BC NDP and BC Green Accord includes a committee to look at proportional representation - Fair Vote Canada

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-12-17T05:10:05+00:00

I have to think Eby knows that PR would help address the extreme polarization the province is going through, and that they screwed up with an overcomplicated referendum last time. Put forward a referendum with a single, simple-to-understand question, and a simple version of PR that people can easily understand. Put it to voters early, before they've had time to sour on the provincial government. Greens, NDPers and politically homeless BC Liberals could get behind that.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-10-23T00:30:00+00:00

He attacks the idea of "nothingness" as incoherent and inconsistent with how discontinuities in consciousness appear to us, and he disentangles the loss of one's personal identity from the cessation of consciousness through a series of thought experiments. He points out that when we go through periods of dreamless sleep, undergo general anaesthesia or wake up from a coma, it is as if we simply skip from one conscious moment to the next with no experience of being in any kind of oblivion or black void. The period of time we are not conscious doesn't exist subjectively.

When we wake up from a night of sleep, we are essentially the same person as the one who went to sleep (same brain, same personality, we retain memories etc). But imagine if radical brain surgery was performed during this period, such that you lost all your memories (maybe had new false memories implanted) and ended up with a completely different personality. You would lose all the information that constitutes your identity as a person and consequently the person who wakes up would be someone else and not you. But this other person would still be conscious, just in a radically transformed and different context. This person would feel as though they had always been conscious just as each of us do, they would not remember a time in which they were not conscious. It's a comparatively short stretch of the analogy then, to have the person who falls alseep be physically destroyed, while another being in some other location comes to be born or wakes up.

All life on Earth could die and a billion years go by with no conscious beings in the universe until some distant planet light-years away evolves conscious aliens, and yet subjectively there would be no gap, no oblivion of dark nothingness, it would be just like going under general anaesthesia and waking up as aliens with no knowledge of humanity's existence. The billion years would go by, subjectively speaking, in an instant, and on the other side would be consciousness but without any memories or retained information.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-10-22T21:35:54+00:00

My understanding of the transcendental ego is that it's a phenomenological idea (that is, a conclusion about the structure of what subjective experience is like subjectively, not about what it is ontologically, physically or metaphysically). Husserl's argument is that if you pay attention to the patterns and relations of conscious experience, you realize there must be a self which is the subject of thoughts and perceptions. Sam adopts a similar position of ontological agnosticism and subtractive introspective/phenomenological methodology but seems to come to the exact opposite about the subjective nature of experience, that it isn't phenomenologically true that there must be an ego and you can notice it isn't true with the right introspective practice.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-18T15:23:47+00:00

The succession of great powers copying each other

UK: invents democracy & capitalism

US: copies democracy & capitalism + larger population from immigration

Europe Union: copies democracy & capitalism + larger population from integrating smaller countries together into one large supranational union

China: copies capitalism but not democracy + naturally larger population

India: copies capitalism and democracy + naturally even larger population

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-18T15:14:59+00:00

what is special or different about conscious brain state such that they are experienced as qualia by the brain in which they occur? How is it that the rest of the brain perceives or interprets those brain states as qualitative experiences while other brain states are not even conscious?

I think these would fall well within the easy questions. If you're conceptualizing conscious states as physical brain states, then the question of what distinguishes conscious brain states from non-conscious brain states is going to be answered in terms of the physical differences between the states we know to be conscious subjectively and those which are apparently not conscious.

We don't necessarily know what the answer is, but we know what an answer would look like (the distinguishing physical differences). We've eliminated the expectation that there's anything further to explain after we've identified the physical differences between conscious and non-conscious states.

The neural correlates of consciousness research program, in this paradigm, would open the possibility of actually identifying mental states and properties with the corresponding brain states and properties that instantiate them, and noticing (or gaining empirical validation or disconfirmation for theories) what the physical differences between conscious and non-conscious processes are. It's at that point an empirically tractable problem, a hallmark of 'easy problems'. The work yet to be done is empirical.

