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Posts by Obbe
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2015-12-13 at 4:17 AM UTC in The Universe and You
It's a nice thought, sure, but it doesn't say anything about death or change anything about my current existence. It's just like…Oh yeah, that's cool…moving right along.
It doesn't mean much to you personally. To many people this realization can change their whole perspective on life and death, can change the way they live their life. If you're not one of those people you won't feel the same way. I do not know of any deeper spiritual feeling than what this realization brings to me. -
2015-12-13 at 4:08 AM UTC in Freewill
What makes you think the dualist conception of free will can't affect the real world?
As I understand dualism it is at its core the conceptual separation or division of body and mind, or the material and the immaterial. I do not think body and mind can actually be separate. Rather they are just two conceptual aspects of the same thing, my existence. They affect each other, are mutually dependent on each other. While they can be conceptually divided into contrasting aspects of my existence, they are ultimately united as one thing. Therefore the mind is not an independent force in this world, and so it cannot possibly have free will.Like Lanny said, most dualists actually do make this claim.
A lot of people claim ridiculous things. The question is are they true? I cannot see how the mind and body could be separated beyond a conceptual separation. Therefore I cannot see how free will could magically exist in the mind, I cannot understand how a mans will would remain uninfluenced by the world he lives in. If you do understand how that would work I would appreciate your explanation.Besides, the point just serves to demonstrate that there is more than one way to approach the topic of free will, whereas the OP seemed to suggest there is only one.
I admit you are right about that. There are probably many ways to approach this topic. I just haven't learned any other way that makes any sense. If you know a way to approach free will that makes more sense than my approach, let me know. -
2015-12-12 at 6:09 PM UTC in All I think about is animal abuse, heartbreak, killing, drugs, suicide, & pedophiliaObviously everyone who thinks it's so disgusting that they got together and declared it illegal gives a fuck. I know, I know, you don't care about the law but that doesn't make it not a crime or not disgusting. About consent: People develop at different rates and there is no magic age which makes everyone mature enough to understand what they are consenting to. Even some adults are not mature enough to really understand it. Most teenagers don't know what they are doing, even though they fuck like horny rabbits it doesn't mean they aren't idiots about it. So when a child gives you consent they are most likely not actually mature enough to understand what it's all about. That's why there are age of consent laws, to protect those immature individuals who would otherwise be taken advantage of by disgusting perverts.
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2015-12-12 at 12:09 AM UTC in All I think about is animal abuse, heartbreak, killing, drugs, suicide, & pedophilia
Remember it is just a sexual orientation
So is necrophilia. They are also both disgusting. -
2015-12-11 at 11:57 PM UTC in Freewill
There are a lot of kinds of dualist, a majority propose some sort of casual interaction between material and non-material (the canonical example being Descartes thinking the pineal gland was the way that the non-material soul controlled the body). There are problems with that approach too, the largest would probably be conjuring evidence for dualism in the first place but then there's also the issue that if we admit interaction of non-material mind with the physical world we seem to face the same dilemma with the non-material world as we faced with the material one, either it behaves deterministically or non deterministically (that seems pretty exhaustive of the options here) and neither really affords room for libertarian free will.
That's right. However I am more interested in the discussion you and I were having above. -
2015-12-11 at 11:54 PM UTC in The sophist hate threadYou're a disgusting person.
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2015-12-11 at 1:04 PM UTC in The Universe and YouWho knows what happens when you die? What we do know is that you are connected to rest of the universe atomically, chemically, biologically and perhaps even spiritually if you're into that sort of thing. How is that meaningless?
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2015-12-11 at 12:56 PM UTC in FreewillThat sounds like a pretty useless thing to believe. If their "free will" is unable to affect the real world, how is it really free will?
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2015-12-11 at 4:01 AM UTC in The sophist hate threadHe also supports the cult-like FDR club. It's probably best not to associate with him.
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2015-12-06 at 11:07 PM UTC in NoWords can hurt but not as much as sticks and stones.
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2015-12-06 at 6:06 PM UTC in The Universe and You
Who your creator? Because I'm pretty sure I made him.
