ended in Britain on roughly the same timetable, and the colonies would not have been exempted. Slavery would have ended something like two generations earlier, with no Civil War, no Jim Crow and so on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8mo ago
In a hypothetical world where this happens, they go hungry and head back to where they were born to work the land.
By the time serious hunger arrives, it seems to me that it's too late to do that. By contrast, it is not hard to imagine the authorities getting reports of people abandoning their farms to flood the cities, doing the simple math, and trying to prevent what seems like an obvious crisis in the making. Serious famine is very, very bad. Or maybe I'm wrong and they totally did it just to be dicks. I stand by to be educated.
We needn't pretend that medieval aristocrats were enlightened despots when we can very much see they were no such thing.
Neither do we need to claim that the miseries of existence are imposed by human design, or that a human action being unpleasant proves that there was a better option available, and that the people involved should have known about it. If you want to claim that the laws were pointless and evil, make the argument, don't just assume it.
It feels like you're focusing on one sort-of part of the enlightenment's legacy - technocratic administration (which is way older than the enlightenment) - and breezing by the part that's really relevant to people: individual rights.
If the French Revolution is indeed the more Enlightened of the two, then why should we presume that individual rights are, in fact, a core element of the Enlightenment's legacy?
From the post above:
What is the Enlightenment? What is its essential nature, such that a thing can be said to be more or less like it, more or less of it, more or less descended from it? Which of its philosophical axioms are foundational, and which are peripheral?
How do we actually go about answering a question like that? It seems to me that we can start with four types of evidence, in ascending order of reliability:
- The propositions of the theorists who founded the movement.
- The statements and writings of the revolutionaries who put those theories into practice.
- The actions of the Revolutionaries, which reveal preferences more surely than words ever could
- The assessments and actions of successive generations of ideologues and revolutionaries, which show which ideas and methods persisted within the ideology over time.
If I claimed that deep Christian faith was a core element of Enlightenment ideology, you would laugh. If I pointed to Kant's profound faith in Christianity, you would continue to laugh, and you would be right to do so. Kant's Christian faith may have been the core of his personal philosophy, but it did manifestly failed to propagate into the ideology as a whole. What did propagate are the ideas we see in the French Revolution: absolute, unshakable confidence in the primacy and sufficiency of human reason and rationality, militant hostility to traditional religion, enthusiastic secularism and atheism, and honestly not a whole lot else. Individual liberties get a lot of lip-service, but their actual record is a whole lot worse than the ancein regime's, from what I've seen.
I wrote this post to highlight what I see as the fundamental dishonesty of the consensus discourse regarding the Enlightenment. When people talk about the Enlightenment's results, they talk about outcomes in America or Britain, the two distant outliers of the entire Enlightenment project. When they talk about Enlightenment values, they go straight to Revolutionary France. They ignore the fact that the best results came from the societies that maintained strong Christian social integration and placed absolutely minimal trust in the products of human reason, and the worst came from the countries that embraced Enlightenment principles whole and without restraint.
By the way, the Americans founders were mostly Deists, a highly enlightenment-derived version of Christianity...
Several of the most prominent among them were indeed probably not too far in beliefs from Robespierre. And yet, the sum of their peers and society was such that they kept their opinions mostly to themselves, and often spoke even to each other of Divine Providence in contradiction to their own avowed beliefs. Meanwhile, in France...
The point of this comparison is not to argue that Christianity is awesome. It's to point out that Christianity is very clearly not part of the Enlightenment, and so the revolution that embraces the Christian faith of its populace is not a very Enlightened revolution.
There is little uniquely innovative or "enlightenment" about the fact that the Jacobins were despotic centralizers or that they persecuted religion
Your point eludes me. The revolutionaries themselves, and their subsequent progeny, seemed to find both despotism and religious persecution both innovative and eminently desirable. Here's Mark Twain offering apologia for mass slaughter a century or so later:
“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
The mendacity of that passage galls. Leave aside the absurdity of the cited numbers; grant them for the sake of argument. He minimizes the crimes of his favored ideology by comparing them to all harms and misfortunes, natural or manmade, for a thousand years previously. In doing so, he demonstrates both the founding principle of the Enlightenment, as well as its first corollary:
- We know how to solve all our problems *If a problem can't be solved, that failure is the fault of specific people with names and addresses. These are the principles Twain enthralled himself to. He frames the slaughter of the revolution as an alternative to the pain and suffering of pre-revolutionary life, rather than an intensification of it. He learned nothing of value from the French Revolution, and neither did his fellow Enlightenment ideologues. The slaughter was at worst a necessary evil, at best a positive step toward utopia. That's the lesson they took from their revolutionary histories, not concerns about the limits of human reason or the necessity of safeguards against emergent tyranny.
