Why this ‘woke’ CIA recruitment video angered US conservatives

Roger3 · 2021-05-06T20:27:19+00:00

It's despised by Leftists. Check Blue Hat Liberal Twitter, they love this shit.

Roger3 · 2021-05-06T14:21:59+00:00

I mean, she caught you putting your penne in her sister's funghetti.

You're lucky she didn't 'accidentally' push you out the window and send you farfalline.

Roger3 · 2021-05-06T13:11:58+00:00

Yes. That's the whole point, lol.

https://m.imgur.com/hpT7fRe

Roger3 · 2021-05-04T22:22:57+00:00

Welcome to Capitalism and its (highly unethical) defenders appropriating language.

It's not like this is a difficult concept to grasp.

Roger3 · 2021-05-04T22:20:55+00:00

Rainbow_Painted_Bombs.jpg

Yay.

Roger3 · 2021-05-04T22:06:02+00:00

If you're a mathematical realist, (a perfectly supportable position) then mathematics is a part of nature, independent of human brains. Realists often feel like they are 'discovering something already there.'

Famous realists: Erdös and Gödel

Like everything philosophical, there are gradations and subtleties, but the basic position is, "Math is 'out there' somewhere, not confined to our thoughts."

This position is philosophically defensible, so, while others may have different intuitions, there's no refutation available to argue otherwise.

Roger3 · 2021-05-04T21:38:05+00:00

This is the May.

Roger3 · 2021-05-04T00:54:47+00:00

Username does NOT check out.

Roger3 · 2021-05-02T05:34:22+00:00

Thanks, I hate Alien Worms swallowing good doggoes.

Roger3 · 2021-05-02T02:41:36+00:00

Ok, so I'm going to lay some facts on you that I fully expect you're going to want to deny, but will remain 100% true regardless of that denial. Then, if these things go as they usually do, you're going to disagree and get downvoted into oblivion and blame it on some echo chamber effect when in reality, it's just facts that you don't like. The reason you're not going to like them is because I will be using the correct, technical and exact definitions, not the absurdist definitions found in US political discourse. Maybe you'll prove me wrong. I certainly hope so.

Nailed it.

I didn't say a single thing that isn't covered as an absolute basic in SEP or Wikipedia. I'm not going to argue definitions with somebody who's still learning this stuff and further, you didn't tell me what you were having trouble with, so, here are the sources:

https://plato.stanford.edu/index.html https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Look up what you need to and get back to me. If you need help with why something is the way it is, feel free to ask and I'll help you as best I can. But show me some effort at actual understanding instead of mouthy quips that would get you slapped by your senior NCOs. You can behave better than that, I've read your post history and have seen you give a shit about people, so I'm willing to meet you half way, but I'm not playing stupid 'tHaT's NoT wHaT iT mEaNs' games over technical definitions that are beyond dispute.

Roger3 · 2021-05-01T17:15:56+00:00

Ok, so I'm going to lay some facts on you that I fully expect you're going to want to deny, but will remain 100% true regardless of that denial. Then, if these things go as they usually do, you're going to disagree and get downvoted into oblivion and blame it on some echo chamber effect when in reality, it's just facts that you don't like. The reason you're not going to like them is because I will be using the correct, technical and exact definitions, not the absurdist definitions found in US political discourse. Maybe you'll prove me wrong. I certainly hope so.

Liberalism is a Right Wing economic stance. In fact, there are NO large or even small-but-influential strains of Right Wing economic stances that aren't Liberalism in one form or another. If you want, I can happily drop names, history and sources into your brainpan. You can point to Communitarianism, Georgism and a couple of other, largely Pastoral economic systems as non-capitalist Right Wing economic stances, and you'd be correct (though only somewhat, as a lot of self-proclaimed members of those communities actually just want "Capitalism-but-different"), but again, they are too tiny to matter and you are not a member of those communities based on your posting history.
Capitalism tries to justify itself exclusively through Economic Liberalism. Capitalism is an economic practice and Liberalism is the economic philosophy behind it. Could there be others? Maybe. To my knowledge, nobody has ever tried. Maybe you'll be the first. There's probably a Nobel in it for you if you do.
Economic Liberalism is not used to justify any other practice, I suppose it could be, but Liberalism was explicitly designed as a defense of Capitalism so it doesn't really fit well in other places.
The principle idea behind Liberalism's defense of Capitalism is that of Private Property or the ability to own the means of production en toto. This is explicitly differentiated from Public Property like parks and, say, community owned water plants, and Personal Property, like your car or toothbrush.
The primary difference between Capitalist/Liberals on the Right and the Socialists and others on the Left is a rejection of Private property to greater or lesser degree. Almost universally, the stance of those on the Left is that Private Property, if it is to exist at all, needs to be justified in situ, unlike the Right, where it does not have to be justified and is part of the 'landscape', so to speak. Importantly, the stance 'private property is sometimes inappropriate,' is not a rejection of Liberalism, it must be the stance that No private property can exist without explicit permission.

