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FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

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joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

				

User ID: 675

FCfromSSC

Nuclear levels of sour

20 followers   follows 3 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:38:19 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 675

So let's say the big bang happened. Who cares what caused it?

I do, because it demonstrates that at least one unobservable cause clearly exists. If the universe and everything in it can have an unobservable cause, I don't think it's too unreasonable to claim that the self can have an unobservable cause as well, given that no observable cause is available.

You are free to assume that the unobserved cause of both the universe and the self are just more physics, but this belief is neither empirical nor falsifiable. It is simply a statement of faith, an axiom you have adopted to direct your reasoning and to filter evidence.

And of course, further evidence can change all this. Demonstrate mind reading and mind control, and I'll agree that Determinism appears to be correct. In the meantime, I'll continue to point out that confident assertions are not evidence.

There is nothing outside of what exists (because their literally by definition, can't be), everything is causal (as we agreed), and thus there is no free will.

Free will does not violate causality any more than the big bang does. We observe the big bang, and you ask "who cares what caused it". We likewise observe free will and the self, and I ask "who cares what caused it?" Why is that answer fine from you and a problem from me?

If I were to grant that this was true, then what is the state of our universe caused by? and let's cut to the chase and go with the Big Bang, which is the back of the chain as far as I'm aware. What was the big bang caused by? What causes the physical laws to exist?

Further, I don't grant that this is true. I've agreed that all effects have causes. I have not agreed that any specific thing causes anything else. I believe in physical laws because I can see confirmation of them. I haven't seen confirmation that physical laws cause consciousness or an illusion of free will.

No, the cause of my free will appears to be me. You can then ask what the cause of me is, and I don't know.

What's the alternative? According to you, the cause of my "free will" is the physical laws. Cool. What's the case of the physical laws?

Happily.

There is no apparent existence of free will. That is what I am saying. All evidence is explicitly to the contrary if you have even a passing understanding of physics at an observable scale.

Then use your understanding of physics at an observable scale to demonstrate that the human mind is deterministic and not possessing free will. All it would take would be a practical demonstration of either mind reading or mind control. I'm pretty comfortable claiming that neither you nor anyone else can do that, but I stand ready to be proven wrong.

Absent such a demonstration, physics at an observable scale doesn't answer the question. I observe gravity and thermal conductivity in exactly the same way I observe free will. My confidence in my understanding of gravity and thermal conductivity is reinforced by experience, exactly the way it is for free will.

I ask again, do you not accept cause and effect?

I don't accept a claim of cause and effect when the relationship of cause and effect can't actually be demonstrated. I certainly don't accept it in cases where the demonstration has been repeatedly attempted and has repeatedly failed.

The point of the universal fire quote above is that you can't appeal to the tightly-laced reality of nature if you can't actually point to the laces. If you want to claim that a cause leads to an effect, you have to actually demonstrate the linkage. You don't get to just say "well it has to be this, what else could it be?"

You can believe what you want!

One can indeed. As Bertrand Russell puts it:

I am persuaded that there is absolutely no limit to the absurdities that can [...] be generally believed. Give me an adequate army, with power to provide it with more pay and better food than falls to the lot of the average man, and I will undertake, within thirty years, to make the majority of the population believe that two and two are three, that water freezes when it gets hot and boils when it gets cold, or any other nonsense that might seem to serve the interest of the State. Of course, even when these beliefs had been generated, people would not put the kettle in the ice-box when they wanted it to boil. That cold makes water boil would be a Sunday truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life. What would happen would be that any verbal denial of the mystic doctrine would be made illegal, and obstinate heretics would be "frozen" at the stake. No person who did not enthusiastically accept the official doctrine would be allowed to teach or to have any position of power. Only the very highest officials, in their cups, would whisper to each other what rubbish it all is; then they would laugh and drink again. This is hardly a caricature of what happens under some modern governments.

Your belief in Determinism is observably a "Sunday Truth, sacred and mystical, to be professed in awed tones, but not to be acted on in daily life." It makes no testable predictions, and it directs no useful actions. It has no connections of any kind to the real world. Maybe it will not be so in the future, but appeals to the future are not part of empiricism.

