shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
No bio...
User ID: 2609
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
9d ago
Tolkien, Chesterton and presumably @PyotrVerkhovensky actually think Christianity is true. You seem to be talking about Christianity as if it is a means to an end. An end which you coincidentally don't state anywhere, leaving you open to accusations of nihilism. The people you are trying to convince that Christianity doesn't work to achieve their goals, have Christianity itself as their goal. I don't think your disagreement is about whether Christianity is currently 'working' or not, but about what end we should be working towards. Chesterton et al. are bemoaning the fact that what they believe to be good is getting further and further out of reach and your reply appears to be "ah, but that good is getting further and further away, therefore it can't be good!". I believe "pornography is morally evil" to be an objectively true statement, just like I believe "1+1=2" is an objectively true statement. Whether modern westerners watch porn and whether they are good at arithmetic or not, does not change anything about those beliefs.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
13d ago
So far I have only seen planning ones. However the planning ones show Musk asking whether he can visit and one of them has Elon asking when the "wildest party" will be, when discussing a date for his visit. So unless I'm missing something here or these documents are fabricated, the idea that it was Epstein taking initiative and Elon always refused seems demonstrably a lie, because we have emails with Elon asking whether he can visit.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
13d ago
It looks like there's serious dirt on Bill Gates and Elon Musk at least. The funniest possible timeline is if Trump of all people has no credible evidence against him, but like every other elite from the USA on both sides of the political aisle does. So far I've only seen the non-credible witness stuff with regards to Trump, but I understand there are literally millions of files so who knows what will turn up in the coming days.
Elon Musk previously claimed Epstein tried to get him to go to the island but Elon refused.
However, Elon appears in the Epstein files asking to go to the island. Some back and forth emails to pick a date for the visit, so it looks like he did go there and again rather than refusing to go, he requested to go there himself. Multiple times actually.
Here's Elon in 2012 (reminder, that's after Epstein had been convicted for procuring an underage prostitute) asking when the wildest party would be.
Here's Elon again a year later with some back and forth planning a date for another visit.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
14d ago
"Modern liberalism"
Don't really understand how that one rolled out, that's certainly not how I see myself. One thing which always causes problems for me in this type of political tests is that I want both centralised government and the marketplace to have less influence than they do now in western society. What I want instead is more civil society and local communities and institutions that aren't run (directly) by a big centralised government. To be fair, the third best match which this test gave me was Distributism which is more in the ballpark of the kind of politics I want.
Interesting point. I've thought about it a little and two ideas come to mind.
First, I think the broader definition of hedonism might end up being unfalsifiable. Let's say that people value status as some sort of more sophisticated form of hedonic pleasure over things like sex and drugs, which I think is a reasonable idea. How in this scenario does anybody value anything over hedonism? Presumably whatever one values, if you achieve it, it will bring you pleasure. If every possible good one can value is accompanied by a pleasurable experience and we suggest that what people really want is the pleasurable experience rather than the good itself, how can there ever be a situation where somebody can't be assumed to be a hedonist? Given these assumptions, hedonism seems almost definitionally true.
Second, on further thought I think the experience machine thought experiment actually does manage to solve the problem of my first point. If one is motivated primarily by the experience of status, presumably the experience machine will bring about that experience as well. So if the in the thought experiment we know we would have a perfect experience of being high status without knowing that it is false, but nevertheless we reject that experience because we think it is low status, I think it still amounts to choosing actual high status over an experience of high status, thus rendering the person who makes that choice not a hedonist. If the person in question truly values the hedonic pleaure of being high status above all, why not get into the experience machine to perfectly experience the hedonic pleasure of being high status?
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
20d ago
If people need to be convinced that the experience machine is high status in order to enter it, does that not prove that people value status over pleasure? It seems to me you are in agreement with Nozick, only you expand on his idea by suggesting a candidate for the thing which people value over hedonism.
