Tretiak
2mo ago
I was wondering when I would see someone make this comment.
(Not insulting you at all. But I knew it was coming. Lol.)
That comic is wonderful, :D. Thank you for sharing.
As a Catholic I take the soul as an article of faith. It hasn't been adduced or supported by any scientific evidence. It'll probably indefinitely stay contained within the realm of philosophy and theology at best. The trend of the evidence has been in one direction. I'm not sure uploading human consciousness is something to get anymore excited about than reincarnation though. With WBE's for instance, you could in theory simulate a brain up to behavioral isomorphism of all it's inputs and outputs. Provided it be fully scaled up in complexity with the brain it's emulating, it indeed would be every bit as real and just as complex as the brain. Neuron by neuron, atom for atom. But that's in the same sense I could say I have two water bottles sitting in the refrigerator. They are identical as far as their material constituents go even though the tetrahedral geometry of the arrangement of water molecules will differ. But in neither are they the same in the sense that taking a drink out of one of them will cause water in the other bottle to disappear. Which is the kind of thing people are asking for.
People can't think clearly about the ontology of identity a lot of the time because it isn't always clear how one should think of it. People's folk notions of it are incorrect as you said, but even we've been discussing it at the level of a folk notion that only approximates reality because it's easier for us to understand each other this way. When you dispel the idea of personal identity as one of human being's being made up of these persistent billiard balls bumping around but get used to thinking of it in terms of the ontology reality itself seems to use, the correct frame of mind is to think of identity the way it's described by Special Relativity, which is to say points in space-time that are related to each other causally. I'd push back on the idea that when we wake up, we can be thought of as waking up as a reconstruction of sorts. There's a physical continuity between the me right now and the me of one second ago. The me of one second ago isn't dead per se, but it no longer exists either. But my thinking on this issue I'll readily concede isn't completely clear to me. Science can definitively rule out a notion of personal identity that depends on your being composed of the 'same' atoms because modern physics has taken the concept of "same atom" and thrown it out the window. Subatomic particles themselves do not possess a sense of personal identity. It's completely, experimentally ruled out, which makes it difficult for anyone to speculate about where personal identity is located.
The brain doesn't exactly repeat itself. The state of your brain one second from now is not the state of your brain one second ago. The neural connections don't all change every second, but there are enough changes every second that the brain's state isn't cyclic, not over the course of a human lifetime. With every little fragment of memory new you lay down and every thought that pops in and out of short-term memory and everything that changes the visual field of your visual cortex, you ensure that you never repeat yourself exactly as before.
Over the course of a single second (not seven years, which people mistakenly think all the atoms in the body are replaced), the joint position of all the atoms in your brain will change far enough away from what it was before such that there's no overlap with the previous joint amplitude distribution. The brain doesn't repeat itself. In just a single second, you will end up being comprised of a completely different, non-overlapping volume of configuration space. And the quantum configuration space is the most fundamentally known reality, at least according to what our best physical theory says. Even if quantum mechanics turns out not to be truly fundamental and there's something deeper, it has already finished superseding the notion of individual particles.
And actually, the time for 'you' to be comprised of a completely different volume of configuration space is much less than a second. That time is the product of all the individual changes in your brain put together. It'll be less than a millisecond (even less than a femtosecond). And then there's the point to consider that the physically real amplitude distribution is over a configuration space of all the particles in the universe. 'You' are just a factored subspace of that distribution. This means that the idea that you can equate your personal continuity with the identity of any physically real constituent of your existence is false and any attempts to rehabilitate that folk conception of personal identity is a dead end. You are not the same 'you' because you are made of the same atoms. You have no overlap with the physical constituents of yourself from even one nanosecond ago. There is continuity of information, but not equality of parts. This is where I think personal identity will ultimately be located. The new factor over the subspace looks a lot like the old you and that isn't by coincidence because the flow of time is lawful.
Whatever makes you feel that your present is 'connected' to your past it has nothing to do with an identity of physically fundamental constituents over time (hence why I think the Eastern metaphysics of reincarnation is bullshit).
On the theology line: I appreciate Polkinghorne’s attempt to reconcile persistence with physicalism (I must admit I've only skimmed it), but I do not need it to ground my choices. From a secular starting point the null hypothesis is no afterlife, and the world hands us ordinary cases that already break naive essence talk. Neurons turnover. Sleep erases consciousness for hours. Anesthesia erases it for longer. Memory is reconstructive and highly lossy. Yet prudential concern flows across these gaps because causal structure and stored information persist. Uploads aim to preserve that structure more faithfully than biology eventually will.