You can't claim that the pathological hubris and maniacal bloodlust were tangential to the spirit of the movement, when the movements' own champions consistently affirm that that they were necessary and justified.
It's more than fair to say, as @IGI-111 does downthread, that it's debatable whether scientific government can be given credit for the industrial revolution. There is still, however, a strong argument that individual rights and liberalism can be given that credit.
And what sort of societies gave birth to such principles? Was it France, with its radical egalitarianism and staunch secularism and obsession with "scientific" progress? Or Britain and America, deeply Christian, cautious, skeptical of revolutionary change?
I don't know if I fully buy the argument myself, but anyone arguing against the enlightenment needs to be able to fully extricate all of its credit for the industrial and commercial revolutions to challenge the strongest arguments in its favor.
One would.
The other approach, of course, is to bite the bullet and say the post-enlightenment world has brought prosperity, but it wasn't worth what we lost.
I don't think the Enlightenment has any claim to creating our prosperity at all. It did not end the religious wars; the religions and secular authorities did that jointly before its birth, and once it got rolling it caused some of the worst wars we've ever seen. It did not establish universal literacy; the Protestants did that, with the able assistance of Guttenburg. It arrived after science was already organizing itself, and so cannot claim credit for establishing it. It cannot claim credit for the subsequent industrial and scientific revolutions, because its focus was always social science and the theories it promoted were uniformly garbage, and because the nations that drove those revolutions the hardest were not very Enlightened. It cannot claim credit for individual rights and liberties, because it systematically trampled those rights and liberties wherever its ideology was allowed free action. What it did do, quite reliably, was produce vast, pitch-black concentrations of human misery, the historical record of which our current consensus steadfastly refuses to seriously grapple with.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
It'd determine almost everything were we beings who did not need mineral resources or foodstuffs to exert their will.
Why doesn't it determine the acquisition of material resources and foodstuffs?
I honestly don't think I'm being uncharitable or an ass to ask this. The term is "biodeterminism", but now we're talking about resources and food, presumably tied to arable land. That ain't genes any more, is it? We can soften the theory to say that superior genes give a considerable advantage that tells in the long-term, but then there's the problem that the only long term we can test this against is the past, which we already know the results of, and we're not actually going to be around to see a similar stretch of the "long-term" future, are we?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
lol, that makes a lot more sense, thanks for the explanation.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
25d ago
I used to be one of those "quality contributor charity cases". People make choices, and sometimes they choose to change.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
26d ago
But... the AI systems we have today are capable of finding large improvements through the same principle of trial and error. Your "absence of empirical evidence" has already failed.
Large improvements in a human mind or in a human-equivalent AI mind? I'm pretty sure they haven't.
For that matter, evolution already found out how to improve the human brain with trial and error.
Sure. But your assumption is that there's lots of headroom for further improvements, and in point of fact evolution hasn't found those.
The claim that the third exponential is necessary rests on the idea that humanity could only be beaten by something much smarter than us if it had much more advanced technology AND that much more advanced technology will never come.
The claim that the third exponential is necessary rests on the idea that humanity could only be beaten by something much smarter than us if it had much more advanced technology AND that much more advanced technology will never come.
I highlight the third exponential because it underlies so many descriptions of the AI endgame. IIRC, Yudkowski has publicly assigned a non-zero probability to the idea that an AI might be able to hack the universe itself exclusively through executing code within its own operating environment. I'm not arguing that a superintelligent AI can't beat humanity without an overwhelming tech advantage; maybe it can, maybe it can't, though I think our odds aren't uniformly terrible. I'm arguing that most AI doomer persuasion hinges on science-fiction scenarios that may not be physically possible, and some that almost certainly aren't physically possible.