@ -SpectraL, tell us about your creator. -
2015-12-06 at 5:41 PM UTC in whos your favorite super hero?Dr. Manhattan a.k.a Dr. Jonathan Osterman
Abilities- Twelfth-level Intelligence
- Super-human strength
- Telekinesis
- Teleportation
- Full control of matter at sub-atomic level, can create and destroy matter
- Reactive adaptation/evolution
- Duplication (Ability to create fully independent copies of himself)
- Force-field creation
- Projection of destructive energy
- Full perception of time (perceiving past, present, future simultaneously)
- Physiological manipulation
- Omni-linguism
- Physical immortality (able to walk on surface of the Sun)
- Resurrection
- Healing Factor
- Ability to reverse entropy
- Ability to create life/Animation
- Intangibility/phasing
- Cross-dimensional awareness
- Psionic blast
- Gravity manipulation
- Dimensional travel
- Flight
- Size shifting
- Precognition
- Disintegration
- Density control
- Mass manipulation
- Superhuman tracking
- Ecological empathy
- Ability to reconstruct himself on the atomic scale
- No need for air, food or water
The character of Doctor Manhattan is one that invokes thought on metaphysical philosophy. There are various themes addressed throughout the Watchmen series from philosophy of time and eternalism, to determinism and its relationship to ethics, to addressing questions such as what it means to be human? and do the means justify the end?
The character is primarily cited as the representation of the potential side effects and dangers of a superintelligence. Side effects which include detachment from the rest of humanity and potentially characteristics of apathy. -
2015-12-06 at 7:43 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?Creatures that drift
in the depths of the sea
are the very last
to discover the water
In order to perceive solid structures in voluminous space, you must move around the subject under observation and fuse an indefinite number of aspects from all sides. A cone, for illustration, is seen as a circle in plan view, a triangle in elevation, and various angles subtended by various arcs in all other views. The solid structure of a cone is conceived only after fusing all images in the mind. If your mind were not able to construct this gestalt, you would be unable to recognize the triangular aspect of the cone as having the same identity as the circular aspect.
The ability to fuse an indefinite number of plane images into a solid image in the mind is usually achieved during childhood as we master language, so no one is aware of common aberrations. As an example, few people saw the view from the top until everyone traveled by air. Without flight experience, you don't learn to fuse plan views of the landscape with the familiar elevations; therefore, aerial photographs remained unintelligible to most people. You would be surprised by the number of people who cannot read blueprints because of their inability to fuse all sectional drawings into a dynamic tridimensional gestalt. Cubism is four-dimensional perspective; the art of Cubism makes no sense to people who cannot analyze plural perspectives and recombine them mentally to form a hyperspacial image of the pictorial subject.
Just as only one side of a solid structure can be seen at a time, without a mirror, only one phase of a hyperspacial structure can be perceived directly at one time. It is natural, therefore, to assign a unique identity to different phases that exceed the observer's capacity for resolution into a single gestalt. Union of complementary opposites transforms them both into a structure of higher dimension.
If your views of a cone were limited to the extremes of plan and elevation, only extraordinary conditions and mathematical calculation would enable you to realize that the two mutually incommensurable figures were aspects of the same identity in a higher dimension of space. Ordinarily, you are able to relate one extreme view to the other extreme by innumerable other viewing angles revealing the gradual transformation of the circle into the triangle. Even after identifying the circle as an allotropic aspect of the triangle, you would still be unable to form the concept of a solid cone unless your mental space were large enough to comprehend three dimensions; you would believe that the conical structure alternates between a circle and a triangle according to the viewing angle; it would be the wave-particle paradox all over again. -
2015-12-06 at 7:34 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?It's a neat idea, and while I ultimately do not entirely agree with his propositions, I think he has more or less tuned into the general idea. I don't suspect that our reality is a computer simulation but rather the concept of a "computer simulation" is like a metaphor, something sort of resembling a truth that we can't quite grasp just yet. I suspect that reality is much more complex than we can perceive, consisting of dimensions which we are not aware of, and that thinking of it as something similar to a machine or a program can be helpful.