He's not the only one to do this. Peter van Inwagen attempted to do something similar at one point. I remember reading his books but I can't fully recall the details. The subset of Christian materialists is something that's caused me to raise an eyebrow and I've always found it interesting. You're correct that you don't need to buy Polkinghorne's thesis to explain personal identity. In fact I don't buy it at all. But if you're a non-denominational Christian or something of his particular stripe, you need what he's selling or something close to it to preserve personal identity in the classical sense, given what science says about it currently.
We very much do agree on what's important about family. The rest of your overall comment leaves me with some interesting things to consider and think about. I wouldn't want to respond prematurely on it.
I understand the worry people like Ezra have. His appearance on the podcast was a horrible debate for him, but it was highly instructive for illustrating a similar view the left and the right both share. Ezra has a view of these topics that’s almost on par with the way the right-wing views the concept of a gateway drug.
Weed is an innocuous drug. We have known that chemically, medicinally and almost every other way you want to have it for a long time. So why do so many on the right remain so uptight about it even though society has become more acceptable of its use? Well because there’s at least one way a gateway drug retains a valid use as a concept. It’s proximity to everything else.
I knew a person once who wanted to open a dispensary in a state that had at that time fairly recently legalized recreational marijuana. And he was well positioned to do it. But after thinking over it for awhile he decided against it, because of the ‘type’ of clientele that’s mostly associated with smoking it. Yes, otherwise normal people also smoke weed, but we all know the popular images of the kind of people who use it. And those types of people do exist. In large numbers. And much of the time, those ‘are’ the kinds of people you’re dealing with.
But it goes even further than that and also puts you in proximity to other people. Hard drug users, or maybe not people who do hard drugs, but drug dealers who sell weed along with hard drugs. And that puts you in closer proximity if not outright in the same circle with those people. If you are a person who doesn’t want the risks associated with that kind of activity or it’s more than you want to think about from a business perspective as the person I was talking to, you’ll abandon the idea entirely just as he did.
Yes, of course IQ exists. Of course there are differences between people and populations. Just as there are height differences, skin tone differences, hair and eye color differences, the whole 9 yards. But these are all differences in a mundane sense and shouldn’t attract such significant attention to them that the KKK and every Neo-Nazi group closely follow your research activity and publication pipeline, and it places those people at the discussion table along with you; because these differences are truly inconsequential and meaningless. And yes, I don’t want those assholes at my table either.
Large swathes of my family are racially intermixed. Several cousins are half Hispanic. I have a red head cousin who’s been in a long-term relationship with a black man. When I was in high school I was in love with a black girl. But you can understand why the whole table becomes quiet and nervous if you bring up a topic like that, especially when large audiences are tuning in to see what you have to say. I think Ezra feels the same way. And I don’t blame him for it. But his approach for handling the matter is not one I would adopt. Sam was having a debate. Ezra was speaking to the mob.
Frankly I’m stunned that Ezra has ‘any’ audience at all. It’s even more concerning to me I live in a locality that’s colored by the mentality of his type of thinking. I understand the backdrop people like him are coming from, but he is a ‘horrible’ advocate for the cause. Sam could’ve had a much more sensible discussion about this with someone like Shaun. Ezra is too psychologically fragile and had a hard time stomaching and keeping down what he was hearing. He is not the guy for practically any subject out there.
Tretiak
2mo ago
Zelensky is not a fully independent actor. There’s a lot of players involved both inside and outside his administration that are pulling chains on him. He should’ve went for a peace plan right out of the gate and tried as hard as he could for that. All of his efforts will be in vain now when he empties the clip of whatever political capital he still has left, things end the way people thought it would from the beginning only now with hundreds of thousands of bodies and a wrecked country trailing behind him.
There’s people on the frontiers of whole brain emulation (WBE’s) already, but even they don’t seem to think a copy of you is a continuation of the present day you in the same sense that today is a continuation of the you of yesterday.
Your ontology of identity may be flexible, but that’s exactly what most people don’t want. They want a continuation of themselves for tomorrow that feels pretty much like today, only either extended perhaps in another added faculty of perception, or as a backstop or guarantee of their ordinary present day consciousness in case something (like death) happens to them.
This is why Buddhist and Hindu philosophy has never drawn or inspired any real attraction or attention from me, though I’ve read their religious texts. If I was someone in a past life, and even if the wheel of karma went on in both directions forever and there was something in me that never died, why would I care, if there’s no concrete mental and physical continuity between that life and my present life today? The two are causally disconnected. If it was me, it’s not me in any sense I regard as interesting or that I should care about. It’s about as meaningful as saying the person standing across from me is also me. I can’t see out of his eyes as well as my own. I can’t feel what he feels and I can’t think what he thinks.
