domain:parrhesia.co
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Yeah, maybe he was actually crazy?
TheThrowaway
1hr ago
Are cradle Orthodox accepted? Count me in if so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will.
I have had materialists very directly deny the existence of free will in extended argumentation with me. I have observed other materialists, here and elsewhere, insist that no evidence against Materialism exists, and also that we know free will cannot actually exist because otherwise it would break materialism. Noting these positions is not a "pretense".
But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
Things can work without us knowing how they work on a mechanistic level. Starting a fire is mechanistic; people worked with fire long, long before they had a mechanistic explanation of how it worked.
We can work mind-to-mind to communicate, teach or persuade. We cannot work mind-to-mind to read or control.
But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
They are not my absurd standards, they were the absurd claims of the scientists and philosophers who built the paradigm of the material mind. These men claimed their axioms were empirical facts for more than a century, and used those claims to wield vast social, economic and political power while steadily retreating from every scrap of empirical evidence available. It is not my fault that much of the modern world was built by lying to people about empirical fact. I will not stop pointing that the lies were in fact lies, nor tracing the social consequences of those lies down to the present day. Nor will I cease to note the evidence of my own self-reported mind-states, and the ways in which simple observation entirely contradicts the materialist narrative.
Nor will I claim that I have knowledge that I do not, in fact, have. Determinism is a perfectly respectable axiom, and utility can be acquired through its use. but it is an axiom, the utility is acquired strictly through its use as an axiom, and it pays no direct rent at all.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
I do not believe this is the problem here - the problem is that your explanations for the current gap in Hard Determinism that is the lack of user-friendly brain interface are, in their structure, no different from explanations that had at various points been raised against other gaps that are resolved by now.
Resolved by you yourself, in the case of comparing LLMs to human brains! We know the building blocks of LLMs, and have the control capacity to inspect and manipulate their state in less complex iterations, but not in more complex ones. We know the building blocks of organic chemicals, which resolve to DNA, which resolve to live cells, some of which are neurons, and the earlier less complex iterations of those structures we can not only predict but manipulate and recreate. Nondeterminism simply does not make a convincing enough case that the latest iteration, the live human brain, is somehow so qualitatively different from a silicon-based neural network that hoping to grasp it with determinism is hopeless hubris.
I disagree with his framing (and yours) that women are just tee-hee frivorce-raping hapless men with the power of the state.
Starting from egalitarianism, I would expect there's likely the same amount of abuse of both processes by their respective bad actors when each was/is the dominant mode of abuse.
And then there's the illegibility of what that being a possible outcome actually does to the average citizen's behavior under that law; men talk about it all the time, so do women. (So do responsible parents when the topic of CPS comes up- same kind of chilling effect.)
I don't think one or other gender holds a monopoly on that evil (and am not really willing to consider it, because DreadJimming/DreadJilling is inevitably where that ends up). If both are permitted, each can check the other, but more total abuse then occurs at the margins.
it's not by listening to people who, frankly, hate the other sex.
Yeah, but arbitration and spending hours trying to pass the Turing Test for the interested parties is boring, I'd much rather complain about how cokes that have had 40 penises inside them are spiritually degraded or whatever instead.
TIRM
1hr ago
Is he a boy and is fucking any significant part of the motivation for his actions? >He's a fuckboy.
Sure, but then fuckboys are everywhere. Given a broad enough understanding of "significant part of the motivation", most men are.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
He must have been working on it a while. Feels like it's been actually over a month since we had an actually good post? Maybe it's just me
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
Any number of things, thats the point. Social status, economic status, family dynamics, cultural affiliation, level of interest, environmental factors (hot/cold, wet/dry, average exposure to sunlight).
We know this because we can, in fact, point to the gears in CPUs and RAM and do gear things with them, and this is in fact the best, most efficient way to manipulate and interact with them. This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed. There is no mind-equivalent of a programming language, a compiler, a BIOS, a chip die, etc.
The computer analogy is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but it's carrying more weight than it can bear. Yes, if you take a soldering iron to your CPU, you'll break it. But the reason we know computers are deterministic isn't because we can point to individual transistors and say "this one controls the mouse cursor." It's because we built them from the ground up with deterministic principles, and we can trace the logical flow from input to output through layers of abstraction.
Compare that to any more tangled, yet mechanistic naturally occurring phenomena, and you can see that just knowing the fundamental or even statistical laws governing a complex process doesn't give us the ability to make surgical changes. We can predict the weather several days out with significant accuracy, yet our ability to change it to our benefit is limited.