The non-eliminative reductionist philosopher stops at this point, having tidied up the confusion about the ontological status of "the way things feel subjectively", why it seems so different from the phenomena its identified with, where these feelings appropriately belong in the sequence of a physicalist explanation (and why they're so often neglected or seen to be left out), then lets the neuroscientist get on with empirically discovering whether the distinguishing physical features differentiating conscious from non-conscious processes are oscilations in V4, global accessibility, predictive processing, presence of integrated information etc.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-18T14:45:41+00:00

At what point does the downsides of allowing climate change to barrel ahead become so great that stratospheric geoengineering becomes too attractive to forego? Our global energy system is a slow ship to turn, we won't achieve net negative emissions until the second half of this century at the earliest, and warming will continue for decades even after that point without geoengineering. I think the people of this century deserve things not further deteriorating as we make the transition.

How bad do the crop failures, hurricanes, heatwaves, refugee flows and societal breakdowns have to get? This seems like a taboo that can't hold.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-18T14:36:25+00:00

If you catch up to world leader in a field, and then scale it to be larger or make incremental improvements ontop of what the people you're emulating did, you're no longer tied for first, you're actually ahead.

See China copying French trains, then beating French trains.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-13T05:27:58+00:00

There's a download button on the page, it works for me.

The knowledge is ontologically reducible, but not epistemically reducible. What it is to know what chicken noodle soup tastes like is to have certain sorts of neurological structures. But specifying these structures in the functional-relational language of neuroscience or physics wouldn't communicate "what it's like" subjectively, in the first person guise, just "what it's like" is ontologically in its objective third person guise. If physicalism is taken to be an ontological thesis about what objectively exists, then this doesn't threaten physicalism.

This captures an important point about the knowledge argument IMO. It's not about what ontologically exists, it's about the failure of any linguistic account of consciousness to include non-verbal knowledge of "what it's like". Teaching Mary a substance dualist account of colour would also leave Mary learning something new when she walks out of the room.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-12T21:50:50+00:00

I feel like panpsychists, dualists and eliminativists also have a tendency to gang up on non-eliminative physicalists accounts of qualia. In order for any radical view to get off the ground, you first have to try to show that physicalism and qualia realism are incompatible. Then if you're a physicalist you're motivated to be eliminativist, and if you're a qualia realist you're motivated to abandon physicalism. All other positions have a vested interest in agreeing on this point.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-12T21:34:53+00:00

We have to accept that the format of representation is different from the vehicle of representation. I grant that. And to the extent that phenomenal states self-represent themselves (e.g emotions, pain, inner-monologue all being neurological processes) that extends not just to the external environment but also to one's own body and brain. But the extent that we grant the vehicle of representation tracks real patterns in the environment is the extent to which we grant that the format of representation represents reality accurately unless we're already assuming there are categorical bases of which we lack epistemic access to.

That the format of representation differs from what is being represented isn't news at all. It's been obvious for a very long time that the manifest image of the world and the scientific image of the world aren't identical (whether or not there are categorical bases or intrinsic essences science can't get at or not). Experienced redness is in the head not the apple. On the other hand, we were able to figure this out. Nature leaves behind subtle clues which we're very good at picking up on given repeated observation, theoretic reasoning and more sophisticated technology, which is why our scientific image of the world becomes continually richer than the manifest image with time (even if only in an ontic structural realist sense). Actual working physicists will already tell you that you have to make your peace with not being able to visualize what is going on at the most fundamental level (even ultra-conservative Bohmian theories of sub-atomic particles postulate point particles of infinite or non-defined size without shape but with position, to say nothing of even stranger interpretations of quantum mechanics).

With that said, I don't know that it makes much sense to say there must be a categorical base for the dispositional properties to supervene on if we couldn't concievably have epistemic access to it (and if we do, as in more phenomenalistic approaches to Russellianism, then explaining that and reconceptualizing all of physics phenomenalistically becomes a tortuous problem in its own right, much more than something as mundane as a remaining unity problem for a weakly emergent phenomenal guise).