If he's real, and also timeless, I'm sure he won't mind if he was to wait a few quadrillion years for my immortal soul as opposed to this century. Since Christians believe in medical care and extending healthy lifespan, there are no downsides I can see.
I think John Polkinghorne was the only theologian I’ve ever read that made a case similar to this. Even as a Catholic myself, most of the arguments I’ve seen Christian philosophers make against transhumanism are incredibly weak.
Having children is better than nothing, when it comes to leaving your mark on the world. But it is still a pale imitation of actually staying alive and healthy to tell people about it. I do intend to have kids, and I'm sorry to hear about your fertility issues. But doesn't change the fact that my kids would also like to have me around too. When I talk about life extension, it's not just me being selfish, but thinking about my parents, and my grandfather, and all the other humans alive who would like to keep on being with their loved ones.
Most people don’t consciously decide to have children because they want to extend their biological footprint into the future, although we know evolution programmed that drive into us for that specified purpose. But it’s incidental to our conscious processing. I want to have children because family is what I find meaningful and fulfilling. Hedonism is empty and a dead end and even if transhumanism could extend my life a million years into the future, lack of a family would still ultimately leave me feeling unsatisfied. Even in my life right now, I would never be in a relationship with someone who wouldn’t consider or has already decided against having a family of their own. That’s a completely worthless relationship as far as I’m concerned.
Tretiak
2mo ago
I stopped listening to Ezra Klein ever since he appeared on Sam Harris’ podcast and looked like a complete moron.
Trump is a hiccup in our democracy. Until there comes a hard and fast dismantling of institutions, you can’t license the claim that he’s an authoritarian when the same system you approve of has also put all the candidates you’re palatable to in the same seat Trump is in right now.
Cryonics supporters aren't "not" accepting their mortality. They still understand it perfectly well. If a human being lives for 10,000 years, that is not technically immortality. Our current understanding of the laws of thermodynamics says that isn't possible. Maybe that'll change one day but it's highly unlikely because all the laws of thermodynamics are inevitable. There's only a certain amount of negentropy left available in the universe to perform physical computations with. But if today you will want to live one more day it's not far-fetched to think tomorrow you will also want to live one more day. That's proof by induction on the positive integers. I remember the article Chris Hallquist put out that caused people to raise some interesting objections to it, namely difficulties with the preservation of the of the brain after vitrification takes place. I don't know if that's been overcome or changed in recent years but I found it somewhat persuasive.
I don't know anything at all about the financial stability of these institutions, but yeah there's that as well.
I'll seize upon your post to address your claims as well as the claims of /u/BahRamYou below since he claimed my education was amiss, and since they somewhat overlap and I won't end up repeating the same arguments. I'm also not a proponent of the Hidden Variables Theory which I got saddled up with earlier. I'm a supporter of Many-Worlds.
First, what you and him are doing to a degree is drawing light to the distinction that's already been known between quantum consciousness and quantum 'cognition'. Quantum consciousness is garbage. Quantum cognition is not. My conclusion as maybe an informed layman, or statistically/mathematically literate student is right in line with what the cutting edge of science gives you in popular format or an undergraduate textbook:
The human brain is a classical scale system and as such can't really be guided in any meaningful way by quantum phenomena. Because even a single perception or decision involves the operation of millions if not billions of neurons, which are massive systems already (even just one neuron is a cell comprised of trillions of atoms). So any quantum indeterminacy that's there will be completely washed out by the system as a whole. This is exactly the reason hardly anyone (and especially experts actually in neuroscience, rather than other fields who are nosing in) buys the quantum consciousness thesis beyond the role of analogy, which is what I was alluding to earlier. And this is the difference between the Weak vs. Strong forms of quantum cognition.
Even if quantum effects became relevant somewhere within a single molecule within a single neuron, and even if this were somehow pertinent to the I/O protocol of the neuron (and had any effect at all on computation) and that’s already two “ifs” for which still no evidence exists, that still would not explain consciousness in any way. All it would explain is how each neuron runs its I/O protocol (which is all to say how the neuron decides what the output signals should be, given the input signals). Single neurons are not conscious. And there won’t be any shared quantum states between neurons, because any molecule doing anything meaningful quantum mechanically in one neuron will be separated by any other neuron by trillions and trillions and trillions of atoms chugging right along as a classical system.
