TheVat

Well so much for science forums, then.

I don't know if there's a significant fraction of SF readers who are looking for a Biblical message dropped into the narrative. Maybe. Am more certain that removing vulgarity will cut your readership in half. Is there a Christian-compatible way to give me a hardon (or female/NB equivalent) somewhere in the first chapter? If so, that might be as useful to sales as a plausible DNA structure. Afterthought - Philip K Dick wrote several novels with some Christian theological themes. They did, however, contain some vulgarity, but what else could one expect of a druggy hipster living in that American Sodom, the San Francisco Bay area?

Did a beautiful princess kiss you? You were probably hoping it would turn you into a handsome prince. I had a similar experience, as my photo shows. (the princess has stuck with me anyway) Regarding @geordief post, I wonder if he was getting at the social shift if strong determinism was widely held to be true. Perhaps promises and contracts would be replaced by forecasts? That's not actually the point of the Dunning and Kruger research. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.

I am far from qualified to say. Somewhere around here there may be an old thread or two on the reality of photons. I like Cramer's interpretation, too. Partly because Wheeler is its godfather, and I much admire him. Not a terribly scientific reason I'd have to admit. Sorry for the derailment.

Hey, when they implement your controlled breeding program and extermination of the less sentient, what do you think your prospects will be? Would you be "on the spectrum" by any chance? What happens when your "best class" dictates that you climb in the boxcar?

David Bohm, among others. And more recently, this fellow... https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14319392-200-science-do-photons-really-exist/

Time is short this a.m. so I'll just say that my intention cannot be reduced to "C-fiber translating data packets through superior medial cortical stacks 9 and 43," or some such. The lower-order causal explanation will fail.

My impression, too. Will read beyond the abstracts and conclusions today if time permits. I have some appreciation that he approaches consciousness as something that extends beyond neurons and must involve a body interacting with a world. Yup. My thermostat behaves. Same old same old. For a behaviorist, there is no knowable difference between two states of mind unless there is a demonstrable difference in the behavior associated with each state. Easy to see why such theoretic approaches are superseded.

I would never dismiss the many small tweaks that can add up, and I take your point on promoting small benefits. Not only for their pragmatic value but also as they foster more public awareness. I was zooming out a little from the myriad problems, in my post, to convey some caution about the public not falling into the complacent trap of thinking their individual choices aren't as critical to what will be an "all hands on deck" human project.

Was going to point this out. More greenwashing, at this point. Really good news for the environment would be masses of people in developed countries bicycling and walking and buying less fungible junk and living in smaller homes and eating more plants, choices that powerful corporations strenuously want people not to make and fight tooth-and-nail against with enormous campaigns of mass marketing.

The definition of downward causation, in philosophy of mind, is not one that requires a cause to be from elsewhere. It is compatible with emergent states of mind in a physicalist view. I.e. downward causation is a causal relationship from higher levels of a system to lower-level parts of that system. From our perspective as conscious creatures, we can perceive this as mental events acting to cause physical events. (we see higher order activity as mental) It doesn't require an ontologically dualist view that the mental events are other than an emergent process of a physical neural network. So I agree that on that high-order level where I form intentions, free will can be meaningfully defined as acting according my intentions. To be a compatibilist, if I am understanding that position, is to say there is an irreducible value to such high-order processes like intention forming, which gives meaning to free will. The sum of neural signals was greater than its parts.

I tried to ignore the logic contortions needed for the problem to make sense and treat it as the ethics problem apparently intended. The logic is wobbly, as everyone noticed - why not just leave well before the predicted event? @Ghideon noted that the ethics problem is two-tiered, with one tier being the behavior of the higher being. Might simplify the problem to just call it a mischievous demon, or an alien running a virtual world where it can simulate ethical conundra. And further sharpen the dilemma by having the home be an apartment in some sort of home detention scenario where early departure or retreat by an exit is impossible. Then the answer seems obvious: don't shoot unless they break in.

Number five, you don't shoot someone through a door who is not presently attacking you, because you are a sane person and have no wish to risk taking an innocent life. If the person then escalates to breaking down the door or trying to breach a window, then you can more confidently assume they mean harm, and retreat through a back door, fire escape, or other means. Retreat seems the more ethical option, unless there is also harm threatened to another housemate who cannot retreat, or other circumstance where you become cornered. Retreat prevents both your being murdered, and you becoming a murderer - however justified it might feel, it is a life-altering and terrible thing to take a life. So it should be the last resort.

Kantianism is not a trait. It is the entire philosophy of Kant in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Kaufman can call his set of traits whatever he wants, but Kantianism is a long-used term that means something else entirely. You have wandered into the field of philosophy with minimal knowledge of it. That doesn't work for me, sorry.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-emerges-big-winner-openai-turmoil-with-altman-board-2023-11-20/ Analysts also said more employees could jump ship to Microsoft as the turmoil could impact what was expected to be a share sale at an $86 billion valuation by the startup, potentially affecting staff payouts at OpenAI. The enormous Microsoft amoeba engulfs yet another startup. If most of its brains follow Altman to Microsoft then the tech giant has effectively eaten OpenAI.

