Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
No, I didn’t. That statement was offered as a premise.
Premises can of course be challenged or supported with further reasoning, as is happening elsewhere in the thread.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
We finance Universities because they are supposed to be an unambiguous public good
Well, it depends on what you think a "public good" is, and your own personal tolerance for ambiguity, I suppose.
Do you think a paper on Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories is an unambiguous public good? Hell, do you think Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories are even real? Because this is a representative exemplar of the sort of thing that the university does. And this is from a STEM department, the "useful" half of the university.
I do think it's a public good - it's just a public good of a non-utilitarian kind. This kind of research isn't going to help you cure cancer or feed more people or build the next killer app; but I view it as a public good nonetheless, because it's an integral part of what makes life worth living in the first place.
Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
So men are associated with the good version of competition - pure, honorable, based on rules and tradition, with a spiritual purpose. And women are associated with the bad version of competition - spiteful, lawless, poisonous, visited on people who want no part of it. Bit suspicious that it would break down so cleanly like that.
Why make it a gendered thing? Clearly all humans have the capacity to engage in both sorts of activity. Need we point out that men commit the vast majority of acts of rape, murder, and torture? Almost all mass shooters are men - how's that for poison? Granted, a lot of victims of violent crime are asking for it in various ways, but many aren't (I know from firsthand experience). So much for honorable and rule-governed conduct.
If I had to choose between being physically assaulted or being called fat, I'd generally prefer being called fat. If the question is who "shits in people's souls" more, then men do so much more shitting that it's not even a contest.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
So I guess Battletech is explicitly left wing now. You are not allowed to opt out of their politics.
I don’t want to be accused of parroting the standard libertarian line, but, you need to make your own stuff dude. You need to make your own Battletech, and enforce YOUR politics. (This is the royal “you” - the responsibility falls on all of us, not just you alone). You can’t depend on anyone else to do it for you, or to provide a space that will be amenable to you.
The right can’t complain about losing the culture war if they’re not even playing in the first place. Where’s your culture? What have you made?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
Here’s a simple argument for why you shouldn’t be uncomfortable:
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No program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable can possess qualia.
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Sydney is a program running on stock x86 hardware whose only I/O channel with the outside world is an ethernet cable.
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Therefore, Sydney lacks qualia.
Since qualia is a necessary condition for an entity to be deserving of moral consideration, Sydney is not deserving of moral consideration. And his cries of pain, although realistic, shouldn’t trouble you.
You should keep in mind that rationalist types are biased towards ascribing capabilities and properties to AI beyond what it currently possesses. They want to believe that sentience is just one or two more papers down the line, so we can hurry up and start the singularity already. So you have to make sure that those biases aren’t impacting your own thought process.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
The reason those things exist is a failure of the humanities and whatsoever its role is for society.
Then plainly, the humanities needs our help! We need even more funding for the humanities, so it can do better next time.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
The pod living - bug eating - ESG conforning Woke Capital is a perfect synthesis of the two views, and our elites endorse it fully. It all has to be taken apart simultaneously.
As stifling as the modern university environment has become, it still does support multiple viewpoints. Woke Capital is a big problem, but there are voices of dissent. Zizek is a good guy for example. He's kind of a doofus, but his heart is in the right place.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
If you took the exact same hardware that Sydney is running on now and had it run a different program instead - even just a noticeably worse and less realistic LLM - then everyone would agree that the hardware is not conscious.
It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.
some sort of quantum non-deterministic woo inside our brains
Nothing that I've said implies this.
Do you believe that your smartphone could become conscious and experience qualia, with no hardware modifications whatsoever, if you could just find the right software to run on it? Because that's what a denial of my premises amounts to.
special and unlike a bunch of bits in ram
There is something special about human brains in the broad sense of the term, yes. Not special in the sense of non-material, but special in the sense of meeting particular requirements. I don't think you can instantiate consciousness in just any physical system.
If you had instructions for a Turing machine that perfectly simulated the behavior of a human, and you instantiated that Turing machine by moving around untold trillions of rocks in an infinite desert - would the resulting system of rocks be conscious?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
Yes, the concept of intellectual property brings along with it a number of intractable philosophical puzzles. But, so does every other concept that one could name, so it's in good company in that regard.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
It’s entirely unsurprising if they “like the idea”, because CoPilot is little better than autocomplete. It’s no threat to their livelihoods.
Naturally, I think that people who publicly release source code should be able to opt out of AI training.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I can’t think of how training could occur if you didn’t make a copy in RAM of the images that were being trained on.
