All of alexgieg's Comments + Replies

A few remarks that don't add up to either agreement or disagreement with any point here:

Considering rivers conscious hasn't been a difficulty for humans, as animism is a baseline impulse that develops even in absence of theism, and it takes effort, at either the individual or cultural levels, for people to learn not to anthropomorphize the world. As such, I'd suggest a thought experiment that allows for the possibility of a conscious river, even if composed of atomic moments of consciousness arising from strange flows through an extremely complex network o... (read more)

1blallo
thanks, the consideration about the river is interesting. The reason i picked it is because i am trying to provide a non computer medium to explain implications of computers being conscious, in particular the fact that the whole mechanism can be laid down in a single direction in space. I could have picked a set of marbles running down pipes instead, but that would be less intuitive to those that have never seen a computer implemented with marbles. I am not sure which alternative would be best. then just a clarification on symbols. symbols would not be the source of moment of consciousness. symbols would just be a syntactical constructs independent from consciousness, which can be manipulated both by some conscious beings such as humans and by computers. For example, a sheep is very clearly conscious, but if it does uses symbols, they are very simple symbols to keep track of geography, other sheep and stuff that is important for its survival, it is not a turing complete machine. in that view it is not a issue that symbols attach to any substrate, because they are unrelated to consciousness and simply muddle the water by introducing the ability of self referencing. The substrate independence of symbols does not extend to consciousness, because in that view it is the conscious mind that generates symbols not the other way around. I lack the knowledge to express the following idea with the right words so forgive the ugly way of saying this: it is my understanding that to some degree one could even claim that the objective of buddhism (or at least zen buddhism) is to break the self referencing loop arising from symbols, since symbols are a prerequisite for self awareness and thus negative emotions. Without symbols one would be conscious and unable to worry about itself.

Where is all the furry AI porn you'd expect to be generated with PonyDiffusion, anyway?

From my experience, it's on Telegram groups (maybe Discord ones too, but I don't use it myself). There are furries who love to generate hundreds of images around a certain theme, typically on their own desktop computers where they have full control and can tweak parameters until they get what they wanted exactly right. They share the best ones, sometimes with the recipes. People comment, and quickly move on.

At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning at... (read more)

gwern*162

People comment, and quickly move on.

That's the problem, of course, and why it can't replace the mainstream sites. It's trapped in fast mode and has no endurance or cumulative effect. So it sounds like there is plenty of demand (especially allowing for how terrible Telegram is as a medium for this), it's just suppressed and fugitive - which is what we would expect from the cartel model.

At the same time, when someone gets something with meaning attached, such as a drawing they commissioned from an artist they like, or that someone gifted them, it has mo

... (read more)
Answer by alexgieg176

This probably doesn't generalize beyond very niche subcultures, but in the one I'm a member of, the Furry Fandom, art drawn by real artists is such a core aspect that, even though furries use generative AI for fun, we don't value it. One reason behind this is that, different from more typical fandoms, in which members are fans of something specific made by a 3rd party, in the Furry Fandom members are fans of each other.

Give that, and assuming the Furry Fandom continues existing in the future, I expect members will continue commissioning art from each other... (read more)

gwern*233

I was surprised to hear this, given how the fur flew back when we released This Pony Does Not Exist & This Fursona Does Not Exist, and how well AstraliteHeart went on to create furry imagegen with PonyDiffusion (now v6); I don't pay any attention to furry porn per se but I had assumed that it was probably going the way regular stock photos / illustrations / porn / hentai were going, as the quality of samples rapidly escalated over time & workflows developed - the bottom was falling out of the commission market with jobs cratering and AI-only 'artis... (read more)

4RogerDearnaley
Good one! I think I can generalize from this to a whole category (which also subsumes my sex-worker example above): 4. (v2) Skilled participant in an activity that heavily involves interactions between people, where humans prefer to do this with other real humans, are willing to pay a significant premium to do so, and you are sufficiently more skilled/talented/capable/willing to cater to others' demands than the average participant that you can make a net profit off this exchange. Examples: Furry Fandom artist, director/producer/lead performer for amateur/hobby theater, skilled comedy-improv partner, human sex-worker Epistemic status: seems extremely plausible Economic limits: Net earning potential may be limited, depending on just how much better/more desirable you are as a fellow participant than typical people into this activity, and on the extent to which this can be leveraged in a one-producer-to-many-customers way — however, making the latter factor high is is challenging because it conflicts with the human-to-real-human interaction requirement that allows you to out-compete an AI/robot in the first place. Often a case of turning a hobby into a career. 
alexgieg*133

I'd like to provide a qualitative counterpoint.

Aren't these arguments valid for almost all welfare programs provided by a first-world country to anyone but the base of the social pyramid? For one example, let's take retirement. All the tax money that goes into paying retirees to do nothing would be much better spent by helping victims of malaria etc. in 3rd world countries. If they weren't responsible enough to save during their working years to be able to live without working for the last 10 to 30 years of their lives, especially those from the lower midd... (read more)

When this person goes to post the answer to the alignment problem to LessWrong, they will have low enough accumulated karma that the post will be poorly received.

