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
11d ago
Here's a sentence out of that paragraph
But why did you ignore the other two sentences I quoted?
The institutions of a socialist society, even in their most democratic form, could never resolve all the conflicts between the universal and the particular, between human beings and nature, between individual and individual. Socialism does not and cannot liberate Eros from Thanatos.
Why do you think these sentences say "we know how to solve all our problems"?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
12d ago
What are your standards for unclear writing??
Hegel can be unclear at times:
In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.
The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I meant SS's top level post and all its replies, most of which are directly related to Holocaust discussion, not just this particular sub-thread where we're discussing meta issues.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
because I don't feel excited, but think it's probably the right thing to do, and that I will probably be glad to have a son later on, I hope.
Did you want a daughter instead?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
If only one country has a nuclear arsenal, they could conquer the world quite easily. If many countries have nukes, there is no such danger.
Right, there's value in deterrence. But presumably you don't think that every individual on earth should have personal direct access to the nuke button - instead we try to limit that power to a small number of trusted actors. It seems to me that everyone having unrestricted personal access to ASI is the same as giving everyone a direct line to the button.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
What if they decide 'hey there are a lot of resources in this lightcone, how about I not share them with the overwhelming majority of the world population and take them for myself - what are they gonna do'? Some people are insatiable, some people have uncommon ideas about marginal value/simulations/clones - AI venture capitalists are very likely to have such greedy thoughts.
But there are plenty of people in the general population with the same sorts of thoughts. Not everyone, obviously. But more than you might suppose - if everyone had their own personal ASI, then people who would normally be stopped by incompetence or laziness can offload all the work to the ASI.
You might think "well I'm a god anyway, so I'll still be able to get everything I want". But you have to remember that your adversaries are also gods who are putting a roughly equal amount of intelligence and material resources into their goals as you are into yours.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
I guess I had always assumed there was a robust and parallel way of learning things like how to draw dynamic poses for storytelling
Well there definitely is. Sort of. David Finch has a bunch of lecture-style videos on Gnomon Workshop, Glenn Vilppu has a bunch of demo videos, Michael Hampton has a figure drawing book that a lot of people like. I'm sure there are more Japanese-language resources specifically for anime that I'm unaware of. My problem was that I was too stupid for everything and nothing held my hand to the degree I needed.
A lot of these things go like, "well if you want to draw a person, then you draw a ball for the head, an egg for the ribcage, cylinders for the arms and legs, and 1 2 3... there you go, you drew a person". But whenever I tried to do it myself it just looked awful. I understood the basic idea, and I agreed that it made sense, but something was going wrong and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.
The problem is that there's only so much detail you can convey verbally. You can tell someone to use basic shapes like eggs and boxes and cylinders to construct more complex ones, but the catch is that if you don't draw exactly the right kind of shapes in exactly the right position and proportions, then everything will look like crap. That's where all the magic happens. The devil is in the details.
The head is a really instructive case study because it's a small and self-contained object that has a ton of complexity. I kept banging my head into the wall over and over again trying to get the Loomis head method to work and I didn't know what was going wrong. Yes I'm drawing a ball for the cranium, and then I'm attaching the jaw and marking where the side plane is and I'm drawing the features on the front plane, so why does it look awful every time? The books themselves didn't give any hints. There's so much detail that goes into even something as simple as the ball-and-jaw idea - where exactly does the line for the eyes/brow go? how long do you make the jaw, how wide? what is the exact ratio of the front plane to the side plane, when viewing the head from a given angle? how exactly do you arrange all the features, how far apart are they? - that you really can't write it all down, you just have to look at a lot of examples and figure it out for yourself.
The big first step for me was drawing studies of references (anime references in my case) and then overlaying my drawing onto the reference (digitally) to see how accurate I was. For the first time I could actually describe explicitly what mistakes I was making, instead of just having a vague feeling that everything looked wrong - now I could say that this particular drawing was wrong because the eyes were too far apart, or the jaw was too long. Now I had actionable items I could improve on in both my studies from references and my original pieces.