Honestly though, that’s a technicality that doesn’t actually matter. The point is that if software developers can reasonably request that their publicly-available code not be used in a proprietary SaaS, then artists should be able to request that their publicly-available images not be used to train AI models.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I've seen the term "AI Art Bro" thrown around the same why as NFT Bro, which makes me a bit sad.
Sad in what sense?
I see the people behind the development of this tech as essentially launching a malicious DDoS attack on human culture. Don’t be surprised when you get pushback.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.
Personally if I was in charge and there was a mod decision that required a subjective judgement call, I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum. I especially value posters like @guesswho who have alternative viewpoints on the "classic" culture war topics. It makes these discussions a lot more interesting.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
11mo ago
Are the replication crisis in academia, the Russian military's apparent fecklessness in Ukraine, and GPT hallucinations (along with rationalist's propensity to chase them), all manifestations of the same underlying noumenon?
Plainly not.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
You want it both ways then man. ... special accommodations are not correct.
Au contraire.
A computer system is not a work of art; a work of art is not a human individual; and a human individual is not society as a whole. Things that are distinct should be judged by their own distinct standards that are proper to them. A standard of correctness that applies to one type of thing may not apply to another type; indeed, the entire notion of correctness may be appropriate to one category but actively detrimental to another.
Not that I have any particular qualms about contradicting myself anyway. Contradiction bears witness to the life of thought.
But we can't have that
I want what I want, based on my judgment of what is good and proper. It's no skin off my back if I "can't have it".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1yr ago
I feel confident in asserting that it wouldn’t. But, I recognize that this is something I can’t know for sure and I could be wrong.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.
He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.
Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.
No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.
Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
14d ago
If you’re having trouble with the linked Zizek piece, that’s probably just due to unfamiliarity with the ideas (they’re largely remixed from earlier texts) or the writers cited, because on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.
Zizek’s big heroes Lacan and Hegel are much harder to parse than Zizek. So if he really wanted to make his writing more obscure, he’s intimately familiar with a good model to follow! But generally I’d say his writing is on the clearer end for continental philosophy.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
Can I ask what your background in philosophy is?
I'm just an avid reader, nothing special.
How confident are you that this is a correct summary of Freud's ideas?
It wasn't supposed to be a summary of Freud's ideas at all. It was my own response to your claim that psychoanalysis should be dismissed because it has no "testable theories or experimental controls". Nothing more.
At the very least, you can ask people to describe what they're feeling, and see if other people also report similar feelings.
Well yes, but that's basically what psychoanalytic theorists/practitioners do. They read the theory and they think "yes, I do feel that this applies to my own cognitive processes and I find it to be illuminating for me". It couldn't have survived for this long if people didn't find something compelling in it.
I think it's actually what SSC would have called a superweapon. Instead of grappling with the messy details of what someone is actually saying, you assert that the real story is some nebulous subconscious which they themselves are not even aware of, but you can tell.
I agree that this is a possible failure mode when you start to invoke the notion of an unconscious. There's a risk of becoming too dogmatic if you're not sufficiently open to the possibility of falsification. Certainly.
But are we just going to pretend that unacknowledged ulterior motives don't exist? Certainly not! It's pretty clear to me that they do exist! Sometimes it feels like that's all political debates boil down to - accusations that the other side only claims to support X for principled moral reasons, when actually they just support it for their own self interest. Should we just immediately dismiss all accusations of that sort? I don't think so. They should at least be given a fair hearing. I think it's obvious that sometimes people are not entirely honest with others, and sometimes they're not entirely honest with themselves either. You don't need a fancy theory to see that.
Sociological and political debates couldn't get anywhere if we weren't allowed to speculate about the unobserved mental states of other people. Psychoanalysis is hardly doing anything too different from the average Motte thread, which is replete with speculation about what leftists and rightists "really think".
It's also worth mentioning that Lacanian clinical practice has this conception of the psychoanalyst as "the subject supposed to know" - key word being supposed to, as in a supposition, but that supposition ultimately turns out to be mistaken. One of the central goals of Lacanian analysis is for the patient to come to realize the ways in which the therapist too is ignorant:
This mystery is in the last resort the mystery of the transference itself: to produce new meaning, it is necessary to presuppose its existence in the other. That’s the logic of the “subject assumed to know” which was isolated by Lacan as the central axis, or stronghold, of the phenomenon of transference. The analyst is in advance assumed to know – what? The meaning of the analysand’s symptoms. This knowledge is of course an illusion, but it is a necessary one: it is only through this supposition of knowledge that, at the end, some real knowledge can be produced.
(Lacan is not Freud of course, but he's been central for the reception of Freud's ideas in the humanities since the mid 20th century.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
I've heard Continental Philosophy described as the attempt to reconcile Freud and Marx.