More frustratingly, my entire point in this discussion has not been to prove why you should believe in free will or stop believing in Determinism.

The whole point is that evidence doesn't stop being evidence when it goes against a theory you don't like. Under the Empirical framework we have both been claiming at every step of this discussion, evidence must be explained rather than handwaved. You cannot explain the evidence of free will under a materialistic framework, and Determinism is very explicitly a handwave. And this means, inescapably, no matter how much you would rather not admit it, that the apparent existence of free will is evidence against materialism. Further, evidence doesn't force conclusions, in exactly the way it's not forcing this conclusion on you!

You don't have to accept that evidence as conclusive, but I'm not really interested in a discussion based on Empiricism with someone who insists on ignoring the rules of empiricism when it suits them.

At no point have I argued that the behavior Hlynka engaged in that led to his banning was acceptable in this space. My assessment is that past a certain point he didn't care, and was happy to eat a ban if that was the price for expressing his contempt for the proliferation of what he considered fundamentally wrong and evil memes.

I'm discussing a long-standing point of debate that precedes the flameout.

Amusing I'm sure, but do you have a more substantive answer?

I'm more inclined to say that there is no inside. There is only outside.

Hmm. Let's try it this way.

A: I returned and saw under the sun...

B: Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion...

The former admits appropriate subjectivity: I saw frames the sentence as the author's personal experience, which you are implicitly invited to measure against your own. The later inappropriately claims objectivity: Objective consideration, with no mention of who is doing the observing, is the language of a textbook, presenting information to be ingested uncritically. It implies a comprehensive system of knowledge, of which this is one piece.

...Or I can make it even simpler, and hopefully divorced from any political or social connotations.

A: It seems obvious to me that...

B: Everyone knows that...

Both strongly assert a position. The latter bakes in an inherently inappropriate social claim to reinforce the point. You see that, right?

In this case, A is speaking from "inside" themself, about a perceived reality they recognize as outside them. B is speaking from "outside" themself, about a "reality" that almost certainly does not exist. It seems to me that there is nothing that "everyone knows", most especially because the phrase is usually deployed at someone who evidently doesn't know the thing in question.

Likewise:

A: "but time and chance happen to them all"

B: "but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account"

...Are not equivalent either. The former frames time and chance as something to be accepted. The latter frames them as something to be managed, if not outright overcome. But the whole point of the passage is that they are to a considerable extent unmanageable; the A version is highlighting this, and the B version is minimizing this, perhaps even denying it.

It seems to me that the A version presents itself as inside a box, the self, looking out at the world, while the B version presents itself as Systematized Knowledge, looking into a box, which is the world. That is what I mean by inside and outside. I'm further asserting that there is no Capital-S Systematized Capital-K Knowledge, though to really chase that point down will probably require a lot more drawing of definitions. Suffice to say, the implicit claim I'm pointing to is false.

Does that make more sense, whether you agree with it or not?

On the most literal reading, this seems straightforwardly false. Otherwise how could we explain the possibility of lying, or the ability of authors to write convincing dialogue for characters who think differently from themselves?

Lying is difficult, and simulating is likewise difficult. No one can do either perfectly, and we're talking here about conversation, not fiction. I'm asserting that how people argue, especially when they argue well and forcefully, reveals a lot about how they think.

but I'm not sure what all this has to do with the question of the equivalence between the contemporary far left and far right

Because the assertion that I am endorsing is that the appropriate way to group ideologies is not by position statements, which observably change with some frequency, but rather on core axioms and values, which do not. I've argued previously that the core of Enlightenment/Progressive/Left-wing thought is the axiom "we know how to solve all our problems", with the point being that it is a false axiom, and anyone who uses it is making the same fundamental error, regardless of what specifically they think the problems and solutions are. With the example above, I'm trying to show how that thought iterates out into even basic statements about observable reality, like "chance exists".

Conservative is a lifestyle choice, not an innate identity. Editors control more newspaper columns than surgeons, that's not a social injustice, that's just people doing their thing.

How can we tell without a few centuries of affirmative action?

