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Posts by Common De-mominator
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2019-03-25 at 2:07 PM UTC in $2,000 a month
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2019-03-25 at 2:07 PM UTC in In this thread Russia-Trump Conspiracy Theorists apoligise.Trump cannot keep his mouth shut for 30 seconds, Russia would be better off just manipulating him and his handlers.
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2019-03-25 at 1:01 PM UTC in $2,000 a month
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2019-03-25 at 12 PM UTC in In this thread Russia-Trump Conspiracy Theorists apoligise.Only idiots thought Trump was in on it. If anything, the probe should have been looking for Russian manipulation and interference.
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2019-03-25 at 11:34 AM UTC in Catbox.moe have a browser extension for quick rehosting nao
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2019-03-25 at 10:44 AM UTC in Catbox.moe have a browser extension for quick rehosting naoThe only people who use this are guys uploading child porn
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2019-03-25 at 9:24 AM UTC in How do you explain your enthusiasm for hallucinogens?
Originally posted by gadzooks The terms hallucinogen and psychedelic are often used interchangeably.
Actual hallucinations in the psychiatrically defined sense rarely occur. I've done LSD, shrooms, salvia, and all kinds of other drugs often described as both, and never experienced hallucinations in the strict sense. That isn't to say that they are by any means not an intense experience.
Also, obligatory u gay, I'm dum, blah blah. Your feud seems to be that important so I'll play into it for your sake.
Originally posted by Common De-mominator Not all psychs make you hallucinate at all doses, which is why I'm asking, you quartercuck. Hallucination is specifically when you see stuff that is not there, not all visual effects you see. For example I've never once hallucinated on acid, even if I saw the stuff that was actually there doing weird shit.
I have hallucinated on DMT. -
2019-03-24 at 9:18 PM UTC in In the end Christianity will prevail. judaism will continue to be a parasite but nothing and islam will just disappear into the shadows.Modern christianity = do whatever you want but don't admit you're going to hell if it exists.
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2019-03-24 at 9:17 PM UTC in What have you eaten today?Damn, Golem be going hard on the cuisine
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2019-03-24 at 7:15 PM UTC in sophie, twitterChild porn exchange
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2019-03-24 at 5:22 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by SHARK My personal dissatisfaction comes from the fact that my mouth can obviously talk about things like the ineffable nature of the colour blue, and how hard it is for me to describe it to a blind man.
It is difficult for me to imagine why my mouth would be talking about something like the "shape" of a ball if my integrated visual experience was not part of the process. And if it is, I don't find a good reason to separate it from its syntactical function for any good reason.
I like to think about it by analogy to a calculator. Certainly I can generate report without consciousness, like I can generate the number 40 on a screen without ever doing any actual calculation of the number. In theory it could just contain a massive list of "if/then" statements that match an input question to fetch a precalculated output. For example "if input 2+2 then print 4" but for all possible combinations of calculations I might reasonably try.
What convinces me calculation is actually happening is that we can understand reductively what's taking place and principally break down WHY the calculator generates the output in the general case. The explanation is completely syntactical at its most basic level, but the calculative idea is an abstraction of that.
In the case of consciousness, there is decent evidence that our conscious perception does play some causal role our behaviour, even if we don't know HOW (and I am not saying this means evidence of conscious libertarian free will or anything, but that conscious perception feeds forward into behaviour).
For example, ever catch a ball? Go out with a friend and have them freely toss the ball to you from far away, do it a couple of times and try to observe the contents of your mind as it happens. Now, as an unstructured informational procedure this shit is difficult as fuck to automate. But as it turns out, the "optimization" that the human brain developed to perform this function is to move the object into the middle of the visual field, then use proprioception to move your hand relative to your head and catch it. I think in that case, you're very consciously aware of what's about to happen as the ball moves in on you, and you adjust to catch it.
You can still argue that an integrated information structure that is analogous to a visual field can exist and be used to process data without consciousness (in theory), but I think empirically that is not the case for the brain.
As an example, you can look into the "phi illusion". One version of this illusion uses only two lights, separated by some distance. At the beginning, one is lit and the other is off. The first goes off, then the second goes on.
However those subjected to this version of the illusion will report seeing the light move between the first to the second, even though there is no intermediate light, it is just an on/off.
Now of course no intermediate light exists. The illusion of movement exists purely in their consciousness, and it is mistakenly reported from the subjects' consciousness.