The brain is not a tool we built. The brain is a three-pound lump of evolved, self-organizing, wet, squishy, recursively layered technology that we woke up inside of. We are not engineers with a schematic, I'd say we're closer to archaeologists who have discovered an alien supercomputer of terrifying complexity, with no instruction manual and no "off" switch.
The universe, biology, or natural selection, was under no selection pressure to make the brain legible to itself. You can look at our attempts at making evolutionary algorithms, and see how the outputs often appear chaotic, but still work.
Consider even LLMs. The basic units, neurons? Not a big deal. Simple linear algebra. Even the attention mechanism isn't too complicated. Yet run the whole ensemble through enormous amounts of data, and we find ourselves consistently befuddled by how the fuck the whole thing works. And yet we understand it perfectly fine on a micro level! Or consider the inevitable buildup of spaghetti code, turning something as deterministic (let's not get into race-conditions and all that, but in general) as code into something headache inducing at best.
And LLMs were built by humans. To be legible to humans. Neuroscience has a far more uphill struggle.
And yet we've made considerable progress. We're well past the sheer crudeness of lobotomies or hits on the head.
fMRI studies can predict with reasonable accuracy which of several choices a person will make seconds before they're consciously aware of the decision. We've got functional BCIs. We can interpret dreams, we can take a literal snapshot of your mind's eye. We can use deep brain stimulation or optogentics to flip individual neurons or neural circuits with reproducible and consistent effects.
As for "determinism of the gaps". What?
Two hundred years ago, the "gap" was the entire brain. The mind was a total mystery. Now, we can point to specific neural circuits involved in decision-making, emotion, and perception. We've moved from "an imbalance of humors causes melancholy" to "stimulating the subgenual cingulate can alleviate depressive symptoms." We've gone from believing seizures were demonic possession to understanding them as uncontrolled electrical storms in the cortex. The gaps where a non-material explanation can hide are shrinking daily. The vector of scientific progress seems to be pointing firmly in one direction. At this point, there's little but wishful thinking behind vain hopes that just maybe, mechanistic interpretation might fail on the next rung of the ladder.
I am frankly flabbergasted that anyone could come away with the opposite takeaway. It's akin to claiming that progress from Newton's laws to the Standard Model has somehow left us in more ontological and epistemic confusion. It has the same chutzpah as a homeopath telling me that modern medicine is a failure because we were wrong about the aetiogenesis of gastric ulcers.
This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.
Citation needed? I mean, what's so non-deterministic about the advances I mentioned? What exactly do you think are the "non-deterministic" techniques that work?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
Can you give me a quick summary of your understanding of Materialism and Determinism in the scientific era, and also your understanding of when Materialism, Determinism and Atheism began being taken seriously as workable axioms?
My concern is that I’ve never really heard of a secular society with those kinds of restrictions on sexuality
Every society everywhere on Earth for all history up to the 20th century exerted sufficient intrasocietal controls on male avarice and female caprice or else it collapsed. Religious language framed what they already knew, now we don't know and today it's framed purely religiously. Christianity has kept record of its inspired line on biotruths and their peculiarities -- non-consanguineous marriage for life with many children -- you'll see certain lifestyles were discussed from frame of their harms being known in common wisdom. The lecher or the whore were already seen as contemptible, moral lessons weren't "It's bad to be a whore," everybody knew that, so they were "Divorcing your wife makes whores of both of you."
Our connection with this common wisdom withered and died in the age of rapid modernization and individualization, so some Christians, already on the fool's errand of attempting to reconcile their faith with society, could only present their opposition in heavily religiously connoting or outright religious terms. It's bad because God says it's bad, true, but that's at the top. At the bottom is "You'll sleep around in your 20s, get married in your thirties, have one kid, maybe two if you're really lucky, not deeply love your husband, divorce him when your kids are out of the house, and every cold night in your lonely bed be unwarmed by the memories of the dalliances of your youth." It will ruin your fucking life, that's why you don't do it.
