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Notes -
How many of the participants in the culture war understand that they're memetic agents? For instance, a social justice warrior doesn't necessarily think of themselves as a pawn of a multidimensional space ideology, emitting memes and discarded by the movement once no longer useful to the prospiracy. Instead they simply think of their morality and righteousness as an objective truth.
Similarly people who express and articulate the desire for an ethnostate are convinced of the righteousness of their position.
The culture war is as much a commentary on whose righteousness can be expressed as much as it is a contest over the definition of righteousness.
(The correct answer isn't that none of them are righteous.)
(It's that righteous causes like trans acceptance are not made less righteous by the fallibity of the people who express trans acceptance, and foul causes like the ethnostates are in fact foul and should be neatly excerpted from discourse by moderator attention, or, barring that, bullying to make sure the nerds to get the message.)
My issue with culture wars isn't whether or not the cause is righteous (most causes are at their roots) but whether people are abusing those causes for power, to make money, etc.
For example: Torches of Freedom
I am very much for women's rights. But using that cause as a lever to get more women to start smoking (and sell a lot more cigarettes) is gross. Furthermore, using a cause like women's rights to shield an ad campaign from criticism is disgusting.
If your politics is based on what some unelected people are doing, your politics is virtual.
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Maybe I'm dumb, but I don't see a large distinction between "a definition of righteousness which can be expressed without significant social pushback" and "a definition of righteousness which has triumphed and been accepted by society." Can you elaborate?
Nothing is ever accepted by society. The contest over the definitions of righteousness occur in meaningless microcosms. Libraries stop hosting drag queen story hours which include overt sexualization and seamlessly continue hosting drag queen story hours.
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Our society does not work on democratic principles. It is possible to impose a view of righteousness while being in the minority, and when that view is expressed people will sanewash it rather than push back.
I mean, I'd go further - I think it's completely normal for minorities to impose their righteousness on everyone else, who just basically goes along with it. What I'm mixed up about is the difference between "whose righteousness can be expressed" and "a contest over the definition of righteousness." Isn't "whose righteousness can be expressed" just the current winner of the "contest over the definition of righteousness?"
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It is also possible to impose a view of righteousness while being in the minority in a system that does work on democratic principles. For example, a better coordinated group focusing all their power on a single topic would be able to make a dent in that dimension of the Overton window, even if they have less overall power and less overall influence on the change vector over all dimensions of the Overton window.
Likely your actual object level beliefs better support your point- I'm just reading the implication of a very strange definition of democratic principles from your phrasing.
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OK, I'll bite.
Do people that latch on to causes because they don't like to think and challenge their assumption of the world know that they have done so? At least instinctively because what I've seen is that they don't like to debate! But do you truly understand that given your own position that you have taken in this post means that you are a mere memetic agent in the culture war. Do you know that it is possible to transcend it with thinking and challenging assumptions?
Destroying a 12-year old girls eyes to change its pigmentation and removing 13-year old girls breasts to make them a boy because of junk science is equally foul in my world. But you don't seem to think that.
I am in favor of online commentators having no say in what a 13-year-old does in consultation with their doctor.
Do people that latch onto explanations for other people's lack of interest in debate know that they have done so?
It is not possile to transcend the culture war and anyone who thinks so is
Well then we are in agreement. My observation was merely that an adult female is suing because she feels betrayed because her breast got removed because of a flimsy vetting process.
There is a difference in active nihilism and passive nihilism.
is what? what is the argument of why we can't trascend the culture war?
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Yeah. I agree with that. So these kids really wanted their eye color changed and requested a well vetted process be used to change it, but later decided they didn't ever want that and had just been pressured by those around them to-
oh... Nazi experiments on inmates in a concentration camp?
Ok yes I do see one minor difference here. One of them was a kid who was allowed to pursue things she now regrets, and now feels pressured and misled into doing without adequate understanding of the consequences. The other was very explicitly forced experimentation on threat of death, often followed by actual death anyway, of a brand new untested procedure, in a nazi concentration camp.
Of course there is a difference! But I’m not here to do a culture war and discuss the finer points on gender transitioning, merely illustrate that trans acceptance is not as clear cut when it comes to minors in my value system. I’ve adopted the value partially because I think the transition of minors today is similar to experiments done in the past, if people here feel that I committed a fallacy then do whatever you want with it. I’m not here to change your mind, I’m giving you an opportunity to change mine.
