Oceans Yet to Burn

this implies that objects and their boundaries are probabilistic, but in practice this is how we treat them anyway! e.g. chairs vs stools classifying, what counts as part of someone’s body, etc

philo

argumate

Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.

mitigatedchaos

I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.

A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.

In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.

You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.

argumate

Yes, because it’s causally entangled with arrangements of atoms in the brains of a certain species of ape.

mitigatedchaos

Most possible configurations of matter within the same bounding box are not chairs. And at the atomic level, if you take the same atoms, there are almost infinite permutations within the same macro-scale shape of any given chair that have nearly-indentical outcomes in interacting with the environment. Where we put the boundary around the fuzzy cluster is our choice and to some degree arbitrary, but the cluster itself is legitimate macro-scale information.

philo

argumate

Philosophy is not engineering, but neither is computer science, at least not the good bits. But that’s a bit of a sidetrack.
By making new universes I meant defining possible worlds, either on paper, or better yet in executable form. These can be humdrum, such as the world of Minecraft, made up of discrete cubes of material with certain laws of interaction, or much more abstract, like a distributed database system where there is no global clock to give a single unambiguous ordering of events, and it is a struggle to achieve a consistent interpretation of the current state for every observer. Or you can go even higher and try and define a dependent type theory that can unify mathematical proof and executable code, which is what we really need.
The interesting thing about these worlds is that we have direct access to the underlying laws and can address questions of object properties and identity directly. Most of them are not reductionist in the way that the real world is, so you can have a chair that literally exists as an independent object that is not made up of smaller parts, and lots of traditional reasoning about object identity then applies.
If we look at a reductionist universe like Conway’s Life, then I think there is not much to say about objects. The only fundamental entities in this universe are grid cells, and the absolute time step that updates them. Influences can propagate through the grid, and particular patterns of cells might be labelled as “objects” while analysing their behaviour, eg. gliders. But this is for notational convenience, we can’t actually learn anything at the object level that we couldn’t learn by studying the underlying cells.
You can create Turing machines in Life, and then you can analyse them as if they were abstract computing devices, ignoring the grid cells. But if a stray glider crashes into the machine, it will break, and the analysis will fail, just as if a chair in the real world caught fire: at some point your mental model would shift from chair, to burning chair, to smouldering remains of what once was a chair, or just pile of unidentified ash.
So there is clearly not much point for philosophers to debate the fundamental nature of Conway’s Life (right? I am assuming this).
The real world is still less well-defined, and there is behaviour we have not yet explained, and laws we have not fully worked out. But I have to draw the line somewhere, and if someone thinks that a chair has existence independently of the particles that make it up, well I don’t really know what to say to them. I mean, the question of what objects are was answered 2500 years ago by Democritus: arrangements of atoms in the void. Even I know that :)
Since there are no intrinsic properties of objects that can’t be dissolved into statements about their component parts, the only reason to have a theory of objects at all is for convenience in modelling and communication. But both of those have specific requirements, there is no single model of objects that will be ideal for every use case. You are going to need a very different model of chairs depending on whether you are talking to a furniture designer, a cafe owner, a Roomba, or a hunter gatherer.

mitigatedchaos

I was speaking in a very compressed way about causal bundling just now, but I wasn’t joking.

A chair has qualities that its subcomponent parts do not, in terms of how it deflects the development of the world towards different directions/timelines vs a non-chair.

In this case, a chair is not an absolute definition, but rather a causal bundle - a cluster within the matter configuration space which has a high probability of producing certain related outcomes.

You can, then, learn something at the object level that you couldn’t by studying the atoms of the chair.

philo

remedialaction

mitigatedchaos

This is really about your desire to justify an unjustifiable concept - infinite moral liability for finite beings - despite your guesses about me “being upset over a loss of control”.

Alright, I’ve had my tea, so I’m feeling a bit more charitable.

Your grounding is based on the idea that the root causality is encompassed in the self, and that therefore the self ‘owns’ the results. But the causality passes from outside, through the subcomponents, and then back out again, with the self riding on top in a sense. The subcomponents can radically alter the total outcome, while the self remains riding on top.

You haven’t established why this ownership should not be subsurface. After all, you said it was about causality. You say “but the self is also a whole”, but causally, so is an aircraft, so that doesn’t really help. There are of course many practical reasons, but for your purposes that doesn’t really help, either.

Since I’m weighting on experience, rather than control, I don’t need to establish a perfect sovereign will that re-roots causality locally from the universal level to the individual.

