domain:parrhesia.co
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
13hr 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
13hr ago
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr ago
Substack, Substack, Substack! People need to be less obsessed with centralization. Make your own standalone blog.
fmaa
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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
13hr 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.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
14hr ago
Mmm idk I feel sketchy linking this place given what some folks have said about it's reputation.
You should start one! I'd be happy to help edit or whatever.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
14hr ago
I agree that a dead bedroom is a problem, and no one should be expected to live with that. But the "sex is an obligation and marital rape doesn't exist" guys don't seem to acknowledge a wife's right to say no ever.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
14hr ago
I/O is not Read/Write
You dont really have read/write access to your harddrive either, unless you open it up and look with a microscope. The "direct" access you get as a normal user is just a very reliable introspective report.
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.
Thats because the computer is designed to be understandable and manipulable. Its not the least bit difficult to write a programm or OS that doesnt have meaningful interactable gears for you, and transistor-level analysis is not the best, most efficient way to interact with computers. I mean, we talk a lot about LLMs here, and I dont think they are the same thing as humans, but it seems like they pass an non-mechanical by your criteria.
fribble
14hr ago
Thank you for the recommendation. The Chilton manual also recommended gloves!
My lasting memory of a car door fix is when I was a kid I was a second pair of hands for my dad replacing a window in his Datsun Z, and when he tapped the last bit of trim into place, he accidentally shattered the just-replaced-window. The second replacement went faster.
Hadad
14hr ago
I don't think you could possibly insult a fat person enough to make it worse than them being fat in the first place, and I say this as a lifelong fatty who found Jesus (ozempic) and slimmed down enormously.
You have to have ironically thin skin to be more upset people call you fat than you are at being fat.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
14hr ago
I've thought about starting a substack, just to have a place to collate ten years of writing if nothing else. Sadly, for the moment, no dice. You can always link to comments here if it helps.
TIRM
14hr ago
A young woman may go to college in a town other than the one she grew up in. And later graduate and get a job in some third town. No reason to think she has a local brother or father ready to punish you for not committing in the way she prefers.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
To be fair, women don't understand men's mindset either (see the discussions on here about male sexual desire and need versus women's; yeah my dear men, emotional disturbance can make it so that the very last thing you want is to have some snoo-snoo and if the body isn't aroused, it ain't gonna happen).
We do have different bodies, it's hard to understand how something works from the outside as against the experience of "I've been this body all my life".
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).
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