So there cannot be any superposed macrostates in the brain. Moreover, anything the proposed quantum effect “does” to determine a neuron’s I/O protocol can be replaced by a classical circuit doing exactly the same thing and therefore won’t even be necessary to the output of the neuron, much less the whole brain. This is why consciousness can never and will never be explained by quantum mechanics. All sorts of classical systems can replicate quantum outcomes (well weighted dice are just as random and classical waves do many of the same things as quantum waves; when I was in high school we were replicating matrix mechanics with any classical algorithm).
This is also why quantum consciousness can't do what some of it's advocates claim and rescue contra causal free will (which doesn’t exist, and no one should want to exist anyway). For quantum indeterminacy (if that even exists) to change the output of the otherwise deterministic system of the brain, it would require spontaneous coordinated events across trillions of atoms, which even at most (at literally the most ridiculously most) won’t happen but maybe once in a trillion decisions. Which at a decision a second is once every thirty thousand years or so. This is the problem with vast macrosystems like the brain: quantum phenomena simply can’t cause or explain anything relevant about them.
I've read Penrose's book years ago as well as the claims of many of his supporters and the ensuing criticism of his work. There's already a real good summary of this school of thought and it's why only the advocates of the 'Weak' end of quantum cognition (which is to say those who use quantum mechanics as an analogy) are worth taking seriously. The people on the other end of that argument are all cranks. Even the best supporters of legitimate quantum cognition are all rooting their work firmly in classical mechanics by viewing neural computing as a geometric process (an exploration of a vector or concept space) rather than a linear process (say a hand calculation on paper or a Turing machine, although the latter isn't entirely accurate I recognize).
So legitimate researchers can say the brain functions 'like' a wave tank that can produce analogous circumstances of superposed wave-forms, interference patterns, and quantum switching between binary states without literally being quantum mechanical. We know the human brain cycles at around 40 Hz for instance, which seems related to our conscious perceptual threshold of about 20 Hz (that's why film and television media shoot to exceed that in frame rates to get our visual system not to notice). But even then, individual perceptual events often involve waves of coordinated signals across neural nets in the brain, hence entertaining two thoughts simultaneously, and using interference patterns to locate and determine outcomes. So obviously we'll get some analogous phenomena to wave particle duality; but none of this is quantum mechanical, it is all entirely explicable with classical mechanics, just like waves and sound (even hydrons and phonons, though no analog to those has been discovered yet in neuroscience far as I know).
Real quantum cognition research doesn't have anything to do with quantum mechanics and postulates no strange or mysterious physics like indeterminism. It is classical and deterministic through and through. It deviates from classical probability theory (which is linear), not classical physics. Wikipedia even provides a good summary for why thinking the alternative is bunk.
Brains/Consciousness being some kind of magical quantum system was always nonsense. I took physics classes in high school as well and at least what we learned even then was enough to expose several problems with that thesis. You still see similar pseudo-science get peddled when Wolfram published A New Kind of Science, despite it not being taken seriously and the problems with it have been well known for a long time.
If you ever took a physics class in your life that did any unit on quantum mechanics, you will have watched double-slit experiments (just as we all did) that were performed in front of you using sheets of common craft material and a tank of water. Not a single thing you saw there was quantum mechanical. All that you saw was that classical systems that carry waves can do weird things very similar to what quantum mechanical systems do. You can generate static wave interference patterns with just ordinary waves in water, which is a totally classical system. No quantum mechanics is required for this. This is not quantum mechanics.
You can also have quantized interacting systems (standard desktop computers do this) where there are only two states, and the system flips between one and the other (on or off, 1 or 0, contained or flooding) once the classical system reaches a threshold. The human brain can also do this too, where you can be in two states (think of turning right or left, running mental simulations for both outcomes like we do when driving), and when a threshold is reached (eventually enough neurons fire on one side over the other to cause a cascading outcome, leading us to turn right or left), and therein a state is chosen. This is "quantum" in the analogous sense that it is an undecided either/or, on/off state that can be flipped (or "collapsed" if you want to call it that) under the right quantitative conditions. But the point remains, no actual "quantum mechanics" is involved.
You can talk about modeling consciousness by analogy to quantum mechanics if you like. Just like we can also do for wave mechanics in a bathtub, or acoustic mechanics in the construction of a concert hall, or in designing decision-making CPU's in computers. If you want to speak of a cognitive state of considering options as "quantum superposition," that's true in a very loose sense of the word (there are 2 states being considered simultaneously and 1 of them hasn’t been chosen yet, so the superposed state has yet to "collapse" into a decision), but again it's not literally true. It's only true as a useful comparison. There is no "quantum superposition" going on. The entire system is an analog "classical" computer. Not a quantum computer.