Secular society moving past these doesn't come from science. If anything the scientific paradigm should be hyperfixated on healthy, responsible human sexuality. Creatures have reproduced sexually for a billion years, mammals diverged 300 million years ago, 100 years of sexual insouciance might as well not exist on the epochal timeframe yet here we are. Looking down from a period of .0000003% of the history of our biological class and with absolute sincerity and absolute lack of any awareness these people say "Yeah sex doesn't mean anything, it can just be for fun." We feel this dissonance cognitively and viscerally, it's part of the constant psychic background radiation driving everyone crazy, we engage in behavior we know instinctively as destructive and then throw cash at our best so they target their tremendous mental faculties at justifying what we can conclude from intuition and pure reason as wrong. I can only wonder what sort of writing Scott would be putting out if he'd moved to a small Jewish community in New England and married a sensible reformed girl who wanted lots of kids. I can only wonder how much of his tremendous brainpower is sequestered in its quiet battle against a billion years of evolution screaming NO NO NO NO NO!
But it's not about science, it's about greed. It's about the money and power drawn from a destabilized society, and you bet your ass it's about top-% men being able to have sex with whichever beautiful commoners they want, using them up and discarding them. I'll use the socialist's most apt phrasing, it's history's true and greatest transfer of wealth, a self-sustaining fire consuming each new generation.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
1hr ago
It matters because if "spooky undetectable woo" or even "ordinary detectable woo" such as cultural affiliation, economics, or social status can be demonstrated to have an effect, it will (at a bare minimum) weaken the genetic hypothesis, and if the effec sizes are large enough wreck it outright.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1hr ago
Wanting attention and desiring to be seen but also feeling revulsion at the disgusting old men seems to be the go-to outward facing stance for any girl in Japan who's asked off the clock. Any cursory browsing of reddit will reveal people who hate their jobs and everyone at their jobs and all their customers, but they still want that paycheck.
There's a twisted logic to it. Or per @Sloot 's thesis, substitute imaginary for twisted.
That said, I am not sure there's more logic in imagining a call girl who just loves men to pieces.
TIRM
1hr ago
On Friday a butcher exposed his wife to Sale in Smithfield Market, near the Ram Inn, with a halter about her neck, and one about her waist, which tied her to a railing, when a hog-driver was the happy purchaser, who gave the husband three guineas and a crown for his departed rib. Pity it is, there is no stop put to such depraved conduct in the lower order of people.
The Times (July 1797)
Huh. Never would haven't guessed that.
I was aware of the more common colonial practice of a man skipping town on his wife and her later getting a legal divorce due to abandonment.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1hr ago
Substack, Substack, Substack! People need to be less obsessed with centralization. Make your own standalone blog.
fmaa
1hr ago
This is not the case for minds: every workable method we have for manipulating and interacting with human minds operates off the assumption that the human mind is non-deterministic, and every attempt to develop ways to manipulate and interact with minds deterministically has utterly failed.
I genuinely can't tell what you mean by this, though I'm assuming it's part of your usual pretense that compatibilism doesn't exist and materialists deny the experience of free will. But how can a method of action possibly operate off an untestable assumption?
We have no proof that Determinism is true; we also have no proof that it is false. People are free to choose their beliefs accordingly. My disagreement is exclusively with those who insist that their system is empirically supported, when in fact the opposite is true.
While determinism is currently unfalsifiable, we do fact have a significant amount of empirical evidence that the mind in materially embodied in the brain. But we've been over that before and, no, whatever new evidence has appeared since then will not meet your absurd standards (iirc, literally no connection between biochemical processes in the brain and observed or self-reported mindstates counts as evidence until people have fantasy story mind-control).
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
1hr ago
DreadJimming is just as destructive when women do it.
Yes, but I disagree with his framing (and yours) that women are just tee-hee frivorce-raping hapless men with the power of the state.
It's harder than MRAs would have you believe for a wife to just casually strip-mine an ex, even with no-fault divorce.
If you want to restore a stable equilibrium between the sexes, it's not by listening to people who, frankly, hate the other sex.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
You don't really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope.
But you can in fact open it up and look at it with a microscope. Moreover, you can make a new one from scratch with tools, and make it to your exact specifications. You cannot open the mind and look at it with a microscope, and you cannot make a new mind to-spec with tools.
The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
And this is distinct from the access you have working in the hard drive factory. But there is no hard drive factory for minds; the normal user access is all the access any of us have ever observed or confirmed empirically.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable.
The computer is matter. Matter was not "designed" to be understandable and manipulable. It is understandable and manipulable, and so complex arrangements of matter that we intentionally construct with tools generally retain this property. To the extent they lose this property, it is generally because multiplicative complexity accelerates their mechanics from within our grasp to outside it, and we can generally simplify that complexity to make them graspable again. In the same way, we construct LLMs from mechanical components, and to the extent that they lose the predictable and controllable mechanistic nature, it is through the multiplication of complexity to an intractable degree.
