jrlocke

Because there is no evidence to the contrary?

I'll save reasonable people some time by highlighting the key premise: "what if materialism is not the only game in town?"

I think, broadly, it's that a theory of mind should be informed by empirical evidence, by scientific research, and that liberal doses of the those will dissolve away many of the classic problems in philosophy of mind.

I'm partial to the 500 mile email: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html

I totally get the sentiment, but I really want to read 3 NYT articles a month.

To make the company what I pay now for a subscription, that would come out to around $6.00 an article. I'm not sure I'd press that $6.00 to read button very often.

Your scheme would broaden the total number of readers, but I'm unsure that the company would actually do well under it.

To be more explicit, I'm saying I find it weird to hear so much about the Chinese room argument from a crowd of (presumably) materialists.

The Chinese room argument itself isn't very compelling. Surely the constituent parts of the brain are fundamentally governed solely by physics, surely thought arises solely from the physical brain, and surely the constituent parts (and thus thought) could be described by a sufficiently complex discreet computation.

Are we not conscious?

You're looking for rout, not route :)

Unbelievable photo of the decrepit state three years ago: https://twitter.com/gpk320/status/1078885655634157569

Why not some animals have fictional mental states and others do not?

> I’ve seen Denver the guilty dog. She’s behaving like she feels guilty [therefore she likely experiences guilt].

I'm not sure I believe this, but there are other believable explanations than yours: consider that humans and the dog could share a non-mental dispositional state (something more basic and hardwired into us) that leads to guilty actions. You would acknowledge that some very simple animals function in this way, and we as humans retain other core systems from simpler times.

Human consciousness could be on top of this and not a guaranteed consequence of it. We additionally rationalize and experience this state and the actions we tend to take from the guilty dispositional state–and as humans call that guilt–but the dispositional state could exist on its own.

This is an unpopular opinion, and should be wielded very carefully, but I think something often lost in these conversations is that the existence of a human behavior in an animal is not sufficient evidence that it's backed by the full weight of the human-like mental states. It may well be, but additional evidence must be presented.

As humans, we're strongly prone to anthropomorphize–I'm capable of ascribing human feelings even to inanimate objects–and so are prone to doing the above without rigor.

An extreme example: if you drop acid into the water in which a paramecium lives, it will fire up its cilia and frantically try to retreat. It's a single cell, there is no suffering or mental states, but it sure looks like it.

An ant could have a sad looking death, but it surely cannot reach the depths of human sorrow, and the related suffering, that a similar event could elicit. It can't mourn the time it won't spend with its children, or the ways its life could have gone.

I'm not proposing that everything between us and the paramecium cannot suffer, but that arguments in these areas must go beyond X has behavior Y, so X must have full mental state associated with Y.

> Cigar smoking in moderation (all the way up to one cigar per day) has been shown to be a fairly minimal risk multiplier for cancer

Honestly curious about this one, do you have a source?

Let me just say that if you think you may not want to view the image, you don't want to view the image.

> Even from an ecological standpoint: hotter climates will positively impact some species (including species which don't even exist yet!), while negatively impacting others.

The worry isn't that global warming will be bad for animals, you're right, there will be winners and losers, likely in comparable amounts. The worry is that it will be bad for biodiversity, a resource that is extremely slow to replenish (even taking into account these new opportunities). On the edges of the curve, some animals will be huge winners, and some will be huge losers. 10xing the populations of some species while others go extinct is only a net null on the very surface, it's still a huge loss diversity wise.

Consider the things beyond this one planet. Surely we're simply at an interregnum between two great ages of exploration.

Location is simply a convenient cudgel. It would be just as defensible to trot out family size based pay (greater pay for more mouths) or net worth based pay (greater pay for lesser existing privilege) or the like.

Location just gets those in power what they want: higher personal comp and lower employee salaries.

Within the article it's revealed that not only is this a new variety, it's a potentially useful tasty eating and cider apple.

Yes.

But many preexisting remote-focused US tech companies are not heavily outsourced. They've gone "through the initial pain of setting up remote work" and are subject to the same economic forces. If these companies haven't been tempted into heavy outsourcing, why should we imagine that new companies entering into their situation will?

This article presents the functionality as new, but wirelessly charged electric vehicles have been in use at small scale for many years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_electric_vehicle

Like every other study that purports to show the toxicity of MSG, this one cites wildly unrealistic dosages, dosages that would cause toxicity with salt as well. Just skimming the abstract I see an example with a dosage of 2 mg/g. Scaled up to human terms (assuming a 180 pound human like me), that's a dose of 160 grams, but personally, I'm a heavy MSG user and a 50 gram shaker of MSG lasts me for months. Also consider that my daily intake of sodium should be 3.4 grams. 160 grams of MSG has 19.2 grams of sodium alone! Almost everyone on earth eats less than 1/100th of that studied dose of MSG daily. The dose makes the poison; in my opinion this writeup is intellectually dishonest.

> The NYT employs enough disingenuous obfuscators

The opinion writers are purposely selected to oppose and challenge the viewpoint of the editorial board. Assuming that the editorial board is largely truly correct, there is going to be some degree of intellectual dishonesty among the opposing opinion writers.

I do sympathize with you; I do not enjoy many of their opinions.

Well, it at least means that their supporters don't consider racism a dealbreaker.

There is a larger gulf between the complexity of human behavior and animal behavior than you are acknowledging.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that we have an illusion of consciousness.

When I took classes with Daniel Dennett, he was always amazed at the strength of convictions people had about consciousness even without education in the area.

This is an unpopular opinion, but the human intuition is not a good discriminator of consciousness: "Dennett (who argues that consciousness is unique to humans), claims that intuitive attributions of mental states are “untrustworthy”, and points out that “it is, in fact, ridiculously easy to induce powerful intuitions of not just sentience but full-blown consciousness (ripe with malevolence or curiosity) by exposing people to quite simple robots made to move in familiar mammalian ways at mammalian speeds (1995).”"[1]

Personally, I'll be agnostic until consciousness is much better understood.

[1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-animal/

Wet streets cause rain.

In philosophy, you sometimes hear an idea along the lines of "the least useful (or useless) map is that which has a 1:1 scale. This is a nice counterexample.

SEEKING WORK | iOS Developer | Boston | Remote Only

Tufts educated iOS developer with 5 years of experience building world class iOS apps (Notarize + Savant).

Experience + expertise with Swift, Obj-C, functional programming, RxSwift, RxCocoa, Redux, MVVM, Clean Architecture, testing, UIKit, and Foundation.

Looking for moonlight work, 1-5 hours a week. Bug fixes, surgical UI updates, small feature refactors.

Get in touch: julian.r.locke (at) gmail.com