david_w

Man I do not believe this. The restaurant and bar industry cater to the reckless youth segment. Seeing "nothing bad happened" to people you know who are less risk-averse than you is enough to coax people back into herding into bars and restaurants. We herded for a century before anything happened and those are clear memories everyone has, too.

What is going to change is the world's attitude toward the Communist regime currently running China. I feel pretty confident in saying that that regime is slated for death, even as public officials and famous people act, in public, like they're willing to get back to normal.

This is where some of us have been for a long time. You cannot permit an intolerant, racist, minority persecuting, citizen murdering, dictatorial, totalitarian government armed to the teeth with the latest in biowarfare who is inclined to make aggressive noises towards everyone who is not like them and some who are (Taiwan) to exist, period.

I think COVID-19 finally brought that home to everyone who is not just outright anti-Western in their outlook.

People are going back to bars and restaurants and jobs, the stock market is going to go up, but the Communist regime in China is going down.

That's what the near future looks like.

But that is OK because that money goes elsewhere in the economy. No?

He leaves out "developing a treatment" as an option. Why?

From the article: "The first is that it overlooks the negative impacts on consumer sentiment and spending, which are likely to persist for many months, if not years. "

Yeah, right. Citation needed. My to-buy list of pent-up demands grows longer by the hour.

It is somewhat, yes. Or I could cause gradual cell death in someone's brain. Same idea.

ianmerrick: I never understand this. How is the fact of experience in any way debateable or something which people disagree on? I am not asking about the epistemological details which appear to be a prerequisite to experiences we have, neurons and neurotransmitters and brain networks and the physics of light and phosphorus and the eye etc , I am talking about experience itself. How can it be confusing?

Often when I have this conversation it appears to me that somehow, impossibly, the other side suddenly gets fuzzy on this thing I call "experience".

hackinthebochs: Your point seems to be that a thing has to exist- have some ontological status, to have thoughts at all, even if that "thing" is only itself a thought or, more vaguely, a temporary convergence of "something or other." When you say "self" or "I" as in, "I think therefore I am" people drag in a whole load of qualities they attribute to a self or an I. I feel like that is what your interlocutor is getting caught on. I understand and take your point.

My replies to each of your comments, in order:

panpsychism or panexperientialism can't be right because they're not weird enough- to paraphrase Bohr. Would it surprise anyone to find out that, in our exploration of the brain we come across something as weird and upsetting to standard theory as QM is to physics ?

__________

If we do a gradual, over a long time, brain cell by brain cell replacement of a living human's brain, that human's self-report is our best bet to get around the impenetrability of the subjective experience of other minds. It is also the biggest challenge to people like me and could point strongly to consciousness as a thing supportable by machines.

__________

I agree that this is a problem that science, as it is right now, can't deal with. But that doesn't mean it's not real. The Big Scientific Inquiry, the spirit of science, seeks to explain and understand everything. Many really dramatic upheavals come out of corner cases in science; the things that are slighly off or not accounted for in an otherwise productive theory.

_______________

It's not important to anyone's brain research, but it is important to society because making a mistake about what is and is not conscious has the potential for huge negative repercussions.

When Dennett dismisses the issue and effectively assumes the consequent of the argument he's supposedly engaged with, not only is he making an error but the consequences of that error are far-reaching into how we act towards one another.

What I am arguing, to the extent I am arguing for anything, is that people like Pat Chruchland have a point and it's not an "academic" one; it's substantive. We are making a mistake if we ignore it.

goatlover said: "only the qualities of perception which are objective exist,"

If you change "objective" to "scientifically validated" you have defined a position known as "ontological positivism", and I would say Dennett does subscribe to this.

The funny thing is, the school of thought which says consciousness is computation by our brains and any computer properly programmed can be conscious, a school known as "functionalism", itself gives ontological status to a non-corpreal abstract thing, namely computation.

If computation can be abstracted from not just the brain but any substrate at all then it exists. So computation can take place on an AMD chip and a Intel chip and a Turning Tape and anything you'd care to rigged up made out of anything whatsoever so long as it could represent the computation of a Turing Tape.

It is what Dennett thinks. Actually, it's what Dennett thinks he thinks, because that idea of Dennett's is inherently non-sensical; it is self-contradictory.

Here's why.

To explain qualia as a "trick" is to void the onotological status of qualia itself. He can't do that. It doesn't matter if it's all an illusion or a trick, it doesn't matter what its ultimate epistemological status is. Qualia is experienced and it's the experience itself, whatever its biological underpinning turns out to be (you can't have sight without eyes), which is relevant.