The next thing was taking references (still anime head references) and tracing the construction directly on top of the reference. Like, I knew that there was allegedly a ball-and-jaw construction lurking in this drawing somewhere, but I hadn't really internalized how exactly that should look (even for the more realistic heads that Loomis used I didn't have a good sense of how it should work, and I certainly didn't know how to apply the same technique to anime proportions). So I just took a bunch of pro drawings and went, ok if I was going to draw this I guess the circle would line up like this, and then we have the jaw here, and if I was going to draw a guideline representing where the eyes go it would go here... basically taking the drawing apart like a mechanic takes apart a car. And it really helped me start seeing patterns and shapes that I had never seen before, and it forced me to really focus on all these little details that I had been getting wrong this whole time.
Anyway I wanted to try and describe my thought process explicitly because I've never seen any book or video lay it out like this, and I hope it's helpful if you have any students who want to learn more about anime or Western comics. A lot of art instructional material just goes with a sort of "grind" mindset like "yeah just do 10k one minute figure sketches and you'll learn how to draw" but that sort of thing didn't work for me at all. I had to really slow down and think about what I was doing.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Solve your damn problems.
Different forms of dissatisfaction. - The weak and, as it were, feminine discontented types are those who are innovative at making life more beautiful and profound; the strong discontents - the men among them, to stick with the metaphor - are innovative at making it better and safer. The former show their weakness and femininity by gladly letting themselves be deceived from time to time and occasionally resting content with a bit of intoxication and gushing enthusiasm, though they can never be satisfied entirely and suffer from the incurability of their dissatisfaction; they are also the promoters of all who know how to procure opiates and narcotic consolations, and consequently they resent those who esteem physicians above priests - thus they assure the continuance of real distress! Had there not been a surplus of these discontents in Europe since the middle ages, the celebrated European capacity for constant transformation might never have developed, for the demands of the strong discontents are too crude and basically too undemanding not eventually to be brought to a final rest. China, for example, is a country where large-scale discontentment and the capacity for change became extinct centuries ago; and in Europe too the socialists and state idolaters, with their measures for making life better and safer, might easily establish Chinese conditions and a Chinese 'happiness', provided they are first able to extirpate that sicklier, more tender, more feminine discontentment and romanticism that is for the moment still superabundant here. Europe is a patient who owes the utmost gratitude to his incurability and to the perpetual changes in his affliction: these incessantly new conditions, these no less incessantly new dangers, pains, and modes of information have finally generated an intellectual irritability that approximates genius and that is in any case the mother of all genius.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Also saying something like "I don't trust myself on x, but I can also spot other folks who can't be trusted" seems to be a little bit of a double-reverse. I can't quite put a finger on it, but I think this is rhetorical sleight of hand.
Let me put it this way: I have no interest in classifying works as either "mass market products" or "genuine Art". This is of no use to me (and indeed it can be actively harmful).
Even when you're one of the greatest writers in 100 years, when you talk about fucking the farts out of you "shitting like a pig" girlfriend, you're getting fuckin' gross, dude.
His letters are obviously beautiful.
The technocrats pretend to believe in that so that they can trick normies into hypersexual practices that obliterate communities.
I hear this idea a lot that the globalists want to push porn because it destroys people, but as far as I can tell this is contradicted by most of the available evidence. Most major corporations and websites are not very friendly to porn at all:
- Patreon's ToS outright bans porn involving real people (and they will shut down fiction/drawings too if they think it's too "extreme")
- Apple app store obviously bans porn
- Major payment processors like Paypal do not want to be associated with porn
- Steam's guidelines have a bit of leeway but generally they don't publish porn, it's common for localizers of Japanese adult games to put a gimped version of the game on Steam and then have a separate patch you download to restore the cut content
I mean yeah porn isn't literally illegal and is always just one click away for anyone with internet access, but, the same can be said for a lot of politically incorrect stuff.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1mo ago
Pornhub is not out there trying to enhance the spiritual achievement of the race
I prefer to reserve judgement and proceed cautiously in such matters, when possible.
With regards to the case of pornhub specifically, I'd gesture towards something like Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes, or his prints of Marilyn Monroe - turning the concept of mass production itself into an aesthetic phenomenon.
don't see that a fetish about eating shit is going to move the spiritual needle upwards
I sincerely, earnestly disagree.