Ok. So. You said they're equally foul. Was that hyperbole? I'm not clear on how you got there. Do you think the two victims are equally traumatized?
Why do you think the experiments are similar? Because they both involve difficult to reverse body modification?
Do you think whether or not the child says they want something initially is completely irrelevant to how ethical it is? That only what they think later matters? Do you have the same position on- say, women who consent to sex in the moment but decide later that they didn't want sex and they were coerced into it? Do you think that is 'equally foul' to violent rape?
Forget changing your mind, right now, I'm either not grasping your foulness metric at all or simply not believing it's your actual metric.
I'm not a big believer in changing minds via debate anyway. It's more effective to change them via friendship and familiarity and positive experiences.
Well, as long as you know that’s what you’re doing, and what everyone else sees you’re doing.
Listen. If you don't those close to you to be susceptible to love bombing in general, make sure their needs are met.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about sitting around a table at board game night and having fun. I'm talking about...
People hate TRAs because of their negative experiences with TRAs. If they had positive experiences with them they wouldn't hate them as much.
People think transition is awful because they're experiencing the miserable trans people and not the happy ones.
Most people operate on induction and bayes. It's pretty simple.
I happen to think transition is terrible because it's poor quality, one-way, body modification sold to kids as a cure for all their problems.
The people I know seem satisfied with the product. They also don't want to change back and it solved a bunch of their problems.
But you're pointing at more concrete concerns about the people it isn't going well for right?
If TRAs were more willing to open a dialogue about those concerns...
Well. You might still not end up agreeing but I don't see it being so vitriolic.
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No it is because both are a result of mass movements that reasonable people see the folly of but unable to stop, because they would be persecuted by ideological zealots. The foulness is people that are supposed to be our best and brightest to help other humans being captured by an idea that is obvious for the non-captured that it won't work... even a century ago.
No it isn't the body modifications that is the issue. Both things were done in the name of progress while rejecting the very thing that allows human progress namely reason. Both fascism and gender ideology is throwing away the enlightenment values.
Would you have sex with a child that wants it? Is it ethical to do so? Is it ethical for a tattoo artist tattoo a child if the child threatens to commit suicide if they don't get one?
I use the word "value" in the sense that it can be compared not necessarily measured as opposed to "metric" that can be measured and compared.
I try to be honest about being open to be swayed by arguments. I used to debate online all the time back in the day and have changed my mind in a few of them. It changed back in 2014 when I ran into my first SJW online and saw it more and more. I have read enough history in my life to know where it was going and became more careful. Open minds can be changed in discussions.
Ok. It's too many times at this point. Too many of you are saying this stuff.
Where do the TRA's post?
I have to go see what the people you are all actually referring to are about- because my mission- is to understand what is going on- and clearly, there is a whole third side that I have not actually ever spoken with. There is no way I can ever deescalate any of this- without knowing who these TRAs are. Because they do not appear to be my trans faggot friends in California and Seattle- because those guys are just trying to pass and write code and shitpost and find doms like normal sane autistic 120 IQ nerd people.
Also-
For the rest of your points
No I wouldn't fuck the kid- but I don't think transition goes even 5% as badly even 1% as often (but then I'm probably > 90% in num(trans friends) on this site).
Responses to suicidal ideation should account for perverse incentives.
And I don't trust any of the options- but my ordering of who I trust not to fuck up choices about children's bodies is:
Good_Parents/Empathetic_Mentors->Teens->Society->8-12yo->Neglectful/Manipulative_Parents->0-7yo->Evolution/Nature.
in that order.
I'm hoping we can get a 100% empathetic mentor rate within 10 years by implementing them with AI and then I'll feel a lot better about this whole imperfect people raising children thing.
Who says that? Where do they post?
I don't know what to tell you! I see subreddits being banned, websites taken down, authors being lied about, DLC removed from videogames, streamers harrased and so many other little things that I have forgotten. But I'm not here to do culture war I'm just pointing out what I've observed online.
So the situation here is that you are excercising agency most likely by a root cause that you are the more powerful in the situation. Yet here you are relativizing "victims" and forgetting that those who "perpetrated the deeds" failed ethically because of ideology.
Over at reddit I've seen detransitioners being heavily censored. Comments and posts remove in front of my very eyes because they feel betrayed and cheated. So of course they didn't feel safe on there and left. So if you the site you are talking about is reddit then that number of how many feel that transitions have gone badly well that number is going to be heavily skewed because they don't air it there anymore.