 

I don't think this is accurate, it depends more on how it's presented.

In my experience, if someone posts something that's controversial to the general LW consensus, but argues carefully and in details, addressing the likely conflicts and recognizing where their position differs from the consensus, how, why, etc., in short, if they do the hard work of properly presenting it, it's well receive... (read more)

2MadHatter
That's pretty fair, and an argument for me to be less trollish in my presentation. I have strong-agreed with you.
Answer by alexgieg10

The answer is threefold.

a) First, religious and spiritual perspectives are a primarily a perceptual experience, not a set of beliefs. For those who have this perception, the object of which is technically named "the numinous", it is self-evident. The numinous stuff clearly "is there", for anyone to see/feel/notice/perceive/experience/etc., and they cannot quite grasp the concept of someone saying they notice nothing.

Here are two analogies of how this works.

For people with numinal perception, hearing "it's pretty, but that's all" is somewhat similar to some... (read more)

I mean sure if you take self-reports as the absolute truth (...)

Absolute truth doesn't exist, the range is always ]0;1[. 0 and 1 require infinitely strong evidence. What imprecisions in self-reporting do generate is higher variance, skewing, bias etc., and these can be solved by better causal hypotheses. However, those causal hypotheses must be predictive and falsifiable.

why go with the convoluted point about aro-ace trans women (...)

Because that's central to the falsifiability requirement. Consider: if transgender individuals explicitly telling res... (read more)

2tailcalled
Yeah I know, I've put a lot of effort into this. See also: my blog. In some of the studies, it included asking wives, looking at prior patient reports, or measuring erections in response to being read stories. Personally, I have done the research by looking at prior responses prior to transition. I'd think this only works if you have a shitton of data, which these studies don't. Maybe I'm confused though, which is where a more coherent explanation would help. See also: 5-HTTLPR: A POINTED REVIEW.

Feels like an example of bad discourse that you dismiss it on the basis of ace trans women without responding to what Blanchardians have to say about ace trans women.

Thanks for the link, but I'd say the text actually confirms my point rather than contradicting it. The numbers referred to:

"In this study, Blanchard (...) found that 75% of his asexual group answered yes. Similarly, Nuttbrock found that 67% of his asexual group had experienced transvestic arousal at some point in their lives. (...) 45.2% of the asexuals feel that it applies at least a littl... (read more)

1tailcalled
I mean sure if you take self-reports as the absolute truth rather than suspecting various problems with them, but then why go with the convoluted point about aro-ace trans women instead of just saying "most trans women disagree with autogynephilia theory"? (I don't think self-reports should be taken as an absolute truth, but in arguing about that we get into the complicated weeds of the typology that I don't feel like arguing about here. Feel free to start a top-level thread about it or engage about it in one of the other places where it is relevant, e.g. here.) More studies != better integration of the information from those studies into a coherent explanation.

Yep, the idea autogynephilia explains transgender identities can be shown to be false by referring a single piece of direct evidence: it isn't difficult to find aro-ace trans people. That right there shows autogynephilia isn't a universal explanation. It may apply to some cases, maybe, but transgender identities definitely go way beyond that.

Besides, but also mainly, we have evidence for physiological causes:

  • Frigerio, Alberto, Lucia Ballerini, and Maria Valdés Hernández. “Structural, Functional, and Metabolic Brain Differences as a Function of Gender Ide
... (read more)
1alexey
Do any prominent pro-AGP people claim it is? Even when I see them described by their opponents, the claim is that there are two clusters of trans women and AGP people are one of them, so aroace trans women could belong to the other cluster without contradicting that theory.
7tailcalled
Feels like an example of bad discourse that you dismiss it on the basis of ace trans women without responding to what Blanchardians have to say about ace trans women. Idk, I find the neurological research kind of unreadable and sketchy. Like small sample sizes and unclear theories. I would enjoy if someone could lay it out in a more comprehensible manner.

Which texts is Hegel responding too? Is it ultimately rooted in Aristotle/Plato/Socretes? How much work does one have to do to get up to speed?

I'm not well versed in Hegel's philosophy, but I know he does three things (and probably more).

First, he builds upon Kant, who himself is moving against all philosophy that came before him and refunding the entire thing so as to be compatible with modern scientific inquiry.

Second, he changes the concept of truth, from static to dynamic, not in the sense that what we think is true may be wrong and so we fix our kn... (read more)

2Chris_Leong
"Second, he changes the concept of truth, from static to dynamic, not in the sense that what we think is true may be wrong and so we fix our knowledge until it becomes actually true, but in the sense that the very notion of "truth" itself changes over time, and hence a knowledge that was true once becomes false not because it was incorrect, but because it's aligned with a notion of truth that isn't valid anymore." I don't suppose you could give a rough idea of why he sees the notion of truth as changing?
2avturchin
I have an impression that Hegel was the first who predicted that humanity will eventually evolve in what we now call "superintelligence". He suggested that human evolution represents stages of the evolution of the spirit, which eventually will become God. He also described something which reminds me Big Bang in the beginning of his "Science of logic", where "being" and "nothingness" are combined into evolving becoming. 
1Randomized, Controlled
Thanks! Do you have any recommendations for how to start with Kant?