The writeup is still in progress, but I want to try to at least communicate some portion of the insight in the meantime.

Let's leave aside "Red" and "Blue" as labels, and substitute "A" and "B". From Orwell's "politics and the English Language", here's an example of the same idea written written two different ways:

Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

Let's call the first style "A" and the second style "B". Obviously the two are quite different, and Orwell, being a master of composition, has intentionally written the second to be bad and wrong. Let's ignore aesthetics completely, and not care at all about which is more pleasing to the eye or ear.

I think there's a significant and irreducible difference between the two formulations, and a way to try to begin describing it would be to say that "A" presents itself as on the inside looking out, and "B" presenting as from the outside looking in. I would say further that the former is better than the latter, because there is no "outside", and presenting as though one is "outside" is fundamentally dishonest. In this way, the passage shows that the way one talks about something reveals the way that one thinks about something, and that some ways of thinking are better than others.

Does that description make sense to you?

Ah, thanks much. None of those are the actual exchange, but they are part of the lead-up to it, as he and I started poking at each other more and more. This and this are close preludes, and probably contain most of the information, but it took an actual head-on argument about it to drive the point home.

Amusingly enough, I actually read Rogue Warrior as a kid.

I wonder how much this drove Hlynka's attitude, because, looking back, it seems like the sets 'what he hated about Rationalists,' 'what he hated about woke progressives,' 'what he hated about fascists,' et cetera, were significantly overlapping — lack of traditional religiosity, insufficient colorblindness, insufficient Hobbesianism, and (possibly most importantly) intellectualism.

Now suppose that, based on the evidence available, one comes to the conclusion that the list of hated things you've just provided, along with a number of others, appears to emerge from a fairly tightly clustered set of similar values and philosophical primitives. Suppose that there's a specific set of memes and ideas that can express themselves in a variety of negative ways, but share a basic commonality in how one gets to those negatives. The worldview leads to a typical set of strategies, which when adapted to local conditions result in a wide variety of specific behaviors, but with significant commonalities between them.

Categorizing human ideologies is not a trivial problem. Grouping together people who seem wildly disparate under a specific theory is not an unusual occurrence.

It's not a trick, it's just the straightforward truth about how reasoning works.

Here's the intro and the ending of that essay:

In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported from our own universe into the universe of Norse mythology. This world is based on magic rather than technology; so naturally, when Our Hero tries to light a fire with a match brought along from Earth, the match fails to strike.

I realize it was only a fantasy story, but... how do I put this... No. [...]

If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, you would cease to exist as organized matter.

Reality is laced together a lot more tightly than humans might like to believe.

Rather than make the back-and-forth additionally tedious, I'm going to assume you'd likewise endorse the bolded part of the conclusion above. The problem is that the bolded part, the actual conclusion, is straightforwardly, obviously false as he's written it.

You will probably disagree with that statement, so let me try to reformulate it into a perfectly-equivalent statement that will highlight the problem:

"Impossible things can't happen, so if an impossible thing happens, you can be sure another impossible thing won't happen."

This is a logically-incoherent statement.

Yudkowski appears to be correct that reality is laced together a lot more tightly than many humans might like to believe. What he's missing is that this fact cuts both ways. If you observe something "impossible", then there is an error somewhere; either your observation is wrong, or your understanding of what is possible is wrong; it could be either, and you don't know which. What it can't be, is that something impossible actually happened but the rules of possibility as you understand them are still valid.

You cannot, in fact, step through a portal to another world where matches don't work. If you could step through such a portal, there is no valid reason to believe that the matches not working means you don't work. The whole point of the chain of logic about phosphorus chemistry is that the physical laws are supposed to be perfectly seamless from phosphorus down to subatomic physics and up through your internal chemical makeup. Portals to another world have already proved that the chain isn't seamless, and in fact there's a gap the size of the grand canyon. Once you have one confirmed breakdown, there is no valid reason to suppose that the rest of your model is reliable enough to make confident predictions about the region of the break.

