Particles break light-speed limit?
My grandfather is doomed, doomed I say!
Mwahahaha!
Particles break light-speed limit?
My grandfather is doomed, doomed I say!
Mwahahaha!
And what, if I may ask, are your plans for your grandmother?
All I see here is Tegmark re-hashed and some assertions concerning the proper definitions of words like "real" and "existence". Taboo those, are you still saying anything?
Have you read any of Paul Almond's thoughts on the subject? Your position might be more understandable if contrasted with his.
I would think this an irrationality quote? "Fuzzy" thinking skills are ridiculously important. "Intuition" may be somewhat unreliable, but in certain domains and under certain conditions, it can be - verifiably - a very powerful method.
Intuition is extremely powerful when correctly trained. Just because you want to have powerful intuitions about something doesn't mean it's possible to correctly train them.
If you can't think intuitively, you may be able to verify specific factual claims, but you certainly can't think about history.
Well, maybe we can't think about history. Intuition is unreliable. Just because you want to think intelligently about something doesn't mean it's possible to do so.
Jewish Atheist, in reply to Mencius Moldbug
"And yet... and yet..." said I to my Teacher, when all the shapes and the singing had passed some distance away into the forest, "even now I am not quite sure. Is it really tolerable that she should be untouched by his misery, even his self-made misery?"
"Would you rather he still had the power of tormenting her? He did it many a day and many a year in their earthly life."
"Well, no. I suppose I don't want that that."
"What then?"
"I hardly know, Sir. What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one's soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved."
"Ye see it does not."
"I feel in a way that it ought to."
"That sounds very merciful, but see what lurks behind it."
"What?"
"The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven."
"I don't know what I want, Sir."
This dialogue follows the most compelling (to me) scene in C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce". A saved woman is trying to coax a man she knew in life to join her in heaven while the narrator and his guide look on. She clearly acts in such a way as to reveal a preference that the man join her. But nothing he does, not even remaining in Hell for all eternity, makes a bit of difference to her emotional state.
Do I want her miserable? No. Do I think she cares, really cares about the man she's trying to help? Well... no. I don't think that's what "care" means; she lacks empathy for him. I recently acted in such a way as to get myself a baked potato. I don't really care, in the deep and meaningful way I care about other people, about having gotten a baked potato - and I'm not even devoid of potato-related emotional feelings, I would have been disappointed if it had caught fire and I was pleased when it turned out nicely.
Do I like being sad when my friends are sad? Well, no, not really, I don't have sadness-asymbolia. Would I rather not be sad when my friends are sad; do I want to deny them that power, as C. S. Lewis suggests would be only just? No! I don't want to go around helping people just because this is written somewhere on my abstract list of preferences, acting in numb glee and feeling nothing that responds to my environment.
I don't know what I want, Sir.
Ceteris paribus, I would prefer not to be sad when my friends are sad. But this is incompatible with empathy - I use my sadness to model theirs. I can't imagine "loving" someone while trying not to understand them.
It's also something like people with recessive genes for mental illness get some of the benefits (increased creativity) without the debilitation. I have a family history of mental illness but am not mental ill, and I definitely recognize benefits from whatever it is about me that isn't neurotypical.
Same here.
More, actually. I'm not sure what they go through before selling GMO food for human consumption, but I'm pretty certain peanuts wouldn't have passed the test.
The assumption that we can better determine toxicity with our current understanding of human biology than thousands of years of natural selection seems questionable, but peanuts are certainly a good lower bound on selection's ability.
I also don't have much confidence that the parties responsible for safety testing are particularly reliable, but that's a loose belief.
Find me one plant that has been genetically modified enough to make it as different from its original version as corn is from maize.
In addition, genetic modification only changes specific genes. Selective breeding ends up with a lot of other changes. As such, selective breeding is more dangerous for a given modification.
That's technically true, but in practice the results of selective breeding have undergone "staged deployment" - populations/farmers with harmful variants would have been selected against. Modern GMO can reach a global population much more quickly, so harmful variants have the potential to cause more widespread harm.
Corn has been bred to grow six feet tall, among other things. What's a little GMO in comparison?
Less selected for human non-toxicity?
I'm saying that our intuitive concepts of "real" and "existence" have no referents, that Tegmark's restriction to computable structures is unnecessary, that nesting (ie. simulation) of worlds is an explicit causal dependence, and that Platonism needn't be as silly and naïve as it sounds. Also to the extent that I am rehashing Tegmark, I'm doing so in order to combine it with Syntacticism and several other prerequisites in order to build a framework that lets me talk about "the existence of infinite sets", because I think Eliezer's 'infinite set atheism' is a confusion.
I'll read "Minds, Substrate, Measure and Value" (which seems relevant) and then get back to you on that one, ok?
Thanks, that's a concise and satisfying reply. I look forward to seeing where you take this.