... this quote ... was used by Scott Alexander in his Nonfiction Writing Advice as an example of entirely unreadable abstract paragraph.

It isn't unreadable. Hegel is arguing with concepts from previous philosophies which he presumes the reader already knows and understands well. If one begins reading him possessing the prerequisite knowledge one can understand him just fine. Besides, this is a point in the middle of a long discussion, so he already presumes the reader understood the previous points and is connecting the dots.

Great philosophers are great... (read more)

4ChristianKl
Did you actually try reading Hegel in the German orignal or spoke with someone who tried that instead of reading an English interpretation that's more like an interpretation of Hegel by doing things like splitting one sentence into multiple one's as in the opening quote?
2Randomized, Controlled
Which texts is Hegel responding too? Is it ultimately rooted in Aristotle/Plato/Socretes? How much work does one have to do to get up to speed? I can see the argument for the language style as being fundamentally rooted in the difficultly of trying to say something fundamentally new, but being oracular can also give something memetic fitness -- perhaps at some point philosophers realized they could get status by moving more towards poetry or riddles? I've also read some contemporary philosophers who seem to take pains to write in extremely clear ways -- when I read Bostrom, Parfait, or Focault or listen to Amanda Askill or Agnes Callard or Amia Srinivasan I don't get the sense that they're necessarily trying to bring fundamentally new objects into our ontology or metaphysics, but rather that they're trying to clarify and tease apart distinctions and think through implications; if so, is that a project that tends to lend itself to a really different, "clearer" way of using language?

Either that, or instead this happens. I guess by this point we're in Schrödinger's Cat territory:

Multitrack drifting

Humans also bottleneck the maritime side of cargo shipments via artificial scarcity in the form of cartels and monopolies. The referred $2k shipments could have costed even less, but there's rent capture in it driving final transportation prices higher than they could be, and payments to on the ground operators lower than those, too, could be, the resulting spread going into the hands of the monopolists who successfully work around legal impositions from as many jurisdictions as possible.

I wouldn't say it's a matter of validity, exactly, but of suitability to different circumstances.

In my own personal ethics I mix a majority of Western virtues with a few Eastern ones, filter them through my own brand of consequentialism in which I give preference to actions that preserve information to actions that destroy it, ignore deontology almost entirely, take into consideration the distribution of moral reasoning stages as well as which of the 20 natural desires may be at play, and leave utilitarian reasoning proper to solve edge cases and gray areas.

The Moriori massacre is precisely one of the references I keep in mind when balancing all of these influences into taking a concrete action.

This analysis shows one advantage virtue ethics has over utilitarianism and deontology with its strong focus on internal states as compared to these and their focus on external reality. And it also shows aspects of the Kohlbergian analysis of the different levels of cognitive complexity possible in the moral reasoning of moral agents. Well done!

One concrete example I like to refer to is the Maori massacre of the Moriori tribe. The Moriori were radical non-violence practitioners who lived in their own island, to the point even Gandhi would be considered too... (read more)

1Lucas2000
Doesn't your Maori massaclre example disprove the validity of virtue ethics?

Thanks. Now I'm torn between my own take and a possibly improved version of this one. :-)

Thanks for this review. I have done evil in the past due to similar reasons the author points. Not huge evils, smaller evil, but evils nonetheless. Afterwards I learned to be on guard against those small causal chains, but even so, even having began being on guard, I still did evil one more time afterwards. I hope my future rate will go down to zero and stay there. We'll see.

By the way, an additional factor not mentioned in the review, and thus, I suppose, on the book, is the matter of evil governments manipulating the few who are good so they, too, serve ... (read more)

"The Worst Mistake in the History of Ethics"

I'm curious what GPT-3 would output for this one. :-)

PS: And I have my own answer for that: Aristotle's development of the concept of eudaimonia, "the good life", meaning the realization of all human potential. For him it was such a desirable outcome, so valuable, that it's existence justified slavery, since those many working allowed a few to realize it. Advance 2,400 years of people also finding it incredibly desirable, and we end up with, among others, Marx and Engels defending revolutionary terror, massacres, and mass political persecution so that it could be realized for all, rather than for a few.

lsusr100

The Worst Mistake in the History of Ethics is a book by philosopher Peter Singer. It has been published in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. It was also published in Germany in 2004 with the title "Der größte Fehler der Geschichte der Ethik".