So a lot of "quantum cognition" garbage you’ll see published is doing this. It's just looking at how our brains work as classically mechanical computers, and only finding similar operations to quantum mechanics, much in the same way looking at how ocean or sound waves work in classical mechanics, and then finding behaviors that resemble ones we observe in quantum mechanics. But it’s not quantum mechanics, which means in turn that most quantum cognition models allow no indeterminate, "quantum spookiness" to hang your hat on (looking at you, Deepak Chopra). They are all deterministic macroscopic systems. They just share behaviors in common with quantum systems in physics. That's all.
It's actually evidence that quantum mechanics is itself also just classical mechanics. We just can’t observe the operating variables so it only "looks" really mysterious; just as if we could not see the ocean but could only see the peaks of waves as individual particles, and found the behavior of those particles really strange, and then we invented a bunch of woo bullshit about it, when in reality it was just a perfectly sensible deterministic system in classical mechanics. But we don’t know if this is the case. Maybe quantum mechanics behaves the way it does because it is somehow fundamentally indeterministic. At bottom it could be. But we don’t really know that either.
Physicists have been reproducing even the weirdest quantum mechanical phenomena within entirely classical systems (both with fluids and sound and even so, hydrons and phonons entirely obey classical physics). And should Superstring theory turn out to be validated one day, would even further reduce all quantum phenomena to a classical system.
Tretiak
2mo ago
Not sure what you're asking, because that's not relevant to what I'm pointing out.
What I'm saying is all the examples I've provided of the way these corporate entities behave only a small handful of people seem to anticipate based on prior experience and knowledge of history. After these events occurred the mass of people began acting surprised and amazed that a corporation like Google/YouTube would behave this way. To which the response of a small handful of people on the sidelines were saying, "No shit?" Hence the remark:
"I just don't know why it's captivated the attention of so many people." It's only a surprise to people who aren't paying attention to how corporations behave.
Tretiak
2mo ago
Of course people can’t see into the future. I don’t know what tomorrow will hold but I’m very confident about what it’s going to look like.
Corporations all follow such predictable patterns of behavior over time. If the future were that unknowable there wouldn’t have been people saying things like this would come long before the Adpocalypse ever happened.
Tretiak
2mo ago
I was going to say as well like you, I'm not terribly well versed on this subject. But I am a geek who's read a book or 12 on the present state of cognitive science.
If you're asking me what qualia is, it's simply a catch-all term for all the features that are unique to conscious experience. Thomas Nagel's “What is it like to be a bat?,” or to see the color red or hear your favorite song or smelling chocolate or feeling angry. It's one of the last scientific frontiers in neuroscience and it's one that hasn't even been resolved hypothetically. And yes, the explanation for qualia most likely does have something to do with the inevitable physical effects of information processing. All evidence that we've amassed so far is converging on no other conclusion. But that still leaves us ignorant of a lot of the details.
That's because we can’t access the information we need to answer this question. For instance to tell what is actually causally different between a neural synaptic circuit whose activation causes us to smell dog shit rather than freshly baked bread, we need to have resolutions of brain anatomy which are still far beyond any present technology. The mere arrangement of synapses won’t be enough, and we still don’t even have that; and since the IO signal for any neuron is determined by something inside the neuron, such as (maybe?) methyl groups attached to the nuclear DNA of the cell, we’d need to be able to make a map even of that, and for every single cell in the brain, which is far beyond any present physical capability. By a long shot. Maybe AI research could get there sooner, if somehow they achieve general AI and can ask it about its personal phenomenology, but that’s also just another technological capability we presently don’t have.
But no matter how you want to look at the problem, you're still stuck needing to explain why chocolate doesn’t smell like vanilla. Why does activating one neural circuit causes you to experience a smell at all and not hear a musical instrument, or see the color red or feel lust, etc. Why does any of this happens at all to begin with? We already know what it's like to process this information without any of this phenomena. We call it our subconscious. So what makes the difference between just walking though life running purely on subconscious processes, and instead experiencing all these bizarre but also specific phenomena?
In this sense we don’t really mean by this the biomechanics of our sensory systems like I led with previously above. What's really being asked is what makes the difference between chocolate smelling like chocolate and not vanilla, people don’t mean what has to be different about the molecular receptors in the nose that distinguish between these two odors. Those don’t have anything whatever to do with what things smell like. No matter what molecule stimulates a certain neural track in the nose, that’s just a binary signal, “on or off,” that flows into the brain. At best, perhaps, it has a quantity scale. But there’s nothing qualitative about it. That wire could go anywhere. It could go to the circuit that makes you see red, rather than smell anything, much less some particular thing. And actually for some people, it does. Synesthesia is a real thing. (So why are only some people synesthetes?)