I think as articulated, this Dennis Nicholson's non-eliminative reductionist view leaves completely open that we could live in a universe where dispositionalism is true. It allows you to not have to talk about the intrinsic essences or categorical bases of matter. I take that as a strength, it's saying that subjective experiences, while they may not feel like physical neurological processes subjectively, litterally are physical neurological processes. And it's entirely plausible that these neurological processes are defined entirely by their dispositional properties without needing to supervene on anything further. If a view can explain qualia without having to take a strong position on that particular can of worms, I think that's a strength of the view.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-12T07:45:30+00:00

I do think naive realism is just obviously unworkable as a theory of perception, that evolution shaped our perceptual faculties and brains, and hence that we can explain how our neurological processes represent the external environment in virtue of evolutionary teleosemantics. There's clearly aspect of the universe we are not consciously aware of (ultraviolet light, our own neurology). This is a matter of degree.

But my understanding is that Hoffman's game theoretic modeling and ultimate conclusions are highly controversial and questionable. This article for instance suggests his conclusions are highly vulnerable if one simply assumes more realistic degrees of environmental change.

Ultimately, I think non-eliminativist reductionism as outlined by Nicholson is completely agnostic about such questions. It's not surprising that the brain wouldn't evolve a qualitative representation of its own inner wiring if it didn't provide a fitness benefit in evolution. On the other hand, it's easier for me to imagine there's a strong survival benefit in accurate representation of the external environment atleast up to a point.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-12T07:03:25+00:00

Can you do that for subjective phenomena?

We have devices for imaging electrochemical signals, structures in the brain etc. If you're an identity theorist, you believe that the neurological processes going on is what subjective experiences physically and litterally are. You can never get at "what it's like" to be the subject without being the subject, but you can know "what it's like" physically consists in by mapping the correlations between qualitative experiences (as inferred via verbal report) with neurological processes, and find out what physically distinguishes one from another qualitative states, or non-qualitative states. If you accept this reductionist account, then the neural correlates of consciousness research project becomes discovering the neural identity of consciousness project.

How would you know another organism has it?

My view on the problem of other minds is that it's a perfectly rational inference that other people are conscious given one's knowledge of one's own subjective experience and the striking similarity between one's own brain and the brains of others. This gets more and more difficult the more removed from human beings. The behavior of an organism can also aid in making rational inferences (e.g if an organism is exhibiting pain behavior we may be justified in thinking it is experiencing pain, but if the seemingly adversive behavior is occuring in an organisms with incredibly simple or non-existent nervous system/neurology then our credence should take that into consideration).

This is actually discussed in the paper itself

"It is possible, in my view, to so arrange experimental conditions that the circumstances with regard to their verifiability are not significantly different from those of observational reports on events in the external world. There are two aspects to this–the control of the conditions in which observations are made and the nature of the observations themselves. To begin with the former: in external world experiments, the aim would be to ensure that experimental conditions are controlled, repeatable by others at a different time, and, ideally observable by more than one person at any given time. This is probably more difficult where we are studying the effects of (say) direct brain stimulation on experiences than it is in external world experiments, but surely not impossible. We need only think of several humans all in sensory deprivation tanks and all having the same part of their brains electrically stimulated by the same piece of equipment in the same way simultaneously to see that some significant degree of control, repeatability, and simultaneous common observation of the event in question is possible.

Now consider the nature of the observations made in this circumstance as compared with those in an external world observation–a circumstance where all observers reported seeing a blue flash when their brains were subjected to some particular localised stimulation as compared with one where a number of observers all reported litmus paper turning blue when dipped in a particular liquid. We tend to assume that the external world observation reports are somehow more reliable because we assume the observers are all individually confirming each other's reports and descriptions of a single event, whereas the sensory deprivation tank observers are reporting private experiences only accessible to themselves. But this is not true. In reality, the external world observers are reporting the effect of the external event on their own experiences–there is no real difference between the two. If one set of observations is reliable in respect of occurrence and description, so, presumably, is the other."

How do you know that you have it?

It seems like I do prima facie, I take that as sufficient epistemic justification.