(Of course not all porn is great just because it's porn. Every genre has superior and inferior works. But if a video about eating shit is bad, it's not bad because it's a video of eating shit. It would be bad for other reasons.)
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2mo ago
What is supposed to be the point of the "but Muslim schools are going to be really Muslim" argument?
I think it's just supposed to be a pragmatic reason for why the right might not want to support school vouchers.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
So give me an example of a difference between political ideologies that you think is non-identitarian. Any two ideologies, doesn’t have to be alt right vs SJW left.
I gave several that I think qualify: identity as rooted vs fluid, willingness to accept hereditarian explanations for behavior, the degree to which the state can force individuals to undergo medical interventions for the collective good. Conversely, here’s an identitarian difference between two ideologies: the alt right wants to promote the interests of white people, black nationalists want to promote the interests of black people. So, I think that some things reduce down to identity, but not everything reduces down to identity.
Often when this topic comes up (“the left and the right are just the same with the races swapped!”), what seems to be underlying that sentiment is an implicit notion of “anyone who who isn’t a liberal individualist is really just caught up in the identitarian game, regardless of what else they claim to believe”. Do you endorse that view? I don’t think that’s a crazy view or anything (it’s reminiscent of how ethical positions basically break down into utilitarianism vs deontology I suppose), I just want to know where you’re coming from.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
9mo ago
No, I think they still have an out. You’re not allowed to treat cis people however you want either. Everyone’s gender identity has to be respected, and you shouldn’t misgender people. It applies universally.
But this also gets back to the concern I raised earlier about collapsing the political universe into minimal individualist libertarianism vs everything else. If an ideology takes a stand on “X is bad” or “X is good” you can always spin that as being “actually” an identitarian difference because it creates a distinction between one group of people who is pro-X and one group of people who is anti-X. So, what’s an example of a genuine non-identitarian difference to you?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I've also never liked the Rationalist love of betting and I considered writing an effortpost about it at one point.
There is a certain machismo to it that I find distasteful. I also don't think it's a coincidence that the same belief structure that loves to make people pay rent (via utilitarianism) also love to make beliefs pay rent (via betting). The motto is the same in both cases: "if you're not useful, you're out".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I wasn't sure if you would recognize any difference between ideologies as a non-identitarian difference. The fact that you recognize the possibility of such differences is helpful for understanding your view.
I would argue that the differences between the alt right and the SJW left regarding medical transition are not identitarian. The SJW left regards transition (hormones, SRS) as a formal freedom that should be open to all; it's not tied to any one identity group. Anyone is free to transition as much or as little as they want to. Attempts to identify who is "truly" trans or not are considered "gatekeeping" and are generally viewed as pernicious. Doesn't matter if you're trans, bigender, genderfluid, or even just a man who wants to look more feminine... you should be able to have access to trans medical services if you want. That last one is not unheard of by the way. Plenty of "femboys" take estrogen for softer skin and wider hips, while still identifying as cis men. The SJW left would say "cool!", the alt right would say "what is your problem? You're a man, no you shouldn't be allowed to take any damn estrogen, what is wrong with you?"
I think the competing views on trans issues flow from the fact that the alt right is very friendly to the concept of rootedness, while the left views rootedness as constraining. This is also why the alt right is much more supportive of HBD, and biological explanations in general for human behavior. For the alt right, you are rooted in your identity - you were born into a certain race, into a certain gender, in a certain country, and you should stay put, you need to conform to the norms and live up to the expectations that those identities place on you. You can't just up and change who you are. The left is much friendlier to the concept of identity as a fluid thing that you can change as it suits you. Even when it comes to race for the left, where they're much less sanguine about fluidity, they're still careful to endorse social constructionist views of race instead of biological views, and they stress that the properties of racial groups can be socially re-constructed (in principle). The alt right thinks this is nonsense.
