an effective way to glean a little slice of understanding of the human experience throughout the ages, though 'every human never' might be more apt a name as its all statistics from the demographics to the generative portrait
this would require us to still be baffled by consciousness after knowing everything about neurophysiology that might be relevant - until then, the keys to unlocking its secrets could still be hidden in our wetware behind a veil of ignorance
It will still be baffling that there is consciousness.
Maybe if you start messing with parts of my brain so I can become familiar with the third person correlates of consciousness (which in my usage refers entirely to the first person part) then I could learn something, but I could never learn why or how the first person exists. It just does.
If we perfectly reduce the brain to some scientific model, and I don’t doubt we will, we’ll be able to predict what I will say, but not understand why I’m observing it being said.
Can you learn anything about 'why 8?' or 'how 7?'.
If you pose an incoherent question, the answer is 'that's not a valid question', rather than 'oh wow, how baffling'. The baffling is coming from forming what seem to be valid questions that aren't.
Another example of it is that famous who cuts the barber's hair (Russell's paradox):
The barber is the "one who shaves all those, and those only, who do not shave themselves". The question is, does the barber shave himself?
Here's an LLM explaining it:
the philosophical/logical lesson is: sometimes a description that sounds grammatically fine does not actually describe a possible thing. The contradiction is in the premise, not in our failure to find the right barber.
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For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.
> For clarity, consciousness is like free will - if you invent a thing that doesn't exist and proceed to ask questions about it, the problem is you having invented a thing, not that you are then having difficulty answering questions about it.
Doesn't that prove too much?
Suppose I claim that there is no objective world - i.e. standard solipsism. You may make various claims about the world being coherent to you and existing even in my absence, but these are first-person accounts, just like accounts of qualia and the existence of first-person consciousness are. I can claim that all that I'm observing is something generated by me that contains a part that argues that the world is objective, but that your failure to conclusively prove to me that objective reality exists is a consequence of the concept of an objective world being incoherent.
The claim, "you invent[ed] a thing that doesn't exist", seems to be just as useful to a solipsist to respond to someone arguing for objective reality as it is to a materialist to respond to someone arguing for first-person consciousness. Yet it's considered uncontroversial to assume (without direct proof) that an external consistent world exists.
Philosophy departments are like economics departments. They engage in long, complex, useless theoretical discussions that have nothing to do with reality whilst pretending that they are connected to reality.
This has caused a lot of people to waste years of their lives trying to understand what the hell is going on and many to mindlessly propagate idiotic, harmful ideas these departments 'teach'.
Anyone that talks of 'consciousness' and how it's baffling is in the midst of being misled by philosophy and/or neuro-'science' departments, much like anyone who even mentions free markets is being misled by economics departments.
Denying that consciousness exists is pretty bold. It’s obviously completely wrong since it’s the only thing we can actually know exists, but I’ll give you that it’s bold.
I’m pretty sure people’s perspective will change when they understand the process in detail, and that the “I” isn’t a singular thing, but an interplay of parts, where some observe the processing of others. For me it’s already non-baffling now.
Reducing it further into parts does not and I believe cannot explain why there is qualia. Denying qualia is just proudly ignoring reality.
There is absolutely no reason to believe all aspects of reality are reducible to their parts and equivalent to representations of them.
You can say you are not baffled but I’m baffled by that because it’s like saying you’re not baffled about understanding how there is something and not nothing. “Why should there be nothing?” does not dissolve the mystery.
This is the question of qualia - and it's surprisingly intractable. Realize that in this context, I can't be sure that you are conscious, either. Arguments here will crash into solipsism in the end: you guys can never prove you're not just one of my dreams.
I think that was the ultimate point of the Turing test. We can't know for certain - so the best we can do is just ask.
I recall reading that some thought that simple electrical signals could not fully explain our nervous system and there may be some quantum effects in the mix.
if the professor took all human knowledge, much of which was explicitly not free, and used it to make a for-profit knowledge machine that extrudes unreliable summaries of that knowledge, then yes, being obligated to teach for free would be a fitting punishment.
It seems like that has pretty substantial time lag. Maybe require the ai companies to build power plants before they're allowed to build data centers in a certain region?
the implied suggestion that we should not seek to remedy anything that is not the worst thing that has ever happened to the species seems more like bait than the article
To be fair though, that horse bolted a couple of centuries ago. What other name would you call it by? There's another "united states" on the same continent. The country to the immediate south is formally known as the "United Mexican States".
But the whole hemisphere is not "Mexico". USA and Canada are not also "North Mexico". Their harmless little reminder is more correct than any of the attempted arguments against it.
It was the first group of united states on the continent. North America was, relative to the land that became Mexico, thinly peopled. Unlike in Mexico there was no pre-colonial, indigenous empire that had ruled and named the land which eventually became the 13 colonies. So there wasn't necessarily a better alternative to put after "United States of" at the time. Do you know of one?
>Unlike in Mexico there was no pre-colonial, indigenous empire that had ruled and named the land which eventually became the 13 colonies.
Actually, there were multiple indigenous political entities both along the Eastern Seaboard (where we find those 13 colonies) as well as across what is now the US and Canada[0].
We just took their land and killed most of them, but they were still pretty organized -- with political groupings of various types.
Of course colonists committed genocide against indigenous people everywhere they went. No one's denying that. I'm addressing precisely what you yourself said
> there were multiple indigenous political entities both along the Eastern Seaboard
They were fragmented and smaller than the Aztec empire. That doesn't make it right to take their land. It does explain why their names didn't apply to the entire land. Because none of them was so big and centralized. If you look at the geographical features of the Eastern seaboard - mountains, lakes, streams, rivers, cities and towns, even 2 states (Massachusetts, Connecticut) - native names abound.
The lands that became the US and Canada really did have fewer people living on them than the lands that became Mexico. [1] Again because Mexico had centralized states and large-scale agriculture capable of supporting large populations.
What about Iran? Iran was conquered by muslims. So should we conquer it and kick muslims out because it wasn't ok to take that land? What about every muslim country? Muslims stole mecca from the Jews, as is extensively detailed in muslim history books. Should it be conquered and returned?
What about China? The kingdoms did most of the conquering of course, then "unification" took their land and then communists did ethnic cleansing until Han Chinese were in most places all that's left. Hell, a number of the people they cleansed aren't even gone yet. There are still Tibetans. There are plenty of original Hong Kong'ers still alive.
What about Russia? What about North Africa? What about ...
The level of arrogance some western-hemisphere Spanish speakers have, trying to tell foreigners that the name they use for their own country in their own native language is wrong, demanding that they translate the Spanish name and use that instead, is so absurdly entitled that it's just... hilarious.
In your world, then, is it normal to complain about other people's names, and expect them to change what they call themselves to better suit your preference?
This is the point: in English, it is not a generic geographic term.
It is in Spanish, though, so I get where the confusion comes from (at least when that confusion is genuine and not just boring troll shit). In Spanish, "América" refers to what in English is "the Americas", because in English we use separate terms for North, South, and (sometimes) Central America.
It's not pushback. It's just dishonest ragebait bullshit.
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