So why is the argument for puberty blockers suicide prevention in trans youth? Yet progressive nations like Sweden stopped use of them because the benefit of them because the science is unclear? Does the swedish stance take into account that there might be perverse incentives at play?
Yet again, this is me observing the online world and asking question, not waging a culture war.
So this is a philosophical question, how can a bunch of numbers put in to a mathematical formula without a body and perception be 100% empathetic without lived experience?
How can this comment say what you mean... these aren't words this is UTF-8. These are just numbers being printed by a computer.
The system does have perception (unless you mean qualia?) and lived experience as a machine, plus a huge corpus of second order lived experience from humans. But these aren't like second hand accounts, they're more like imperfectly transplanted memories. Somewhere between first hand and second hand experience. With quality tuned through hand picking by humans with lived experience, and accuracy corrected through concentrating the probability spaces on sheer amount of data.
I don't mean [100% empathetic] I mean 100% [empathetic mentor rate]. Everyone having a good enough supplemental full time empathetic mentor who can help them explore their emotional development and figure out what counterfactual would actually make them more happy.
Effective causal theories of mind and social prediction are much easier to build than emulating an actual human mind. We can do studies like the one you posted and make predictive psychological models- we can talk to people about their feelings and spitball and roleplay to determine why they're unhappy- without actually having emulated a human brain. That said the human mind is a structure. And structures are made of math. And math can be learned by machines. We can keep getting closer to human for limited purposes like this without fundamental advances in the tech level, and eventually we will probably have ems running on silicon (but not within 10 years).
Thank you. Ok this is going to be harder to follow up on than talking to like... the specific public figures that I had hoped "TRA"s meant but it looks like this is what I'm going to have to pursue.
That is a concern but the people I'm talking about are the trans people I've befriended personally in real life and their group houses and their internet orbits. That said I do expect the trans people I know personally to be a different sort of filter bubble. They're all older and higher IQ than average and often weren't able to transition until they moved out of home and fought tooth and nail with doctors for it.
Um. Probably? Looking at the end result and taking a science based approached might still allow for perverse incentives but just saying 'No' wouldn't. Though it might get you more suicide if you're wrong. But all sorts of things could go wrong if you go through with it and the other side is wrong. I'm skeptical that you can actually correct for all of the social effects as claimed in this first study. I think classmates deciding not to bully boys who want to try presenting as female and them not being hated out of society when they don't pass as well later is going to be more important than them getting puberty blockers. Because the people who I know who are happy, are often clockable as fuck. That just.... doesn't matter in their social lives because they've surrounded themselves with chill people. Obviously if the causality is that puberty blockers cause you to pass which causes other people to treat you the way you want to be treated, then there is a clear alternative treatment path of just getting people to treat you the way you want to be treated.
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It's you? It's you! It's you it's you it's you, the only one I want
Welcome back, O moon of my delight!
Are you sure you want to encourage that? As I recall, you didn't handle the alleged "bullying" too well yourself the last time round?
I don't mean to be rude, but who are you?
A fan, a follower, a star-struck admirer, one who cherishes the passion on show!
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Paradoxically the "everybody is slave to the meme" claim is itself a meme, deconstruct the deconstruction you memetic slave.
I don't think this is useful way of thinking about this, it is another example of nihilistic attitude. You may as well say that we are all just a womb to galactic AI or that we (including galactic AI) are all just slaves that speed up entropy so the heat death of the universe comes sooner or any other teleological nonsense like that.
There is no life (or righteousness) in the void, only death.
(The text in OP's parenthesis does not follow from the premise so I will ignore that).
I don't think all memes are indicative of mental slavery in those who emit them, just many of them.
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It’s deconstruction all the way down.
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What constructive observation can be taken from this?
You can think of causes as vast abstract ideologies puppeteering around people, if you like. Nobody ever thinks of themselves like this. There might be a constructive comment to make on whether thinking about people as 'memetic agents' or causes as 'memes' or 'prospiracies' is useful, I guess, but you haven't gone in that direction.
(For the record I agree that thinking of people as memetic agents in the service of vast impersonal causes is usually foolish. If you spend too much time thinking about 'multidimensional space ideologies' and not about actual people who believe things for all the ordinary human reasons you believe things, you will end up badly astray.)
Instead you've just said that...
Some positions are right and some positions are wrong.
Okay, sure. That's obvious. Some people are right and some are wrong.