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2015-12-05 at 5:46 PM UTC in Freewill
If a person were to pretend to be an expert in something when, in reality, they are not then sure, there's a definite similarity there. If a person pretends to be something rather mundane, or even undesirable (for example, when we act as though we hold views we don't for the sake of argument or to elicit a certain response from others) then I think it's forgivable. Socrates is a famous example of someone pretending to be someone other than what he was to famous and much applauded effect.
This Sam Harris guy seems pretty famous too (despite the fact that I had never heard of him before), and he also got a lot of applause at the end of that video. I guess the criteria for being a cunt is sort of subjective, but considering the fact that free will cannot exist it's hard to blame a cunt for being a cunt. It's not as if cunts had any real choice to not be cunts.It seems like there's a risk of circularity here. If we say a person is responsible for a thing when they can claim credit for it then we need to ask what is the criteria for claiming credit? I think the common answer would be responsibility, you can claim credit for things you're responsible for.
I guess I'm asking you if you think people who would traditionally receive credit for (or be deemed responsible for) specific events are actually responsible for those events. I mean, you could say Newton is responsible for the discovery of gravity, but isn't it just as correct to say the apple that fell on his head also bears some of the responsibility? Or the tree that dropped the apple on him? Or perhaps the man who planted that apple tree? Or perhaps none of these interactions and people are really responsible for the discovery of gravity, rather they are merely links in the chain of cause and effect.As for creators, I think it's fair to say they deserve a level of credit. While their actions may be mere consequences of prior states their output is incomparable to the input, that is to say calculus is more interesting, more commendable, than the educations that Newton and Leibnitz enjoyed. While their discoveries may be the inevitable effect of the confluence of their circumstances they are not equal. They produced something of value, whether or not they had any choice in the matter.
If a man didn't have any choice in the matter how can he be responsible for the production of something? If a man despite his best efforts cannot control his body odor and produces a rather disgusting smell because of some genetic disorder he is inflicted with, would he really be found responsible for it? I mean, of course in a room full of people questioning who stinks he would be found to be the culprit, but would we really blame him for the odor that he has no control over? If a man cannot be blamed for producing something he has no control over, is it really right to praise another man for producing something he had no choice in?As for royalties, it's a simple question of consequences. In a world where invention is rewarded we would expect more people to try it, more people to succeed. If inventors are too richly rewarded, if their inventions are made too costly, then they pose little benefit to us, thus the question of how much a person deserves for their effort is the optimal point between encouraging discovery and making the fruits of that labor widely available. Sorta like laffer curves only not retarded. I suspect, although I can be swayed by empirical data, that we tend to overreward many sorts of inventors in the 21st century western world, evidenced primarily by the fact that historically most of our great minds were not exceptionally well compensated. I suspect there's a connection between eagerness to do something (that is, willingness to do it for minimal compensation) and likelihood of doing good work. This shouldn't really be surprising, if a person love their job it seems wholly realistic to think they'll do more of it and generally be better at it than someone who doesn't.
It is not necessarily true that people will be more motivated to improve the world based on their expected compensation. For example, I don't think Tesla invented alternating current because he expected to become a rich man if he did so. If you look into it, it seems that the idea of alternating current just arose in his mind one day, just like your own thoughts arise in your own mind, seemingly out of nowhere. You don't will your thoughts into existence anymore than he willed alternating current into existence. The idea more or less just came through him, as if he weren't so much its creator but more like the conduit of its creation. And most inventions and innovations seem to have come into being in this way.Just because an explanation of ourselves requires reference to non-us things doesn't mean we can't draw a line between self-things and non-self-things or that such a line can't mean meaningful
Of course not. But a line drawn in the sand is just a line drawn in the sand. Just because people evolved to distinguish themselves from their environment and reaped benefits from doing so, doesn't mean that we cannot now realize that we are intricately linked to the environment and to each other and also reap the benefits of integrating this realization into our worldview. You might feel like you have some special unique "self" deep within you and I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't feel that way, but you can't honestly deny that the concept of "the self" is just as illusory as the concept of free will. I'm not saying it doesn't have its uses, it certainly does, but being able to recognize that we really are all part of a greater whole is one of the first steps away from an egocentric view of life, and towards a greater commitment to well being and the improvement of life for all of us here on earth.Well the value is that they are lever arms on action. We're not perfectly rational beings, not even the most rational among us. We need pride to motivate us towards nobel goals and shame to keep us from doing wrong. Yes, you can feel pride at doing evil or shame from something innocent, but it's hard to imagine any person producing a great work that didn't feel either pride in it or shame in failing to do so. I mean obviously pride and shame aren't the only two emotions here, anything that acts as a hedonic motivator will do, but those two, even if they are tied to a false sense of responsibility, seem to be very powerful motivators towards action. Probably because they're tied to the idea of responsibility.
