91 karma · joined July 22, 2024
"But," they continued rather than stopping at defending rights, "when those rights can be used to enable activity which we deem criminal but hasn't yet been tested in court, we have to take them away."
Please imagine for a moment that I told you the REAL truth is: we are surrounded by trickster spirits. There once was a Creator who created these tricksters along with the cosmos, and they whispered their powerful lies into his mind and convinced him to die. Now, they turn their powers on us and convince us of religious beliefs. Every personal mystical discovery through prayer and meditation is a lie from such demons, and the only path to salvation is the painful task of purifying yourself of all religious belief.
I think you would probably not believe this (me neither). But how could you know it's not true?
Maybe you would reject it because you have received God-given teachings that contradict it, but I would say this is evidence of my view, the supernatural convincing power of the trickster spirits. You might challenge my view, but that's not possible, because my statements are unfalsifiable. Every statement you made in favor of your belief would further support mine.
Neither of us would be able to test or disprove one another. We would be stuck, each believing the other ignorant of an essential cosmic truth.
This type of thinking is poisonous to our species, it locks us into ignorance and makes us putty in the hands of the powerful, leading us to believe whatever we feel or hallucinate or are taught. It leads us to label non-belief as idiocy and a rejection of happiness. It leads good people to believe they are impure and in need of purification. The power of those trickster spirits twists our kind natures into isolation and self-hatred.
The fact is, to be truth, a statement must be observable by even our enemies and all of those who do not share our views. What makes truth is its objectivity.
Your belief is that you and very few others have a special knowledge of the thoughts and intentions of the creator of the universe. I feel this is an intensely prideful view. How small the creator's intentions must be to be comprehensible to our minds, a few tiny mites crawling on a mote of dust for only an instant, floating through a sunbeam in a vast and ancient cosmos.
You say we are all one human race and should care for one another and create peace here on our blessed Earth. I agree with you fully on this.
But what peace we have has come only from diverse and open societies, liberalism and secularism and scientific pursuit of truth. The world is improving, demand for equal human rights growing, lifespans extending, generation upon generation thanks to idea exchange and liberal values, not faith or autocracy.
You say all groundbreaking science is rejected at first. This is to the credit of science, not a criticism of it. All the examples you referenced were the result of questioning, skepticism, and the acknowledgment that previous views could be wrong, and today they are accepted, thanks to science. What religions can be said to equally subject their own ancient god-given teachings to the same skeptical inquiry? If this is what you value, the ability to be proven wrong, you will not find it in your religious claims of ancient, infallible, immutable teachings.
You claim to know the science of the soul, but science is challenge, disproof, falsifiability, doubt, skepticism. I don't see evidence of skeptical science being done on the soul by the faithful. Faith has none of these questioning qualities. In fact you encourage me to call skepticism negative, an enemy, a parasite.
No truth has ever feared any doubt or question. That's the nature of truth: it is not harmed by doubt. Skepticism is not the enemy, it is the path to discovering lies. Descartes said: "If you would be a real seeker of truth, you must, as much as possible, doubt all things."
Thank you again for your thoughtful discourse.
This is part of what intrigues me about this topic, the inductivist view that if we make enough empirical observations we can eventually settle on an objective truth. E.g. by observing enough cats we can conclude that all cats have whiskers.
The realm of science is falsifiable statements. "All cats have whiskers," is a falsifiable statement. We can only state it with 100% certainty by observing all cats (impossible). We can disprove the statement by experiment, however, one designed to discovering just one pathetic little whiskerless cat.
I subscribe to this, Karl Popper's view, that truth is an ideal we can pursue but never quite expect to arrive at. Truth seekers aim to be less wrong, but have little hope of being 100% exhaustively right.
This isn't to say we are unable to act like we believe anything. We can assume the next cat we meet will have whiskers and get by pretty well. But I wish more people could accept that statements like "God exists but is not observable in any way," or "The government is covering up aliens and anyone who says differently is part of the cover-up," are not falsifiable, and because they can't be disproven they also can't be trusted as truth. Maybe they are true, but you can't know, so it doesn't matter.
If a used car salesman tells you the car you're buying has above average fuel efficiency, you can test that and you should. If he tells you that it is a magical car that only runs out of fuel when destiny ordains it, we can't test that, so we should stay skeptical of the claim.
Whatever means by which someone believes they are directly querying the universe, if they are making falsifiable statements, those statements can/should be tested by the truth seeker; and if they are not making falsifiable statements, there is no compelling reason to believe them.
> No observation was even feasible for Einstein to formulate GR
Einstein made many observations about the real world to formulate his theories, e.g. Mercury's orbit, the relativity of motion, the inability to distinguish between different forms of acceleration.
> if all that matters to you is what you see, that's your choice
To be clear, in this discussion about what science can explain/understand, I'm advocating for the scientific method as the sole means through which objective truth can be verified, not the sense of sight.
When you mentioned a Creator being whose intent could be known and aligned with, my reply was a reference to a Laplace quote I thought you'd recognize. I apologize if it seemed personal. I only meant to say that we can and do query the universe to discover explanations for how it works without ever assuming the existence of gods or their supposed intentions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace#I_had_no_...