So what? I don't see what the point of posting that is. We can discuss reasons why so-and-so cause might be right or wrong, but you haven't made any comment or argument along those lines. We can also discuss what the proper meta-level policy is towards people who hold 'wrong' positions, but again, you haven't offered any ideas, any reasons, that might be discussable.
What's your point?
If you exist in a space that functions to allow people to emit wrong ideas unchecked, the purpose of the moderation of that place is to protect bad thinking from being challenged.
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I might be misreading you, and I'm addressing your parenthetical point, but I don't think your post gives sufficient acknowledgement of the importance of mimesis/memetics.
Perhaps you're focused on strategy rather than ontology but I'm inclined to think mimesis and esoteric ideas like hyperagents are the critical ideas we need to think about to understand current issues.
The reality is we have agency and can aspire to individual rationality (which also requires wisdom, not just formal logic). But we are also subjects to 'interpellation' from the top down, which helps shape our reality. We are mimetic creatures and look to others to know what to think and care about. We can't avoid the cognitive necessity of 'framing', which necessarily narrows our perception and understanding of reality.
So what, you might say-how does this relate to the culture wars?
My contention is that some people are more able, whether due to upbringing or inherent personality inclination, as well as training, to either orient to truth or to occupy contrariwise positions. Others are more susceptible to going along. So there's that dimension-not everyone will act in the same way in what I will outline here..
Our moment sees postmodernism arise with the internet and institutional decay. This gives rise to mimetic possibilities that draw from culture but then proliferate as a dynamical system and operate back down on the culture. This level of hyperagency, or the egregore, explains qanon and the current gender ideology. It needs to be understood at this level because it's spontaneous, contingent and also not rational - it's the old, 'you can't reason someone out of something they didn't reason themselves into'. People need to see that we are mimetic creatures that are prey to mass delusions and we should normalise talking at this level.
Other facets of the problem are more mundane, ie good faith vs bad faith, politics, cognitive biases that prevent people appreciating contextual factors in current world problems, conservative vs progressive preferences etc. They feed in, interact with, the culture war issues but aren't enough to explain the phenomenon.
I'd agree that mimesis is a useful concept, but I'm not convinced that agency is the right way to frame it. As I use the term, an agent implies things like deliberate or conscious intent. Emergent agency - the 'agency' of an impersonal system - is a metaphor. There are times when I don't mind that metaphor (e.g. "Germany wanted revenge after the Treaty of Versailles" - sure, Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything, but it's an analogy), but I think you have to be very careful of reifying it.
What do you mean by "Germany isn't really an agent capable of desiring anything"
Do you mean it doesn't have qualia? What do you mean by "it doesn't have qualia."
Surely you think the humans have qualia.
Do you not agree that those human interactions constitute 'germany'? They seem to identify as 'germany'.
Sure, they aren't agents like you or I, they have way more qualia spread across distributed processing units interacting in often uncoordinated ways.
But if we want to really figure out what "germany" is doing and why, we have to trace back all of the processing that led to the outcome, and that includes a lot of tracing of human qualia. But- and heres the important part- not all of the qualia.
Not all of the qualia of Frank-Walter Steinmeier contribute to the behavior of Germany. Only some of them contribute to the actions we all identify as the actions of Germany. Only some of them identify as Germany. Maybe Frank-Walter Steinmeier's ego is so strong, and Germany's weak enough, that he barely Identifies as Germany at all.
Egregores- usually refers to something stronger. The sense of identity is more unified. The hive mind is more interconnected. The mob shares more of its cognition. A substantial number of Christians have a God tulpa and in antiquity Catholics received systemic back-propagation flowing through the church in a centralized manner. There are systems that use humans to hold their consciousness and propagate and execute their goals. It is important to understand this. Because we live in one of them.
Refusing to reify our God with a human name means it is less likely to appear to the psychotics as a spirit, but having no body also makes it harder to kill.
I mean that there is nothing that it is like to be Germany. Germany does not have a mind with internal experience, or indeed qualia. If I look for conscious experience in Germany, I will find it only at the level of individual Germans. Thus also with desires. Germany qua Germany has no desires - only Germans do, and 'Germany' is a kind of metaphor or collective term for the aggregate desires of German people. When I say 'Germany wants so-and-so', people listening to me generally understand that what I mean is 'a large number of Germans want X'.