Qualia are undeniable. I don't think they can 'not' exist. Because it is literally 100% impossible that “I am experiencing a black field with whitemarkings inside it right now” is false; that it “isn’t happening” and thus “doesn’t exist.” That I am seeing letters on a computer screen as I type can be in doubt, maybe I’m hallucinating or dreaming this; maybe I am mistaken about what the sensory signals my brain is interpreting as letters on a computer screen actually signify; etc. But that I am experiencing seeing letters on a computer screen is impossible to doubt. And why that is has to be explained.
Qualia are also fictional (our brain invents them to be able to demarcate and navigate through information) and yes, their “existence” will have something to do with information processing. Because we know if you remove or numb the pertinent information-processing circuit that generates any given experience, you consequently remove the experience. And you can even cause the experience to occur by simply sticking a wire into the pertinent circuit and shocking it. So we know this is simply something that circuit does, this is scientifically established, and does differently than a circuit that doesn’t generate any phenomenological experience (as most circuits in our brain don’t) or that generates a different one than this (as all the remaining circuits in our brain do). What makes a “chocolate circuit” cause that experience and not some other (or none at all)?
One thing that often throws everyone off including the eliminativists is the completely unnecessary folk assumption that qualia are 'things'. That they're objects or entities. They are not things, they are events because the mind is a process, not an object. Qualia don’t “explain” things they are the thing to be explained. And they don’t exist separately from the physical process underlying them; they are the physical process underlying them. So the question is what is different about those physical processes, and other physical processes, which don’t generate such phenomena? That is exactly identical to the question of what causes those events of experience to occur, and to have the qualities they do (rather than others instead).
As an example, if there were anyone out there who can “experience” the difference between “324” and “325” as quantities, that logically entails that for them there is something experientially different between them. And that’s exactly what the word “qualia” means. Most of us though don't qualitatively experience any difference between such abstract numbers. We comprehend them in a computational sense that's absent any unique qualia. We generally have to work out in what way they differ. We don’t experience it directly, the way we do the difference between “two” and “three,” which are quantities we can directly apprehend in experience.
All that said, my cheap theory to offer you is that all qualia are just ways of discriminating the geometry of touch as a sense. And all other 4 senses remain subordinated to touch as a primary sense, simply generating complex mixtures of touch sensations. Complex emotions like love include psychosomatic feedback. Your internal monologue relies on the same neural circuitry you use to hear spoken voice. Touch more generally is just a way of discriminating geometries. If there were no qualia, you would not be able to discriminate between those things. And I think a summary of the evolutionary history of sensation lends support to this. One of the things pointed out in the article is how touch was the first sensation that developed. Vision later developed from the same circuitry and machinery as touch. And then smell came after that. In most animals sound is processed by touch sensors on the moving hairs of the ears. There's no inherent reason why that had to be the case, which indicates an evolutionary development: all senses ultimately go back to touch. It's also pretty well known that pain sensing cells evolved from touch sensing cells as a way to detect irritants. In general 'pain' is a touch sensation so intense that it disrupts and overloads other mental computations. Which is exactly what pain computes: an attention claiming condition report that needs immediate resolution.
I could keep going with other experiences like vision and pleasure, but it still follows the same evolutionary pathway.
Tretiak
2mo ago
Human prehistory was more primitive and barbaric. I don't know if it was any less violent than today. The only reason Torquemada and the rest of the Inquisition didn't kill everyone was because Torquemada didn't have access to machine guns and gas chambers.
Tretiak
2mo ago
I don't think you can understand an ideology without trying to sympathize with it to some degree. I've gone far out of my way to read far left-wing literature. I've read the classics of left-wing thinkers like Proudhon, Lenin, Bakunin, Chomsky, etc., things as esoteric as left-wing publishers like Haymarket Books whose lineup of scholars on the left still do Marxist analysis, and right-wing literature as far as Hitler, Dugin, Mearsheimer, Yarvin, etc., on the other end. Most people can only satirize the views of the people they're trying to criticize but can't accurately represent or articulate it coherently enough to have a meaning critique of it.
Tretiak
2mo ago
My understanding was that psychometricians currently rely on individual self-reporting of where you assess yourself on the Big 5 personality traits. It's still subjective but still provides key insights and data you can do interesting things with. I've taken one myself, only at the persistent request of others.
