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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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.
Tretiak
8d ago
Crypto is 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
8d 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
8d 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
8d 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).
If you pay close enough attention to people, you can very often spot a point in the conversation where things begin to shift to them telling on themselves, behind a foil of projecting their own issues out onto the world and everyone else in an attempt to conceal their misery or embarrassment in front of you. Sometimes in conversations I'll just throw out a statement or do something for no other purpose than to see how that person reacts. Do they pause when reacting? Do they snap back? Do they pivot to something else? I'll just pretend to be stupid and not notice what's going on around me.
Case in point. I was party to a conversation with a group of friends several years ago, and there was an older woman who was a part of it. The vibe she gave of was clearly one of a spinster and this was confirmed to me when she made a remark where she attacked men for not shacking up with women their own age and dating younger women. What apparently nobody ever told her or she ignored is that often times men did try dating people like her who were her own age... When they themselves were younger... When you get turned down by your peers enough, eventually you get out of the pool to go swim in other waters. And so she was attacking men her own age for their own refusal to give her a chance, which reveals nothing illogical about the mating game itself, but rather the paradoxes people like her live by in their own personal lives and the problems that are of their own making.
Why shouldn't the bar be that low for the way flailingace is using it?
You can personally set the bar wherever you want. But in that case, I'm struggling to understand why people say this like it's some kind of surprise. What am I supposed to be made to think or feel upon hearing that?
Even selectively signal-boosting true-but-non-representative things can have an effect of misleading an audience. This very thread is based on someone taking something that has happened (an accusation of pushback against people wanting to help) in a way that generates outrage (FEMA is deliberately witholding help, partisan motivation?) that plausibly wouldn't exist with other potentially relevant context (the government has an interest in managing airspace, which appears to be the form of pushback being alluded to).
Well put it this way then. Anyone who would want to hold Russia or anyone else for that matter guilty of disinformation and not the media complex in the west which IMO is far worse by comparison, has a very hard sell to convince me of some kind of moral indictment, because anyone who wouldn't also hang the whole of CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS and everyone else from lampposts outside their headquarters for also being guilty of disinformation, is just being a partisan hack.
Nothing in it is false, but it's not information structured for building objective understanding either. It is an oppositional / antagonist information presentation, and one that- if done deliberately- can be information to promote discord rather than discourse.
And RT can also make similar claims in some of their reports as well as far as exposing disinformation. So what? Are people calling for them to be restored to YouTube now on grounds of their occasional fairness?
flailingace's position, as I understand it, isn't that it's disinformation on the basis of truth / not truth, or 'their own' narrative, but the intended result of why the information is being presented.
Meaning what? If they're doing it for a good cause or something they agree with then its okay then?
Tretiak
11mo ago
In all seriousness these days, it can be hard to tell the difference. Bari Weiss could've passed as someone they hired off Twitter.
Well one problem has been that technological developments and social trends have made it easier by lowering the costs for people with cheap contributions to have a voice. I was one of the few skeptical and somewhat cynical naysayers in contrast with those who took the opposite position and usually went around championing things like the democratization of the media or X or Y, and allowing people to have a voice, saying its going to raise the aggregate level news quality among people's media diet. Instead you got the reverse, more along the lines I more or less thought it would, where the signal to noise ratio became so out of hand that the bad drives out the good, and mediocrity rules the waves from one end to the other.
None of these things ever get pitched on the harm they'll do to society when the first appear and gain traction, but instead it's all about the great and wonderful and productive things it'll enable us to do. But the noble and moral uses of these things only ever end up being a footnote and an afterthought to their real uses. Mindless consumerism. Intellectual laziness. Style over substance. I really don't understand how it seems like nobody ever saw this coming. I saw it coming from a mile away. But maybe I'm just that pessimistic.
It's always extremely easy to be intellectually lazy and unconsciously fall victim to propaganda. Britain and the US invented the modern public relations and propaganda industry and have been very successful at convincing the average person who had never even heard of places like Donetsk and Luhansk up until a few years ago, that they're on the right side of an issue they know nothing about.
I remember awhile ago getting into a debate with someone in the /r/geopolitics subreddit, who literally said to me that if Russia only spent more money on it's domestic social programs to take care of its people, NATO wouldn't expand into Ukraine. And that is not hyperbole. This is the quality and caliber of the average person who takes great pride in having very strong opinions about something they know absolutely nothing about. Americans in general are not very good when it comes to putting themselves in the shoes of other people, and when you combine that with someone who mistakes the philosophy subreddit for the geopolitics one when it comes to understanding international affairs. Riding a bike on the highway isn't your only problem when you're also going the wrong direction.
If you don't understand what's really going on, then you can't even represent the other accurately enough to have a sensible disagreement with it.
Tretiak
11mo ago
I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.
For example, just the other day I was watching Piers Morgan's regretful debate with Mehdi Hassan over Israel/Palestine. Mehdi being a big player in the same space Piers is, clearly knows how the game is played, and spanked Piers pretty hard on his own show. It makes for great soundbites and entertainment, but is no way to conduct an honest debate.
Tretiak
1yr ago
Oddly, neither of your sources indicate that the pro-European protests were orchestrated by the US as opposed to the US supporting protests that would occur from organic pro-EU support following Yanukovych's backing out of a highly popular agreement with the European Union also suppored by EU advocates well implaced.
So this is really how far we're reaching, huh?
Tretiak
1yr ago
Fortunately I am still willing to engage you as to why anti-globalization conspiracy theorist is not a full or accurate representation of what the US State Department position is.
Did you even read the content of the article?
If you choose to call Chomsky a moron, that's on you. I call him a tribalist and a sophist, but fully recognize his intelligence in his field of competence- which is not geopolitics, but linguistics. (Though I have heard from others in the field that he devolved to non-falsifiables in defense of his fame-earning theories, so it's not particularly relevant.)