Yes, all experience could be fallible and illusory but the fact of experience itself cannnot be an illusion.

Experience qua experience is the thing no scientific theory of perception and cognition needs. So why does it exist? In other words, why are we not as not-conscious as rocks and chemical processes and planets and electrical activity, doing all we do, saying all the things we say? It's certainly possible.

Dennett, and I am inferring this I haven't heard him say it, is an ontological positivist. Only those things which the methods of science reveal to exist are "real" and everything else is, as you say, some kind of illusion. Sonunds good. But an illusion (which is some experience whose epistemology we have misconstrued) is not itself an illusion. Its ontgological status as "a thing which does exist" is secure.

Never take the arguments of a side from their opponent's mouths.

The arguments I offered have nothing to do with any of the three he claims they all boil down to.

If you think I made one of these three, please tell me which one so I can clarify the argument.

Assuming it's a side effect of processing- known as an epiphenomena- immediately commits you to answering the question- does a badly programmed computer have a form of consciouness? Does a thermostat have a primitive form? Is it specifically impossible to create AI which emulates human thinking to the last detail, but has no consciouness, i.e. really is just an empty machine with zero experience? Is that an impossible task which could not be achieved by anyone by any means?

Suppose I debate with someone who has a computer programmed to be conscious. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to very very slightly change the programming so whatever output it's producing which is proving, my opponent claims, the computer is conscience, starts to degrade.

I'm going to do that then ask my opponent- still conscious? I'm going to do this and I'll guess my opponent will say "less so perhaps" , which would be his best reply.

Then I'm going to repeat until I get a "probably not" and then a "no" from him, which by his own hypothesis has to happen.

Then I'm going to diff the conscious program and the unconscious program and ask him if he really thinks those slightly altered lines of code are the difference between consciousness and a humdrum computer.

Because that's where this goes, this idea that a certain type of computation is consciousness.

It also goes to consciousness being granted to a machine like a Turing Tape. You may not think that squishy biological matter should be bequeathed with a "magical" property which hosts consciousness, but tell me, how do you feel about a Turning Tape?

No literate scientifically minded person disputes your point, but it doesn't address my point. My point is this- qualia as a phenomena exists. Even if I think a red thing is blue, I am still experiencing some color and the experiencing itself- aside from its accuracy- is what needs explaining.

So experience, aka qualia as a phenomena unto itself is in need of explaining, not any particular qualia and not the presence of absence of any correlation between the qualia and objective reality, i.e. the "truthfullness" or "accuracy" of the qualia.

naasking, as I see it, Dennett (in Consciouness Explained) engages in a sleight of hand. He redefines consciouness as "a bunch of distinct phenomena that gets muddle together", but that doesn't touch the mystery of qualia, it tries to just deny that there is anything to explain, owing to the fact (Dennett claims) that the problem is mischaracterized from the start.

Just to toss off one more worthwhile idea to you since it seems like you're interested in this topic. p-zombies is not the most challenging scenario strong-AI deniers are likely to face. Brain cell replacement is.

With p-zombies you have two observers outside the system arguing about the system's inner life. With brain cell replacement, you have the subject directly and quite authoritatively experiencing the system in question and reporting back.

It seems many times more likely some of us will live to see this, but you just never know. Newtonian mechanics had it all locked up save for a few details and look what those details held.

Every brain science / cog-sci paper it seems has some alternative amputating conclusions to pronounce about consciouness.

They sort of have to do that because of the funding model they live under. Positive results only ! It's not the researcher's fault; I don't fault them. I just adopt a highly skeptical, wait and see, there's-probably-more-to-the-story attitude generally in science, that, and the more concrete counter-arguments I mentioned in my other comments make me a very highly dissident observer of this field.

"The very concept of p-zombies illustrates this a priori refusal to admit any possible evidence whatsoever of consciousness. Another person could simply decide that I am in fact a p-zombie and lock themselves in a closed system of thought out of which there is no path to demonstrating that I "experience" anything at all."

This is a good point and makes the problem interesting in an additional way. We (I) assume something like p-zombies exist in non-human consciousness, dogs and cats for example. It's like something to be a dog. How far down do we want to go ? Frogs? I'll bite; it's like something to be a frog:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8IY2eTBqd8

But here's a counter to the p-zombies argument, OK?

The p-zombies argument is usually taken to mean there comes a point where what has been created is so indistinguishable from "real" people, ala Ex Machina, that arguing over it is a form of ideologically motivated perversion.

