newcomputerwhodis
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User ID: 3218
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
You can like surprise and novelty, and you can at one point enjoy a movie that surprises you and later lose that enjoyment when it stops surprising you (because it can't, since you already know it so well or whatever), but those are definitely way above the level of basic sensory pleasure - are they the only things you enjoyed about the movie? The movie can still look good. The movie can still sound good. You could move very slightly up the ladder and enjoy something like wordplay (needs a little context). If a person can only appreciate things at the highest level, they've genuinely lost something - quite a lot of somethings.
newcomputerwhodis
5d ago
Outside traumatic self-shattering experiences, why should there be (much) change other than accumulation? Typical mind fallacy, I suppose, but of course I'm roughly the same person over time - how could I not be? I wouldn't be me if I was someone else! Some people undergo harrowing Big Deal Events and come out the other side changed, but without such a forcing function shouldn't people stay roughly stable? If you change dramatically all the time, then you don't have a stable stream of experiences and should have trouble thinking of yourself as a single conscious being - you should have trouble planning for the future since past you was so different and future you will be yet more different.
The child is obviously still there, and ~all his base-level tastes remain intact. Some of them are moderated by knowledge (this has a side effect I don't like) and there are plenty of new enjoyments I've found, but for the most part anything that was good then is good now. Is this like that thing where adolescents throw out their old 'taste' because it doesn't fit socially, like my younger sister completely 180'ing on music several times in several years? I never did that. Some of it I like a bit less, there are new things I like much more, and there are a handful of things that might still drive sensory pleasure but I no longer engage with for other reasons, but my younger self wasn't wrong - thing X produces positive sensation Y.
newcomputerwhodis
6d ago
Then philistine am I. To Scott's point, the background of the work cannot modify the experience of a blind sampler, and so it cannot reliably impact the experience of consumers in the future when the background or context may be lost or warped. Or even now when the seller can just lie about the background. The work is as good or bad as it is with zero context. Sure, you can use the context (assuming you trust it is accurate) to predict salient facts about it, but that is not the same as those facts being modified by or dependent upon the context. The structure of a book is perceivable "blind" so it can easily be considered - it is part of the work. The vintage of some wine? No. The author is dead. Embrace that and don't fool yourself into disbelieving your own senses because of the prestige of the thing. Does it have desirable quality A, or not? If you don't like a passage of Shakespeare given to you unlabeled (and you didn't recognize it), then you ought not like it in the alternate setting where you're told the author. All else is pretentious hogwash.
Scott is right - there is a bare, brute fact of sensory pleasure, and training yourself to override it, while possible, doesn't make it go away. Angelus Novus evokes no sensory pleasure. Any pleasure I could imagine derivable must come from appreciating context and hence, is not attributable to the work itself. There is separately, a 'work' of situating a work in a context, of creating a work within a context, and the quality of the two may differ drastically. "Fountain" is a terribly low quality work. While the 'work' of getting it displayed amongst fine art is perhaps an enjoyable thing, it does not make the actual object any more appealing. Decouple. Always decouple.
newcomputerwhodis
29d ago
From time to time, I see articles/essays that speak negatively about modern games in ways that are mostly true but not really getting at the heart of the problem, and then comments ripping them apart and saying 'the games haven't changed, you have' and I hate this! It's completely and verifiably true that games have changed - a lot - and I miss what I still think of as video games; not that none are made anymore, but that the industry has moved on and the word means something else now and I mostly have to go to various poorly publicized indie corners to find what I want. I just haven't actually gone through the effort to put together my own competing essay to explain what the change is and why it happened. So here's a prototype/outline/draft/braindump:
Video Games were a fixed, finite product with a defined, finite audience. Somebody would have an idea, some people would think about how much effort and cash and time it would take to make that idea into a game and how many people might buy it, if it seemed like it had a good chance of a healthy profit they'd do it. The developers would develop the game. The publishers would hound them about deadlines. The devs would either buckle down or push back, but the game would be (mostly) done before it released because there was no way to turn back once the physical goods were produced. And the number to be produced had to be figured out, because if too many were produced money would be lost manufacturing and warehousing and shipping, and if too few were produced the lead time to produce more would be a drain on the hype.