I do not know whether much more advanced technology will come, and neither do you. I think that the more our reasoning is based on the imagination rather than the empirical, the less reliable it becomes. I observe that predictions about future technology are extremely unreliable, and do not see a reason why these particular predictions should be an exception. More generally, serious tech improvements appear to me to be dependent on our current vastly interconnected and highly complex global society maintaining its present state of relative peace and prosperity, and that seems unlikely to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1mo ago
The problem is that the "not atomized communities" can just be (hypothetically) glassed and population-replaced by the atomized communities that use that atomization to build modern technology.
That's certainly one available interpretation of the available evidence, and it's not one I can conclusively disprove from our present position. I strongly suspect that it's wrong, though.
I would agree with you that "liberal" and "atomized" are at least somewhat orthogonal, in that you can have an illiberal society that is still quite atomized; I think the Soviet Union did a pretty good job of creating such a society. What I don't think is that atomized is itself particularly sustainable, and I don't think technology actually helps. Put it this way: a Colt 1911 decisively trumps fists in a standup fight, but the person with the 1911 can still lose the fight if they are so mentally ill that they decide it's a good idea to shoot themselves in the head instead.
The tech that you cite as providing atomized societies a decisive advantage over non-atomized societies stops providing that advantage if the atomized society turns the tech on itself, and atomization provides an abundance of incentives to do exactly that. I do not think we have hit the end of this particular slope, and I do not think most people are doing a good job of anticipating what the approaching reaches of the down-slope look like. I don't think the Amish have much to worry about.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
...And the reply to you, of course, is that "not hating" does not obviously preclude burning cities to ash together with their occupants. Christianity is not a pacifistic religion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
I disagree, for reasons explained in the rest of the comment.
Christianity demands a balance between loving the sinner and hating the sin. Non-Christians seem determined to insist that we only do one or the other, as their short-term-preferences dictate, but we will continue to do both regardless.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
sadly, the page with my reply on it was the one I refreshed.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
...Assuming this is based on your own direct observation, maybe it's just different local populations? I have no problem believing that in a place with a relatively large asian population, most of the people one saw wearing masks would be asian-american.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
Besides, there were SF sent into the region, who are undeniably so.
As the saying goes, "You can't thicken up a bucket of spit with a handful of buckshot."
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3mo ago
I don't think a single person here has ever argued that the blood spilled in avdivka is on Ukraine's hands. I don't think I've ever seen that point of view put forward anywhere, ever. It seems possible to me that you're arguing against a fictitious position, at least outside Russia itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
The argument is that the act itself, the moment of decision, is cheap. The expensive part is living with the consequences as they grind away, moment by moment, for years without respite.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I think you or one of the other participants asked if I could disbelieve in a chair I was sitting on, but I said no. I do believe that I can change my axioms at will, because I've done it several times. It requires introspection about why one has chosen the axiom, and what other beliefs it's connected to, but the process is relatively simple once you get the right perspective.
I am pretty sure people can work themselves to the point of denying basic elements of observable reality; people have been known to handle snakes, drink poison, and self-immolate in apparent calm. The problem is that while all reason is motivated, there is no pressing motive for things like disbelieving in a chair. If there were, people probably could do it.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
I have not ever convinced myself of the nonexistence of a chair I was sitting on.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
Take two theories about our actual universe:
A) The universe loops infinitely based on physical principles we have no access to.
B) The universe is a simulation, running in a universe we have no access to.
My argument is that none of us can break out paper and pencil and meaningfully convert the ideas behind these two statements into a formula, and then use mathematics to objectively prove that one theory is more likely to be true than the other, whether by Kolmogorov complexity, or minimum message length, or Shannon entropy, or Bayesian Occam's Razor, or any other method one might name. It seems obvious to me that no amount of analysis can extract signal from no signal.
In short, I'm arguing that when there is no evidence, there is no meaningful distinction between priors.
That and the existence of the universe are two fairly important natural phenomena which remain unexplainable, and which the potential role or attribution to God Science has failed to minimize. In fact, Science resorts to unfalsifiable stories for the one, and resorts to solipsism for the other. This doesn't prove Christianity or Heaven true, but the standard materialist narrative on this topic is fundamentally dishonest.
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