faktorialas

For a general case of the harms of privacy invasion, I recommend reading relevant chapters off of Schneier's Data and Goliath. Brilliant book.

I also think assuming that you know this can't hurt you yourself is naive, but it's just easier to point to people in more vulnerable spots.

You want to protect your privacy so that in the event that you become politically interesting, they don't have a backlog of your data. Furthermore, you want to protect your data to not be dissuaded from any (even subtle) actions that you might take if you weren't affected by a chilling effect.

You want any person who hasn't been previously cognizant of the dangers of privacy to not have that hang over his head, in case he becomes politically interesting (even not on purpose, like could be the case with whistleblowers), or become politically interesting, like an activist, journalist, etc. Any free society needs this. To do this, everyone needs to have privacy.

Finally, even for the first group to have privacy, everyone has to have it. It's not something you can just give to specific people.

I'm assuming you know that there are plenty bad things can be done with data, if someone is willing. I hope that's evident. Not mentioning what criminals could do with it, or how corporations can abuse people with it. As they routinely do.

It's great apart from that, but this is a fairly big negative if you want to use a bunch of email accounts. There are some other negatives as well, but apart from this, it seems ahead of the pack.

I can back up that Chrome point, unless it has been added in a recent update. On Android, it can do encrypted and plaintext backups - never tested, but I assume they include messages. What else.

IIRC, Yahoo has always provided more data not even because they shared it, but because they were so lax with security.

It'd be difficult to delete metadata about a message, but still keep the content. And they are claiming to not retain message metadata.

Whatsapp and Facebook, meanwhile, are sharing data to improve ads - surely they share much more than that with LE.

Check the metadata portion. One thing to note, this isn't surprising at all. All of the centralized IM servers can do this and, usually more. The alternatives that try to minimize or obfuscate metadata are far from market-ready.

We are creating absurd amounts of information compared to before. Just because US Gov could access the measly amount of info that was generated before doesn't mean that they should be able to access the crazy amounts created now. It is from a very narrow perspective that anyone can call this a "fundemental weakening of government". Compared to before the internet, they're still drowning in insane amounts of data.

We can also add that if they can access some things, they will manipulate their way into accessing more things. Which means that reducing privacy and security is just optimization for them. And that will have costs beyond the US Government's own doing.

Sure, the current law climate seems to be that they can access it. But that climate was created with pushes from LE agencies and ignorant politicians. You may argue that that has always been the case, but clearly there's increasing demand for this to be decided democratically. So US Gov "giving up" this "right" might be the thing that democracy wants.

Mathematicians apply it very rigorously, but mostly in math. Applying that to other areas without specific training is difficult. For this reason, academic philosophy makes a person more rigorous in life generally.

Until you meet a math problem, of course.

Not that learning anything as rigorous and precise as math won't teach you clearer thinking - of course it will.

I'm curious as to what you think.

With regards to science, it seems like at least young people respect it, so we're going to have progress in that sense.

Unfortunately, philosophy doesn't produce life-changing tech or neat gadgets, so reading philosophy that would change one's outlook on politics, ethics or epistemology is ignored.

I'm not sure I generally agree that technological progress helping people is deeply counter-cultural. People like to wallow in cynicism, but young people are super hopeful about the progress of science. I guess that's partially bias of whom I meet online, but it is well established.

Not that most are deeply interested in science or tech, but they sure do like professing love to it, scrolling through cute image macros about it online, and they're not afraid of using it when it's easy enough. Now they might not be the majority if we count old people in the US, I don't know, but if this is a counterculture then it's one that's huge, and growing.

However where I think our points tie together is how people think about politics. People sure love professing cynicism about politics as a way to relieve responsibility. We can make as much tech progress as we want, but no, we won't get better political institutions or more freedom. Impossible.

Unfortunately, tech people are just as guilty of this one.

This leads to people being ignorant of and confused about philosophical issues, but more importantly, it leads to them dismissing them without looking at them. Which doesn't make a worldview void of philosophy, instead it makes one with an unquestioned amateur philosophy.

It's a lot like many in politics assuming that our time is different, and historical examples are irrelevant, even when there is no good reason to believe that. Our modernity is a lot like that.

Well you did say:

>If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.

I mean, how am I to read it. It reads like you're denying what you yourself experience if it isn't registered with scientific techniques.

We are yet to receive an actual datapoint from someone's mind, and it doesn't even seem like we know how we could do that. So all of your talk about scientific and not scientific theories seems to me a category mistake.

There's no scientific support for dualism. There's no scientific support for physicalism. Science can inform them, but we don't have scientific datapoints supporting either one. We merely have rational, or, if you will, philosophical arguments for them. I think I have made arguments against physicalism, namely, that we have no scientific method of accessing the contents of a mind, and we have no idea how to go about doing it.

What I'm hearing from your arguments is just your intuition telling you that all things are or will be intelligible under science, and having faith is fine, but at this point you have to know that this is the most grandiose claim of all in this discussion.

