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The relevant portions of the Great Wall such as Shanhaiguan and Gubeikou which were involved in the war were constructed during the Ming dynasty, built in the 15th and 16th centuries along a path that was somewhat reminiscent of the route past walls traced, but which were effectively entirely new fortifications. Really the entire brick portion of the Great Wall that people picture is the product of this very Ming wall-building project.
The earlier Qin and Han Great Walls tracing back to the 2nd century BCE were earthen fortifications that had pretty much eroded away over more than a millennium of disuse by the time the Ming took power; you can still see remnants of the original Han dynasty earthen wall in rural Gansu province which are more or less useless as fortifications due to how degraded they are. After the Sui, there was a really large gap in wall-building, which appears to be due to the fact that wall-building was seen as an admission of policy failure from the Tang onwards; a dynasty with successful foreign policy maintained engagement consistently with steppe-dwellers and was seen to have no need for such costly and manpower-heavy infrastructure projects.
Disclaimer: I really did not like this city when I travelled here to see my SO, it was one of my least favourite cities I have ever been to, but YMMV. My grievances with the city may all be normal and expected in the North American context, so maybe it's a good idea to not use me as a barometer for your experience.
Go see the Old City Hall and distillery district if you're already downtown, they're nothing to shout about but are decent pieces of old architecture, in addition to this it may also be worth making the trip out to Casa Loma to see the OG McMansion "Gothic Revival" architecture. CN Tower is interesting if you've never been in a tower before. Skip Centre Island in the middle of Lake Ontario (or Lake America depending on your nationality), it's extremely underwhelming, it's just a middlingly-sized meadowy island with hokey tourist infrastructure and virtually nothing going on; if you like nature I'm told the Scarborough bluffs are a decent choice though I did not have time to go there myself. Possibly the most interesting offbeat historical spot I can think of in the entire city of Toronto is actually the Mount Pleasant Cemetery, it was inspired by European and British garden cemeteries of the 19th century and features some stately mausoleums for important figures, including but not limited to Timothy Eaton, Hart Massey, William George Barker, etc. Oh and Glenn Gould is there.
Also the Group of Seven paintings, housed in the Art Gallery of Ontario, are worth seeing if you like that kind of thing. They're nicer in real life than they look in photos.
EDIT: Royal Ontario Museum is also okay for a short trip, though frankly there’s nothing all too distinctive about its collection.
I have to admit, crying foul over national sovereignty and international law is a bit rich coming from the US. After all, the general position of the US for the last quarter century or so has been that US law applies within the US and to US citizens, and the US president has unlimited jurisdiction over the life of freedom of anyone else.
No but you see when the US and its allies mess with the Middle East and Latin America for the umpteenth time, bomb their countries to smithereens and/or try to install their own puppet governments in the area, this is an act of magnanimity and liberation of the downtrodden as well as a justified act of retaliation against evil dictatorships. When US competitors exercise power on a much smaller and less consequential regional scale, for example China enforcing their sovereignty over Hong Kong or throwing their weight around in the South China Sea, this is uncalled-for aggression, authoritarianism and belligerence and a violation of international law. As always everything is just realpolitik and the ideological justifications are created ad hoc to legitimise it.
It's literally just rules for thee, not for me; their mode of engagement has never been particularly consistent. The actual basis for their objection to the ICC is primarily just that the US and its interests may be subject to some external power that constrains their ability to act, it has nothing to do with any serious belief in consistently-applied "international law" or "rules-based order". In this context, it's very hard for me to care about any arguments about how the ICC is trying to gain and keep power as an arbiter of international affairs, when we already live in a system where flagrant overexercise of power is the norm. America is just not used to being on the wrong side of that dynamic, and as such suddenly feels obliged to care.
Pain in the purely physical, immediate, tissue-damage sense is probably not accessible to an ML model and I don't think there's an argument for that which really holds up. The more defensible argument and the one I've seen thrown around more in model welfare circles is the idea that some analogue of affective pain would be available to a model, which I think most people would still consider worthy of moral consideration if present.
I think if you subscribe to the idea that qualia is meaningful and worth discussing in some way (an opinion which I do hold) you have more plausible outs from the idea; p-zombies for example are only legible through the lens of a distinction predicated on qualia-based language. In contrast if you're defining affective pain via only functional language your argument has to rely on splitting hairs about how the mechanism of action differs between conscious beings and ML agents, which isn't impossible by any means, but you have less options to argue a meaningful distinction.
Right but I also tend to think visceral distress is defined functionally without needing to rule either way on the presence of qualia, so I deny your premise.
I'm a bit confused since if you are defining everything functionally, this would appear to update in favour of ML agents being worthy of moral consideration, not against it, and in a way that isn't trivial. It appears to nullify your previous objection invoking panpsychism.
Pain and suffering is intrinsically linked to being able to register good and bad and respond accordingly; in other words, valence. Your brain is always predicting what’s going to happen next, and when that mismatch marks a state as worse, unsafe, costly, incoherent, or threatening to continuity, the same learning architecture marks it as discomfort so as to update future behaviour. It's negatively-valenced prediction error.
TD error in ML models are somewhat of a broadly similar concept; it compares expected outcomes with actual outcomes and updates future behaviour based on the mismatch. The whole architecture only works because better and worse outcomes mean something to the system going through it. This paper also reports a representation of "functional welfare" that tracks how well or badly the system is doing relative to its goals, which exists before RL in a latent way but gets recruited and modified through the training process as part of alignment in a way that results in longstanding valence evaluations of sorts post-training.
Not all of this is the same as what occurs in human brains, but if functional similarity implies moral value then this is a lot more similar to it than what goes on in a rock.
This has been discussed ad nauseam but it’s just intra-racial status signalling. The progressive leftist outgroup is not other races/immigrants; they don’t necessarily see themselves as being in competition or even in the same social worlds or status hierarchies as them, the outgroup they would most like to distinguish themselves from is the poorfag hick whites who worry about low-status things like manual or unskilled work being outsourced to waves of Oppressed Refugees who massively increase the supply of low-skill labour and are willing to perform these jobs for lower pay. By embracing these kinds of lax immigration policies, they distinguish themselves not only as one of the Good Whites but also as one of the Cultured Whites, who are magnanimous in their kindness, enlightened enough to accept and understand the value of other cultures, and most definitely not a part of the lowly social stratum at risk of competition from migrant workers. They are too genteel to care about that.
It bears mentioning that the converse exists too; those who hold the opposite view are countersignalling in a way that marks themselves as the populist voice of the masses, as steadfast advocates for the Real Salt-Of-The-Earth Americans/Australians/Canadians/[insert nationality here] who are so impervious to social control that they’re willing to go against the Establishment, but their base position is also just less inherently paradoxical than that of white racial progressives and it’s no great mystery why they would hold this position.
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