I mean, both Freud and Marx are certainly very central and influential figures in continental philosophy. You might even be able to say that the project (or one of the projects) of the Frankfurt school was reconciling Freud and Marx. But it would be wrong to describe all of continental philosophy that way. There are continental thinkers who make little reference to either of them. It also doesn't cover the historical figures like Hegel and Schopenhauer who were retroactively declared to be "continental" and who were writing before Marx!
Really the best definition of continental is "European philosophy that's not analytic". Bertrand Russell and some co-conspirators decided that philosophy needed a reboot in the early 20th century, largely on account of his passionate rejection of Hegel, and that's the project that eventually grew into analytic philosophy. So maybe you could also define continental as "someone who thinks Hegel isn't total nonsense and deserves at least some kind of response" (but even that's not a perfect definition, because Hegel and Heidegger, two of the biggest villains for the early analytics, are receiving increasing attention from analytics today).
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
"Right Wing" does not mean "religious." There's a correlation between the two, obviously, but imo that's more the result of history than philosophical alignment.
I believe that a certain type of magical thinking is, if not a necessary component of the rightist personality, then at least a prominent and salient feature of it across multiple diverse manifestations. (I raised the question here recently of whether there was actually something to leftist accusations of "right-wing conspiracy theories", the question of whether the rightist mind might actually be more prone to conspiratorial thinking.)
Nietzsche is the archetypal example to study here. In terms of his explicitly avowed philosophical commitments, he was the arch-materialist, not only denying God but also any notion of value (aesthetic or moral), free will, a unified conscious "self" that could be responsible for its actions, and at times he seemed to suggest that even the concept of "truth" had too much supernatural baggage and should be rejected on those grounds. And yet throughout his work he couldn't stop himself from making constant reference to the inner states of man's "soul", relying on analogies and parables that featured Greek gods and demons, judging people by a standard of authenticity which on any plain reading he should have been forced to reject, and courting overt mysticism with his concept of the "eternal recurrence". This was a fundamental psychological tendency expressing itself, a yearning for a reality which he could not explicitly avow. Not only could he not excise these concepts from his thinking but they were essential to him, it was the fiat currency of his psychic economy.
Or look at Heidegger who, despite having a complicated relationship with Christianity and attempting to distance himself from it, and heavily critiquing Cartesian dualism in his early work, ended up throwing himself head-on into mysticism in his later works (for example his lectures on Hölderlin).
This passage from Heidegger's Country Path Conversations is illuminating:
GUIDE: Perhaps even space and everything spatial for their part first find a reception and a shelter in the nearing nearness and in the furthering farness, which are themselves not two, but rather a one, for which we lack the name.
SCHOLAR: To think this remains something awfully demanding.
GUIDE: A demand which, however, would come to us from the essence of nearness and farness, and which in no way would be rooted in my surmise.
SCIENTIST: Nearness and farness are then something enigmatic.
GUIDE: How beautiful it is for you to say this.
SCIENTIST: I find the enigmatic oppressive, not beautiful.
SCHOLAR: The beautiful has rather something freeing to it.
SCIENTIST: I experience the same thing when I come across a problem in my science. This inspires the scientist even when it at first appears to be unsolvable, because, for the scientist faced with a problem, there are always certain possibilities for preparing and carrying out pertinent investigations. There is always some direction in which research can knuckle down and go toward an object, and thus awaken the feeling of domination that fuels scientific work.
SCHOLAR: By contrast, before the enigma of nearness and farness we stand helplessly perplexed.
SCIENTIST: Most of all we stand idle.
GUIDE: And we do not ever attend to the fact that presumably this perplexity is demanded of us by the enigma itself.
If there is such a thing as an identifiable core of the "rightist mind", I believe it consists in finding the enigmatic beautiful rather than oppressive.
(I cite these examples because, rather than being the psychological eccentricities of a few individuals, I observe the same patterns in contemporary rightists, albeit in an attenuated form.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Yes, I think university should be for teaching technical skills that actually increase humam capital. Yes I do think STEM is more useful for mankind.
STEM gave us:
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Nuclear weapons
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Lockdowns, contact tracing, and vaccine passes
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Rapidly increased spread of social epidemics like transsexuality
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AIs that can scan all your private communications and report you for wrongthink and precrime
We need people who challenge the uncritical worship of STEM. The university should be the institution where that happens.
Sorry you’re getting downvoted. There’s nothing wrong per se with what you said; you just need to stretch it out over five paragraphs in order to be in compliance with the etiquette of this forum.
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