Games needed to be (mostly) complete and free of game-ruining bugs, but alongside this developers had a little more pushback power because going gold was a line in the sand - if they felt something needed tweaking, they could meaningfully press the publisher for a bit more time. The target audience needed to be figured out and sized so they could produce the right number of copies, and this meant that games needed to know what they were and who they were for.
That's right. I'm blaming digital distribution for the vast bulk of modern gaming. Ever finer sanding off of edges, dumbing down of gameplay, yellow paint (though this also has another technological cause), open worlds and crafting systems everywhere, pretty much all of it comes downstream of the dissolution of the idea of a 'finished product'. There's no longer any meaningful way for devs to push back unless the game is totally non-functional - patch it later! There's no longer any pressure to tailor your game to your audience - just keep casting a wider net, there's not cost to overproduction! A wider net will surely fall around many who are less versed in your niche - just make it simpler more accessible! A net can be widened by aping the successful bits of the big boys - open up that world, add in that crafting system! Some devs may somehow stand firm, but even if they don't buckle they still feel these pressures. Incentives are powerful, and the industry today is shaped by incentives I despise.
Something like that. Things have changed. I'm not so much a fan of games these days. I miss video games.
newcomputerwhodis
1mo ago
I'll go one further. Not only are there so many different nutrition profiles, but there are so many different consumption models that even eating the exact same ingredients prepared the exact same way (or even the same total amount!) can get you radically different results, like munching a handful of something once every day around the same time or consuming a kilo of it all at once. There is an enormous difference between daily activities on a live service game and a no-schedule-but-your-own finite activity set you complete and then exit, even if the genre and other trappings are all alike.
...and that's why Final Fantasy XI and XIV do not belong with the others, despite whatever similarities you care to name and I will never let it go. Ahem.
I've only ever dabbled a bit in multiplayer games, and even during periods of 'high' dabbling that would top out at like an hour or two a week. The vast majority of time I've spent gaming is single player finite-content experiences - games that have a beginning and an end - and that tends to feel like a completely different world than most of today's gamers inhabit.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Apologies, folks, never seems to be enough time. I tried to keep up the other day, didn't have any time yesterday, and now I'm gonna have to collapse and condense a bit here and move on. Maybe hit round 2 in a future week, dunno how available I'll be this coming one.
The most prominent flavor across the disagreeing replies seems to be of the stripe "of course if you assume your theory is true it is true!"... but that's not what's happening here, not at all!
I'm taking a handful of parsimony-guided steps through the initial fog to land on physicalism. If you want to call that part "assuming my theory is true" then I won't fight you further (today) because dualists are exhausting and my time is short, but what do you call everything after that? Assuming a non-novel, in fact popular, and not-trivially false framework, can you honestly say that nothing after that follows and I'm assuming the whole thing? I don't think that's a tenable interpretation of what I've written, and I think - as I've emphasized in some replies - that if you take physicalism seriously then there are a lot of bullets here that need to be bitten which many who call themselves physicalists have not even put in their mouths.
