TheVat

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.

It's a reasonable question, I think. These are jumbucks: This is a tucker bag (carried in front): This seems a problem, in terms of fit. I feel there are limited possible explanations for the jolly swagman's achievement of jumbuck insertion. 1. 19th century sheep in Australia were miniaturized, in an amazing secret leap forward of GM technology. 2. Tucker bags were capable of massive elastic stretching. 3. Lyricist Banjo Paterson reported falsified data when he wrote the line, And he sang as he shoved that jumbuck in his tucker bag Are there other possible means of jumbuck insertion and containment that have been overlooked?

The question, for me, is how on earth can you fit a jumbuck in a tucker bag? This may be a topic I meander towards in a new thread. Perhaps after my billy has boiled. Fair point. Eastern and Western thought have exerted mutual influence on each other for a long time. I Ching, or Yi Jing, hexagrams guided decision making. Hexagrams formed by what is essentially an ancient form of random number generator, the fall of yarrow stalks. Does this set aside the role of a free will, in favor of some other kind of causality that appears random to us?

In their analysis, levels of confidence with sigma up in the teens. If sigma there means what it does in other fields, that's quite high confidence in Newtonian dynamics versus MOND. Damn. I was sort of rooting for MOND, given that it would upset the apple cart of dark matter. From the chat on MOND over at sciforums, which Pinball started last week, it sounds like there will be hard scrutiny of the data quality.

It struck the funny bone then?

A lot of Christians perpetuate lies or, at best, distorted caricatures of Jesus. JC was a Commie. He would find modern materialistic society to be vile beyond words.

Have you ever seen a philosophy discussion that doesn't meander? I thought the anthropology sidebar was sort of relevant to how we arrived at modern Western definitions of mind and how that impacts our intuitions about free will. TV Judge: I'll allow it. You may proceed, counsel.

The anthropological stuff I've read suggests that the concept does vary somewhat (though I think Julian Jaynes's "bicameral mind" has been mostly rejected). The only way to really get at what pre-literate societies thought would be either artistic remnants, burial rituals, or looking at modern H-G bands that have preserved their pre-agriculture way of life and might be comparable. Jaynes explored this somewhat, but unfortunately (IMO) tended to cut everything he encountered to fit his theory. From what I read, some ancient cultures didn't identify their living essence specifically with a mind or intellect, but in a more general way, sometimes referring to their breathing as a soul, or placing a soul in some other anatomical location, like the heart or the gut. But there are also very ancient peoples (like Cro-Magnon) whose skeletal remains show evidence of trepanation, as if they were trying to fix the troubled brain by incising a hole in the skull. (mean comment about former president deleted)

The cheap ones - they're called bottle jacks - are usually 2 - 4 tons. Mine is 2, iirc. Haven't used in years.

Gullibility. Poor critical thinking skills. Persistent mood of pessimism and fear. They are the clay that extremists mold.

I think our language tends to cause a creeping in of dualism when we speak of minds and brains, as if those are separate things that interact with each other. The implication is a false Cartesian split. Rather than use umbrella terms like mind, it seems more useful to look at specific cognitive processes in a neutral monism stance, trying to see how that process, e.g. intending to purchase beer, plays out through neurological operations, physical movements (checking in the cellar and fridge, writing beer on a list, placing money or card in a pocket, etc.), spatial shift, vocalizations to other bodies, etc. The parity principle (Chalmers et al) is a useful one here. Thanks to @AIkonoklazt for bringing that. This moves our understanding away from the mind as a thing that influences other things, and perhaps towards a truer understanding of mind as an array of dynamic processes that extend through the world. One pitfall of having created a memory narrative we call The Self is that we tend to defend it by making it separate from the world. This invites the fallacies of dualism, or at least aspect dualism.

I was taught that all elements with atomic number above 92 are radioactive, making me think visitors may want to pack their lead undies. But if there is a way an element with 163 AN is stable, I would be interested to hear how that happens.

We were sent out to walk on fresh road tar so that it would adhere to our feet and form a sock that would last for several weeks. (I feel we are entering The Four Yorkshiremen sketch)

I enjoy some philosophy of science, but agree the free will stuff has a way of going in tedious loops. As you trenchantly point out, we have to go with our gut. Determinist! 😀 I feel we do want a better word. But I'm not really sure what you are suggesting there. I like @Peterkin citing of how aboriginal society deals with these problems. It underscores, among other things, how modern urban society depersonalizes the relation between miscreant and their victim.

How do you think this impacts the Second Amendment right to arm bears?

Hi, Dim. In terms of justice systems, it seems we rely on the idea that people have some free will. When someone commits a crime, and is determined to be of sound mind, then it is held that they could have chosen to do otherwise. In a determinist view, however, they were fated to transgress (however society was equally fated to devise a criminal justice system and punish them). Indeed, from a deterministic perspective, all beliefs in free will and moral responsibility were predetermined, and any future retooling of that social consensus will also be predetermined. One could argue as a determinist that society should embrace immediately the view that there are no real choices and set about eliminating all choices as illusory nonsense. Which would sort of end life as we know it. Prisons would be gone, but so would the most minimal assurance of public safety, and democracy, and probably a vast array of other social structures that presume human moral choice. That's not gonna happen, so we remain with a belief in real moral choice, and the institutions that follow from that. But if you are asking about gray areas, about degrees of belief in free will, then there is certainly wiggle room. E.g. we now identify mental illnesses that deprive people of the capacity to make moral choices, and can move in the direction of therapy rather than incarceration.

Me, too, as per my reply over at the dot org website today. Paternal grandmother had some Sámi roots. (paternal grandpa could also, but not known to him)

Thread seems more like a vehicle for the OPs narcissism than about genetics.

I think I mentioned downward causation yesterday (to massive yawns, apparently). Epi forbids it, in ways that do seem to create logic problems. How would we ever discuss such things as qualia, if they had no causal role? Epi is like emergence without downward causation .