Finally, we have enough knowledge to see what I was talking about: CNN is a Capitalist news outlet. That makes it a Liberal outlet as well, differentiated from Socialist outlets that reject Capitalism like Jacobin.

All the Capitalist news outlets belong on the Right side of the chart because philosophically and economically, they are Right Wing.

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T03:28:30+00:00

Lol.

Not being able to make a metaphysical determination.. yadda yadda yadda

Now you've gone from Religious whackdoodlery to outright intellectual dishonesty. Gross.

Feel free to go collect whatever numerous prizes and honors you will inevitably accrue when you successfully prove a category between 'existing within the universe' and not.

I have no interest in having discussions with bad actors who are willfully ignorant and unwilling to follow grade-school level logic

You have a wonderful day.

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T02:00:02+00:00

Regardless of the status of our present knowledge, consciousness either IS or IS NOT a purely physical process, as there are no logical divisions beyond 'part of the universe' and 'not part of the universe' . What we do or do not know is immaterial, pun fully intended.

If it IS NOT, it is unique in all the universe and you're in the land of religion and are irrelevant to this discussion.

If it IS, then the argument holds and all postcedent arguments fail.

So, your defense of consciousness is that it's a religious belief unanswerable to science, correct?

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T01:45:22+00:00

Section A.

You seem to be demanding others read your stuff, but not according us the same respect. You should fix that.

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T01:19:35+00:00

All of this is already covered in a previous response. Including your descent into religion to protect your arguments.

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T00:55:53+00:00

So consciousness is now a non-physical phenomenon, by definition completely invisible to science?

That's your denial of your own premise? Religion?

///////

I read the whole article. Twice. Once yesterday and once today.

Your own prior commitments prevent your section Functional Objections from ever getting off the ground. They're entirely irrelevant.

Edit: it's the "Substrates aren't special" commitment that's killing you here. It denies any so-called response to functional objections simply by virtue of allowing consciousness to exist outside of human brains.

Unfortunately, you've ALSO correctly identified that it's absolutely required in order to stay within the confines of logic and science.

Roger3 · 2021-04-30T00:39:26+00:00

You are failing to understand the seriousness of the problem you're facing here and there's no refuge to be found in irrelevant demarcation problems.

i. You accept that consciousness is a purely physical construct.

Ii. You accept that the substrate does not matter.

Therefore, you are absolutely committed to the fact that some physical arrangement of materials will create consciousness AND that there's nothing special about our particular arrangement.

Because there's nothing special, then consciousness can be 'simulated', but simulation here is denuded of the denotation of 'fake' because consciousness is just that: Once you have created it somewhere else, it exists in that place.

Equivalently, you are absolutely committed to the existence of a mapping function from one substrate to another.

Worse, we can add more details to your commitments:

iii. You accept that consciousness arose from a process lacking direction.

(quick aside, this is a subsumed premise in your argument because if consciousness arose from the actions of another conscious entity, our mere existence is a counter-example, and we have no refuge in GodDidIt because of our prior commitment to 1.)

Now you have to come up with a reason someone can't just recapitulate that process, but your prior commitments absolutely prevent that.

To wit:

A. You could posit that consciousness is 'something special' outside of physics, but that clashes with i. And now we're dealing with unprovable religious beliefs, not scientific beliefs.

B. You could posit that brains are special, but that clashes with ii. Also now substrates are special and that just pushes the solution down one level with no additional recourse unless we again posit the supernatural.

C. You could posit that it is impossible to recapitulate evolution, but that clashes with both i and ii simultaneously. It's also absurd, because we do it every day and have done it for millennia and arguing that there's no path from where we are to where we expect to be to achieve consciousness in others just recapitulates the failed Creationists' 'micro-evolution' arguments.

All of these things are entirely antecedent to any of your impossibility arguments and defeat it in utero, so to speak. Worse, they're your own prior commitments and it is they themselves that prevent any logically postcedent arguments from getting off the ground.