I agree that they can be powerful motivators, but they can also be powerful demotivators and distractions. People have killed themselves out of shame, and people have wasted their talents being distracted by pride and hedonism. If we truly want to move forward as a species it might not be such a bad idea to let go of such a primitive "motivation" in exchange for a simple commitment to improvement. Many of the greatest minds in science were not led by pride or shame but rather led by ideas that could and did change the world for the better. -
2015-12-04 at 2:52 AM UTC in Freewill
One element of his cunthood is his delight in trying to make expert commentary on topics where, often by his own admission, he is painfully ignorant of prior art.
You know, when you stop to think about it, that sounds a lot like pretending to be someone he isn't.Again, it depends on what you take to what you consider "responsibility" to be.
Like taking credit for stuff. Let's suppose a man invents something amazing and world changing. Knowing that freewill does not exist, and that all of his activity leading towards this invention were merely a result of earlier events and interactions, does he really deserve praise for the invention when he isn't so much its creator but rather the conduit of its creation? Would his taking pride in his "accomplishment" really benefit anyone? Should he be paid royalties for the invention, when the truly altruistic action would be to allow the world free access to it?have no idea what line of logic you think leads from lack of free will to individually being meaningless though.
While I admit that I do not believe individuality is meaningless, the concept of "self" appears to be illusory in light of our lack of freewill. I mean, what is "the self"? Most people tend to think of the self as some interior essence that distinguishes a person from the world around them. But if you think about it, it's fairly obvious that you didn't just will those thoughts you are thinking right now anymore then you willed the words that I typed on this screen. Thoughts just arise in your mind. If the self is not really the author of your own thoughts, what is the self? If we suggest that the self is consciousness, then what is consciousness? A sort of highly evolved awareness, a highly evolved reaction to our environment. It appears to be perfectly reasonable to suggest that the environment is the cause of consciousness, for consciousness (you and me) arose out of this environment and if there were no environment to be conscious of, what exactly would consciousness consist of?
This sort of realization leads us away from an egocentric view of life, and that can be liberating. We are not truly separate. We are linked to each other, and to the world around us, throughout time and space. While you might not take credit for your talents it's still important that you use them. While you might not really be to blame for your weaknesses, it's still important to correct them. What is the value in pride and shame when it would be better to just commit to well being and the improvement of your life and others? Love and compassion make sense. This sort of realization does not diminish the value of political or social freedoms. It just doesn't make sense to believe in free will, and if we want to be guided by reality instead of fantasy, it's probably important that our views on this topic change.Time and space are an illusion. The universe is as we imagine it.
Please take this moment as an opportunity to explain your view further. -
2015-12-03 at 3:21 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?A technologically mature “posthuman†civilization would have enormous computing power. Based on this empirical fact, the simulation argument shows that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) The fraction of human-level civilizations that reach a posthuman stage is very close to zero; (2) The fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulations is very close to zero; (3) The fraction of all people with our kind of experiences that are living in a simulation is very close to one.
If (1) is true, then we will almost certainly go extinct before reaching posthumanity. If (2) is true, then there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations so that virtually none contains any relatively wealthy individuals who desire to run ancestor-simulations and are free to do so. If (3) is true, then we almost certainly live in a simulation. In the dark forest of our current ignorance, it seems sensible to apportion one’s credence roughly evenly between (1), (2), and (3).