Source: mitigatedchaos the yellow black snake philo

discoursedrome

mitigatedchaos

Like, the obvious question is: will the price you’re willing to pay be a price you can pay? The institutions of society (including authoritarian restrictions on reproduction, if any) are going to be designed for the service of the most powerful, and agelessness will considerably widen the gap between the most and least powerful (a stricter immortality such as through hand-waving “backup” technology is actually even worse).

There’s little reason to think that there is a fundamental physical cost that is highly expensive, like with flying cars.

The rules for agelessness cannot openly be designed so that only the wealthy benefit because people have accepted democratic principles. They’ll revolt if that happens. The powerful will have to make concessions whether they like it or not.

and the “being dead is terrible in principle” element is unconvincing to me simply because we’re all still going to die in an ageless world, or even an “immortal” one, and it’s not at all clear that we’d even die later than we would in this world.

Considering that the world is still getting safer overall, I’m not sure how reasonable that projection really is.

Additionally, postponing death by 10 or 50 or 100 years is still a very big deal, and here you’re treating it like “well you’re still going to die eventually, so it’s irrelevant.” Like another 50 years to know your loved ones or fulfill your potential (with things like art) is irrelevant.

and there’s a good chance that the quality of life we’d have in that world would be drastically worse overall, because society is made for the powerful and on average the powerful now live 100 times longer than everybody else and that will have really significant effects on how society, law, and work are structured.

Your argument hinges on this, but I feel it’s overstated and don’t find it compelling.

How hard would people be willing to fight if they knew it meant a lot more than just their ordinary limited lifespan?

And how do the powerful justify and maintain their power?

Political support for things like basic income are growing. If there is a big wave of mass displacement by automation, I think it will even go through, even though it would have been unthinkable ten years ago. The reason people aren’t thinking about these problems in the mainstream is that the technology doesn’t seem plausible yet. The political landscape will change as it does.

In other words, I expect the boring liberal democracies to essentially remain as such, with some set of politically-palatable compromise solutions. Some of the elites will even believe these solutions are good ideas.

Source: testblogdontupvote philo death transhumanism

discoursedrome

mitigatedchaos

Well yes, the economic argument isn’t the strongest one. The strongest argument is that the alternative is becoming weak, helpless, and mad, followed by literal involuntary permanent nonexistence. There are very few arguments that would convince me that we should not develop immortality technology when I have a metaphorical gun to my head that can only be moved farther back by immortality technology.

You don’t find the economic argument compelling, I don’t find “really, death isn’t that bad” plus all the other arguments compelling. The price I am willing to pay for this technology is very high. My enjoyment of the future beyond the end of my lifespan is literally zero or null if it is not developed.

That price includes authoritarian restrictions on reproduction.

Source: testblogdontupvote philo transhumanism death

discoursedrome

testblogdontupvote

I can on conscious level sort of understand that some people aren’t bothered by the fact that they’re gonna die, and can even sort of understand their reasoning (and I do believe in the right of people to make choices that I consider to be shitty), but on the intuitive level this is just incomprehensible for me. But then I remember that there are plenty of women who don’t just totally buy the idea that only young attractive thin women have value and deserve respect, and everyone else must be constantly shamed into “knowing their place,” but also enthusiastically and aggressively perpetuate it. That is despite the fact they’re basically guaranteed to sooner or later enter the category of people they worthless and deserving shame. And presumably the project of stopping appearance-based shaming or at least changing your own beliefs and finding yourself an accepting community is easier than eradicating death. So defending mortality makes at least as much sense - if not more - than defending old-unattractive-shaming, and evidently people can be extremely enthusiastic about the latter.

discoursedrome

I’m definitely in the “death is preferable to no-death” camp, and while I can’t speak for others, I can maybe do a bit to try to explain my own position. The first thing I should emphasize is that “not being bothered by the prospect of your own death" and “in favour of mortality as a thing” are not as tightly coupled as you’re probably supposing. As with many issues, it’s often necessary to separate large-scale social policy from personal interests. It’s also important to distinguish between death by accident, trauma, or illness and death by aging, because they’re very different things. I don’t know anyone who’s against eliminating the former, but a lot of people (including me) are wary of tinkering with senescence. Futurist critics tend to frame this as a kind of superstitious nature worship, a slavish fixation on the moral supremacy of What Is, but I find that dismissal a bit too pat.

(cut bc long)

Keep reading

mitigatedchaos

There’s more to it, but you even if you set aside the fact that not dying is actually very, very valuable, you also have to account for the disadvantages of the current system.

For instance, it is extraordinarily expensive to raise an entire generation of people, during which time they can’t really be part of the workforce without compromising their later effectiveness, have them work for a limited time as their bodies and minds slowly degrade, spend even more money as their bodies start to fall apart all at once, then discard them and bury their bodies.