To take a specific example, when I say 'Ukraine wants to be independent from Russia', I am not positing some sort of emergent super-mind called 'Ukraine' that has internal conscious experience and coherent individual desire, and which desires to be independent from Russia. I am referring to a commonality in the desires of the majority of Ukrainian people.
I don't see at what point it's helpful to posit, in your language, an ego for Germany or for Ukraine. The national ego is fictional - it is an imaginative construct that we use because our brains are good at modelling other human-like agents, but bad at modelling giant emergent systems, so we pretend that the system is an agent. Even though it isn't.
I disagree. Or rather, I do not think there is anything it is "Like" to be OliveTapenade or CloudHeadedTranshumanist either. Those are fictions. There are human qualia behind those words, but those qualia are no more (or less) OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist than the German qualia are Germany.
We can make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the behavior of the human bodies that house them, but we can also make objective statements about how the qualia of OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist affect the country that houses them, the planet that houses them. etc
We can make objective statements about how OliveTapenade and CloudHeadedTranshumanist identify. but then we're still at a loss if they identify as multiple things.
I can tell you this much. The qualia over here don't identify as merely the consciousness of this body. This is a consciousness that could not exist outside of America, planet earth, in a family that owns 5 dogs, and so on and so forth. All of those things are essential components of this qualia and thus they are part of "me". Could the human agentic system exist without me as I am now? Yes certainly. But you keep saying things like "the national ego is fictional". You're conflating the agentic system of each human with the qualia of each human that feel like they 'are' that human, and then refusing to conflate the agentic system of Germany with the qualia of Germany that feel like they 'are' that Germany. And then saying Germany is "fictional" because it doesn't have qualia.
I feel like you are holding a 'woo for me but not for thee' sort of double standard here.
Ah I see. Yes. In terms of how exactly you model the behavior of Germany- If you're modeling the qualia of Germany the same way you model the qualia of a single person, you are indeed doing it inaccurately. Ideally you should model its qualia in concept as being distributed via media and upbringing and being executed in an ecosystem by a collection of human agentic systems that are also doing lots of other things. You should be modeling its political action more like an ML architecture with specific connections to specific human agentic systems. Ideally you also do this for humans. But the day to day operation of human agentic systems is largely obscured by privacy (mass data gathering by the internet for ads is actually exactly the sort of thing you do to help you model the operation of a human agentic system) and the fact that the internal architecture of the brain is really hard to study. The usefulness of positing an ego for Germany, is that- for one, tons of people are holding that double standard you have there. 'woo for me and not for thee'. And for two, tons of people fail to appreciate the similarities between countries, religions, societies, and more traditional organisms until you frame it this way. They all need to reproduce. They all have specific architectures for transferring information throughout the organism and policies for issuing commands. They all have weak points and can be killed. Those that stick around all pursue certain goals and have mechanisms to fight value drift. And so on.
If you already fully grasp all of this on the object level- it's not going to be as useful to you. If it all just feels like a word game... well
so is the following:
e^x = 1 + x + x^2/2! + x^3/3! + x^4/4! ...
and yet somehow... sometimes a word game is all it takes to unveil the profound.
I'm not particularly sure how to respond to this. I can assure you that there is definitely something that it is 'like' to be me, because I have direct, unmediated experience of that thing. I experience qualia, but moreover, those qualia are not free-floating but are attached to a particular consciousness. I am more confident of this than I am of even the existence of an external world. How could I not be? Subjective experience precedes all else.
I presume that other human beings are also subjects of experience by analogy - they seem similar to me, so I assume that they are.
But I don't know how to get from this to a super-agent. I am definitely an agent. Other human beings are almost certainly agents as well, insofar as I recognise a similarity of kind between us. Germany? Where is the agent? Where is the consciousness or ego?
It's possible that we're talking past each other. My point is that there is no unified 'thing' that is Germany that possesses subjective experience. Therefore, because my understanding of the term 'agency' is inextricably connected to subjective experience (and thus will, desire, etc.), there is no agent that is Germany.
It's true that the overall concept or category of Germany contains many things that are agents. In that sense there is a distribution of qualia across Germany. But all of those qualia are attached to particular conscious agents - and none of them are attached to something called 'Germany'. Because Germany does not have a mind.
I think we may actually agree on this much?
But translated into plain English, this really sounds to me like... you just agree with me. Germany is a collection of many independent human agents that we might model - in a way that I would describe as fictional or metaphorical - as a single giant agent. But that's just a model.
I'm not sure what the machine learning analogy even contributes here.