Tretiak
2mo ago
True. But I don't think that should've come as a surprise to anyone. Why should it? You saw that on other fronts as well that had nothing to do with advertising. You saw it with them kicking RussiaToday off the platform at the outset of the Ukraine war (propaganda at work). You saw it with Chess channels having their subscribers removed (collateral damage?). You saw it with both left and right-wing political channels being demonetized (business cycles come and go, progressivism is out of season).
I just don't know why it's captivated the attention of so many people.
Crypto will never replace the traditional banking system or international financial system. The major selling point behind all crypto at least in the beginning was blockchain tech, which aimed to be able to make electronic payments without relying on trust. Which is a cool and ambitious idea. But it’s just not true. Yeah, bitcoin eliminates 'some' trusted intermediaries that are inherent in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust bitcoin and consequently everything else about it.
Blockchain tech mostly just ends up reshaping trust. But if you actually think about it and analyze both blockchain and trust, it's pretty obvious that it's all much more hype than value. And blockchain solutions are often worse than what they replace in the beginning.
If you look at the data structures that make up a blockchain, the first is a distributed (which in this case means multiple copies) but centralized (as in there’s only one) ledger. That's a way of recording what happened and in what order. The ledger is public which means that anyone can read it. And it's also immutable that means that no one can change what happened in the past. The second part is the consensus algorithm, which ensures all the copies of the ledger are the same. That's what "mining" is. And a critical part of the system is that anyone can participate. It's also distributed, which means that you don’t have to trust any particular node in the consensus network. It's also extremely expensive, both in data storage and in the energy required to maintain it. Bitcoin has the most expensive consensus algorithm the world has ever seen, by a 'long' shot. The last element is the currency itself. Some type of digital token that has value and is publicly traded. Currency is necessary of a blockchain to align the incentives of everyone involved. Transactions involving these tokens are stored on the ledger.
All three elements of a public blockchain fit together as a single network that offers new security properties. But the relevant thing to ask is: "Is it actually good for anything?" It’s all a matter of trust. Most blockchain enthusiasts have far too narrow of a definition of trust. They’re fond of catchphrases like “in code we trust,” “in math we trust,” and “in crypto we trust.” This is trust as verification. But verification isn’t the same as trust. Interpersonal trust can work very good on the basis of morals and individual reputation, but the problem is they often only scale to a certain population size. Primitive systems were good enough for small communities, but larger communities required delegation, and more formalism. This is where political institution's come into play. Institutions have rules and laws that induce people to behave according to the group norm, and they impose sanctions on people who don't. What laws do in this context is they formalize reputation.
If you look at banking and the financial system, financial institutions, merchants, and individuals are all concerned with their reputations, which prevents theft and fraud. The laws and regulations surrounding every aspect of banking keep everyone in line, including backstops that limit risks in the case of fraud. And there are lots of security systems in place, e.g., anti-counterfeiting technologies to widespready internet security technologies.
What blockchain does is shift some of the trust in people and institutions to trust in technology. You have to trust the cryptography, the protocols, the software, the computers and the network. And you need to trust them absolutely, because they’re often single points of failure. When that trust turns out to be misplaced, far too often there is 'no' recourse. If your bitcoin exchange gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If your bitcoin wallet gets hacked, you lose all of your money. If you forget your login credentials, you lose all of your money. If there’s a bug in the code of your smart contract, you lose all of your money. If someone successfully hacks the blockchain security, you lose all of your money. In many ways, trusting technology is harder than trusting people. Would you rather trust a human legal system or the details of some computer code you don’t have the expertise to audit?
Blockchain supporters love point to the more traditional forms of trust like bank processing fees as expensive. But what blockchain trust does is also costly, the cost is just hidden from you. For bitcoin, that’s the cost of the additional bitcoin mined, the transaction fees, and the enormous environmental waste. It doesn’t eliminate the need to trust human institutions. There will always be a big gap that can’t be addressed by technology alone. People still need to be in charge, and there is always a need for governance outside the system. This is obvious in the ongoing debate about changing the bitcoin block size, or in fixing the DAO attack against Ethereum. There’s always a need to override the rules, and there’s always a need for the ability to make permanent rules changes. As long as hard forks are a possibility—that’s when the people in charge of a blockchain step outside the system to change it.
Any blockchain system will have to coexist with more conventional systems. The advantage modern banking has is that it's designed to be reversible in real time. Crypto isn't. That makes it hard to make the two compatible and that makes things more insecure. Steve Wozniak got scammed out of $70K in bitcoin because he forgot this.