For a culture war take, I reckon something like the experience machine is already in play in my opinion in the ever increasing part of our lives by swallowed up by the digital. From titillating 24/7 drama in the news and on social media to gaming and porn, a lot of it is not too far removed from the experience machine, providing continual stimulation, most of which is devoid from any meaning in the real world. The main difference is that this continual meaningless hedonic stimulation seems to not actually make people all that happy in the long run. And furthermore, people will often acknowledge it's fake and makes them miserable, and yet are unable to spend less time glued to their screen. Rather than voluntarily entering Nozick's experience machine, it's more like we placed unconsenting in a Skinner box by an egregore running the techno-capitilist establishment. Misaligned AGI is a scary scenario, but I'm afraid that the current leaders of our technological advancement are already misaligned to humanity's best interest. Whether we will achieve AGI or not, as long as our technology is made by the current crop of tech CEO's, the result will be something like a Matrix style dystopia where all of us are forced to watch adds as we move from one addictive pleasure to the next in a digital experience machine, whether we like it or not.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
21d ago
numerous heterosexual activities which are widely considered "vanilla" (PiV sex with condoms, sex then pulling out, fellatio to the point of orgasm and so on)
While in a post sexual revolution western world these things are considered vanilla, the largest religious organisation of the world in its official teaching still condemns all these things (even if its members don't always adhere to those official teachings). I reckon most philosophically literate people who agree to "homosexuality is wrong because it is unnatural" also condemn contraception. I guess there are a lot of Evangelicals today who think homosexuality is sinful and have less of a problem with contraception. This is actually a relatively novel phenomenon; all Protestants rejected contraception up till ~100 years ago or something. Luther and Calvin for instance strongly condemn any form of contraception in their commentaries on Genesis 38:9-10. I suspect the Evangelicals who have a looser attitude towards contraception and such while also condemning homosexuality (implicitly) subscribe to some sort of Divine Command Theory, rather than the Aristotelian Natural Law theory that is prominent in Catholic ethical teachings, and its the latter that tends to give us language about it being "unnatural", at least in a philosophical context. So I think for most people interested in philosophy the purported contradiction really does result from equivocating different meanings of the word 'natural'.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
25d ago
Personally, being of the Luddite persuasion, the element of the MAGA tent which I most dislike is the Thiel/Musk tech right clique, of which Vance appears to be an agent. I'd much rather be governed by woke moral busybodies or Trumpist kleptocrats than by gay space fascists. Ideally I would like none of these clowns to govern the USA, but that appears to be too much to ask for. (I don't live in the US myself, but I'm afraid my own position is not much better.)
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
25d ago
FWIW I was born and raised in the Netherlands and I was read multiple Roald Dahl books by my parents as a kid and I'm pretty sure he is very well known around here. I distinctly remember liking the BFG as a kid, or rather 'de GVR', i.e. 'de Grote Vriendelijke Reus' as it gets rendered in Dutch.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
25d ago
In last week's CW thread I wondered what Trump's motivation might be for wanting to purchase Greenland. While various explanations have been offered, none of them have managed to convince me. Today however I stumbled across a fact which made all fall in its place.
The USA has purchased Danish islands before, i.e. the United States Virgin Islands. Strikingly, these formerly Danish islands have a connection to Trump! Probably the most famous of them is Little Saint James whose popular name derives from Trump's great friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Presumably, having lost access to Epstein Island, Trump is looking for another Danish island to purchase so he can go about his business in private.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
27d ago
It's still not clear to me what exactly the US wants to do with Greenland that they cannot already do. They already have a military base in Greenland and I can't imagine that (before this whole kerfuffle) Denmark would have made a big deal about a larger military presence of the USA in Greenland. Why bully and alienate countries in your sphere of influence to get something you already have?
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
The idea that traditional vices are in many cases actually good for the economy goes back to at least the 18th century, see The Fable of the Bees. Published in 1714, with the subtitle "Private Vices, Publick Benefits", arguing that traditional ideas about honesty and virtue are bad for society and society benefits more from selfish individuals pursuing personal gain, rather than virtuous individuals pursuing the common good. This idea is still pretty prominent in certain types of libertarians and ardent defenders of capitalism, as you can see some of the reactions in this very thread.