The correct statement is, "If you stepped into a world where matches failed to strike, who the fuck knows? Maybe you instantly die because phosphorus chemistry doesn't work there. Maybe it's magic. Maybe you're in a simulation and match-striking has been hard-locked by a recent patch. Maybe someone is playing an elaborate prank on you, and swapped your matches for fakes."

Do you disagree?

If natural laws don't work and time isn't real and consequences don't follow actions... then yeah...you can't make computer chips.

If they aren't real at all, that would follow.

If they aren't universal constants in areas having nothing to do with computer chips, it doesn't follow.

Materialism's core claim is that all matter works according to the same principles, and so you can't claim exceptions in one area. Yudkowski's Universal Fire is as good a formulation of this claim as any.

Matches catch fire because of phosphorus - "safety matches" have phosphorus on the ignition strip; strike-anywhere matches have phosphorus in the match heads. Phosphorus is highly reactive; pure phosphorus glows in the dark and may spontaneously combust. (Henning Brand, who purified phosphorus in 1669, announced that he had discovered Elemental Fire.) Phosphorus is thus also well-suited to its role in adenosine triphosphate, ATP, your body's chief method of storing chemical energy. ATP is sometimes called the "molecular currency". It invigorates your muscles and charges up your neurons. Almost every metabolic reaction in biology relies on ATP, and therefore on the chemical properties of phosphorus.

If a match stops working, so do you. You can't change just one thing.

This is the basic argument you are making, yes?

I can't find a post by gattsuru citing Hlynka in this thread. got a link?

....Still working on the writeup.

These are all things you were already going to do exactly that way based on the billions of years that came before YOU. What makes you make those choices? Your mind, which is a result of genetics and the impact of the material world on that genetically distinct mind. You've never had a moment of free will, nor have I, and we never will.

Okay. Please demonstrate that this is true by making a testable, falsifiable prediction about the behavior of another human, with enough specificity to clearly distinguish between the two models.

If you believe in chemical reactions or electricity or gravity...free will can't exist.

Alternatively, I can believe in chemical reactions, electricity, and gravity, and note that our understandings of these a) do not appear to be complete, b) do not seem likely to be made complete in the future, and c) do not have anything useful to say about human behavior. If human brains actually worked like clockwork and could be manipulated like clockwork, I would agree that they seem to be clockwork. But they don't, so I don't. Instead, when the theory and the actionable observations of reality appear to contradict each other, I go with the actionable observations. Why should I do otherwise? What does "assume that determinism is true, despite it appearing in every testable way that it's false" add to my thinking? Does it help me make better circuit boards or chip designs?

P.S. is your religiosity argument really based on simulation theory?

Not particularly. Both Christianity and Simulation theory posit that observable reality is not baseline reality. I think the apparent existence of entropy and the apparent existence of free will are two solid indications that observable reality is not, in fact, baseline reality, and that the nature of baseline reality is probably not accessible to us under present conditions.

What does this mean?

It means that when a computer does something wrong, we yell at the person who programmed it, and when a machine does something wrong, we yell at the person operating it, but when a person does something wrong, we yell at that person in particular. This is how it works in every facet of human interaction, and for the obvious reason that doing otherwise doesn't work.

More specifically, it means that I am conscious, that I can direct my conscious experience through choices with apparent total freedom. I can think about what I want to think about. I can not want to think about things for a set of reasons, and want to think about them for another set of reasons, and make a decision about what to do. It means I can decide whether to get up in the morning or sleep in, decide what to eat, what to drink, what to do, who to talk to, what words to say. It means I can compose this post to you by choosing each word, based on the message I wish to convey. These conscious experiences of free will are notably distinct from non-conscious impulses, itches, sensations, etc, and can with effort directly override the later. One can choose to suppress the response to and experience of severe pain, for example, through the direct application of one's will.

The laws of the universe are deterministic at the scale humans operate on.

They observably are for all inert matter. They ought to be for human minds, if Materialism is true. They do not appear to be, if our internal experience is to be believed, which is why this has been a hotly-debated topic for decades even when very nearly everyone involved in the debate very much wants the same answer. The problem is that the evidence we actually have flatly contradicts that answer.

