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Posts by Common De-mominator
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2019-03-21 at 10:40 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks That's called academic honesty. Literally EVERY theory has opponents. Evolution, vaccinations, the list just goes on and on.
If a theory having dissenters is enough to convince you that it's incontrovertibly false, then you better stop believing in evolution, vaccines, a heliocentric universe, etc.
It's not a matter of a theory having opponents you fuck wit: it is directly contradicted by data, such as the Chinese examples. -
2019-03-21 at 3:48 AM UTC in Where is the line between being a junkie and not?
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2019-03-21 at 3:32 AM UTC in The Retarded Thread: Malice Metro Edition
Originally posted by hydromorphone Dude, most people who would do what he's done for me would expect, if not demand sex.
Most people would think that we were in a relationship the way we are, and how we do shit. Hell, most the other homeless friends we have think we are a couple. It's just easier to let them think that, and it also keeps them from trying to make a move on me.
I'm really lucky that I have the friend I have. I may not have many blessings in life atm, but he definitely is a blessing.
I also had a man come up and pray for me this morning, praying I'd be healed. Well… I don't generally buy into all that shit, but my pain has been a lot better than it has been. I was even able to half as "run" for about 30 ft which I haven't barely been able to walk fast muchless do anything like that. Right now I couldn't since I'm hurting a bit, but I'll have some dope in me soon enough.
I'm really tired. I can't wait to get some sleep soon.
AKA leading him on to manipulate him into doing shit for you, and he's too cucked to say shit -
2019-03-21 at 3:31 AM UTC in Where is the line between being a junkie and not?Honestly, don't fuckin play around with the drug shit man. Honestly, all my time on these communities and I still can't get over it. I know many of you THINK you understand pharmacology to a much higher level than is true. Just be safe and don't mix and match shit and die, ok?
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2019-03-21 at 3:04 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
http://www.julianjaynes.org/
Probably the one time you shouldn't have cited the source. -
2019-03-21 at 2:42 AM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Originally posted by gadzooks I'm not the one claiming that another person's claim is unilaterally wrong. You said "Jayne's theory is wrong."
I never made any such firm assertions.
Only you did.
I referred specifically to Obbe's link, which directly raised issues with the idea that were not been resolved thereafter. -
2019-03-21 at 2:36 AM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooterActually the more I think about it, the more I want to start a mail correspondence with him and drive him internally insane.
You just need to push 2-3 of the right buttons with most people, and he is already retarded and autistic. -
2019-03-21 at 1:07 AM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-21 at 12:36 AM UTC in Atlantis Discovered?
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2019-03-21 at 12:35 AM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooterI wonder how little it would take to make mail informationally worthless for him.
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2019-03-21 at 12:29 AM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooterYou can't send "books" in the mail either btw.
Although now that I think about it, I might end up writing him letters and feeding him disinformation just so he learns his mail is utterly unreliable as a source of information. -
2019-03-21 at 12:26 AM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
Originally posted by Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country Why would he want that? He has a legal right to receive letters, same as Uncle Ted. People will print out memes and send them to him.
You can't send him books. How loose do you think the definition of a "book" will be when they want to fuck his ass in a supermax, make an example out of him and fundamentally undermine any attempt at getting a payoff? -
2019-03-20 at 11:51 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-20 at 11:31 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-20 at 11:14 PM UTC in Atlantis Discovered?I practice chaos magic.
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2019-03-20 at 9:30 PM UTC in What would your most critical sexual partner share with us if he/she came here to ruin you?I have a second peepee just above my anushole.
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2019-03-20 at 9:28 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooter
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2019-03-20 at 9:27 PM UTC in Someone made a mural of the NZ shooterEjjy
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2019-03-20 at 9:22 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. -
2019-03-20 at 9:20 PM UTC in The Hard Problem of Consciousness