In this book, Singer attacks what he calls "the myth of sanctity," which he says pervades discussions of ethical issues. He asserts that there is no such thing as a human being who is essentially holy or sacred, and that any being that has a capacity to suffer is en... (read more)

I personally think quotation-over-punctuation would solve this nicely. Here's an example from someone who managed to have his TeX documents do exactly that:

Overlapping quotes with periods and commas

alexgieg*330

Minor curiosity: originally, back in old printing days, quotations marks went neither before nor after punctuation marks, but above these, after all, it's a half-height symbol with empty space below it, and another half-height symbol with empty space above it, so both merged well into a single combined glyph, saving space.

When movable types entered the picture almost no types set had unified quotation+punctuation types, so both were physically distinct symbols that needed a sequence when placed on the printing board. Over time the US mostly settled with pu... (read more)

2smountjoy
I've always thought the British style puts an awkward amount of space between a comma or period and the word preceding it. It's even worse if you start using it with American-style double quotes. Interesting discussion here on blog of the Chicago Manual of Style, which supports the American convention: Personally, I alternate between the two styles like a total maniac.

I'm intrigued – google gives only porn videos as search results.

The tongue is very sensitive. A very skilled kisser knows how to intensely stimulate the top of their partner's tongue with theirs while French kissing, to the point one or both of them get a very specific kind of orgasm different from any other. In my case I got spasms while washed in endorphins, which took several minutes to subside. :-)

Also, I assume you mean a P-spot orgasm when you say "female orgasm"?

No, I mean actual female orgasm. I can provide exactly zero evidence for this, wh... (read more)

Ditto, or more precisely, no one from my graduation class has any interest in paying for one, so we all got our certificates by mail. I suppose it helps that most everyone was 30+, and the major was Philosophy, neither of which predisposes one to care much about such things, much less when put together.

3lsusr
I majored in physics and graduated at 22. I think the common threads are that neither of our majors are highly-employable on their own and that our graduations were never in doubt. Someone who struggled through a valuable degree would be in a different position.

Looking at the pain scale, I guess I'm somewhat atypical. On the pleasurable experiences I had, I'd order them such:

  • 0.0: College graduation (I haven't really felt it as anything special)
  • 0.2: Alcohol consumption (but I haven't gotten really drunk)
  • 1.0 to 3.0: Male orgasm (kinda meh most of the time, sometimes good)
  • 2.0: Tongue orgasm from a skilled kisser
  • 4.0 to 6.0: Female orgasm (the first one is 4.0, successive ones being more and more intense until it plateaus at 6.0 on the 8th orgasm or so)

(Yes, I've had the last one despite being 100% a cis-male.... (read more)

3lsusr
I skipped my own college graduation.
3niplav
I'm intrigued – google gives only porn videos as search results. Also, I assume you mean a P-spot orgasm when you say "female orgasm"?

That depends. Several metaphysical systems develop ontologies, with concepts such as "objects" and "properties". Couple that with the subfield of Applied Metaphysics, which informs other areas of knowledge by providing systematic means to deal with those foundations. So it's no surprise that one such application, several steps down the line, was the development of object-oriented programming with its "objects possessing properties" ordered in "ontologies" via inheritance, interfaces and the like.

1TAG
I was making a dig at Solomonoff induction. SIs essentially contain machine code.

I've tried adding spoiler tags, but it isn't working. According the FAQ for Markdown it's three colons and the word "spoiler" at the beginning, followed by three colons at the end, but no luck. Any suggestion?

3lsusr
It's a paragraph-level operator. You need a newline after the ":::spoiler" and before the three colons at the end. Inline spoilers tags don't work. :::spoiler demo :::

I think that was the one, yes. It's been years and I forgot the name.

I'll add the tags, thanks!

There's a Naruto fanfic (much better than the actual manga, mind) with this trope, except the author adds a cool extra at the end. In that, it turns out one with looping power only goes back to the same point in time because

they haven't learned how to set a new, so to speak, "save point". This mechanic became clear to the characters after they had decades of experience in child bodies, so that they began to carefully plan the world they wanted to have, and exhaustively time looped until they managed to set things perfectly aligned for the next stage of their plan, at which point they "saved", and went for it.

1Gyrodiot
If I'm correct and you're talking about you might want to add spoiler tags.

Those aren't metaphysical. Metaphysics is a well defined philosophical research field.

1TAG
Well, it's not defined as the study of bitstrings or programmes.

To complement @Dagon's comment, another difficulty is that Skepticism itself is also a philosophical model, which can be taken either as merely epistemological, or as a metaphysical model unto itself, so the initial 1:1 model actually giving Skepticism a 50% prior vs. all other models. And then we have some relatively weird models such as Nominalism, which is metaphysically skeptical except for affirming, atop a sea of complete no-rules free-formness, the absolute will of an absolute god who decides everything just because.

Fun detail: my Philosophy major f... (read more)

This was extremely informative! Thank you!

A few points I'd like to comment on:

"So eager were poor farmers for dirty, dangerous factory jobs (...)"