As a fellow enjoyer of premodern literature, I am with you however. I find this attitude completely incomprehensible.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
Just what our society needs, more screen time!
If anything, I would support the direct opposite: make politics boring and difficult again.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
The people who do the best job of keeping the western world peopled, i.e. conservative religious people, are the same to whom all this nonsense is an abomination. For all your fertility edgelording and sneering at priests, the people who listen to the priests are the ones actually having children.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
If you are willing to elaborate a bit on the content of the book I'd be interested. I am a poor sleeper myself and I might be interested in the book.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
If running universities as businesses creates problematic incentives, maybe it could be a good idea not to run universities as businesses. I'm not super familiar with the history of how universities are organised, but universities are older than capitalism, so at least at some point they must have been run in a different fashion.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
You have had plenty of replies to your post already, so I won't bother you with a detailed response to everything you said, but there is one thing that caught my attention that I'd like to reply to:
The experiment's "insight" presupposes consciousness is not an operation of the brain.
( ... )
ANYTHING the mind "experiences" must come from these physical phenomena, unless there is some other thing not contained in the set of physics which is causing them.
I don't think the Mary's room thought experiment necessarily intends to prove that consciousness is caused by something non-physical, but that it is something non-physical. If A is always caused by B, that does not entail that A and B are the same thing. The thought experiment, as I understand it, doesn't intend to prove that consciousness is not caused by processes in the brain, but rather that perfect knowledge of the physical processes in the brain does not entail perfect knowledge of the conscious experience caused by these processes. Perfect knowledge of everything physical related to colour, does not entail knowledge of what red actually looks like. Only conscious experience of redness can give that knowledge. Hence the conclusion is that even if the experience of redness is only ever caused by physical processes in the brain, it still can't be completely reduced to those processes because perfect knowledge of every physical aspect involved does not yield knowledge of what red looks like and thus that experience has to be in fact something non-physical.
Obviously the idea that a physical process in the brain causes something non-physical is a little bizarre. But that's why the hard problem of consciousness is named hard. If we had some straightforward solution to the problem which would satisfy most people, calling it the hard problem would be a bit of a misnomer.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
I do wonder how AI will affect these types of things. AI has been better at chess than humans for quite some time, but still people care much more about human chess than matches between different chess engines. I'm not predicting it will turn out this way everywhere, but I can imagine a world in which a similar dynamic happens in a lot of creative media where people really do prefer it to be more human. For me personally simply the knowledge that something is AI generated will cause something to feel less meaningful. But I suppose my media consumption is rather far removed from the median to begin with, so my feelings on the matter might very well not be representative of wider trends.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
Nope. I have never lived in the bible belt myself. The church I go to is of a type that's pretty common in the bible belt, although in a proper bible belt village it might be one of the less conservative ones. There is a bunch of stereotypical stuff associated with the Dutch bible belt that you won't really find in the type of church I go to, like avoiding vaccinations and insurance, experiencing a lot of existential dread over whether you are part of the elect or not, not being allowed to drive a car on Sunday, etc. But we do adhere to historical creeds, only men can be ordained, conservative views on medical ethical issues, etc. so definitely still on the conservative side of the spectrum.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
While there is some truth to your claims, some of those creeds were recited at mass every week, so I would certainly think even Mediaeval peasants would have at least heard about them.
The context of this thread also seems to be more about the institutional level, rather than what individual church members believe or practise, which indeed can often be in tension with official teachings both in modern and premodern times. And looking at the institutional level, the Nicene Creed or opposition to abortion or whatever have been shared close to universally among all Christian churches for more than a thousand years.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
In terms of what I think the correct message ought to be (although I am also not American, so I am not speaking for that context specifically), I think people elsewhere in this thread have pointed out there are plenty of historical creeds that Christians of various denomination have adhered to for more than a thousand years. Even on some issues that are currently contentious in the culture war, like a lot of issues pertaining to medical ethical stuff or sexual ethics there are clear Christian positions adhered to by official Roman-Catholic, Eastern Orthodox teachings and also by conservative Protestants. I don't want to overstate the case here, of course there are also plenty of meaningful differences and all of these groups have changed in various ways throughout the centuries and have in some ways been influenced by the surrounding culture, but things like the Nicean creed, or general pro-life medical ethical positions, or the idea that sex should be within marriage, are believed by the vast majority of Christians always and everywhere. I really am convinced that there is a consistent core of historical Christian teachings which a lot of Christians around the world have preserved.