There is no scenario in which "free will" could ever even be a thing.

Well, the Christians could be right, and humans could be an immortal soul housed within a material body, not subject to the deterministic rules of the temporary physical universe. Alternatively, we could be living in a simulation, our understanding of causality and material reality could be based not on baseline reality, but on the simulation's own arbitrary-though-internally-consistent code, while our free will could come from a separate module that runs on different principles. So that's two scenarios where free will could ever even be a thing.

But the point remains that you simply repeating yourself: free will can't exist because it breaks Materialism. This does not change the fact that all the direct evidence indicates that free will does in fact appear to exist. All your arguments to the contrary are inferential, not direct. If I want to prove that a machine is deterministic, I show you how the gears work. If I want to prove that a computer is deterministic, I show you how the circuits work. The human mind from the inside does not appear to be gears and circuits at all. It's possible that appearances are deceiving, but "possible" and "proven" should be distinct concepts.

It is a physical and even metaphysical impossibility.

How so? Is there any answer that doesn't amount to "because Materialism demands it be so"?

What determines what you will or what action you chose?

All direct evidence available to me indicates that I determine what actions I choose, through an exercise of non-deterministic free will.

Unless you're flipping a coin you're always going to chose it based on who you are genetically and your interaction with the universe up to this point. That is it.

Genetics determinism should be considered a subset of physics-based determinism, but it hardly matters because there is no evidence to support either. You can sequence someone's genome and measure their environment, and you still can't predict or manipulate their thoughts or behavior with any appreciable degree of accuracy.

There isn't any other option.

...Unless we accept that Materialism appears to be wrong in this case.

There is no such thing as free will because there literally can't be.

...Unless we accept that Materialism appears to be wrong in this case. You are demonstrating the nature of axiomatic thinking perfectly. You are not providing direct evidence of Determinism, you are simply repeating that a commitment to Materialism demands that one accept Determinism, despite all evidence to the contrary. And that is my entire point.

We make new humans every single day. So yes they can be constructed. Just with DNA right now instead of machine code. It is all still code.

The fact that we can make more humans does not demonstrate that humans are deterministic machines, or that we can make a human-equivalent deterministic machine.

You can imagine making different ones which gives you the false impression that something different could have happened. But it never could have.

Based on what direct evidence? This is not an abstract, unfalsifiable question by default. If what I am going to choose is predetermined, you could demonstrate that by successfully predicting what I will do next to an arbitrary degree of precision, or by demonstrating arbitrary control over my decision-making through some form of mechanistic tampering with my inputs. Only, neither you nor anyone else can do either to any significant degree, and in fact the above statement makes no testable predictions, nor is based on any testable predictions. Worse, multiple generations of scientists have previously claimed to be able to do exactly that, and have observably failed. You are repeating their claims, modified only to the extent that you carefully avoid any claim that could be tested empirically under current conditions.

The only reason my choices "can't" be free is because them being free would contradict materialism. Only, I can directly observe my choices, and they do in fact appear to be free, and the apparent fact that they are free has material consequences that can be measured and observed in the real world. Your just-so story about how they only "appear" to be free in every single observable way is precisely analogous to Sagan's invisible dragon.

Ask yourself this, how are you making your choices?

By focusing my will, determining the action I wish to take, and then following through on it, despite incentives to do otherwise. I can directly observe every part of this process, as can you. I can embrace unthinking habit and instinctive responses, or I can cultivate my will and consciousness of choice, as can you. This experience of exercising the will could indeed all be an illusion, but if it is, no evidence of it being so has ever been presented.

I reiterate: your belief in Determinism is not based on evidence of Determinism itself, because such evidence does not exist. You believe that our minds are deterministic and that the evidence of free will you have directly observed every minute of every day of your entire life must be an illusion, because if it is not, then it implies that Materialism is wrong, and you are committed on a pre-rational basis to Materialism. Yours is an argument from logical inference, dependent on logical axioms, not a position derived at from direct observation of facts on the object level. And this is normal, because all human beliefs are derived in exactly this way.