There's an underlying question on why those farmers were that poor and such dire need for those factory jobs. One reason I've seen given was in Hillaire Belloc's 1912 book The Servile State, one of the first books of the Distributist school of economics. According him, the end of the feudal system in England, and its turning into a modern nation-state, involved among other things the closing off and appropria... (read more)

1L Rudolf L
Regarding the end of slavery: I think you make good points and they've made me update towards thinking that the importance of materialistic Morris-style models is slightly less and cultural models slightly more. I'd be very interested to hear what were the anti-slavery arguments used by the first English abolitionists and the medieval Catholic Church (religion? equality? natural rights? utilitarian?). I think there's also another way for the materialistic and idealistic accounts to both be true in different places: Morris' argument is specifically about slavery existing when wage incentives are weak, and perhaps this holds in places like ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, but had stopped holding in proto-industrial places like 16th-18th century western Europe. However I'm not aware of what specific factor would drive this. One piece of evidence on whether economics or culture is more important would be comparing how many cases there are where slavery existed/ended in places without cultural contact but with similar economic conditions and institutions, to how many cases there are of slavery existing/ending in places with cultural contact but different economic conditions/institutions.
1L Rudolf L
Thank you for this very in-depth comment. I will reply to your points in separate comments, starting with: This is very interesting and something I haven't seen before. Based on some quick searching, this seems to be referring to the Inclosure Acts (which were significant, affecting 1/6th of English land) and perhaps specifically this one, while the Catholic Church land confiscation was the 1500s one. My priors on this having a major effect are somewhat skeptical because: 1. The general shape of English historical GDP/capita is a slight post-plague rise, followed by nothing much until a gradual rise in the 1700s and then takeoff in the 1800s. Likewise, skimming through this, there seem to be no drastic changes in wealth inequality around the time of the Inclosure Acts, though share of wealth held by the top 10% slightly rise in the late 1700s and personal estates (note: specifically excludes real estate) of farmers and yeomen slightly drop around 1700 before rebounding. Any pattern of more poor farmers must evade these statistics, either by being small enough, or by not being captured in these crude overall stats (which is very possible, especially if the losses for one set of farmers were balanced by gains for another). 2. Other sources I've read support the idea that farmers in general prefer industrial jobs. It's not just Steven Pinker either; Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization (my review) has this passage: It's probably the case that it's easier to recruit landless farmers into industrial jobs, and I can imagine plausible models where farmers resist moving to cities, especially for uncertainty-avoidance / risk-aversion reasons. However, the effect of this, especially in the long term, seems limited by things like population growth in (already populous) cities, people having to move off their family farms anyways due to primogeniture, and people generally being pretty good at exploiting available opportunities. An exception might be if early industrializa

I have the impression you're confounding the terms "freedom" and "democracy", themselves quite broad. The contents of your post suggest what you're seeking is to live in a country that are representative liberal democracies, and whose electoral process results in specific representativeness quotients, as well as in other specific features. But that doesn't exactly overlap with any specific notion of "freedom", such as that of "true freedom", unless you also were to provide a specific definition of both.

I imagine you're going to find a better response if you were to taboo the words "democracy", "freedom", and "true freedom", so as to restate what you're seeking in more objective, concrete terms.

5MikkW
Not so much confounding, as conflating. But I agree conflating them without explicating why I believe they are correlated makes this post weaker, and it could be beneficial in the future to more explicitly make the case for my implicit position that more democratic and closely representative countries are also more free. I agree that value can be had in playing Taboo with the words you list, though I do also feel that taking advantage of the existing connotations these words have is beneficial in using people's existing intuition about freedom and democracy to pump intuitions for why the systems I value are important and better than the system that currently exists in the US. Thanks for the feedback!

I can vouch for Aigent's effectiveness! It even help with hobbies! Why, over the last month it earned me about +30 karma on LW alone!

Powered by Aigent® Free. More smarts, less effort!™

5lsusr
I upvoted your comment for mentioning Aigent in a positive light. We need to raise awareness for Aigent. Too much valuable human time is wasted that could be automated with Aigent. Powered by Aigent® Professional. More smarts, less effort!™

About this:

People reproduce at an exponential rate. The amount of food we can create is finite. Population growth will eventually outstrip production. Humanity will starve unless population control is implemented by governments.

The calculation and the predictions were correct until the 1960's, including very gloomy views that wars around food would begin happening by the 1980's. What changed things was the Green Revolution. Weren't for this technological breakthrough no one could actually have predicted, and right now we might be looking back at 40 yea... (read more)

You're welcome. There's a stronger continuity if you look at pre-modern Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but yes, Christianity changed a lot over time.

By the way, something that may help you locate your own personal moment in your relation towards the religious teachings you received are in light of Piaget's theory of cognitive development, Kohlberg's theory of stages of moral development, and Fowler's theory of stages of faith development, as these helped me understand my own. They build one atop the other in this same sequence, Fowler's depending on Kolhberg's... (read more)

There is an element of submission, but originally it meant submission of the will to the knowledge of those who know better even when what they say goes counter your base interests.

