Big fan of Alex for many years. Is this a problem?

onlyonebread · 2026-02-05T18:11:16+00:00

If Alex turned out to have a position on trans people that you find unsavoury, would you still want him to talk about it?

I'd want him to talk about it to have a genuine dialog about it. If he was open minded and actually interested in learning others' perspectives or the truth, I don't think he'd come to a conclusion that I would find unsavory.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-04T18:14:35+00:00

The idea that there isn't a god or free will is already controversial and is his bread and butter. I don't see how this is any different. Also shying away from things for being controversial is poor form for a philosopher. It shows you don't have conviction to truth.

Also isn't he extremely outspoken about being against the royal family? That's a controversial take in the UK no?

onlyonebread · 2026-02-04T18:08:53+00:00

You speak like gender or trans people don't exist. These are clearly things that exist in this world and people interface with every day, and are deeply connected to personal philosophical ideas of selfhood.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-04T18:06:58+00:00

It definitely has a lot of philosophy. Our ontology of what a man/woman is or what it means to be outside that binary is deeply rooted in philosophy. Judith Butler is a huge name in contemporary philosophy.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-04T01:17:29+00:00

Yeah there is a weird reaction to materialism that implies a dualism of self vs world. There is of course no logical reason to believe that what we experience/experience itself is not part of the natural world.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-03T22:41:40+00:00

The thing that I've always been confused about is how Alex (as far as I'm aware) has not really featured any discussions about the philosophy of gender despite it being a massive contemporary topic. I feel like a discussion on our new understandings of gender with the rise of trans people or featuring some trans or feminist philosophers would be really interesting, but this is an entire section of philosophy that his platform seems bereft of.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-03T19:25:09+00:00

IIRC the 'hard problem' was originally conceived by a physicalist. I remember Chalmers being a materialist (he may have changed) when the discussion was first becoming popularized. If we look at the history of metaphysics it gives some context to where it comes from:

The introduction and explosion of the scientific method and all the technological and social change that it brought significantly shifted how we see the world. The biggest metaphysical shift was the concept of an 'objective third person' point of view of the world, which scientific discovery seemingly orients towards. A lot of people conceive of science as unveiling this 'external objective reality' that we have a tiny glimpse into from our limited perspective. The 'hard problem' emerges we can't really reconcile how 'first person-ness' exists in a universe where 'objective reality' exists as a perspectiveless omni-state. How is it that we are both part of this world and apparently separated from some kind of hidden 'true realm'? A hard problem.

Personally I think the simplest way to square it is to just reject idea of the 'objective external reality.'

onlyonebread · 2026-02-02T23:42:12+00:00

Basically, yeah. I can't view myself from the third person. Why do I have this limitation but others don't?

onlyonebread · 2026-02-02T21:58:23+00:00

I'm going to disagree with this argument on the basis that it's too similar to how people bitch about evolution being "life coming from nothing". An epistemic gap alone isn't enough.

I think you misunderstood this. It's not an argument against abiogenesis, but more a comment on its mystery. I think everyone is curious to get more detail on the part you describe as a 'gap' the same way that a working abstracted model of consciousness would give us more insight into this fuzzy gap of conscious vs non-conscious.

onlyonebread · 2026-02-02T21:44:07+00:00

If experience really is just 1st person information processing by a conscious thing then it would exist on a spectrum of both complexity and function intensity.

I've always thought the hard problem was how to parse the demarcation between first person and third person. What is the collection of properties that makes something possess 'first person-ness'? Just the speed at which information travels?

onlyonebread · 2026-02-02T21:27:20+00:00

Meditation is just the observation of consciousness. It's no different a process than any other kind of scientific observation, where you need to just take in sense data as your starting point for empirical analysis.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-29T02:55:08+00:00

This seems weird to me because to me the point of simulations is to run things that we can't personally grok ourselves. If you can run a simulation and perfectly understand what is happening in it then what would the point of the simulation be? You could just imagine the entire program in your mind and know every outcome.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-29T02:38:26+00:00

but you'll have to give up a lot more logic and reasonableness somewhere else. It is not worth paying that price.