Regarding Covid vaccines, I agree that concerns about disabled people did play a role in the left's thinking, but I don't think it was the overriding factor in their policy decisions. And it certainly wasn't the overriding factor for the alt right - it would be uncharitable to them to say that their position was "yeah, if we cared about disabled people then we would support mandatory Covid vaccines, but we don't, so, they're out of luck I guess". I think the left simply saw an opportunity for collective social action with universalist ends and they embraced it. "We can all play a part in ending Covid and flattening the curve if we all take the vaccine, so let's all fulfill our social responsibility together". The alt right has a certain individualist strain that makes them skeptical of large-scale collective action like this, perhaps because a lot of alt rightists today are ex-libertarians. They bristle at the idea of the government swooping in and telling them what to do, even if it's for an allegedly good cause. These types of concerns aren't identitarian, but rather are simply related to a generalized conception of how the individual should relate to the social collective.
I'm less sure about the case of women, so I'll leave that to the side for now.
But then how do you explain:
-
Opposition to medical transition in general, and especially hormone therapy for children, is an alt right position, while supporting them is a leftist position.
-
The alt right thinks women should be encouraged (through both informal cultural means and formal policy) to be housewives, while the left thinks that women should be encouraged to build independent careers.
-
Opposition to mandatory Covid vaccination is right-coded, support for mandatory Covid vaccination is left-coded.
Are these not legitimate differences? Differences that aren't reducible to the target of their identitarianism?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
Well it felt like something that came prior to conscious deliberation or propositional knowledge. A reflex. One that can easily be overridden, but, the reflex is still there.
Could just be the WAW effect. Or it could be that it strikes me as weaksauce to call for mod action against a woman who’s telling you to man up.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
There's no shortage of "spiritual" stuff, which I would include in "supernatural" and "woo".
I read a lot of contemporary humanities work and I've hardly ever seen anything I would describe as "spiritual". I mean maybe you can find one crackpot out there, but they wouldn't be representative of any field as a whole. Do you think this is "spiritual"?
You might need to check the engineering textbooks rather than science, e.g. for solid reasons you shouldn't build roads from macaroni noodles. But they are there.
What if I just want to build bad roads? What if I want to waste a lot of money and build a road that will break on its first use, so using macaroni noodles seems like a good idea?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
And the fine arts gave us Literal Hitler, so I guess they’re out, too.
Being critical of X does not mean that X is "out". (And yes we should also be critical of art, literature, philosophy, etc.)
Your bogeymen are no substitute for an actual argument.
My actual argument is that STEM sometimes does bad things, so we should be critical of it. Pretty straightforward. This is hardly a radical conclusion, by the way. It's harder to name things that we shouldn't be critical of! "Critical" doesn't mean "throw out completely". It means "skeptically evaluating", as opposed to "dogmatically accepting".
If you have an issue with one of the specific examples I raised in the bullet points, I'm happy to discuss it further.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
"Critique of STEM supremacism" is useless because the alternatives tend to be woo
I suppose I wasn't clear enough originally. "Critique of STEM" doesn't mean a critique of a materialist worldview. It would mean something like: a critique of the notion that STEM should be distinguished as uniquely valuable in comparison to other types of intellectual activity, and a critique of the closely related notion that economic productivity should be the central overriding goal of social organization. And also a critique of the value of technology.
It's not woo to suggest that people shouldn't build advanced AI. It's also not woo to suggest that we should value things other than raw economic productivity. You may think these propositions are stupid or counterproductive, but they're not "woo".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
The only thing this sentence communicates is that you have nothing to communicate about pain but would like me to agree.
Are you saying that you don't know what it feels like to feel pain?
But it doesn't follow that I know what pain is.
You claim to know a lot of other things. Most of which seem to have a weaker evidentiary basis than the existence of pain. How are you going to tell me that you know, for example, the necessary conditions for what a possible set of physical laws looks like for any possible universe, but you don't know what pain is?
A rock does not implement anything we can describe as information processing necessary and sufficient for "qualia".
Ok, but - and I have to keep coming back to this - what is your empirical evidence for this claim? How can you empirically observe that the rock does or does not have qualia, or that GPT-4 does or does not have qualia. Or is it "just obvious" to you? If that's the case, then that's very strange. How can it be "obvious" to you what the necessary conditions are for a system to be able to experience pain, when you also claim that it's not obvious to you what pain even is in the first place.