Blockchain technology is centralized. Crypto might theoretically be based on distributed trust but in practice it's not. Just about everyone using bitcoin has to trust one of the few available wallets and use one of the few available exchanges. People have to trust the software and the operating systems and the computers everything is running on. And we’ve seen attacks against wallets and exchanges. We’ve seen Trojans and phishing and password guessing. Criminals have even used flaws in the system that people use to repair their cell phones to steal bitcoin. These issues are not bugs in current blockchain applications, they’re inherent in how blockchain works. Any evaluation of the security of the system has to take the whole system into account. Too many blockchain enthusiasts focus on the technology and ignore the rest.
To the extent that people don’t use bitcoin, it’s because they don’t trust bitcoin. That has nothing to do with the cryptography or the protocols. In fact, a system where you can lose your life savings if you forget your key or download a piece of malware is not particularly trustworthy. And no amount of explaining how SHA-256 works to prevent double-spending will fix that.
To the extent that people do use blockchains it's because they trust them. People either own crypto or not based on reputation. That’s true even for speculators who own bitcoin simply because they think it will make them rich quickly. People choose a wallet for their cryptocurrency, and an exchange for their transactions, based on reputation. We even evaluate and trust the cryptography that underpins blockchains based on the algorithms reputation.
You can see how this will fail too. Look at the various supply chain security systems that are using blockchain. A blockchain isn’t a necessary feature of any of them. The reasons they’re successful is that everyone has a single software platform to enter their data in. Even though the blockchain systems are built on distributed trust people don’t always accept that. Some companies don’t trust the IBM/Maersk system because it’s not 'their' blockchain.
Do you need a public blockchain? The answer is almost certainly no. A blockchain probably doesn’t solve the problems you think it solves. The problems it solves are probably not the ones you have. Manipulating audit data is probably not your major risk. A false trust in blockchain can itself be a risk. The inefficiencies, especially in scaling, are probably not worth it. If you look at different blockchain applications, all of them could achieve the same security properties without using a blockchain.
And to the point about crypto more generally... Honestly, cryptocurrencies are useless. They’re only used by speculators looking for quick riches, people who don’t like government-backed currencies for different reasons, and criminals who want a black-market way to exchange money; which are the real use cases we see involved.
To answer the question of whether the blockchain is needed, just ask yourself: Does the blockchain change the system of trust in any meaningful way, or just shift it around? Does it strengthen existing trust relationships, or try to go against them? How can trust be abused in the new system, and is this better or worse than the potential abuses in the old system? But most importantly: What would your system look like in the first place if you didn’t even use blockchain at all?
For most people that would ask themselves those questions, I think it's likely they’ll choose solutions that don’t use public blockchain. And that’ll prove to be a good thing in the end.
Tretiak
2mo ago
That's why the Bitcoin and crypto-crowd overplayed the selling point of the tech, thinking it provides some pathway to this purified economic system of the future that does away with the broad experimentation and advantages of prior economic systems and mixed economies. Anyone thinking economics is going to completely do away with politics in the future has oversold themselves on an ideology. The problem being that techno-libertarians may want to live in this kind of fantasy society, but normal human beings do not.
Tretiak
2mo ago
At any rate, advertisers still have a right to choose where they want to put their money. That's why the YouTube "Adpocalypse" was always a fictitious crisis to me by people who wanted to cry "censorship!," because that meant these content creators would have to diversify their platform or find alternative sources of income elsewhere. I'm not a fan of the advertising industry one bit, but calling it censorship stuck me as nothing more than a shout of butthurt among people who think they're entitled to other people's money.
Tretiak
2mo ago
Qualia always struck me as the basic material computation within biological systems. There's nothing magical about it.
If you begin things with the basic idea that consciousness is just at bottom, information processing at the level of the brain, that provides an easy pathway from hereon out to understand this. Whenever computers process information, there's always "something it's like" to be the computer doing that. That's just an inevitable consequence of computational task itself. This is just never experienced by anyone, unless the computation also includes a computed person that's experiencing it. When a computer experience's something, it's because it's computing the experience of that thing.
If you were to start with a simple visual process for example, where a computer needs to discriminate between areas of a space that are light or dark (say you're traveling to one trajectory and not the other), this will always be experienced in some way and necessarily so. The geometry that's being computed will be felt, and there will be something different about "what it's like" to be looking at a light area or a dark area. Because it couldn’t be otherwise. How could it? So there's nothing "extra" to explain about qualia. And the exact way this is experienced will depend on the computational circuit, it’s physical arrangement and how it behaves, etc. Other philosophers have reasoned the same way (including Dennett, Pat Churchland, etc).
I’m actually curious now. Got any stats and case studies on this?
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