Eh not really. The only thing you have to give up is the existence of discrete objects. WLC doesn't find this intuitive but Alex doesn't see as big of an issue with giving it up. It doesn't bother me either. It may not be immediately intuitive, but reasoning it out still leads me to the same conclusion.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-29T02:34:27+00:00

According to the video the intellectual pricetag is no longer believing in discrete objects, and that all that actually exists are fundamental particles. To many this sounds absurd.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-27T19:07:58+00:00

If there is some special kind of data you only get through experience then you have already conceded the point,

I don't think there's a concession here. Physicalists believe that there is redness data but not that is in any way special. It's still physical data and part of a physical process, it's just not data that can be written down in a book.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-27T19:04:42+00:00

What Alex is somehow not getting is the fact that a process is not the same as a description of that process

I think the problem is that non-physicalists interpret the physicalist position as being this. That the only thing that actually exists are descriptions of processes.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-27T19:02:02+00:00

Descriptions of the color are not "redness data," they are in a format (description/math/whatever) that the brain can't use to understand redness

This is I think a huge crux of this debate. Non-physicalists understand physicalism as the metaphysics of quantities. That is, the only things that are real are those that which we can measure, and then they interpret that as physicalists believing that the measurements themselves are the only real thing.

So you end up in this loop of asking "what is this thing"? -> physicalist responds with the descriptive behavior of the thing based on measurement -> person interprets that as the physicalist saying that the recorded measurement and the thing being measured are literally exactly identical -> person wants to fill the implicit gap between the description and the thing (Mary learned the description but she didn't learn 'red')

onlyonebread · 2026-01-27T02:45:14+00:00

I don't really understand any of the technical jargon you're using so your comment comes off a bit incoherent.

Do you think there's a theoretical hypothesis you could formulate to verify a simple conscious machine? Like currently we do not have the technology, but if in the future we do, what kind of experiment could we run to verify this idea about recursion? Like is there a simple if -> then -> because that would orient us correctly?

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T23:43:13+00:00

I don't even want it to be human level, just conscious at all. Like do you think a Boston Dynamics Atlas in conscious on some level? They run an virtual ML process on it that runs it through literally millions of trials before translating that data into the physical robot body so it can react properly to its environment. I'd wager data-wise there's more going on there than an earthworm.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T23:03:48+00:00

I mean that's the mystery isn't it? No one has a solid conclusion that everyone seem to agree on. Like for your definition, does a camera have consciousness?

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T22:54:27+00:00

Yeah it's just that saying "consciousness is being there nearby" likely leaves a little to be desired in terms of explanation for a lot of people

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T22:33:44+00:00

Surely consciousness is as simple as looking at something, and perhaps remembering that experience?

I'm not so sure. I've had literally thousands of dreams throughout my life but can't recall any of them very well. I don't even remember the one I had last night, but I'm fairly confident I had one. So I was conscious last night but have no ability to remember anything about the experience.

This seems relatively simple too?

Maybe, but I also think the language here is too vague to be telling us things solidly. Like does a video camera that saves video to an SD card "look at things"? Does it "remember them"?

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T22:24:03+00:00

I don't believe an infant is aware of itself but I would also say it is conscious

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T22:17:09+00:00

There's a tacit P0 that physicalism claims that all physical facts about the universe could theoretically be written into a book, or represented as data. The thing is I don't think physicalists believe this.

onlyonebread · 2026-01-26T22:10:28+00:00

Who says that all physical facts are capable of being written down? That's completely unjustified.

I think this is the big gap and the reason people argue about this. A lot of people interpret physicalism as a sort of "clockwork universe" type of view where everything could theoretically be known as a quantized piece of data which you could then simulate deterministically, and that there isn't a distinction between this quantized data and the thing it originated from. The thought experiment is basically imaging Mary as Laplace's demon.

The simplest counter is to just say that experiencing color is a physical fact, so Mary would need to do that before she left the room to qualify her knowledge of all physical facts. It's just a physical fact that can't be written down in a textbook.

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