Let me turn that round and say that the p-zombie argument is (accidentally) making the following strong claim- it is impossible to build a machine which in every way acts human but has no experience.

That's a very very strong claim on this universe. I wouldn't take the bet, because someone's going to do it.

But if someone is going to do it, how can we tell when they have or they haven't? The Turing Test is outdated (as I see it) and anyway already passed for some judges ( re: ELIZA).

To me, this circles back to the original problem. We can't distinguish between the high probability that someone can eventually create an actual zombie and "real" experience-having artificial intelligence, and why is that ?

The issue is just another form of the basic problem- we don't have the conceptual framework to get our minds around what experience is.

Our basic assumptions may be off. Instead of quarks et.al. being the basic building blocks of matter and matter of brains and brains of consciouness, some people take experience to be the most basic building block of the universe.

This was my conclusion and I thought it would just brand me as an eccentric so I never pushed it, but now I see it's being kicked around by people with careers.

Another assumption is that experience/consciousness is comprehensible to the level of scientific causality/reality we're aiming at, (let's just shorthand it to "ultimate reality"), because there are separate, distinct things in the first place.

But what if separate things is not a fact about ultimate reality? What if they're more like a hardwired perceptual compulsion we can't escape? Then we might very well find truly insoluable mysteries on the foundational tier of our conceptual scaffolding, because none of the "things" we think about are real in the first place. Things which don't exist, don't have to "add up".

So this would mean our minds and ultimate reality are just not made for each other, even as that reality directly impinges on our personal daily lives in ways we can and do readily experience and talk about.

It seems like the most far fetched and deflating hypothesis possible, but consider we'd merely be joining the rest of the animal kingdom in this regards.

The brain is the most complicated structure in the known universe. The probes currently available to science- fMRI and GSR - are both gross measures of cortical electrical activity. They're enough to start to explore apparent structural and (gross) electrical correlation between brain areas and (gross) alterations in "consciousness", in this case unconsciousness invoked via propofol and ketamine. Fair enough.

However, it irritates me when I hear scientists loosely throw the word "consciousness" into these studies and here's why.

In these studies, consciousness is always implicitly defined operationally as the electrical activity in some identified networks- DAT and DSM and front-parietal and sensory motor etc.. But the concept of consciousness has another life in philosophy where in works by people like Patricia Churchland and others, it references something more subtle- the mystery of why there should be anything we call experience at all.

Experience itself doesn't seem to be necessary to the working of any machine, including our brains. We don't think our TVs have any experiences despite (being capable of) accurately representing all human visual experiences. The reason we don't think they experience what they're displaying is because we know how they work and we know there's no ghost in the machine. Adding on "experiences" to an explanation of how TVs work is gratuitous and unnecessary.

But that's not the case with humans-just the opposite. Experience is absolutely foundational.

Descartes tried to boil his world down to what he could know with absolute certainty and arrived at his famous "Cogito ergo sum" formulation, but actually, he skipped a step; that step is simply- "There is experience".

Experience is perfectly gratuitous to any explanation of brain activity since all that activity, like an electrical storm, could take place in exactly the same way without it. We (our brains) could be, and most scientists believe are, very complicated, but purely mechanical machines. They could be exactly as they are with no more awareness- not to say feedback loops- than a blender.

But that account leaves the problem of experience or consciousness completely untouched. That would be O.K. except we know we have it.

The mystery of consciousness is not totally defined by questions like of "can I make you unconscious or conscious?" or "can I cause you to have this or that illusory experience by stimulating your brain?". The mystery of consciousness is why is there anything like experience at all ?

So whenever I read a paper that makes some confident assertion about consciousness, it gets under my skin. It's electrical activity and perhaps human behavior and speech they are actually examining, not consciousness. I hear these papers gratingly assuming the consequent with respect to the biggest mystery there is. They are implicitly saying "this is consciousness, this pattern of electrical activity in the brain and here is what we have discovered about consciousness". That's one perspective, but to philosophers, both academic and non-academic, it's a form of punting on the real question.

Consciousness is to brain science what AGI is to AI. Researchers just love to make assertions and grand predictions.

Actually the correlation between the two is closer than that since strong AI claims that consciousness can be captured in a computer; Kurtzweil and his Singularity concept is in this school of thought.

He and people like him claim that not only does experience arise as a direct result of brain activity but any substrate- including general purpose computer platforms- will similarly give rise to the same experiences if only they are programmed in a particular way, specifically, if the computations are functionally equivalent to the brain's computations.