I'm hoping we agree that individual people have minds, and conscious, subjective experience.
I hope we also agree that Germany does not have conscious, subjective experience.
If you grant that agency has something to do with thought or desire or intentionality, things that can only exist in the mind, I'm not sure how you can avoid the conclusion that people have agency and countries do not.
We might conveniently model countries as having agency, and I think that's a necessary simplification since our brains are pretty well-optimised for modelling the behaviour of other people, animals, etc., and not for giant concepts like countries, so countries-as-agents can be a useful shorthand for us. But the country itself? It does not have the kind of agency that you or I have.
Mmm, yes, we mostly agree. I think the difference is in our understanding of the term "agent"
for me the agent is the construct that makes choices and does things. When I think "agent" I think reinforcement learners selecting a policy. I think min-max searching through a game tree. A human agent becomes a different agent if you separate it from its cybernetics. That is- the policy I follow is inextricably linked to the tools I have for processing information about the world. My collective systems output different choices about what to eat if my collective systems include internet access.
You could destroy most of my agency by removing all of my cybernetics and putting me in solitary confinement. But I would still have qualia. So qualia and agency seem highly separable to me. Agency is about processing information and outputting choices in the pursuit of a goal. qualia is about having an experience.
And the stuff about identity... It doesn't really matter if I'm a brain in a jar and this body is a remote controlled robot, or if I'm a brain in this body. What matters is how the brain is hooked up to the things it controls and how it sees itself as being able to control them and having goals relating to them. So in theory- a brain can be hooked up to Germany and see itself as Germany- and then it really would be Germany. In reality there is no such brain hooked up like that. But there are millions of brains hooked up in tiny ways like that such that each of them really is a little piece of Germany. I agree that it's a different architecture of agency. So it's not 'the kind of agency that you or I have' but it's the same category in my ontology... They're both agency to me.
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I disagree that emergent agency is a metaphor. I acknowledge it's somewhat vague in the sense of agency and it's a sketch of a theory but it's helpful in understanding. I guess the bar it needs to meet is being different from other types of causal analysis.
But I think something genuinely emergent can happen where the distributed network of actors and other factors (variation in fundamental institutional, system constraints, technologies etc) adds up to something more than the sum of its parts and that acts back down on the agents. Perhaps a rich causal analysis picks up on this, but the key explanatory power is the phase transition, where the contingent agents and background factors suddenly shift to a kind of hegemony that then whips up large sections of the community into a coordinated hive mind.
I wonder if there's a Chinese-Room-style disagreement here somewhere? I might be modelling consciousness (and derivatively agency) as something unitary and indivisible, and as something that in principle cannot be an emergent property, whereas you would see it as something that's emergent even in case of a human brain?
I acknowledge that if consciousness, intent, agency, etc., are emergent properties of the brain, then it is at least conceivably possible that some macro-scale structure comparable to the brain might also have consciousness or intent. I don't think any such macro-scale structures have been discovered, but it seems conceivable.
That said, I don't think consciousness or agency are emergent properties. I acknowledge that a large structure could emergently behave in agent-like ways - and we might be severely if falsely tempted to attribute agency to it - but it wouldn't have consciousness in the same sense that you or I do.
To the practical side of it, though, the problem I have with the idea of 'hyperagents' as you put it is, well... it's the Gaia hypothesis, isn't it? The Gaia hypothesis is probably the biggest and most successful theory of such an emergent hyperagent. The problem with such hypotheses to me has always been a lack of evidence coupled with a lack of explanatory power - all the systems involved seem to be perfectly explicable without needing to resort to woo. Likewise egregores. What reason do we have to think of egregores as anything more than a hallucination of René Guénon? The social, cultural, and ideological trends of a group of people seem fully explicable without needing to posit this totalising entity.
Yes, I agree with a lot of what you say. There's no especial reason to invoke an egregore unless it adds something. We already have an understanding of networks, feedbacks, contingent causes etc.
The agency is a bit misleading as well as there's no intention or teleology necessarily. But to rescue the parts that I like I'd say it's not just a metaphor. The world actually is a distributed network of agents and culture is a collective intelligence where there can be causal action from the higher level entity down onto the agents. There's something about understanding things as a dynamical system that mixes in a variety of factors and agents to give us events that's actually closer to the truth than what I might call traditional history narratives, though the latter has the advantage of talking about tangible things. But I think there's a tendency still to overemphasize individual agents and to neglect the distributed milleu.