Several people have asked, Reddit's search functions are trash so I don't have a link, but I'm working on a writeup. the short version was that I was super-black-pilled and 100% committed to what I perceived to be Red-Tribe Accelerationism, went in hard asking what the alternative was supposed to be, and left convinced that I had, in fact, been thinking like a Blue, should stop doing that immediately, and should endeavor to actually think like a Red instead. People who've talked to me long-term often mention that I've mellowed out a lot since then; that conversation is what did it.

A lot of people dump on him for his theory that blues and the "radical" right are actually the same thing, but I know for a fact he is correct, because I have observed the divide between the two in my own thinking. I was raised Red, and went deep blue for more than a decade before drifting back. What I thought of as moving back to the "right", though, was only surface detail, and my core ideological and philosophical commitments were still intrinsically Blue. His response clearly communicated the difference, and I have endeavored to emulate his good example ever since.

What is the contrary evidence?

We can make choices, every minute of every day. We can directly observe ourselves and others making those choices, and have direct insight to the apparent cause of those choices, which appears to be individual will and volition. We can observe that the behavior of others is not perfectly or even mostly predictable or manipulable, and that the degree predictability and manipulability that does exist varies widely across people and across contexts. All of our experiences conform seamlessly with the general concept of free will, none of them conform with Determinism of any sort.

All long-term-successful social technology presupposes free will and attempts to engage it on its own terms. All attempts to engineer society along deterministic principles have failed, often repeatedly and at great cost. This is not an abstract question; it has innumerable direct and obvious impacts on the real world in every facet of human organization, cooperation and activity. There is a long history of actually testing determinism in the real world, and the results have been uniformly negative.

Humans are thinking machines that are self aware and they exist.

There is no evidence that humans are "machines", ie deterministic chains of cause and effect. This claim is not supported by any direct, testable evidence available to us, and is in fact contradicted by our moment-to-moment experience of making choices freely. Many predictions have been made on the theory that humans are machines, and all of those predictions, to date, have been falsified. Even now, you form the claim in a way specifically designed to be untestable, because you are aware that such a machine cannot now be made. You only believe that it will be possible to be made at some indeterminate point in the future, perhaps ten years hence; ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago and more, your predecessors believed the same thing for the same reasons.

Materialists claim that there is no evidence for anything but materialism. Then they claim that our common, direct observation of free will can't be accurate, because it would contradict Materialism. But if our direct experience contradicts Materialism, that is evidence against Materialism.

You do not believe in Determinism because it has been directly demonstrated by evidence. You believe in Determinism because you are committed to Materialism as an axiom, and because any position other than Determinism evidently breaks that axiom. Beliefs are not generated by a deterministic accretion of evidence, but are rather chosen through the exercise of free will, by a process that is easily observed by anyone with a reasonable memory and a willingness to examine one's own thought-process dispassionately. As I said before, this is how all human reason works, how all beliefs and values are formed and adopted. The mistake is only in failing to recognize the choices being made, to allow oneself to believe that the choices are anything other than choices.

Shouldn't it logically follow that more thinking self aware machines can be made? If it exists, which it does, it can be created by us given enough resources.

It logically follows, provided one chooses to adopt Materialist axioms, and thus commits to ignoring all contrary evidence. Logical deduction from axioms is not evidence, though, and, as I mentioned previously, all attempts to actually demonstrate Determinism have failed. We do our actual engineering off free will, not determinism.

None of the above is a language game or a pointless abstraction, all of it can be directly and reliably demonstrated by universal, directly-observable experiences. None of it relies on supposition or interpretation. I reiterate that to the extent that facts exist, the above is simply factual.

I'm quite sure it wasn't, but if you've got a link I'd love to have it. I'm working on a more in-depth writeup to answer the question above, and it'd be interesting to check my recollection against the actual conversation.

You can suspect whatever you want about what kind of autistic power level hiding fatlords everyone is, but you have to respond to posts that exist. You have to participate in the conversation people are actually having.

You can also not do that because you decide it is beneath you, and accept a ban as the consequence. Each person makes their own choices, and I would be very surprised if Hlynka did not fully expect the ban and at least weakly agree that it was justified based on his behavior.