For example, going back to praus/taming/meekness, one reference Jesus use is that of his "yoke" being easy and with a light load. Yoke is a U-shaped bar used to fix two draft animals together, so they can pull loads together. One way animal trainers used back then (and maybe still use today) to train an animal in a new job is to fix his neck on one side of a yoke, and on the oth... (read more)

alexgieg*370

The English work "meek" is a problematic translation of the original Greek "praus". Praus refers to a wild animal who's been tamed, the connotation being that such a person hasn't lost the virtue of strength of their wild nature, but added to it the virtue of civilized interaction, similar to how a tamed animal learns to do things their wild counterparts would never do.

This links to several other similar notions spread through the New Testament. For example, when Jesus:

a) Tells his disciples to be "harmless as doves" but "wise as serpents";

b) When he order... (read more)

5tcelferact
Thanks for sharing this. When I was studying theology, I most enjoyed learning about the first and second century communities that circulated the gospels, and that was because of points like the one you've raised (although I wasn't familiar with "praus"). It's a shame most of it never made it into church when I was a kid! The messaging of those early communities and the messaging of modern churches are very different.
7Dustin
Many American Christians seem to equivocate between the naïve and informed interpretations of "meek" in a motte-and-bailey-esque fashion. The first thing that comes to mind is submission to church elders and (sometimes) others of the same denomination, restrained (barely) savagery when dealing with people who don't believe as they do.
9Gordon Seidoh Worley
Came here to say the same. This doesn't necessarily diminish the original point, since I think most English-speaking Christian think "meek" here means exactly what the OP does, but I think it's also worth saying that in this case the problem appears not to be with the text of the Bible itself, but with modern misunderstanding of the translation of it into English and the implications of that misunderstanding.

Regarding 1 and 3, good points, and I agree.

On 2, when I say formalizable, I mean in terms of giving the original arguments a symbolic formal treatment, that is, converting them into formal logical statements. Much of non-analytic philosophy has to do with criticizing this kind of procedure. For an example among many, check this recent one from a Neo-Thomistic perspective (I refer to this one because it's fresh on my mind, I read it a few days ago).

On 4, maybe a practical alternative would be to substitute vaguer but broader relations, such as "agrees", "p... (read more)

My comments:

  1. That's actually not the case. Analytic Philosophy is preeminent in the US and, to some extent, the UK. Everywhere else it's a topic that one learns among others, and usually in a secondary and subsidiary manner. For example, I majored in Philosophy in 2009. My university's Philosophy department, which happens to be the most important in my country and therefore the source of that vast majority of Philosophy undergraduates and graduates who then go on to influence other Philosophy departments, was founded by Continental philosophers, and rema

... (read more)
1SocratesDissatisfied
1. You may be forgetting Canada, Australia and New Zealand. When a philosophical field is preeminent in the English speaking part of the developed world; and of significant (but secondary) importance in non-English speaking European countries; it's a pretty good bet that it's the largest school of Western philosophy (population of CANZUK+US > population of Western Europe - UK; and I would guess the distribution of funding/size of philosophical faculties would only amplify this trend). 2. It strikes me as odd to say that Continental ideas couldn't usefully be "formalised" in any way. When Continental philosophers write books or give lectures, are they not tacitly "formalising" their ideas: setting out what they are, how they relate to other ideas, and so on? If they can do this in their own work, shouldn't other people come along and present those ideas and their relations in a different, clearer and more useful fashion? Indeed, isn't that what teachers of Continental philosophy have been doing for the past hundred years or so? Perhaps Continental philosophy aims to be genuinely impenetrable: but that seems a little uncharitable.  3. I agree with you that, as described, phenomena themselves may not fit into a Web structure, given they may have no relations to other phenomena. However, as your post demonstrates, Husserl also developed theories about phenomena, what they were, what they were relevant to (our process of doing philosophy, our understanding of the world, etc.). That theory is one that presumably supports, contributes to, or opposes other philosophers' understandings of how philosophy should be conducted/how we understand the world - and thus exhibits all the characteristics needed to integrate it into a web of theories and their relationships (N.B. that the Web wouldn't be limited to purely logical relations). 4. I'll definitely concede that Philosophy Web makes use of "standard" Western notions of truth value at a meta level; although it could integr

It seems to me this would work for Analytic Philosophy, but not for other philosophical traditions. For instance:

a. Continental Philosophy has, since Heidegger (or, arguably, Husserl) taken a turn away from conceptual definitions towards phenomenological descriptions, so anything concept-based is subject, as a whole, to all manners of phenomenological criticisms;

b. Classic Philosophy frequently isn't formalizable, with its nuclear terms overlapping in a very interdependent manner, the same applying to some Modern ones. Splitting them into separate concepts... (read more)