Enjoy the holidays if you partake, find something else fun if you don't, I'll try to reengage at a later date.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
I dunno man, all the "physicalists" out there still worrying about the hard problem of consciousness or p-zombies or free will or identity seem like they could use a hand. Beyond that, if parsimony doesn't get you finding dualist a dirty word I've got no more ammo on that front.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Given physicalism, why something exists rather than nothing and its related reformulations are the sole family of questions that are outside the domain of science. That's a lot of the point of my post. You can't posit things beyond science if the physical is all you have and philosophical attempts to do so are confused. Is the thing you're pointing at in and of the world or is it external? If everything is in and of the world, then all things are moved only by things in and of the world and so all apparently hard questions have answers in and of the world.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
I believe that if you buy physicalism, I already have. You just have to take it seriously. Further, I'm reasonably certain that if the highest weighted values of an explanation are predictive power and parsimony, physicalism must be selected. If your explanatory judgment criteria are different, I admit little I've said should move you.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
You, you're the tricky one. I probably shouldn't have tried to preempt the math/logic objection at all, because that was clumsier than it needed to be, and you're obviously right about everything you've said, so I'll have to back up a half step. Nothing that followed the math aside depends on it, it's only trying to swipe away a potential objection before anybody lands on it and fumbling the move.
So let's see... Platonism is bupkis. Describing a non-contradictory thing doesn't mean squat for whether or not it actually exists. Math is hypothetical relations built using the same mechanisms the physical world uses - if X, then Y. If there were 7 spatial dimensions, then 7 dimensional "cubes" (hepteracts?) would work like so. When the hypothetical is something actual, when the math is instantiated, all that changes is that we get physical confirmation that our math is correct. I'm not happy about this exact phrasing and would need to workshop, but that would be the basic idea, and I don't think it's remotely a dangerous blow to the overall thrust to just strike the original without replacement.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Buddy, we all contend that every single day we aren't committed solipsists. We take the data we have and then posit a model that explains the data, predicts future data, and fits with what logically must be true.
But I'm really not making much of a change at all - everything follows from physicalism.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Har har, very funny, but you're not talking to a much more straw-filled version of me, you're talking to the actual me. There is no ground to stand on when trying to define "good" without dualism of some sort, because there is no objective connection between the adjective "good" and any part of the physical world. Good is describing different things entirely depending on reference frame - if there exist 10x our number of aliens whose lives/utility functions/whatever thing you want to find valuable are irreconcilably opposed to ours (they only live if we die, they are only happy if we are sad, etc) then there is no classical definition we can even potentially share. There is no universal reference frame for goodness, and there cannot be one. The only way to reason about goodness is to take an axiom that gives goodness a definition. That is not my stance, that is the only way pure physicalism can ever be. Pick one, check your conversational/civilizational partners roughly agree, then proceed.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Is just offhanded snark. I have no philosophical grounding - for all I know 80% of all philosophical texts are centered around whether a hot dog is a sandwich.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Parsimony very much does demand not introducing deities when physics already explains all elements, no further assumptions needed. The relevant objection is whether parsimony is appropriate, and you're now the second person to come from that angle, so maybe I do need to add a bit about why it is.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
That is not my understanding of superdeterminism - it is extending determinism to quantum (and all probabilistic) phenomena and thus necessarily forming one causal chain from end to end through the entire universe, which does indeed follow lightly from a free-will-free determinism that only leaves probabilistic corners. If that is not correct, mea culpa, give this extension of determinism a different name.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
I don't know how best to respond to this. There's a lot where you seem confused or where you're making a notable attempt to sound more poetic than actually get a real idea across, but to my ear it doesn't lend the wise learned sage image so much as someone who is educated in one domain and drastically undervalues others trying to leverage what they do know in a vague way while nodding at smart concepts from what they don't. Ironic to accuse you of that while dunking on famous philosophical problems, I know. I don't think you've stated any substantive objections to anything I've put down, other than perhaps "why do this", to which I can only respond that if you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
"What is good" is a category error and the values that congnitive [oh hey a typo] systems overlay onto the world are simply chosen axioms (which consequentialism helps pursue the satisfaction of).
Reason cannot tell you what is good. It never could in any physicalist frame because "good" is not a physical or measurable property. It's not even defined! Pure consequentialism doesn't try to pretend it is.