Are badly programmed computers therefore experiencing chaos? Well, why not? Are simpler computers, like a thermostat which "experiences" temperature changes, also somehow dimly conscious? If that seems like a straw man argument to you, you should know Marvin Minsky bought it and so do a lot of other scientists whether they realize it or not.

All of this is just a non-starer to people like me. You don't get to skip a step because it keeps your theory neat or provides you the promise of immortality because you uploaded your "you" to a machine.

Consciousness, understood in this way, is a genuine mystery which for now at least I don't think we have the conceptual tools to even define much less make pronouncements about.

No, no we haven't.

A police state is a one-party state whose domination is maintained through the application of despotic force against the civilian population.

We, on the other hand, are experiencing a once-in-a-century, world-wide, corona virus pandemic with a mortality rate at least 10x the normal rate of corona viruses and which no one has immunity to because it just recently jumped species.

Since the vast majority of ultimate victims of this disease are the old and the infirm, we are undetaking a collective, other-sparing, selfless plan of action.

No one is alarmed by this action. It says absolutely nothing about our form of government and.what it says about our national character is inspirational and affirming.

See the difference?

Second this also. Also enjoyed Will To Power as a kind of well of "things well said, which make you think, " even if they're not strictly correct.

Bertrand Russell wrote a lot of very accessible Western philosophy overview or survey books which I found orienting:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/a-history-of-western-philosoph...

and

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/the-problems-of-philosophy_ber...

the former is online here:

http://www.ntslibrary.com/PDF%20Books/History%20of%20Western...

About this one he said :(paraphrasing from memory now), "A big book is a big evil. You may ask why then the author proposes to lay before you the present work..."

He's a hoot.

"we talk more about the good stuff than about the bad stuff,"

20:1 minimum good to bad. Minimum. Even one "bad" a week may just be too much.

Also, limit the relative number of times you approach with something that "needs doing". You can't let your relationship turn into mere help-mate-ism.

Each kit is designed to support a family of 4 for 1 month.

That's some freaking "kit" !!!

Sheldon Axler's acclaimed "Linear Algebra Done Right"

Seconded. Highly recommended.

Right. Conspiracies happen all the time because there are plans, which if understood by those upon whom the planners wish to enact them, would be rejected by their targets.

That describes most plans people have.

So the planners deceive and dissemble. That is how the world has always worked.

What's more, it's instinctive knowledge that this is happening all the time. Suspicion of those in power is a human instinct which, like all instincts, optimizes our survival chances under the conditions for which it evolved. WRT to political conspiracies, those conditions still hold today.

The way to think about conspiracy theories is the same way you think about inventors and inventions.

Nature produces inventors (conspiracy minded individuals) many of whom produce only harebrained inventions ("conspiracy theories" so called) some more who produce hit and miss inventions and a few which produce inventions which are overwhelming important and matter to survival ("Hitler is going to kills us all, we must flee right now!" - spoken by a Jew in 1933 Munich).

What this mapping between domains, inventions and conspiracies, also implies is that just because someone was wrong about one conspiracy doesn't mean they are wrong about all conspiracies and their credibility should not be automatically bankrupted if they believe one or two false conspiracy theories.

I do read some conspiracy theory sites and like to hear plausible (non-alien/ lizard people) ones because I want my mind to at least entertain the idea. It's like panning for gold. Most of it is nothing. Once in a while, maybe a little taste of something and I retain it dimly awaiting future possible supporting evidence.

For example, the "desperate labor shortage" and "Americans don't like STEM" meme is a clear conspiracy amongst employers and attorneys and their clients to control engineering wages and have more of the profits go to business owners. I used to not know about that "conspiracy theory" then I heard it and wondered if it could be true then over time the evidence for it became incontravertible.

Just to give one example.

"What's amusing to be is how anyone can look at the incompetence of governments across the world, and conclude they'd be capable of any kind of organized conspiracy against the general population."

Tell that to the Jews in Deutchland circa 1931...

Tell that to the Kulaks in the Ukraine in 1930 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor,

Tell that to the educated classes in China under Mao;https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/mao-murd...

You see conspiratorial thinking as some kind of bug in the thinking of insuffciently skeptical and analytical minds; a branch of stupidity. But it's not. It's a self-defense mechanism which, like other things considered antiquated and ineffcient like borders and control over immigration saves people from mass death.

These things don't exist because people are stupid and can't reason. They exist because people aren't stupid and do reason and then believe in their own mind's creations.

No matter how smart or sophisticated or computer-aided your reasoning is, no matter how big your data set becomes, you will only match and elucidate upon, but not beat, instincts which evolved under real Darwinian pressures which make you aware and wary of things which kill en masse.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world, Sweden puts into practice what they only speculate about:

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/covid-19-and-swedis...

