shamgar
2d 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
5d 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
6d 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
11d 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
25d 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.
Just what our society needs, more screen time!
If anything, I would support the direct opposite: make politics boring and difficult again.
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