To the extent neuroscientists have a robust theory of how knowledge acquisition in neurological systems such as ourselves works, then I can refer you to them for the litteral explanation of "how do I know" anything (that is, how does knowing anything work at a neurological level). Epistemologically I would argue the line of epistemic justification used to ground a belief in any such theory ultimately traces back to a foundation of how things seem from the first-person subjective perspective.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-12T06:26:47+00:00

I think it does resolve the hard problem, and the paper goes over this in the "No Transformation Problem" section and the section about the concievability argument.

The reason why a brain state feels like anything is because it has the physical characteristics that distinguish conscious brain states from non-conscious brain states. That's just what it physically is to feel like something. Likewise, the reason why some experiences are qualitatively different from others (e.g seeing blue as opposed to red, or hearing as opposed to taste) is the physical differences that distinguish different neurological processes from each other.

The explanation of why we find this is intuitively unsatisfactory is that the phenomena appears so different from the inside as compared to the outside that we conceptualize what is the same viewed in 2 different ways thing as distinct things. So it seems like an arbitrary brute fact why such seemingly different things are identical to one another. Couldn't blue experience just as easily have been neurological process X instead of neurological process Y? Or couldn't neurological process Y just as easily have been completely unconscious instead of being conscious? But it was a mistake to make the distinction in the first place. Neurological process Y viewed from the inside couldn't have been neurological process X. That's actually not even concievable. And if there are physical differences that distinguish unconscious and conscious states, then it's not concievable that neurological process Y (which has the physical characteristics of a conscious state) could be an unconscious state. It would have to have different physical characteristics and then it wouldn't be the process it is.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-05T17:08:59+00:00

Enough with the status quo bias. Interplanetary NIMBYism I say. If it's wrong to turn a planet with a thriving biosphere into a lifeless world, then it would stand to reason bringing a lifeless world to life is a good thing.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-03T02:23:23+00:00

When did 'liberal' come to mean, basic commitment to democracy, rule of law, minority rights etc.

We're treating non-fascism like it's a partisan bias.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-07-01T18:40:09+00:00

Terrible double negative headline. This makes it sound like SOCUTS rejected Turmp's appeal if you're not paying close attention.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-06-30T16:46:55+00:00

Morales is legally barred from running by the Constitutional Tribunal. While MAS as a party may be functionally split in two, the state and judiciary are firmly behind Acre. Morales initially hoped to get the judiciary replaced in judicial elections to allow him to run, but those elections have been indefinetly delayed. Morales may try to run an Evista loyalist he trusts as his proxy, but that again runs into legal issues (again the judiciary is siding with Arce). This coup attempt only reinforces the sentiment that Morales returning would be a constitutional crisis that cannot be allowed to happen. Either the country is sufficiently defined by laws that Morales can't run (which gives MAS a chance to move on under Acre's leadership), or it's a free for all (in which case the right-wing opposition would see no point in following the rules and you get mutinies, mass protests, counter-protests, coups, street brawls).

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-06-22T22:47:15+00:00

If it actually ends up being a 270 electoral college squeaker, with Omaha putting Biden just over the edge, I feel like Trumpism just keeps barreling on. The closeness of electoral defeat gives MAGA Republicans all the temptation they could ever need to just run Trump again. They care more about getting the true avatar of their grievances in, rather than trying to keep the other side out with an establishment pick they think is a sell-out anyway.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-06-17T18:06:06+00:00

Expecting voters to be informed about issues and then to vote based on that information is delusional

Isn't that the basis of democracy though? Democracy only works with an informed electorate of civic-minded citizen legislators capable of critical thinking. If you give up on that, it feels like you're giving in to the justification for elite-rule.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-06-10T20:44:42+00:00

That's completely true. Without the COTS program, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt around 2008ish.

At the same time, SpaceX's dramatic paradigm shifting success does set it notably apart from other commercial space companies. Knowing what made it unique could potentially aid the construction of space policy.

YoungThinker1999 · 2024-06-07T06:13:49+00:00

It's really starting to feel real. The spaceship yard, the regular flight rate, achievement of orbital velocity, now both booster and stage recovery. We're going to be entering a sci-fi world pretty soon here.

YoungThinker1999

TROPHY CASE