The phenomena you're refering to is real. I acknowledge that this set of things exist. There also exists a set of regulations and administrative agency issued laws which are fundamentally political- coersive towards a political or social end and not a safety or public-good end, except in the expansive vision of the annointed who created them. People get pursued and punished over this set of regulations.

Anyone can convince themselves that such a set must exist just by answering the question - are there likely to be people in administrative agencies who had the specific ambition to put themselves into those positions to achieve a purely political, not "good public policy", ends?

In otherwords are there crusaders in the adminstrative agencies?

It's like asking if some politicians are crooked or if some people are criminals.

That's why it's an error to dismiss the cries of foul play when they're raised. We know those people are there somewhere.

T

"JS makes Google Docs, Slack, and a thousand other applications .."

...I never use.

Take all the JS on all the webpages and throw away every page to which it's not essential. Call the remainder set A.

From set A, throw away every application whose functionality could be essentially be replaced by something like an ASP or JSP/Servlet round-trip hit without it much bothering anyone, as in the olden days. Call the remainder Set B.

Take everything in set B and task yourself with creating a secure methodology of obtaining the same or similar level of utility not involving Javascript or anything less secure.

Compare the effort to do that with the sum total cost of what Javascript has inflicted on the world.

Include in your calculations direct financial losses, expenditures in counter-measures, all the manhours spent in ameliorating all the breaches in security caused by Javascript, all the human toll of being tracked - by Javascript- online...

In fact, let's just keep this simple, forget all that.

Every time any human being in any security agency in all nations the world over is engaged in any activity, offensive or defensive, which has as its ultimate root cause Javascript, just make that the bill you have to pay.

Now look at the net gain (Google Docs!) and the net cost and tell me Javascript is a great idea.

I got some time ago that not everyone shares my hierarchy of values and concerns. You use Twitter and Facebook and Google etc. etc ad naseum... all forks where each time I chose the other path.

But by saying "no" to that steaming pile of shit I don't find I've said no to modernity and I don't find myself disavantaged in any way. Those things are not modernity or even the web- they're gadgets. Gadgets you love and can't imagine living without, that's all, like the smartphone you have, and I don't.

J'accuse our world of the following. We have cost everyone incalcuable wealth, time, opportunity and frankly the attention of some of the best minds of the past two generations all to buy ourselves a very particular, circumscribed and unnecessary kind of interactivity on our computer screens.

We have recklessly trodden very far down a dangerous and even deadly path, step by step, merely because at each point along the way we counted our own sunk efforts and extant artefacts as the measure of all things. This, and we have effectively coerced the world into following us.

Everyone should stop writing webpages which require javascript.

Javascript is a security nightmare responsible for the overhelming majority of web-based CVEs .

Javscript's contributes mostly fluff to the vast majority of webpages.

What's worse, some pages check for it and deliver a totally blank page if it's not enabled, just to punish the non-compliant.

Even worse than all of the above is the fact that Javscript is the vehicle through which users are IDed and tracked. It's the reason why telling your browser to dump-cookie at the end of a session is ineffective.

Javascript is popular because people who own websites demand it be enabled. They demand that so they can fingerprint you- no other REAL reason for Javascript's popularity.

Every single person on this particular forum eithers knows or can clearly see what I am saying is true, but their jobs depend on them selling their Javascript skills and that's the reason this post, as you read it, is fading to gray as its downvoted.

Javscript is the instrumentality of the surveillence state. That's 98% of its utility.

All webpages should have a non-Javascript, "here's the info" version available and the fact they don't is a scandal and we are the culprits.

My old lady thanked me for crossing the street as she was proceeding south and me north.

I pumped both fists in the air and exclaimed "we're not dead yet!" and she laughed.

You live in a big city perhaps.

3M was shipping masks overseas until yesterday. Some people were buying out places like HomeDepot and Costco and selling them at huge markup. It's not "their" fault these independent agents behave this way. Culpability can be scrounged up, if it must, to the extent that previous administrations ignored their own experts warnings:

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-03-20/disaster-f...

If you operationally define "good" as "fewer dead people" then reserving what masks there are for healthcare workers and first responders is a "good" because they are society's agents that can save people from death.

Not enough masks? Doctors nurses first on the lifeboat folks. That's just the way it is.

Sure, telling people not to buy them is a poor substitute for what ought to be individual conscience. How is the fact that such a substitute has to be sought "their" fault ?