3SocratesDissatisfied
Hey Alex, thanks for your thoughts. My response would be as follows:    1. Analytic Philosophy is probably the preeminent field of philosophical enquiry in the developed world. So, even if Philosophy Web did prove constrained to Analytic Philosophy, it would still possess major epistemic value (the Hubble Telescope is only useful for astronomy, the Hadron Collider is only useful for particle physics, etc.; but that's not really a problem given the importance of those fields). 2. Having said that, Philosophy Web ought to be able to capture a wide variety of schools of thought, going well beyond the Analytic: 1. As regards Classic Philosophy, overlapping concepts ought to be amenable to formalisation in a Philosophy Web type structure: they would simply share some relations of support and opposition (to the extent they overlapped), and not share others (to the extent they did not overlap). Now of course this could create presentational problems (how to show fifty slightly different versions of concept x), but those should also be superable: for instance through sensitivity filters which let you see more or less versions of very similar concepts. 2. As regards Continental Philosophy, perhaps continental philosophers would object to their ideas being characterised as "concepts" (I am not well read enough in Continental Philosophy to know). However they nevertheless have "theories" (or "ideas", or however else they might want to characterise their units of thought); and those theories contradict, entail, support, oppose, or otherwise relate to other theories. But this is all that is necessary for those "theories" to be usefully displayed in a Philosophy Web style structure. 3. As regards Eastern Philosophies, Philosophy Web would indeed initially model Western Philosophy, as it would be easier to model a contiguous tradition, whose theorists are in open dialogue with one another, than to have to make a huge number of guesses at how the concepts of very dif

These a few problems with that. One is that you just figured out how the universe works without examining the the universe. Another is that it you can't get MWI out if it...unless you regard it as a statement only about subjective probability.

I'm not sure I understood these two points. Can you elaborate?

The unstated part of the argument being that free will must be neither-deterministic nor probabilistic?

Actually, the state part. It's my original comment. Although maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought I was about it.

I know what "reductionism" means

... (read more)
1TAG
The argument that probabilities of past events are always 1 doesn't prove anything objective, anything about the universe, unless you can show that probability always has to be interpreted objectively. As it happens there is also a subjective explanation for the rule. The probabilities or squared measures of the branches in MWI have to aim to 1. So you cant have more than one branch of probability 1.
1TAG
Ok, but why should I care? The question I care about is whether free will per se exists.

the branching structure as whole is deterministic, not that the branches are individually.

That depends on how you consider probabilities. One usual take, when it comes to concrete events, is that the probability of something that actually happened is 1.0, since it actually happened. Therefore, when you look at a sequence of causes and events backwards, that is, as history, this after-the-fact sequence is always strictly deterministic even if every single one of its links had a less-than-1.0 probability of happening before it actually happened in that sp... (read more)

1TAG
These a few problems with that. One is that you just figured out how the universe works without examining the the universe. Another is that it you can't get MWI out if it...unless you regard it as a statement only about subjective probability. But I think we have had this discussion elsewhere. The unstated part of the argument being that free will must be neither-deterministic nor probabilistic? I know what "reductionism" means. The problen is that you haven't explained why reducing the quale of free will disposes of fee will, since you haven't explained why free will "is" the quale of free will, or why free will (the ability as opposed to the quale) can't be physically explained. That's the best known example. Not really. You can conceivably have free will while having no qualia , or while having a bunch of qualia, but not that one.

That's a contradiction in terms

Not really. The sentence you split forms a single reasoning. The first part is the claim, the second is the justification for the claim. You can read them in reverse if you prefer, which would gives it a more syllogistic form.

Which? Logical or causal?

Both, since causal determinism is logically modelled. More specifically, causal determinism is a subset and a consequence of logical determinism, which is inherent to all forms of logical reasoning, including this one.

In any case, the point of causal determinism is that

... (read more)
1TAG
You mean:- But that doesn't make sense. The point of MWI is that the branching structure as whole is deterministic, not that the branches are individually. That makes no sense. Maps aren't territories, even though territories are modelled with maps. Modelling isn't ontological identity. That's not obvious at all. It's not obvious that being reducuble to physics is the same as being reducuble to deterministic physics, it's not obvious that indeterministic physics can't support free will, and it's not obvious that you need a quale of free will to have free will. (Just as you can live and die without knowing you have a spleen).

Formal logic, mathematics, informal deductive reasoning, algorithmics etc. are all interchangeable for the effects of my point, and usually also mutually translatable. Using any of them to model reality always yields a deterministic chain even when probabilistic paths are involved, because on can always think of these as branching in a manner similar to MWI: starting from such and such probabilities (or likelihoods, if the question is about one's knowledge of the world rather than about the world itself) we end up with a causal tree, each of whose branches... (read more)

2JBlack
If they're all interchangeable for the effects of your point, then I'm even more unsure what your point is than when I started. You seem to be mixing up "discussing non-determinism" with "doing non-deterministic things", which seems like the essence of a map/territory confusion.
0TAG
That's a contradiction in terms Which? Logical or causal? In any case, the point of causal determinism is that there is only on possible outcome to a state, ie. only one path going forwards. Huh?that's not generally acknowledged. If you mean an RNG as opposed to a pseudo RNG, yes it does make it less deterministic...by definition. That is not universally acknowledged.