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them; we can neither point to nor manipulate the gears themselves. Minds might well may be both mechanical and intractably complex, but the intractable complexity prevents the mechanical nature from being demonstrated or interacted with empirically. Hard Determinism is a viable axiom, but not an empirical fact. The problem is that people do not appear to understand the difference.
and you cannot control behavior to any significant degree by manipulating the brain's matter directly.
I recall a notorious manipulation of brain matter that had been popular just a century ago and demonstrably controlled behaviour. Destructively so, yes, but, again, not any more a debunkment than medieval amputations were of modern surgery.
As for mind reading, developments appear to be underway on that front.
All we can say, from a strict materialistic perspective, is that all attempts to demonstrate the deterministic nature of the human mind have failed, and history shows a clear pattern of Determinism of the Gaps, where accumulating evidence forces empirical claims to steadily retreat into unfalsifiability.
When I look at the pattern of history it appears exactly the opposite of what you said - it is non-determinism that has steadily retreated, from inscrutable fate woven for each and every object in the world by deities beyond our reach or understanding to sub-atomic processes that light is too big to observe and constructs with states too fluid, ephemeral and non-uniform to categorize. Many aspects of the world that we considered unfathomable and/or random are now predictable. I do not consider myself married to Scary Capital Letter Materialism, but the odds simply appear to be largely in its favor.
It's obviously not one where you and your wife actually love one another.
I am reminded of the classics. The key word is learn to love, and there's no doubt in my mind that this is a learned skill for lots of people, maybe all of them, to some degree. Some more than others, some never do. There's growth potential- I think someone else mentioned "people who think in terms of pathological bargaining in marriage are all insane, those who see it as an investment opportunity prosper", which gets at this- if there was nothing to be learned it wouldn't be growth, would it?
you believe in the Good Old Days she'd just have to spread 'em anyway, no recourse, and if she resists, you could beat her until she stops resisting, and that is the past you want to return to?
As opposed to today, where he'd just have to spread 'em anyway (the folds of the wallet, in this case), no recourse, and if he resists, she can beat him (with another man's fists/State power) until he stops resisting?
Surely there must be some sort of compromise (we did have one in the past, but the problem is that men and women do not, in fact, have equal biological constraints)- a new paradigm is needed to account for a seismic technological shift where women have near-total control over conception and marriage is worth less and less in the face of better alternatives (at least, from a hedonistic perspective).
DreadJimming is just as destructive when women do it.
Niether of those manage to refute anything ive said. Again i feel like you are mixing neccesary with sufficient and trying to control the conversation by controlling the null hypothesis. Asserting that because i have not shown x i must accept y but i am under no such obligation.
I have yet to encounter a serious IQ hereditarian who believes that the environment plays no role.
Then you must be new here (that or The Motte doesn't meet your criteria for "serious") because i have had precisely that argument multiple times here in the last 6 months, including with at least one user active in this very thread.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
1hr ago
Yeah I was going to say, a lot of men don't get this these days either, it just manifests differently. I didn't for a long time. Society really wants people to be narcissists.
It has previously been argued that autism-spectrum conditions can be understood as resulting from a predictive-processing mechanism in which an inflexibly high weight is given to sensory-prediction errors that results in overfitting their predictive models to the world. Deficits in executive functioning, theory of mind, and central coherence are all argued to flow naturally from this core underlying mechanism.
Am I the only one reading this passage and thinking, "what the actual fuck?!" Because my understanding is that the defining neurological characteristic of autism is that the corpus callosum of autistic people does not primarily pass traffic directly back and forth between the brain hemispheres as it does in a typical person but rather it primarily passes sensory inputs to the brain. The autistic brain compensates for this somewhat like the internet, which is to say that it develops a significant amount additional neural connections that essentially travel around the hemispheres and facilitate communication between the left brain and the right brain. Taken together, between the much greater amount of sensory processing that an autistic brain does and the greater isolation of each brain hemisphere, the autistic person experiences reality in a profoundly different way than not just a typical brain, but another autistic brain as well! Thus, blaming the autistic brain's predictive-processing mechanisms and calling them the core underlying mechanism of autism reads to me like wet streets cause rain.
In a weird way I kind of respect it. Blogging while being an e-thot is an argument from ethos-- it's the opposite of self-censorship, and presents you as someone with no need to tell reputation-preserving lies. Call it the Milo Yiannopoulos phenomenon: being visibly and openly a member of the "outgroup" of a particular ideology makes you that much more credible when speaking about it.
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