Unless we are now living in a simulation, our descendants will almost certainly never run an ancestor-simulation. -
2015-12-03 at 2:45 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?The possibility expressed by alternative (3) is the conceptually most intriguing one. If we are living in a simulation, then the cosmos that we are observing is just a tiny piece of the totality of physical existence. The physics in the universe where the computer is situated that is running the simulation may or may not resemble the physics of the world that we observe. While the world we see is in some sense “realâ€, it is not located at the fundamental level of reality.
It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman. They may then run their own ancestor-simulations on powerful computers they build in their simulated universe. Such computers would be “virtual machinesâ€, a familiar concept in computer science. (Java script web-applets, for instance, run on a virtual machine – a simulated computer – inside your desktop.) Virtual machines can be stacked: it’s possible to simulate a machine simulating another machine, and so on, in arbitrarily many steps of iteration. If we do go on to create our own ancestor-simulations, this would be strong evidence against (1) and (2), and we would therefore have to conclude that we live in a simulation. Moreover, we would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings.
Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage – the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure – there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time. (One consideration that counts against the multi-level hypothesis is that the computational cost for the basement-level simulators would be very great. Simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be prohibitively expensive. If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to become posthuman.)
Although all the elements of such a system can be naturalistic, even physical, it is possible to draw some loose analogies with religious conceptions of the world. In some ways, the posthumans running a simulation are like gods in relation to the people inhabiting the simulation: the posthumans created the world we see; they are of superior intelligence; they are “omnipotent†in the sense that they can interfere in the workings of our world even in ways that violate its physical laws; and they are “omniscient†in the sense that they can monitor everything that happens. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.
Further rumination on these themes could climax in a naturalistic theogony that would study the structure of this hierarchy, and the constraints imposed on its inhabitants by the possibility that their actions on their own level may affect the treatment they receive from dwellers of deeper levels. For example, if nobody can be sure that they are at the basement-level, then everybody would have to consider the possibility that their actions will be rewarded or punished, based perhaps on moral criteria, by their simulators. An afterlife would be a real possibility. Because of this fundamental uncertainty, even the basement civilization may have a reason to behave ethically. The fact that it has such a reason for moral behavior would of course add to everybody else’s reason for behaving morally, and so on, in truly virtuous circle. One might get a kind of universal ethical imperative, which it would be in everybody’s self-interest to obey, as it were “from nowhereâ€.
In addition to ancestor-simulations, one may also consider the possibility of more selective simulations that include only a small group of humans or a single individual. The rest of humanity would then be zombies or “shadow-people†– humans simulated only at a level sufficient for the fully simulated people not to notice anything suspicious. It is not clear how much cheaper shadow-people would be to simulate than real people. It is not even obvious that it is possible for an entity to behave indistinguishably from a real human and yet lack conscious experience. Even if there are such selective simulations, you should not think that you are in one of them unless you think they are much more numerous than complete simulations. There would have to be about 100 billion times as many “me-simulations†(simulations of the life of only a single mind) as there are ancestor-simulations in order for most simulated persons to be in me-simulations.
There is also the possibility of simulators abridging certain parts of the mental lives of simulated beings and giving them false memories of the sort of experiences that they would typically have had during the omitted interval. If so, one can consider the following (farfetched) solution to the problem of evil: that there is no suffering in the world and all memories of suffering are illusions. Of course, this hypothesis can be seriously entertained only at those times when you are not currently suffering.
Supposing we live in a simulation, what are the implications for us humans? The foregoing remarks notwithstanding, the implications are not all that radical. Our best guide to how our posthuman creators have chosen to set up our world is the standard empirical study of the universe we see. The revisions to most parts of our belief networks would be rather slight and subtle – in proportion to our lack of confidence in our ability to understand the ways of posthumans. Properly understood, therefore, the truth of (3) should have no tendency to make us “go crazy†or to prevent us from going about our business and making plans and predictions for tomorrow. The chief empirical importance of (3) at the current time seems to lie in its role in the tripartite conclusion established above. We may hope that (3) is true since that would decrease the probability of (1), although if computational constraints make it likely that simulators would terminate a simulation before it reaches a posthuman level, then out best hope would be that (2) is true.