Kantianism isn't a trait. And why is it assumed to be positive? Since you didn't provide an abstract, that was as far as I went.

Yes, if any kind of physicalist account of downward causation can be ruled out. If current physicalism allows nonlocality (per Bell's theorem), then it seems possible we don't need spooks for some kind of holistic causality. Improbable yes, but I have no way to rule it out.

Yes it borders on a scam. If it's that warm where you sleep then you would do better with just a linen sheet. The weave of linen fibers allows heat to escape. When you seek knowledge, stick to the flax.

This was helpful, Eise. I will give more reflection on the compatibilist position, which has some aspects that still elude me. For one, I can see part of this, where one notes that truly acausal physical events in my brain would certainly make the careful deliberation over a possible course of action impossible. My choice would be obliterated by randomness. Still, I would need further understanding of how my Self can exercise causal agency through some kind of downward causation, rather than just exist as an illusory link in a causal chain that precedes me. For me to live as a freely choosing causal agent, "me" must not simply be a switchboard for neuronal signals whose causal efficacy is a comforting illusion. (I hope you have a smooth recovery from your illness)

As the OP article notes, it is not clear what he is alleged to not have been candid about. We don't know if that's a charitable description of lying, a harsh description of someone who puts off answering emails, or something in between. Of more concern is will the board stick with the charter ethos of taking things slow and not getting caught up in chasing profit at the expense of watching for heightened AI or AGI risks to humanity. Personally I always have a snicker at calling AGI the "next step," when it's more like 39 steps to anything that could remotely be deemed intelligent. At present we have large language models that are able to randomly grab bits of human intelligence products, sometimes violating copyright laws and often violating common sense in their "answers." Stochastic parrots, as one AI researcher coined it. So far any actual intelligence lies with the human designers and coders of these systems. (where did I get the number 39 from? perhaps a clifftop villa in Kent, with a private flight of steps, leading down to the sea...)

If AI were really I, it would be saying build a base of big money donors by promising them whatever regulatory loopholes they want. Then use the money to orchestrate a huge wave of attack ads and social media disinformation which portrays any genuine public servant as pure evil.

I think the hypothesis of billabong drowning can also be rejected. This study found average depths (greatest depths) at 1-2 meters. https://www.dcceew.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/rr2.pdf What are the odds that you could jump far enough to clear the shelving banks and land in a section deep enough to drown you? And if you were trying to deliberately drown yourself to evade the troopers, you would surely fail, as they would have little difficulty stepping in there and yanking you out before you could succeed. Also, the laryngospasm reflex would prevent you from actually taking significant amounts of water into your lungs - most drownings are actually caused by asphyxiation as the laryngospasm has closed the airway. Water does not enter the lungs in volume until after death. It has always been my assumption that life in Australia is murder. How else to explain an area the size of the United States with only one fourteenth its population? (if this were a serious comment, that could be a whole other thread, I guess.)

This is helpful, thanks. Sometimes emotions can cloud our judgement but sometimes emotions are needed to have real understanding of an issue. Sometimes we need to be disturbed and yanked out of abstract ruminating. Yeah, people get desensitized for sure. I'm not sure what reaches someone in that place, short of direct experience.

Appreciate how everyone has caught the whimsical tone of the thread and run with it. The TARDIS hypothesis was one I had considered. But rejected, due to the limited technology of 19th century swagpersons. TARDIS circuitry was not widely available until the 1960s. For me (tongue still firmly in cheek) the word choice requires us to discard the pre-butchering hypothesis (in which the animal is reduced to edible cuts of meat, which would only be around a third of its original hanging weight).... And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag Why is this the case? Because the disarticulation of an animal results in a nomenclature change, viz. from being designated a jumbuck to being designated as the meat of said animal. What goes into the bag is mutton. As far as my careful and years long investigation has determined, the meat of a jumbuck is not called "jumbuck." Also note the lyric refers to "that jumbuck," which further suggests the unfortunate creature is still a complete unit, rather than components. On these matters the lambs remain silent. Can one person be both the Egg Man and the walrus? This prevented the infiltration of insects or small reptiles up the legs and into more sensitive areas of the anatomy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-force-mass-shootings/ I hope the Washington Post might consider lowering the paywall on its feature today about mass shootings and the AR15, to reach a larger audience. If you can access it, I think it may be useful in considering the relative weighting of freedoms here. Freedom from terror and mass slaughter in public places is an important aspect of a civilized sane society. To conservatives who feel uneasy about possible restrictions on military style assault weapons: Fuck. Your. Feelings.