You take your axioms, your selection of what is good and what is bad, and then you measure how much of what you have taken as good or bad results from an act. Attempts at other ethical systems are higher-order evaluations, "the kind of society that... the kind of person that... the kind of thinking that... results from... results in the kind of thinking that... which results in the kind of person that... which results in the kind of society that..." and so on. You be virtuous (however that is defined) not because doing so makes you happier right now, but because the downstream effects bring about good results (by your measure). You do not engage in a specific bad act (however that is defined) not because it causes a specific bad thing to happen in the moment, but because the downstream effects make the world worse (by your measure). Mapping it all manually is hard, so ethical frameworks make good heuristics, but that does not make them "true" - it only makes them useful.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
You're now fighting the spirit of the thought experiment to make simulation an infeasible dissolving mechanism due to technicalities.
The point isn't the limitations of the hardware she has or the time available, the point is the separation between "information" and "experience" that people intuitively feel.
But she "has all the information" about how vision works and what apples are made of. In a physicalist frame, there can't be any non-physical process. There's nothing else but the physical processes involved, so consciousness and qualia and whatever other things are proposed either don't exist or arise from the physical phenomena. It is, again, assuming that there is some special non-physical qualia-ness to "seeing" which can not be understood from facts and is not simulable even in principle. If you buy that, you are a dualist.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
In a purely physical world, there can't be anything that "goes against determinism". You have to bite the whole bullet or not at all.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
To those who don't accept brute physicalism, sure, I've done nothing. But there are a great many who sure seem to like labeling themselves physicalists, yet hold on to some strange ideas that I don't think hold up. So I've only solved one half of philosophy, downstream of the physical fork.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Having "all the physical information there is to obtain" does let you simulate - any physical process at all - given enough bits of storage and time to compute. The point is that the experiment assumes a difference between the physical processes and "seeing red", because if it didn't it wouldn't be interesting. The answer would be no.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
You misread me. He and you and everyone else are free to use free will as a model, but know that it is a map and not the territory and if/when you get better data, you must discard it.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
A dog is allowed to enjoy the taste of human food that fell to the floor without any presupposition of a soul or self-conception that would pass the mirror test, and you are allowed to have a rich inner life composed of your various physical systems without attributing mystery to it. Your brain is doing a lot of things, all the time.
I don't know the third thing about how the brain works (I barely know the second), but I don't need to know the how to show that physicalism demands that whatever it is it must be a deterministic or probabilistic process just as I can show there is a Kolmogorov complexity of some object without being able to tell you what it is. If you allow parsimony to reduce you to a single magisterium, there can be no other way. If you refuse to allow that, well then there's not much I can do to move you.
newcomputerwhodis
4mo ago
Determined if you zoom out enough and crank the simulation hard enough doesn't mean it looks determined from up close in-the-moment, same as quantum experiments looking random from inside our lightcone. If the best information you've got looks like free will, use your free will heuristics.
...but if you have better information, well then, feel free to discard another wrong model. Do you have such better information? Knowable and known are distinct.
Two-boxers fundamentally disbelieve the premise - refuse to engage the actual hypothetical. The strict domination idea, that 'once you're in the room, the money is already there' is discarding the very thing the problem is working with - the predictor predicts you. If you are thinking along two box lines, then the predictor will leave one box empty. Once you have entered the room, the game is already over. The prediction has already been made, and if you're a two-boxer, you've already lost. You have to realize that the only way to win is for the predictor to think you are going to pick one box, and for the predictor to think you are going to one box, since it is extraordinarily accurate, you have to be a one-boxer. You can't solemnly resolve to be a one-boxer while secretly planning to be a two-boxer, because the predictor will pick up on that. You have to actually have the thought patterns of a one-boxer. You have to believe one-boxing is the superior strategy. It's not 'irrational' - it's playing the game. In this specific case, because of the predictor's stipulated accuracy, one-boxing is the strategy that wins. It doesn't matter how the accuracy comes about - a lack of free will, time travel, hand waving woo - it's there. The experiment depends upon it, and discarding it is foolish.
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