shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
No bio...
User ID: 2609
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
9d ago
I think pro-life people are typically opposed to IVF exactly because of the reason you point out.
"AI is an existential risk and that's a good thing actually" sure is one hell of a take. Although to be fair, I think this type of misanthropic techno-millenarianism is in the end nothing but the inherent telos of transhumanism or even just of the techno-capitalist "technology is going to solve all our problems" vibe. While I despise your ideology, I can at least applaud your honesty. Rather than the Straussian world-salad of somebody like Thiel or sugar coated scifi dreams of a lot of techbros, you at least have the clarity of mind to see where your ideas lead and the guts to say the quiet part out loud.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
24d ago
Can the wordcells of the Motte come up with an alliteration for the title of a weekly finance thread on Saturday, to make it fit in with the other weekly threads? Maybe Solvency Saturday?
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
Hmm I confess that while I've heard about Suarez being an important thinker at the time, I'm not super familiar with him. I wasn't aware he had significant influence in the Reformed world. I know for instance Gisbertus Voetius, who is one of the most influential theologians in the 17th century in the Netherlands, explicitly defended Aristotelian philosophy against Cartesian philosophy, including also specifically on metaphysics arguing against the extreme nominalism of Cartesian philosophy. But yeah maybe I need to moderate my claim then to saying that the majority of orthodox reformed theologians were realists instead of calling it "pretty much universal". Thanks for providing a counter example to my claim!
In any case, Suarez himself was a Roman-Catholic so at least with regards to differences between Roman-Catholicism and the Reformed tradition I think it is fair to say that metaphysics is not an area of conflict between confessional Protestantism and Roman-Catholicism.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
1mo ago
How does God work and will (1)? Does God have a an array of potential actions, any of which he can actualize? Yet this runs the risk of these potential actions being "outside" God. Does God create the potentials as he actualizes them? Thus no "possibles" exist for God, simply "actuals"? This also could be seen as a constraint on God and limit his radical freedom. Both these potential concepts of God’s will and freedom (of which I’m sure there are hundreds of alternative concepts) seem to be operating at a level above how Barron conceptualizes God’s freedom. Put crassly, Barron seems to be hinting that God could not "make a triangle a square", that is, that God is constrained by logical impossibilities. But this is such a small view of God. God creates our minds and universe. Our minds invent or discover things like logic, or define things like squares or circles. Whether spawned by our intellect or embedded in the structure of the cosmos, these concepts (including logic!) are part of Creation itself. God created the conditions under which we can model physical reality with math, structure, and logic. Logic is a model. Logos is Truth. Logic is created. Logos is the Creator.
I'm a bit late to the party, but having just gotten around to reading this post, this stood out to me. Personally I feel like saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not diminish God's omnipotence at all, nor does it entail some sort of Logic that exists independent of God to which God is beholden. A "square triangle" is simply not a thing in any sense whatsoever, so saying "God cannot make a square triangle" does not entail saying there is a thing God cannot do. Any triangular object can be made into a square object by God, but then by definition it ceases to be triangular. If the words "triangle" and "square" refer to something real, "square triangle" cannot refer to something real. To be clear, I'm not suggesting "triangle" and "square" refer to uncreated things that exist independent of God, I'm simply suggesting that they are real things and that this necessarily suggests "square triangle" is nonsensical sequence of symbols. Saying "God cannot make a square triangle" is identical to saying "God cannot make a weiuytrni". I suppose if somebody would ask me "Can God make a square triangle?" I would reply by saying that question is incoherent rather than saying "no". But if somebody asks me "Can God make something that is logically impossible?" I will definitely answer "no", because I believe logical impossibilities are incoherent nonsense.
To the best of my understanding, my view is simply metaphysical realism and the vast majority of Roman Catholics (very much including Barron), Eastern Orthodox and confessional Protestants are all metaphysical realists and this is not an area of contention between these traditions. Some Catholic apologists have claimed Luther was a metaphysical nominalist because he was taught in university by nominalists, but Luther doesn't write a lot about philosophy and he writes very negatively about the scholasticism he knows from his own education. And besides that, once we get a more fleshed out Lutheran and Reformed tradition in the period of Protestant Orthodoxy, both Lutheran and Reformed theologians are pretty much universally metaphysical realists as far as I know.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
Well, I had higher expectations of the USA than Iran personally. Makes sense to me people would find such rhetoric coming from the POTUS more notable than similar rhetoric coming from a mob in a third world country or from a notorious extremist theocracy.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
2mo ago
This Pew research report suggests almost everybody in Poland has a negative view of Russia.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
3mo ago
The hatred between the Turks and the Armenians is now so intense that we have got to finish with them. If we don't, they will plan their revenge.
That's a quote from Talaat Pasha, who has been called the architect of the Armenian genocide. In some sense he was not wrong. After the war Armenians systematically assassinated a bunch of Ottomon war criminals involved in the genocide, including Pasha himself. Pasha was murdered in Berlin where he lived after the war. His Armenian killer said during the trial "I do not consider myself guilty because my conscience is clear…I have killed a man. But I am not a murderer." The German court proceeded the acquit him from murder.
"Okay maybe we started an unjust war, but now we have to finish our killing otherwise they might take revenge" might well be a factually correct statement, but it isn't going to get you a lot of sympathy.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
3mo ago
Well, I've used plenty of windows and unfortunately still have to use it for my job and I've been using Ubuntu for ~15 years now and I guess we just have very different preferences. It's not that I've never had issues with Linux that would have been solved by using Windows, but all those issues stem from people making software for Windows rather than Linux, not some inherent issue of Linux itself. I also feel like Ubuntu/Linux and just the whole suite of common opensource software around it has improved significantly in recent years. Although to be fair we were talking about Windows 7, not the current situation. Admittedly maybe my current positive experiences with Linux and negative experiences with Microsoft have biased me a little bit when looking at the past. I've always had a strong preference for basic, clean, minimalistic software, which does what I tell it to and nothing more has always made me prefer Linux over Windows. But in recent years the feature bloat and the clunky annoying UI of Microsoft - not just in the OS but in every single piece of software they make - has really been out of control. I feel zero temptation to ever switch back to Windows currently.
As for mac, I've never used it. It's probably fine, but the fact it runs on overpriced devices and tries to get you locked-in on a bunch of Apple hardware and software is enough for me to have never seriously considered using it.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
3mo ago
If we imagine a possible world where Linux was widely adopted so that all common software ran out of the box on both Linux and Windows, are there any advantages that remain for Windows 7 over a contemporary Linux distro with a straightforward GUI (say Ubuntu)?
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
4mo ago
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.
shamgar
Unrepentant Robophobe
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
I agree the NRx (or whatever label you want to slap on it) and Christianity are very much opposed and its a weird quirk of American politics that anybody would think otherwise.
Your framing of the issue is rather bizarre however. The way you talk about it, one would almost think that empathy and helping the poor and the vulnerable is some sort of leftist and progressive invention. In reality of course, Christianity has promoted these things since its inception more than 1500 years before anything that can be meaningfully called 'leftism' or 'progressivism' ever enters the scene. It would be more accurate in my opinion to state something like leftism took a Christian virtue and isolated it from the rest of the Christian worldview and rather predictably ended up in a rather unbalanced and silly place. Recognizing this silliness in the leftist project, the alt-right/NRx/whatever simply completed the process of the secularist revolution and threw out the last remaining bit of the moral order of Christendom.
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