This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Marxism and the History of Philosophy:
If this sounds a lot like a religion, then that's because it should. Marxism undoubtedly shares many structural features with traditional religions in its fundamentals.
(I have argued previously that wokeism is not identical with Marxism. The relationship between wokeism and Marxism should be understood as being something like the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Adherents of the newer religion incorporate the sacred texts of the older religion as their own, but they also make a number of modifications and additions that adherents of the older religion would stridently reject. Nonetheless, the two traditions are united in certain ethical and philosophical commitments that more distant outsiders would find baffling.)
Much ado has been made about the "crisis of meaning" in the contemporary West, and how "we", as a civilization, "need" religion (and how in its absence, people will inevitably seek out substitutes like wokeism). But speaking at this level of generality obscures important and interesting psychological differences between different individuals. Many, perhaps most, people are actually perfectly fine with operating in the absence of meaning. And they can be quite happy this way. They may be dimly aware that "something" is missing or not quite right, but they'll still live docile and functional existences overall. They achieve this by operating at a persistently minimal level of sensitivity towards issues of meaning, value, aesthetics, etc, a sort of "spiritual hibernation".
It is only a certain segment of the population (whose size I will not venture to estimate -- it may be a larger segment than the hibernators, or it may be smaller, I don't know) that really needs to receive a sense of purpose from an authoritative external social source. And this segment of the population has an outsized effect on society as a whole, because these are the people who most zealously sustain mass social movements like Christianity and wokeism.
Finally there are individuals who are seemingly capable of generating a sui generis sense of meaning wholly from within themselves. This is surely the smallest segment of the population, and it's unlikely that you could learn to emulate their mode of existence if you weren't born into it -- but you wouldn't want to anyway. Such individuals are often consumed by powerful manias to the point of self-ruin, or else they become condemned to inaction, paralyzed with fear over not being able to fulfill the momentous duties they have placed upon themselves.
The quoted text in your post is basically all true, except of course for the fact that socialism is a terrible system.
I'll try to be short and axiomatic:
1: Systems become worse with size, meaning felt by the individual is inversely correlated to the size of the structure they exist within (a social being can tell when it's not needed by its environment. This terrifies the social being)
2: Because of laws of statistics, the limit of the micro-scale will result in a macro-scale in which the individual properties of the micro-scale entities don't matter (I don't know the name for this, perhaps asymptotic emergence?)
3: In the far past, emotions didn't exist, life competed in a purely material sense. Emotions (or more generally, qualia) came into existence because they out-competed agents without emotion.
4: It seems we may be creating an environment in which emotions are once again sub-optimal. In fact, a lot of human things are starting to be sub-optimal, and the shortest paths to "success in life" requires destruction of the self ("selling out") and of good taste (morality prunes locally optimal choices if the definition of optimal is purely materialistic)
5: We're trapped in a world in which the incentives threaten to destroy humanity, in the sense that, even if humans exist in the future, they will lack depth and personality. I predict that the standard deviation on various tests and quizzes will shrink as the homogeneity of various things increases.
In short, the problem is not "capitalism", it's the traits/structure of the system that we exist within, like it's size and connectivity. The woke are not wrong when they say that diversity is good, they're wrong when they accelerate the destruction of diversity by mixing together different things.
Technology is only making all this worse, though Ted Kaczynski seems to blame technology for all the problems I listed above.
This is a tremendous claim. I don't object, exactly, but I wonder if you can substantiate it without what amounts to post-hoc reasoning. How exactly does consciousness arise. More importantly, why would it outcompete an equivalent setup with the same output for the same input, i.e. p-zombies?
Well, life originated on earth about 4 billion years ago. Between that time and now, qualia has slowly come into existence. Emotions, consciousness, subjective taste, ego, and other such things. I also have reasons to believe that individuality and higher levels of consciousness are somewhat recent (say, developed over the past 5000 years). But more generally, what I'm claiming is "In a completely material universe, qualia emerged due to some unknown factors, and now it seems that these factors might be disappearing again".
It must have, otherwise it wouldn't exist. The reasoning I'm using is the same that Darwin used, survival of the fittest is a tautology in a sense. If consciousness resulted in a lower fitness, I believe it must necessarily have disappeared. Another fun fact we can deduce from this is that suffering is good (useful), and that deeming suffering to be bad (a problem) is useful as well. So, suffering is good but we're meant to think that it's not.
Some more arguments for why qualia might disappear:
What you learn in school is to be less human, less spontaneous, less biased, less subjective. The socialization process is basically destroying parts of yourself until you fit within the mold. The goal of most religions is suppressing parts of yourself (Buddhism takes this idea the furthestm though). The system just wants you to be useful and productive, and you're judged by your utility alone. In society we value fairness, impartiality, reason, level-headedness, stoicism and other behaviour at which robots happen to be perfect because they lack qualia. Most psychiatry and medicine works by numbing qualia. Most psychological defense mechanisms have the goal of numbing qualia. Most people life in constant distraction (escapism) and hate being alone with themselves. Most philosophies are designed around lowering qualia, bringing it towards zero: "This too shall pass", "Nothing really matters". It's all dead-mans morality, minimization of the human experience, a sort of suicide and glorification thereof.
The remaining aspects are collapsing into categories of superstimuli (porn, girlfriend ASMR videos, power-fantasy manga, slice-of-life manga, gambling, spices, reaction videos, fast food, massage, roleplaying, daydreaming) and serve as drugs to satiate or numb a category of human needs.
More options
Context Copy link
P-zombies don't exist.
Precisely what a p-zombie would say...
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I'll take a stab at it, because I like the spectacular boldness of the claim:
The human brain can host an extraordinary variety of mental structures. Only a minority of them give rise to consciousness. Those that do, however, are better at navigating complex environments than others (maybe some concept of the self and self narratives are the simplest way to get agency, conferring advantage, and those happen to be the ones that host qualia). But environmental drift toward increasing bureaucratized environments make agency less useful: navigating them is difficult for most people, and so the concept and resultant consciousness are abandoned. It's not so much that consciousness gives an advantage in itself, but that the simplest structures that enable taking advantage are conscious. You could have brains that are equivalently capable without being conscious, but they take too much compute to be realized.
I don't have a clue where consciousness and qualia come from, though, so I don't have a sense of whether Homo erectus or Homo bureaucratus would lack them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link