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that one went right over your head...
See? There's the learned language issue. You're using the words, but not matching them to the right contexts and so create the unintended ironies. A more native speaker wouldn't make the prior mistake of making an accusation of not representing another's position after citing a conspiracy theorist deriding another's position.
Lol. Okay.
No, I got the point you were making, it was just historically illiterate.
And yet you didn't articulate it correctly.
Setting aside that the Minsk agreement did not actually propose to restore Ukrainian's sovereignty due Russian-demanded poison pill provisions that would give its proxies vetoes over Ukrainian national institutions, which would lose the ability to govern the country as a whole even as the Russian-separatist regions could engage in diplomatic agreement with Russia (thus giving the Russian-supported proxy groups more foreign power sovereignty than the government) while proposing elective systems that did not require Russia give up proxy control (which they did not relinquish)-
In 2019 Zelensky got elected on a peace platform to resolve the conflict between Eastern Ukraine and Russia. He began to move forward on it and tried to go to the Donbass. What it would have meant was a kind of federalization of Ukraine that gave a degree of autonomy for the Donbass, which is exactly what they wanted. Something like Switzerland or Belgium, but he was blocked by right-wing militias which threatened to murder him if he kept up with it. If you're essentially telling me that the inhabitants of that part of Eastern Ukraine don't have a right to their own freedom and self-determination because it would mean their interests would play into the hands of Russia, that exposes the prejudice of your personal political views on the matter; but does little to address what the source of the conflict was actually about.
-this was not only significantly different from the US government design for Japan, which not only did not enshrine foreign proxy sub-states at a constitutional level, but also was in no way a respectful recognition of Japanese sovereignty to negotiate. The American occupation system was imposed, not a result of amicable negotiation, and there was no pretense of Japanese sovereignty until a good deal after the US occupation forces left and Japanese elections were able to be held without American occupation shaping permissable conduct.
You actually think Japan has this much autonomy and independence in its foreign policy establishment? It's widely accepted in most foreign policy circles that its own foreign policy conduct is ultimately subordinated and dependent upon continued American economic and military support.
Nor, and this is also relevant, does the comparison acknowledge the context of the imposition: that Japan was denied sovereign rights and agency due to having just resolved a war in which Japan was an imperialist aggressor against most of its neighbors including the US itself. Whereas the Russian justification is that Ukraine warrants a Japanese-style submission because... America bad, or something.
The ultimate Russian justification against Ukraine is NATO's military expansion up to the borders of Russia. You can appeal to undetectable, subliminal and nefarious ulterior motives all day, but short of having direct access to his mind, all you're left with in the end are Putin's own statements on the matter. And that fundamentally hasn't changed since he began talking about it.
... it doesn't really establish your awareness with Euromaiden-
That it was orchestrated by the US? Yeah, that's long since been established. (1, 2)
I'd rather you build a competent historical metaphor, not your naval gazing. If your media is telling us Putin is Next Hitler, or running out of gas, or out of ammunition, pick better media, not other trash.
If your historical metaphors are on par with the propagandists you find running the narrative, I see no reason to not treat them as roughly equivalent, and if there's a solid historical argument in there that doesn't omit the facts of what happened, I haven't seen it. Only an egoist's internal monologue.
However, your citation wasn't to have someone on the other side of vested western interests- your citation was on a claim of what the vested western interests were themselves supposed to be admitting.
And it says quite a bit about the integrity of one side of the argument when they won't even fully and accurately represent what the position of the other side is.
Chomsky was a senile old man at heart decades ago, given that he's been an anti-american tribalist for longer than you've likely been alive, and not a particularly impressive one unless you're awed by sophistry. If you think he's the world's foremost critic of US foreign policy, you have a very shuttered view of the world of American critics.
I'm still waiting on the counterargument. If we're essentially at a standoff where either side at liberty to disregard an argument by calling it's proponent a moron, then expect the same kind of dismissive, low effort diatribe from me in return. Otherwise, there's nothing to evaluate.
(If you want intellectual heft, try the French. Defiantly not-American enough not to buy into Anglophone tropes by default, but familiar enough with both western cultural contexts and a cultural inclination towards argument structure to be delightful, and with significant national patronage in order to define themselves against the US in their attempts to align Europe to their interests.)
Let me try the same thing in kind.
"Lol. Sounds like some bullshit to me."
I suspect the difficulty is that you don't seem to recognizing a satirical tone. Neither he nor I were standing with the position, and your continuing insistence that they were (and your word choice in the process) is suggestive that part of the reason why may be that English isn't your first language.
Evidently I did miss the satire. I figured your statements were worth taking seriously and not given in bad faith. I stand corrected.
Now, if you argument is instead that Japan is analogous to Russia, and that Russia should be nuked and forced into unconditional surrender in order to be occupied and forcibly reconstructed as Japan was, that might be an interesting historical parallel to make...
You completely missed the point I was making.
Minsk II was adopted by France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015, and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council. It presupposed the retraction of Bush’s invitation to Ukraine to join NATO and was reaffirmed by Obama, then it was vetoed by France and Germany. It called for disarmament of the separatist Russia-oriented region (Donbass) and withdrawal of Russian forces and spelled out 3 mutually dependent parts: demilitarization; a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty that included control of the border with Russia and complete autonomy for the Donbass in the context of the decentralization of power in Ukraine as a whole. Which wasn't at all unlike the conditions the US imposed on Japan in the postwar period, by banning Japan from having an army, called for disarmament and economic integration with the western powers.
If you care to disagree with my position on historical differences mattering... let's hear it!
It seems you don't even understand my position enough to coherently disagree with it, sadly.
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.
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