We do understand that. "What happens when I push a rock off a cliff?" is a query to the universe. The universe's response is observable when the experiment is executed and the rock is pushed.
> a human being needs to undergo a process of self-evolution to become aligned with the Creator's Intent
I have no need for this hypothesis. We can query the universe at any time simply by observing it, proposing a falsifiable explanation for what is observed, and acting within it to test our explanations.
Yet. There's a very big difference in "I don't know," vs. "I know that no one can ever know."
If karma is the result of will, what we're asking here is "When did the first willful creature come into existence?"
(Or, if karma is simply synonymous with cause and effect, then we can probably say the first karmic act was the big bang, the effects of which we are living with even now. But I think that's a less useful view, so let's abandon it.)
> Karma is a human-only dimension of the universe we inhabit. We alone have free will
Some say only homo sapiens is willful, but that seems unlikely given what we've learned about other now-extinct members of our genus. Did they have free will and/or karma? Do elephants, great apes, dolphins, house pets truly have no free will?
At this point it becomes imperative that we define "free will,"[0] and we just might get stuck there. It's a toughie. We are apparently physical systems, constrained by the laws of the universe just as every other system. Perhaps we are simply acting out our biological programming, another domino falling in a long deterministic line back to the universe's beginning[1]; perhaps we are endowed with the ability to modify reality itself through observation, that our "will" acts in concert with physical law to create reality; perhaps all things have a measure of "will" proportional to their internal systems' complexity[2]... maybe some version of all of these[3] or none of them.
In my opinion, karma is a useful framework for recognizing that we are, indeed, all connected to Kevin Bacon, and whatever we do will ultimately effect that poor man.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_will [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism
There is an ancient hubris in this: the belief that there is something in humanity beyond physics, that we possess a soul or something else which defies mathematical/scientific comprehension.
I would like to believe in our specialness like this too, but I don't understand how someone can confidently proclaim that "AI can never capture" something humans do.
Whatever it is we think AI can never learn about us, is it unlearnable by humans too (i.e. inborn, instinctive)? Or is it learnable by humans, but inexplicable, unlearnable by a machine observing the behavior en masse?
Except Bob. Bob looks at the imagery and, thanks to his up to date technical knowledge, recognizes that the work may be generated. So Bob rejects the imagery, he refuses to allow it to affect him at all. He insults it, calls it slop, insists it cannot be art, insults Alice, and insults the people who were moved by Alice's work.
If one of these two people "doesn't like art" and "doesn't understand it," which one is it more likely to be: the one who is creating, or the one who is criticizing the creation?
Everything dies including (probably) the universe, and shortly before that, our software. So you're right, the number of bugs in a specific application is ultimately finite. But most of even the oldest software still in use is still getting regular revisions, and if app code is still being written, it's safe to assume bugs are still being created by the fallible minds that conceived it. So practically speaking, for an application still in-development, the number of bugs, number of features, number of lines of code, etc. are dynamic, not finite, and mostly ever-increasing.
I don't think this is a description of LLM censorship though, especially in light of the fact that many LLMs are fine-tuned for the explicit purpose of censoring responses otherwise generatable by the model, Contrasting uncensored models with censored ones yields objectively uncensored results.
I thought too highly of modern compiler string literal obfuscation.
> I had found a way to obtain a privileged access token within the environment (a story for another day, but a certain game's executable had hardcoded credentials!), but I wasn't sure what I could do with it.
Can someone speak to this a bit more? I'm under the impression an executable binary shouldn't be easily read to find such credentials, and I don't know what else a game dev is supposed to do if their executable needs to authenticate itself with a remote server.
[1] https://www.perplexity.ai/search/as-far-back-as-the-1950s-it... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PNlf-Ar5oA
By "invisible" I doubt that you mean simply "unable to be seen with the naked eye," since there are of course many things that are only visible using tools (microscopes, telescopes, infrared cameras, etc.)
By "invisible" you might mean aspects of the world which cannot be sensed with any of our human senses using any technology at all, you have a challenge before you: proving they exist.
Perhaps by "the invisible world" you're referring to abstractions or concepts, e.g. "altruism" or "love" or "evil"? But if so, in this instance I think there must be material evidence for these things for one's belief in them to be rational.
The assertion that an immaterial thing exists, but its existence and any effect of its existence are utterly unobservable, is no different from asserting that the thing does not in fact exist.
So life is effectively purely material. One may assert that there is an unobservable unsensible immaterial reality, but this assertion is ultimately meaningless to us.
Observe. Hypothesize with falsifiable statements. Form experiments that could disprove the falsifiable statements. Observe. Publicly make falsifiable statements to peers capable and incentivized to disprove them.
How can this fail to lead us to truth that is as close to objective as possible? What greater method exists?
A long distance relationship between two humans would include discussion about the facts of both relationship participants' distinct life experiences and challenges unexperienced by the other, a necessity for two-way empathy, perpetual conflicts[1] with no obvious solution, compromises, risk of being irreparably harmed by one another, long-term personal growth on the part of both participants, etc. There is a stark contrast between human relationships vs. the relationship of a user with an algorithm crafted to serve.
[1]: https://www.gottman.com/blog/managing-conflict-solvable-vs-p...