I'm not sure why you felt the need to block me. Typically people just stop replying to a thread when they don't want to continue a discussion anymore. I'd be happy to continue this discussion with you at any time, if you ever decide that you want to.
In practice I really do not believe that your mind is much similar to my own, so there isn't really a reason to believe that you can conceive of qualia in a way that I'd endorse
Well, maybe. But obviously our minds are similar enough that we're able to have a productive conversation. We took our initial disagreement, about the conceivability of p-zombies, and reduced it to a more fundamental claim: whether observation of fMRI activity counts as direct observation of qualia or not. That's genuine progress! That shows that we're communicating with each other and we aren't just talking past each other.
You are going in circles. This is worse than circular, this is contentless.
There is nothing circular about pain (or seeing red or hearing sound or etc). It's just pain; that's it. Of course you know what pain is. Nothing could be more familiar or self-evident to you.
The p-zombie thought experiment assumes physicalism
Plainly, it does not! Assuming that this is what you mean by physicalism.
tokens like "I", "you" and "feel" are privileged in your design
The fact that first-person experience exists is privileged, yes. It is more privileged than anything else. Certainly more privileged than any proposition about the "external world", more privileged than any purported law of physics. I can doubt that quarks exist. I can't doubt that pain exists.
I am of course well aware of the arguments that claim to demonstrate that there is no "self", no "I". I do not think I am committed to the denial of such arguments, nor do I think that that question is particularly material to the current discussion. I stake my claim at "qualia exists" rather than "I exist".
So the question is: can information (of a brain state, or perhaps any information encoded on any physical substrate) "feel like anything"
Well, I think you're getting at something here that leads back into my question about the consciousness of GPT-4 (which you did not address). Is a rock conscious? Does a rock encode "information" too, of the type that's needed for qualia? We can speculate on that - we can come up with a theory like IIT that allows us to infer that some systems are conscious and some aren't. But the important question is, how can we settle that question via empirical observation? It doesn't seem like we can - no matter how reasonable we think our inference is, the question will always remain fundamentally open. And that is because qualia other than your own can never be directly observed.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
There is nothing outside the true generative function of our universe (let's assume it really is the universal wavefunction) that it addresses, no heap of states. It is not an arbitrary "mapping", it is a self-contained entity
Ok. Then the state table function I was describing is also a "generative function", it's also a "self-contained entity", etc. It doesn't really matter how you want to describe it, just pick your favorite story and run with it. "State table" was just a way of describing it that I had hoped would make the nature of the function clearer; it doesn't entail that there's literally a table on God's hard drive in an ethereal realm or something. A function is a function is a function, again there's no principled distinction you can draw between any of them at the level of logical coherence (unless it e.g. wasn't total over its domain or something pathological like that, but that's not what we're dealing with here).
You can observe [qualia] with fMRI.
This is the crux of the disagreement.
You observe the brain activity in the p-zombie brain and you say "look, the qualia are right there, you can't say that you both see the qualia here and you don't see the qualia here, that's incoherent, they're obviously here because here they are, I'm showing them to you." But this is what I deny. You are not observing qualia when you observe the fMRI readings (in the sense that, when you look at an apple, you don't "observe" quarks, in the sense that this observation of the apple by itself is not evidence for the existence of quarks. You can't look at an apple and go "yep, there's the quarks, I'm just reading it right off this observation". You might learn on independent grounds that apples are made of quarks, and thus you come to realize post facto that when you look at an apple you are also looking at quarks, but this is not the type of "observation" that is at issue here. It's conceivable that you might learn on independent grounds that when you look at brain activity you are also looking at qualia (I'd have further objections to this but let's just grant it), but you can't look at fMRI activity and go "yep, there's the qualia, I'm looking right at it" in any direct way.)
First we have to make sure we both have the same thing in mind when we're talking about qualia. A quale just is your first-person experience of a sensation. It's the actual pain you feel when you feel, well, pain. It could be other things too, in addition to this; it's possible that we can say more about its nature or properties. But fundamentally, it's just what you actually feel. That is its identity.