Now it is possible that the report is still just generated by completely unconscious processes, and consciousness of the experience is just a coincidental epiphenomenon. But I find that hard to believe because… Then why is the machine behaving like it is?
So let's imagine we prick Lanny and Zombie Lanny with a pin in our universe and the proposed zombie universe. Both say "Ouch!" and I say "you baby, that didn't hurt!" Zlanny snaps back "Fuck you, it did!". Remember, these universes are physically identical so Zlanny surely reports for the same physical reasons as you, and surely he must be speaking with the same conviction as you… You're convinced you're having a qualitative experience but Zlanny would be convinced of the same. So… if it's just some syntactical state that produces the seeming of conscious pain, then how do you know YOU'RE not a Zombie now?
And if that's the case, what does the additional element actually do for you that it doesn't do for the Zombie? Not "what function could it serve?" I mean literally, WHAT are we talking about at that point? What is left over in your case?
The problem simply vanishes if you remove the proposed additional element. In reverse, I think the problem is "generated" by entertaining the additional element. So just don't add any new ingredients.
I do have some sympathy towards property dualism though, and I think information as a concept sets up to derive consciousness as something that reducible arises from known physics. But I still think the properties of information structures are firmly physical in nature.
It's subsumed by the physical in the sense that if we can push it around and get reports of it, we can investigate it as a physical phenomenon.
I think what you are talking about is the software/hardware distinction, and it applies to the mind/brain distinction very well. The hardware involved is some variable syntactical machinery and the software is the input information that can configure it a particular way.
The information stored on a CD vs on a vinyl for example is subsumed by the physical because the point is to generate the same syntactical result. The end goal is how to vibrate your auditory sensors in a particular way, and we can find different ways to accomplish that.
The song isn't actually on the disc nor in the player, both are simply precursors that must be combined to generate that particular information structure to be interpreted by you.
The way I view it is, it is very similar to considering the more abstract ideas of a computer.
For example I can syntactically explain how your PC does everything it while running a Java program without ever referencing Java Virtual Machine, and in theory I could produce all the functionality of JVM from pure random chance too. And conversely if I had no idea wtf was going on from the other perspective and I went in to reverse engineer the PC from the hardware and physics, it would seem indecipherable and I'd have no idea wtf was going on above the syntactical level.
DD's black boxes thought experiment is a great way to think about related concepts.
http://cogprints.org/247/1/twoblack.htm
I think there is decent evidence that conscious events are active physical events, and I find it plausible that they are defined by their physical causal properties, which would be what structures the content of our consciousness. If that is indeed the case, then I think it plays a causal role by being "what your body responds to", essentially.
My current view lines up with most simulationists like Marvin Minsky: that consciousness is essentially the process that crunches the raw data and makes it more workable, the "user illusion", the desktop to your brain so it is actually usable, as opposed to using punch cards on a beige box with no monitor. There is a structure in the brain known as the "claustrum", which seems to be responsible for information integration. I think that, alongside the phi illusion, tells us something about how our brains must process data: consciousness is "assembled" unconsciously as a means to process the external world. So I think it's reasonable to assume that it feeds forward for your body to actually respond to it rather than just being an internal lightshow that you sort of "are".
Think about conscious states in similar terms to software: I can generate a given text file using any computing hardware and word processing software, and open it on pretty much any hardware and software. And you can generate the text output without the file.
But of course my text file is in fact a real thing, and it is fundamentally physical in nature. It is even principally possible to determine the ontic fact about whether or not it exists and it is there. But there are just an absurd level of abstraction layers between it and the physics involved so it's ridiculously difficult, but in principle, all information about my text file is reducible to physics. -
2019-03-24 at 5:16 PM UTC in Unban GGG
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2019-03-24 at 2:15 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-24 at 2:05 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-24 at 8:51 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
Originally posted by CASPER The more clips I watch, the more I appreciate it. It's a bunch of homoerotic "battles" between buff, sweaty men in leather daddy gear clashing their unique powerful spiritual energies (names after 80s rock bands and American pop culture references) against each other until one is entirely overcum.
All I remember is I played jump heroes at a friends house the other day, and one of the dudes had his psychic megazord Za warudo power, and I just spammed it the whole match. Homie was not happy.
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2019-03-24 at 8:49 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
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2019-03-24 at 8:45 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