Then we do it all over again. Only it’s worse, because they have to spend one quarter of their lifespan raising children to keep this going. This not only limits investment in children, but limits time in the workforce.

The stickiness of scientific theories might be related to health degradation and loss of neuroplasticity over time.

As for social change, I’m not sure that more is always better. We’re still wrestling with changes in incentives from the sexual revolution, and while LGBTs are only a small fraction of the population and were never a threat to society to begin with, polygamy has a lot more practical trouble associated with it (like decreases in the psychological health of women and children, and incentives that lead to very early or even child marriage) and is probably next on the Progressive schedule after Transgenderism, even though normalizing polygamy is probably not a good idea. (It’s different when it’s just a few nerds doing it.)

Source: testblogdontupvote philo transhumanism death

remedialaction

Anonymous asked:

I think it's sort of a mistake to try to come up with a "real" definition of private property. It's not a physical truth about the universe we can discover if we only try hard enough; it's an agreement we can make amongst ourselves. I mean, there are better and worse ways of defining it, but the goal should be "useful" (like, for social/legal purposes, such that it's fairly clear to everyone what IS considered theirs) rather than "philosophically airtight".

argumate answered:

Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.

mitigatedchaos

I mean, I think this is a bit of a drift from the core, and that we’re dropping some element speaks a bit to the weakness of the counter arguments. I’m really curious still how the potential dangerous AI has anything to do with the ideology, that one still sort of boggles me, but alright.

No, it is the core, or very close to it. The core of your ideology is about this (or very close to it), and most of the chains of logic I consider absurd spread from there. Arguments about the desirable amount of Capitalism are different from whether Capitalism, in a radical sense, is the fundamental morality.

Keep reading

Source: argumate philo

remedialaction

Anonymous asked:

argumate answered:

Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.

mitigatedchaos

4. Except that it does, and is, based on the simple fact of the material universe, that only you can occupy the given physical space at a time, and only you can control you. You are not your central nervous system and that was never the claim. The existence of outside property necessarily follows.

This part is the core part so I’m dropping the rest of it. In fact, this was what the lost post was about. You can go look up industrial disasters under Capitalism and the like on your own.

Except that it does, and is, based on the simple fact of the material universe, that only you can occupy the given physical space at a time

Actually, given the extreme slowness of the cycle frequency of the human brain, some kind of weird neural multiplexing could probably be devised in some distant era.

and only you can control you. You are not your central nervous system and that was never the claim.

If this were true, both drugs and brain damage could not alter the statistical distribution of human behavior. Instead, all evidence strongly suggests that influence on the brain brings about influence on the mind. That holds even if you define “you” in a holistic manner where it’s a combination of hardware+software+other things, or define “you” as some extra-physical phenomenon/entity that interacts with the brain.

Given the available evidence, it should even be possible, with the right technology and interfaces, to insert thoughts into peoples’ minds.

only you can control you.

Even if this were true, and brains were unhackable and beyond the realm of the physical, that would only prove “only you can control you”. It would not make property exist. It does not logically follow that only you should control you, only that you can.

If that world existed, and some entity arose that could violate that rule and modify people according to its desires, why should it not?

The existence of outside property necessarily follows.

It does not. It doesn’t even imply the existence of internal property as a morally-binding rule. What is the chain of logic from “only you can control you” to “outside property exists and is morally binding”?

With that in mind, let’s get your definition of “property”, seeing as “property” as it exists in the real world exists only insomuch as it is enforced, and is violated constantly.

Source: argumate philo

remedialaction

Anonymous asked:

argumate answered:

Yes. Even if you do come up with a definitive proof of something you still have the problem of some geezer with a shotgun ignoring all of your logic.

mitigatedchaos

1. Quite frankly you don’t understand the true potential of AI if you think it’s impossible for it to lead to human extinction. It’s hardly gauranteed, and longer development time at the civilization level makes doom less likely, but humans are only a small slice of the possible mindspace, so AI can have totally alien values relative to ours. Believing AI cannot cause human extinction is like believing some of the upper end of theorized nuclear war scenarios couldn’t cause human extinction or come damn close.

2. They keep hammering property because that’s what makes your system de facto Neo-Feudalist if it were attempted for real, and because property is a license to do violence. It is property-obsessed relative to other frameworks, as “self-ownership”/property are used to frame all the other rights.

3. If you would sacrifice all of humanity rather than let your honor be stained even one little bit in a world where we evolved from animals, then quite frankly I can’t see your stance as moral, since it concludes that your personal honor is more important than the lives of the entire species.

Source: argumate philo

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.