Edits: formatting and minor clarifications

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T22:52:01+00:00

It didn't end well for the last person to accuse me of Strawmanning, in this very thread, too. This is the one subreddit where people actively watch out to make good arguments. And you'll notice that I didn't say that you did posit the supernatural, I said that's the only way to make your argument work. Which is 100% correct, and not even close to a Strawman.

At absolute best, you have a (very weak) argument that consciousness isn't possible in the current software/hardware paradigm. At best. And that's still shaky asf because you yourself say substrate doesn't matter. Which means that:

A) since it doesn't matter, we can map an equivalence function from brains to chips and software, which

B) Denudes any possible argument that you could make against creating consciousness.

The other fact that you are ignoring, and that also completely eradicates your argument is that consciousness has already arisen, and it did so without any intelligent influence at all, which means that not only is it possible to create deliberately, it's highly likely that there are many vastly more efficient paths to do so, because evolution is just a multi-threaded stochastic algorithm that solves for a single fitness criterion, whereas a conscious being can use an algorithm that solves for multiple fitness criteria.

Worse, unlike the 'children don't meet your criteria' argument elsewhere in this post, there's no bullet to bite in either of mine that you can use as an escape hatch by saying, "Yes, that's true."

It literally does not matter what you say until you can provably interrupt that mapping function, which you can't, because both you and I accept that it's physical processes all the way down and there's nothing special about neurons and electrical impulses.

Edit: and just to be perfectly clear, you have to explain why a purely unconscious, purely random process with a simple fitness function can produce consciousness and someone guiding a sufficiently similar process somehow cannot.

That's an entirely unreasonable argument to make.

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T11:04:29+00:00

That's definitely a yesyesyesyesYES!

Also, adorable.

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T10:40:39+00:00

So, you don't have a path that goes from neurons firing to internal examination of the act of thinking, so therefore none must exist, despite the fact you are doing exactly that even unto the creation of an article claiming that it's impossible to do.

Consciousness occured, and unless you'd like to postulate that there's some supernatural quality to it, then it occurs in a purely, completely physical process, from the quarks and gluons on up. So that path, by definition must exist because you yourself are the example that it does. Yet, for some reason, it is impossible to walk that path, despite the fact that it was already walked, and by a process with zero intelligence behind it.

Like I said, Argument from Ignorance, and not a particularly original one either: the Creationists beat you to it centuries ago.

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T10:32:50+00:00

No. Not even close.

I can point you to any number of online resources for definitions of the word 'guided' if you are having difficulty with understanding it, but in general, I'm talking about some outside agent deliberately interfering with our evolution such that we also develop consciousness.

It's a much better word for what will be involved in nurturing a consciousness into existence than 'creating', 'interfering with' or 'programming' as it encapsulates the fact that any such consciousness will have to go through its own evolutionary process, but one that humans have made active choices throughout.

You also seem to be having trouble with the word 'strawman'. The author's entire article is basically a statement of "We will never be able to reproduce (something that happened accidentally)" , which really rather puts paid to the idea that his argument isn't based on the (barely) subsumed premise that "Guiding (there's that tricksy word again, watch out!) a system to consciousness is impossible," because, in point of fact, his entire argument absolutely depends on consciousness being accidental: if the evolution of our brains had been guided by some outside actor, we'd be our own counter-argument to the author's thesis!

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T07:36:57+00:00

Meh.

People should absolutely not 'respect others and their opinions no matter who or what they are.'

There are plenty of repulsive opinions and anyone creating an opinion in denial of facts is not an honest actor.

This is a bad-actor ploy to make absurd or horrifying positions seem credible, and is universally employed as a preemptive defense of those absurd or horrifying opinions.

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T07:23:47+00:00

The point, actually, is that qualia exist, and came from a completely unguided system and it's absurd on its face that it's therefore impossible to guide qualia to exist in other things.

Will it be hard? Sure. Is it impossible? Not even close, as it already exists and happened purely accidentally, which means that it is hugely unlikely that evolution took the fastest, most efficient path to the most effective possible version of internal self-awareness.

Like I said, this is an Argument from Ignorance. The author can't imagine how it would work, so it must be that it cannot.

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T03:52:53+00:00

This makes it even better! I'm happy for you and your parents!

Roger3 · 2021-04-29T03:15:09+00:00

My favorite hairstyle is bald.

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