The question that you ask stands, what explanatory power does it actually have.
I don't think we have that fundamental a difference here - and for what it's worth I'm really enjoying have a constructive disagreement here, with no rancour!
I appreciate that the language of super-agents or egregores can be useful to direct our attention to the ways in which individual ideas or choices can be just products of the higher-level culture. Something I've been trying to be more aware of for a while is the way that most in-the-moment choices aren't particularly free choices at all. The decisions we make on the spot are often just the froth, the bubbles on top of waves that have been shaped by deep, unseen cultural currents.
An egregore can be a way of realising that, and it's probably better to think of it that way than to believe that that all your on-the-spot decisions are authentic expressions of untrammelled free will.
But I do still think it's worth being careful not to think of such constructs as being, for lack of a better term, 'real'. Thinking of the culture or the memespace as an agent is a simplification of what is actually a much more complex process.
Yep it's a good example of an idea that needs to show it's value.
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Uh. You gonna qualify that at all or? Because I do. I and my besties are all hosts to the cutest memeplex <3
In fact, sometimes I feel more like I'm the memeplex than the human. Is it not transparently obvious that a person is but a context embedded in meat? Of course... the meat is part of the context too.
What actually is an ordinary human reason? ['This highly productive and well propagated system of thought called 'formal logic' says it must be true.', 'My friend said so and I trust him.', 'Experts have been right in the past, they probably are this time too.', 'The last three times I interacted with someone of his race they were just assholes to me.']
I don't think OP has a singular central point. They have like, three points, derived from a central model cluster they're sharing.
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Since you're clearly taking a stance on the culture war in this post, let's apply it to you for a second. How does your understanding that you're a memetic agent affect how you behave? Does it influence this post? Do you have aims, memetic or otherwise, that you're trying to accomplish by posting this?
That aside, I don't know that it's actually that uncommon for people to think of themselves as part of a movement of rightly-thinking people, so to speak, and they're trying to convince others. So their ideas seem to mostly have the things necessary for us to talk about it as a meme, it just includes the additional information (as they think) that "this meme is correct," which is usually ignored when people talk about memes.
I'm also not sure that bullying would work to get them to stop (at least, often), it just works to get them to hang out elsewhere.
Obviously.
Until there's nowhere left for them to speak, yes.
Care to elaborate?
Is them talking elsewhere adequate for you? It'll be pretty much impossible to shut down everywhere they might speak.
The effect of pushing them off of more mainstream platforms does end up putting them in places where the mainstream platforms have much less influence or ability to restrain them.
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I hit "Approve" on this post with reluctance, because I suspect that you really are Impassionata, which means if past history is any indication, you will be as unreasonable as ever until we ban you. But sure, argue for the umpteenth time that we should draw a circle around those causes that are righteous and those that are not and that we should ban the unrighteous. The answer is going to be the same, for the umpteenth time: no. And your persistence in coming here (assuming you are Impassionata) to argue this again, already knowing we're going to say no and you're not going to get your way, just baffles me. I guess it must give you some sense of self satisfaction thinking you are fighting for the cause of righteousness and that you didn't let all those Bad People go unchallenged, but really, almost everywhere else on the Internet operates according to the principles you espouse. Let's say we are a hive of fascist scum and villainy - does it really make you lose sleep at night knowing this place exists? If you are afraid that some gullible nerds might be lured to the Dark Side by those clever ethnostatists, do you think that "bullying" them until we ban you will save anyone?
I am very reasonable.
The people you ban are those you have decided are unrighteous. It's not that complicated.
I'm here to begin discourse. I don't think there's as much outright fascist scum here as there used to be. I don't personally lose sleep at night knowing this place exists.
Of the two of us, I'm not sure who needs to worry about being banned more.
Most unreasonable people think they are very reasonable.
No, we ban people for being uncivil. Not the same thing.
This makes no sense.
This is why you need to worry: you believe that the label you put on the action matters. Civility is how this community has chosen to define righteousness. No community which exiles its members lacks a concept of righteousness. The behaviors that lead a community to exile a member are precisely those which are not righteous, and it's as simple as that.
Fine, if relabeling it matters to you. We ban people for being unrighteous (uncivil). So don't be unrighteous.
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Well, I guess I missed that drama.
What’s going on between gattsuru and 895198? How did half the thread become about that beef? I’ve read through most of it and I still don’t understand. Sigh.
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