The fact that qualia besides your own can't be directly observed seems so obvious to me that it's hard to give an argument for why you should think so as well. But I can try.
I'm not 100% sure about this first one, but I think it's getting at something important, so I'll throw it out there: if there was a sense in which you could directly observe qualia, then it would no longer be an open question whether you were the only conscious mind in existence or not. You would have direct knowledge, on the same level of certainty that you have of your own perceptual experience, that other consciousnesses exist. But you don't have this type of direct knowledge, and it is an open question whether you are the only consciousness in existence or not. You could be hallucinating the whole universe, for example, and no one is having any actual conscious experience except you. Saying that you can directly observe qualia strikes me as akin to saying that you can directly observe that e.g. the apple in front of you actually exists in reality and isn't just a hallucination or a simulation. But as we know from philosophy 101, you can't simply observe this. You can observe the fMRI readings, but you cannot "observe" that they are not hallucinatory; similarly, you cannot observe whether they are attended by qualia or not. It's just something that you don't have access to.
Alternatively, just consider how people are already starting to have debates over whether GPT-4 is conscious or not. Can it actually feel pain? Can it actually feel anything? Most people still don't think so, but already a few are starting to say that it might. And as systems start to get more complex, as you start to put LLMs in humanoid robots and they consistently say "ouch" when you poke them, then people will be even more divided over whether those robots are actually feeling pain or not. What sort of empirical observation could settle this debate? It doesn't seem like there could be any. You can't just "see" whether the robot is feeling pain or not, in the way that you can "see" its performance on a benchmark test.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
10mo ago
I don't think this statement has any content sans vacuous
I'm sorry if the terminology was unclear. It was just a restatement of the questions you were already asking; nothing more. You were asking about the ontology of physical laws.
Here's the simplest way of putting it. Why is this coherent:
The wave function psi(x, t) of a quantum mechanical system tells you the probability of state x at time t
but this is incoherent:
The state table S(x, t) of the universe tells you the probability of state x at time t
Both are functions that map inputs to outputs; there's no principled distinction you can draw between them.
It seems that the crux of your argument regarding p-zombies is the following:
The physicalist model contains elements corresponding to a non-circular definition of quale, thus a zombie can't not have quale
but I don't understand what "the physicalist model contains elements corresponding to a non-circular definition of quale" means. Is there anything we can do to get this clearer? I can state what I think your argument is here, and you can tell me if I'm right or not.
Based on your continued use of the example of "delta brain states", I think that you're thinking of something like the following. There are abnormal medical cases where we can observe that someone is having an experience, but they aren't aware of it. We can put them side by side with a healthy person who is having the exact same experience and is aware of it. We can measure the difference in brain activity between them. Ok.
You then go on to make a few inferences: you infer that qualia just is this brain activity that we've measured, that it's identical to it. You infer furthermore that this inference is logically necessary, and any denial of it would be logically incoherent. But, I claim, these inferences aren't logically necessary; that's the whole matter at issue here.
They're not logically necessary inferences because we can coherently imagine qualia and brain states coming apart. We can do this because I can't directly observe your qualia in the way that I can directly observe your brain states, your behavior, etc. That's why there's a Hard Problem in the first place. I don't even know what it would mean to observe someone else's qualia, even with a direct link between our brains. Pain just is your own first-person experience of pain; whatever else it is, it has to at least be that. How could I ever share in someone else's first-person experience? Whatever I experience simply becomes my experience rather than someone else's.
So no matter what physical observations you make, it's always an open question whether there's any qualia there as well. You can show me a million years of regular law-like correlations between certain brain states and people's reports of certain experiences; and I can still insist "well, yeah you're showing me brain states, and you're showing me behavioral correlates, but where's the qualia? I'm a hard-nosed empiricist, you have to show me the qualia itself."
I'm not imagining brain states without brain states; I'm imagining brain states without qualia. There's a gap there that always allows me to coherently imagine that, because brain states are observable and qualia isn't.
He's saying that socialism can't create a perfect utopia, but it can make things better. This is a pretty common attitude across multiple ideologies. A standard American capitalist liberal might not think that we can create a utopia, but he does advocate for making things better through legal reform, scientific advancements, etc.
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