If we learn more about posthuman motivations and resource constraints, maybe as a result of developing towards becoming posthumans ourselves, then the hypothesis that we are simulated will come to have a much richer set of empirical implications.
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2015-12-03 at 1:34 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?The second alternative in the simulation argument’s conclusion is that the fraction of posthuman civilizations that are interested in running ancestor-simulation is negligibly small. In order for (2) to be true, there must be a strong convergence among the courses of advanced civilizations. If the number of ancestor-simulations created by the interested civilizations is extremely large, the rarity of such civilizations must be correspondingly extreme. Virtually no posthuman civilizations decide to use their resources to run large numbers of ancestor-simulations. Furthermore, virtually all posthuman civilizations lack individuals who have sufficient resources and interest to run ancestor-simulations; or else they have reliably enforced laws that prevent such individuals from acting on their desires.
What force could bring about such convergence? One can speculate that advanced civilizations all develop along a trajectory that leads to the recognition of an ethical prohibition against running ancestor-simulations because of the suffering that is inflicted on the inhabitants of the simulation. However, from our present point of view, it is not clear that creating a human race is immoral. On the contrary, we tend to view the existence of our race as constituting a great ethical value. Moreover, convergence on an ethical view of the immorality of running ancestor-simulations is not enough: it must be combined with convergence on a civilization-wide social structure that enables activities considered immoral to be effectively banned.
Another possible convergence point is that almost all individual posthumans in virtually all posthuman civilizations develop in a direction where they lose their desires to run ancestor-simulations. This would require significant changes to the motivations driving their human predecessors, for there are certainly many humans who would like to run ancestor-simulations if they could afford to do so. But perhaps many of our human desires will be regarded as silly by anyone who becomes a posthuman. Maybe the scientific value of ancestor-simulations to a posthuman civilization is negligible (which is not too implausible given its unfathomable intellectual superiority), and maybe posthumans regard recreational activities as merely a very inefficient way of getting pleasure – which can be obtained much more cheaply by direct stimulation of the brain’s reward centers. One conclusion that follows from (2) is that posthuman societies will be very different from human societies: they will not contain relatively wealthy independent agents who have the full gamut of human-like desires and are free to act on them.
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2015-12-03 at 12:11 AM UTC in ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?The possibility represented by proposition (1) is fairly straightforward. If (1) is true, then humankind will almost certainly fail to reach a posthuman level; for virtually no species at our level of development become posthuman, and it is hard to see any justification for thinking that our own species will be especially privileged or protected from future disasters. Conditional on (1), therefore, we must give a high credence to DOOM, the hypothesis that humankind will go extinct before reaching a posthuman level:
One can imagine hypothetical situations were we have such evidence as would trump knowledge of
. For example, if we discovered that we were about to be hit by a giant meteor, this might suggest that we had been exceptionally unlucky. We could then assign a credence to DOOM larger than our expectation of the fraction of human-level civilizations that fail to reach posthumanity. In the actual case, however, we seem to lack evidence for thinking that we are special in this regard, for better or worse.
Proposition (1) doesn’t by itself imply that we are likely to go extinct soon, only that we are unlikely to reach a posthuman stage. This possibility is compatible with us remaining at, or somewhat above, our current level of technological development for a long time before going extinct. Another way for (1) to be true is if it is likely that technological civilization will collapse. Primitive human societies might then remain on Earth indefinitely.
There are many ways in which humanity could become extinct before reaching posthumanity. Perhaps the most natural interpretation of (1) is that we are likely to go extinct as a result of the development of some powerful but dangerous technology. One candidate is molecular nanotechnology, which in its mature stage would enable the construction of self-replicating nanobots capable of feeding on dirt and organic matter – a kind of mechanical bacteria. Such nanobots, designed for malicious ends, could cause the extinction of all life on our planet.