Now the Lutheran churches in Scandinavia which I presume you are referring to have indeed in the past 150 years or so abandoned a lot of these beliefs. But that is my point, if Christian churches want to have anything relevant to say, they should retain core Christian beliefs. Otherwise, what is the point? What reason to exist do Christian churches have, if they don't even believe in stuff that pretty much all Christians have believed historically? What even is Christianity then?
I come from a Protestant background in the Netherlands myself. In the past years I've lived in a few different towns and been a member of the local mainline Protestant Church of the Netherlands. The majority of this denomination is pretty liberal theologically and ethically, just like the mainline churches in the USA or other European countries. It does however have a pretty significant conservative wing. In all of those towns I can see the same pattern reoccurring; the various congregations in the different boroughs of the towns which have become liberal are dwindling in numbers, they have to merge with each other to keep going and are mostly visited by elderly people. But all of those towns have one or two congregations of the conservative wing of this denomination, which explicitly affirm historical creeds and have conservative views of things like abortion and sexual ethics, and every time those congregations don't have issues with dwindling attendance and you can find plenty people of all ages on Sunday mornings. In all those conservative churches I've even come across a few converts who were brought up without any religious background whatsoever and anecdotally the number of converts have been going up in recent years (although we're still talking about small numbers to be sure, I'm not claiming some sort of revival is going on the Netherlands just yet).
So from my perspective, churches that stick with historical Christian teachings, seem to be doing relatively fine and I'm always put off a little bit by the "ohh we have to change x, otherwise the kids will never go to church" rhetoric, because in the past 150 years or so, the churches that have tried very hard to stay in touch with currently societal trends are exactly the ones that have become irrelevant are closing their doors or are only being visited by a handful of elderly people.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
It seems to me the mainline Protestant churches are currently dying out exactly because what is taught there bears little resemblance to what churches taught a century or two ago, whereas the churches that stuck with traditional Christian theology seem to be doing a lot better. I am fully expecting churches that will now start pandering to the dissident right or whatever will achieve similar results as to those who pandered to progressive sensibilities. The way forward for the Church always has been to stick to its own message rather than to pander to cultural fads.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
Aren't religious conservatives generally anti-AI? I feel like there is a pretty big distinction here between the religious right and the right wing tech bro accelerationists. While the conservative religious people might not have the influence in the Republican party that they used to have, it's still a pretty sizeable group in America, so I think the Rightist and anti-AI quadrant still has plenty of people in it. My feeling is that this also isn't particularly novel, but rather it's indicative of a general distinction between religious conservatives who tend to have at least mildly Luddite gut feelings and the gay space fascists techbro accelerationists, like Thiel and Musk. They might work together in the Republican party because they both hate woke stuff, but I feel like they have fundamentally opposed goals and are going to get into a conflict sooner or later.
To some extent I feel like all big cultural events are getting less relevant. Modern terminally online people are increasingly isolated from a shared culture and live in their own little bubbles. Of course random online niches can have some sort of culture, but traditional national or international massive cultural events which pretty much everyone is exposed to, are increasingly a thing of the past.
That being said, that process is of course far from finished and there are plenty of big relevant cultural events left and in the Netherlands that definitely includes the winter Olympics. At least if you correct for the general trend I mentioned above, I don't feel like it has decreased in significance over here at all. A quick check of the all-time medal table for speed skating at the Olympics will reveal why it is a big event in the Netherlands. Or well, the causality presumably runs the other way with speedskating always having been a massive sport in the Netherlands. Speed skating gets prominent coverage in the Netherlands outside of the Olympics as well and successful speed skaters are massive mainstream celebrities over here.
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