And to be specific, if dualism is true then we can't study minds with science. Science is about corporeal bodies, minds under dualism aren't corporeal. We can study what they do to the physical world, and guess how and when they appear to be linked with it, but we can't pry into the actual contents of the mind, not with science at least. Because under dualism, they aren't physical.

The new translations seem to mean something more like what you note here, rather than what we, westerners would call happiness.

And it's a much better goal in life, isn't it?

That's why it's math and not science.

My original point was that calling a philosophical problem unscientific is like saying this ice cream is nonelectronic. It wasn't meant to be, it doesn't mean it's not good. Or in the case of mathematical theorems or philosophical problems, insightful.

Totalitarianism is absolutely relevant for democracies, because many are only nominally democratic, many employ totalitarian practices and many turn into totalitarianism.

Maybe we'll figure it out someday. That is probably a long way away though, and for now, the problem is for philosophy of mind, only to be informed, but not solved by relevant sciences.

Even if the idea came through empirical means, the theory itself isn't empirical.

Pick your poison. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/#ConCon

If you deny that you experience qualia, well then the core proof for it is gone. At which point we might as well put the whole discussion in quotes.

Still, what makes the definition different from the definition of matter? Do you deny the existence of matter also?

>Because there is abundant evidence that the brain is the mind. Brain damage causes mental impairment, and we can observe it through fMRIs and interact with it through various experiments. We can reproduce some behavior from computer algorithms somewhat similar to biological neural networks, and I don't see why we won't eventually be able to reproduce all of it. Modelling the brain computationally is a huge field of research that has made a huge amount of progress in recent years. Not to mention neuroscience in general, which has produced a huge amount of knowledge.

You mean, abundant evidence than the brain seems to interact with the mind. I think it's inherently tied with the brain too, but I don't think there's anything that bridges the gap and makes the brain = the mind.

>But beyond that, it would be really strange if the physical laws that govern are universe are magically invalid in this one specific place.

Sure, and yet we experience the mind and it's nothing like the things we measure with science. Shouldn't that shake your faith in the universal intelligibility of all things under science?

>Of course it's possible this is all wrong. It's also possible that the Earth is really flat, and evil gods are manipulating all our observations and distorting photos taken from space, etc. But anyone who believes that is crazy.

We experience consciousness. Again, if you don't, then perhaps I'm talking to a bot, at which point I don't deny that I won't be able to show to you what consciousness is. It does have to be experienced.

Your comparisons with flat earth and manipulative evil gods are wholly uncharitable. Science supports the proposition of a round-ish earth; it doesn't of a flat earth. Science doesn't say anything about the existence or lack of existence of consciousness, your intuitions about the future progress of science do. Don't you see the difference?

If this invokes craziness for you, then perhaps you should think longer about what science is and what it says, and compare that with your intuitions about what you think it will be.

>"Qualia" is also a vague imprecise term. If this "consciousness" stuff actually interacted with the physical world, then we would, in principle, be able to observe it. But if it doesn't, then it's irrelevant to us. Totally disconnected from anything you can ever observe or experience.

Funny. It actually is just about the only thing we experience of the outside world. There are people working on the best definitions we have for qualia - if they're not satisfactory to you, do you propose we stop discussing them even though we experience them?

I mean, maybe we should stop discussing unexplored problems in science too.

>If you say "I am conscious", then some chain of events caused that event. Perhaps a thought formed in the neurons of your brain. In principle we could study your brain and see why it believes it is conscious, and what things are causing that behavior. If it's caused by "souls", then, at least in principle, we could study the behavior of the souls, and observe them interacting with physical matter to make you say words or think thoughts.

I mean, I get it, you think it's linked with the brain. It probably is, but we only get reports from people saying it is, that's one thing. The other thing is that even if it is linked with the brain, it doesn't mean that the brain = the mind.

Do you have a different source for the argument? No offense. Yudkowsky isn't an expert on philosophy of mind or philosophy at all, and I don't know of any philosophers who take him seriously. I skimmed it and I'd read it if it was not so long, but I'd prefer a SEP article or something else trustworthy in this case as it's such a long read.

Why "consciousness" in quotes? You don't have it? Are you a bot? And where is the obviousness from? Just this is how problems usually go down, so you assume this one will go the same way?

>But even if science shows that is false, there will always be another scientific explanation.

I mean, science is pretty cool, and having some faith in it is fine, but why this much? Why say always when it doesn't have one now?

> Even if souls exist, they would have to interact with physical matter to work, and so, in principle, could be studied scientifically. Observed and experimented with. And in principle, we could deduce the logical rules that explains their behavior, and build artificial souls, or simulate souls on a computer.

Yes, if they do interact with the outside world, they can be studied by science as much as they do interact. But how do you study them where they don't, where they just provide qualia and the outside world doesn't look any different? Isn't science about reproducible empirical evidence, which qualia don't provide?

>hard problem is weird

Well, you using consciousness in quotes as a, hopefully, conscious person is also weird. I don't see how you avoid the disconnectedness when you see that no science can even know whether you're conscious or not.