"Probably most ambitious people are starved for the sort of encouragement they'd get from ambitious peers"

This, I think, is one of the roots of smart people getting into weird stuff. Contrarians, contra-cultural types, conspiracy theorists (the inventors, not the believers) and the like are usually very smart, they just don't optimize their smarts in a good direction, so a newly minted smart person will feel attracted to them. The end result are very suboptimal communities of smart individuals going in all kinds of weird directions.

That's my case, mind.... (read more)

2Viliam
Signaling. Any idiot can believe things that are obviously true, or mainstream truths that are already in the textbooks. And it takes time for a smart person to become an expert at something actually useful. Doing difficult weird stuff is the obvious shortcut. The problem is, if you take this shortcut, you quite often get lost in the woods.
1Bernhard
If you were to substitute "intelligent" for "ambitious", I would agree. Some kind of dialog is needed to flourish, and a dialog between equals is strongly preferred. Or said another way, when training, it makes no sense to train with to little weight.   I strongly disagree. Assuming a certain bias regarding the selection of examples, this is just a tautology: Highly visible people are highly visible. Successful people are visible. Stupid people are on average less successful. Non-ambitious people are less visible. Some counterexamples would be Grigorij Perelman, or Steve Wozniak (I know basically nothing of these people, and am willing to be proven wrong)
[anonymous]190

I would VERY strongly argue this place also lacks brakes.

2lsusr
Ouch. Your comment hits close to home.

A fundamental difficulty in thinking logically about free will is that it involves thinking logically.

Logic, by its very nature, has embedded as its most essential hidden premise a deterministic structure. This makes all reasoning chains, no matter what their subject (including this one), to be deterministic. In other words, a deterministic structure is imposed upon the elements that will be logically analyzed so that they can be logically analyzed.

This leads one, if they ignore this structure is present as the very first link in chain, then proceeds to an... (read more)

1JBlack
I'm not sure how logical deduction is related in any way at all to physical (or even psychological) determinism. It is normal, and extremely common, to reason logically about non-deterministic systems. Even logic itself is non-deterministic, when viewed as a sequential system. From "A and (if A then B)" you can derive "B", as usual. You can also derive "A and B", or "(A or not-B) and (if not-B then not-A)" or any of an infinite number of other sentences. Nothing says which you will logically derive, it just says what you can and what you can't.

I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (...)

Ah! I have plenty of extremely positive experiences with black people, from black friends, to coworkers, to acquaintances, to (awesome!) teachers, to college friends. For me, people are all individuals, no exception, and I cannot think in terms of groups or collectivities even if I tried forcing myself to do so. As such, I have always been extremely careful not to allow this irrational trigger to affect anything real, and this is why I described ... (read more)

Which subcultures are these?

The furry fandom and the otherkin community here in Brazil.

It's okay if you don't want to answer.

Nah, I'm an open book. I make a point of not keeping secrets unless absolutely necessary. There's no risk in doxing if you yourself provide the doxa beforehand. ;-)

alexgieg*230

I would indeed be interested in your mention of this sort of thing having "changed in a bad way".

Well, in my case it came due to robbery. Until my late teens / early adulthood I was robbed four times, which wasn't uncommon in the region of Brazil I lived at the time (crime rates have diminished a lot in the intervening decades). From those, three were by black thieves, blacks being a very discriminated-against group here, even if not as much as in the US. The third time has caused in me what I suppose I could describe as a "micro-PTSD", because from tha... (read more)

4orthogenesis
This seems pretty tough because humans easily form associations with negative events, relative to positive events (for instance, refusal to visit a place ever again that they were robbed in, or eat a food that made them terribly sick, even if later on they intellectually realize it was a chance thing).  I wonder if more positive encounters would help gradually change the bias, also for your own well-being (for example, having experiences where you were helped by, or have friendly relations with people who happen to be black, and overall being further exposed to that variability in all traits good and bad existing across humanity regardless of race). But then again, not having been through the same situation (and not knowing if I would develop the same response, or if most people in general would, of having feelings of a certain way towards a group because of a given number of negative encounters), I'll refrain from too much theoretical postulating.
6lsusr
Meta: Someone strong downvoted alexgieg's comment. I'm curious why. I read his comment as a costly contribution of hard observational data.

I'm not sure what it means for a newborn to be transgendered.

Over the last two to three decades many clinical studies have been developed scanning the brains of transgendered individuals. Brain regions have been identified that mark brains as clearly masculine, feminine, or somewhere in between, and transgendered individuals' brains show the properties of the brains typical of the other sex, meaning trans women have structurally female brains in male bodies, and trans men have structurally male brain in female bodies. You can find a fairly comprehensive... (read more)

3lsusr
I want to acknowledge that this is an interesting subject and that your comment is well-written. You are obviously well-researched in this field. You approach the subject openmindedly while also drawing from personal experience.
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