card_zero

They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.

There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.

I disagree with what you say, so remind me later.

They might as well merge and become Chromicrapple.

That is a fictional objection raised by the Egyptian god Amun to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was supposed by the Egyptians to have invented music and writing, and was supposed by the Greeks to have invented absolutely everything else too, including botany, surveying, and government.

It's also a critique of writing, written by Plato, to impress on us that Socrates was great orator (or arguer) and was better that way. But it's not somebody's reaction to the invention of writing. It's an imagined reaction to the invention of writing.

I have also vaguely noticed that it started being called pollution sometime this century. "Huh, that's new", I thought. Not particularly surprising, though. Of course that timespan is almost 30 years, so my concept of recent change might be getting stretched.

But yeah, more familiar pollutants are dirty or caustic or radioactive, and chew holes in things or give you lung diseases or poison the wildlife, things like that, so it was a little jarring. Though I suppose we had CFCs, they didn't do anything directly harmful either.

Unpredictable things happen routinely, therefore these specific unpredictable things will happen?

I haven't seen it, but the premise is that you have a second self who is trapped at work and wants to escape. That's really not the same thing, and misses the point of my drug scenario, which is that pain and (simple) suffering outside of meaning don't have moral weight. In this TV show the inside-work-selves are leading meaningfully miserable lives, with the frustrated cognitive desire to escape. They have knowledge-forming thought processes that are being wasted.

I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.

Oh yes, I daresay. I mean to include that sort of thing with "memories" anyway. The drug might not be physically possible in reality.

Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.

Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.

It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"

The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long. The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.

Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.

Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.

Yes, I am! Why isn't that fine? Not "right", you say.

Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.

*Squashed to death in Salem, 1692

No, there's a difference, in that my clone would get PTSD or some similar trauma as a result, which is a waste of a large part of that clone's life. In the version where I'm drugged into forgetfulness, I've only wasted a day, for science and profit.

Got to be philosophical about it all.

You know, if there was a hypnotic drug such that I could be sure I'd remember nothing (and many, many similar caveats), I'd volunteer to be caused all kinds of pain, because I don't see why I should care. The only moral angle I can see is the question of who would want it and why. Research maybe? In of itself, it doesn't seem bad.

Well that would depend exactly what we're talking about. "Cognitive capabilities", wasn't it? Maybe exclude babies but include drunks, if you like. I don't know who really belongs on the list, which is kind of the point.

Ha, OK. The darts seem designed to separate from the fletched part of the shaft, like a two-stage rocket, so the pun sounded confusingly truthful, as in they're not quite hafted.

Babies, the comatose, people currently asleep ... this one is something about universal human rights, a protection against anybody appointing themselves judge and trying to micromanage who is or isn't an equal, which only causes trouble.

What do you mean, can't haft and yeet too, is that about weight?

No, of course I haven't been doing that, and it's going to be a while before I would have collected a representative sample anyway, if I had been.

Something similar happened to Angband, when I went back to it recently it had been given an overhaul that included making the game shorter. So I went back to v3.4.1.

Yes! Which leads into strange territory, because we can say that attachment is not entirely rational, but is influenced by genes pointing us toward more successful reproduction, without concern for creating knowledge. But then this environment of instincts is the environment we've built up all our cultural store of meaning in, it's the human condition, so the argument can be turned around to say that meaning isn't entirely rational. So even gene-driven attachment isn't meaningless, but at the same time, I don't want to be bullied and herded around emotionally by little nucleic acid spirals just so they can replicate themselves.

You could have an alternative explanation: large animals invest lots of food energy in their offspring, and so the slimmest chance that a calf might not be dead is worth lots of effort. Say one in a thousand actually revive.

Here's an article about orcas: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-64559047

It seems that an orca invests so much in a son that it's like an all-or-nothing one way ticket to pass her genes on. (She might get second try later, but the probability is much lower.)

Do whales grieve?

... within a system formal logic.

Do LLMs grieve?

That's logical, yes. If person A wants to read a summary (even a generated one) outlining the state of modern space dinosaur research, or whatever, and person B also wants the exact same thing, then person B should be happy to read the summary that person A prompted.

The same is true if the thing they both want is a stale cupcake bought from a gas station. But this still doesn't mean that person B wants to be presented with person A's stale thing, because the overhead of the social transaction isn't worth the object. Which is to say, it makes a terrible gift.

There's knowledge in books, and it's ingested all the books, so it does hold knowledge. But I guess that's not how you mean it.

But of course with the gen-AI stuff you are getting put in touch with the real ideas of real artists (e.g. Miyazaki), it's just that they've been anonymized and put through a blender.

> I don’t think there are many of these people

I think there are lots of people who value art for the ideas of the artist. There are also lots of people who think that they value something like quality of brushstrokes, and these are the same people, mostly. I mean they don't know what they like it for, but the raw graphical data is what's in front of them, so they ascribe their preference to its (supposedly) measurable qualities.

Hence this thing about I can tell it's AI because its graphical quality is bad. In a way that's correct though! The artist's ideas are hinted at in the brushstrokes (or whatever other graphical aspects). In the gen AI picture you get hints of a phony mind. It becomes hollow when you know that, or when you think you know that. It's not delivering the cultural experience, if the hints you pick up on are false.

Like how if you bought a box of chocolates, and it was actually filled with rocks, you wouldn't dislike it until you found out.

Immediate glamor followed by gradual disappointment is AI output all over.