ripsawridge

Bartlett is the most amazing presenter nobody ever heard about. I like his talks/papers very much.

i upvote you because i agree with you.

Yeah, my leisure is running, meditation, hiking, playing guitar. Aside from driving to hike on occasion (or train), I don't consume more.

Nice. All philosophies (or religions, what have you) must be pursued with kindness for all beings first, last and middle.

Sorry for the long delay, I just saw your reply. I agree with you more than I disagree. That is -- facing truths is important. Suicide should not be a crime. A dignified death is often about knowing when to go, and that choice is the final sentence of the long book that is a life.

I don't want to drag doctors into "futile quarrels." I just think that the occasion of death is special, and deserves to be communicated face to face, not with robots (oh sorry, with iRobots).

"Tell us how you really feel," asked no one, ever, but it's a free country so--

Yet another way to draw us away from actual connection with a painfully and joyously real world outside.

Better to long to just once, enumerate and follow the subsurface scatter of light on the face of your beloved than to coo and preen over mere mechanism.

A dying culture turns away from whats out there. Rolls over and wishes to slumber in dreams where everything is controlled and safe. Hence, the computer.

I finally figured out what I hate about CGI the most: the animated figures convey no dismay at the weight of their bodies. It's how that dismay is coped with that injects grace into movement. The princess here looks nice enough until she moves. Then it becomes clear there is no soul within the frame that first suffers the pain of an ungainly body coping with gravity, then masters itself, and resolves to move as best it/she can anyway.

That is beauty: the acceptance of limits. The carrying on despite them. You can see this in real people when they walk.

Until the entire inner world is modeled, these constructions have less life that a good puppet. A puppet at least telegraphs the spark of life from the hand and soul that control it's strings. That spark is constant, microsecond communication and feedback.

Stop trying to create simulacrums. Live the life you've been given.

[Returns to computer job. Resolves nonetheless to walk under the moon tonight].

Maybe the tribal identity is muted in good times, when the greater, more complex societal organization offers advancement and the reasonable hope of attaining goals.

But when inequality increases, when a grim determinism seems to hover over all fates, then the tribe is more appealing. So people make them, or draw into them. And tribal allegiance requires demonstration.

Here, students who already suspect they'll get the short end of the stick in the years ahead signal tribal allegiance, as it becomes a growing power in the world. Smart, I guess. But sad if you believe(d) in the complex society.

There are subjective and unknowable states. The whole world is not inside your head. By asserting that the cells in my butt can't possibly love each other, you've made a pretty lifeless machine psychology that I don't have to accept, happily. You can't even prove your idea -- I would like you to be aware you are making a faith-based argument. Anyway, cheers. :)

Ridiculous. If the natural state of the world is "suffering, sex, and death," it's also joy, sex and birth. Sex is at least value neutral -- if you are going to sandwich it between suffering and death I may as well put it between joy and birth -- which are real experiences. Animals seem to experience joy, to play, etc.

Animals also take care of their young, they often mourn those who died.

Plus, your incredulity at the thought of "love" between single-celled organisms is without basis. Love is a subjective state which we can only infer. We (well, some of us, not you I guess) think it's real because we've felt it at a level to which to describe it as not real would do violence to our conception of real/unreal.

And then we infer that it's felt in other organisms around us based on their actions.

Now, a single-celled organism really doesn't have a great range of "actions/behaviors" it can show us. Therefore we don't get to see it. This says nothing about whether it's experienced or not.

What, is healing pure mechanics now? Like, the doctor is a programmer in a room far away and that's a good doctor?

"these theatrics we assign to conveying a few bits of information..."

Really? You really are of the opinion that news about death is just "a few bits of information?" And you are capable of describing the ways humans attempt to be empathic with each other as "these theatrics?"

I'm not sure I want to live in this world. :(

Is it possible that the outflow of people from a developing nation reduces population pressure in that nation such that population there increases?

For Chrome the TurboFan (jit optimizing compiler) Spectre mitigations are turned off when site isolation is on.

Maybe when this genie is out of the bottle everywhere it will convince us to re-prioritize face to face communication and simpler lives with less computing.

"To clean the village we had to destroy it!" he said, wiping his brow. Nods of agreement and approval all around.

This kind of statement is designed to provoke introspection resulting in a "resolve to do better."

However, vast communities are not individuals. They don't have the capacity to "put two and two together." Whatever consciousness exists at that level can only express the most basic emanations from it's constituents.

The decision not to grow is a very sophisticated one. Even considering the question is something only a subset of individuals is capable of doing. It is akin to facing and accepting death. Taking that on board, can you imagine what kind of amazing culture we'd have to have for this to be expressed at the level of large groups? (segments of society, etc).

There is an esoteric/occult idea that if you want something to stick around, you oppose it directly. Something "bad" (and I'd call the willful ignorance and lowest common denominator style of the current White House bad) actually moves towards chaos and dissolution. Fight it, and you lock it into it's current orbital position. This is not right/wrong or good/bad, simply a kind of physics.

Completely agree, +1.

Wow, thanks for the recommendation...this interview is blowing me away. So much insight.

Gorgeous, thanks for that!

Amazing moderation, amazing response. Wow! Kudos to both of y'all.

Thanks! I'd quibble a bit with that though. I love the way Zen banishes ideas and concepts, throwing them into the fire the moment they reify. However there is a something. A something greater. That is very much the point. To perceive it, to align with it.

Zen knows that ideas in the mind prevent you from doing this, that's why they are so militant about banishing concepts.

For example, when we westerners say "God," we attach all kinds of stuff to it. Near-eastern King, sitting frowning on a throne.

Buddhism would agree with none of that. And so, to them, that kind of God doesn't exist.

A field which surrounds us though...this is the Buddhist idea of God and it's precisely what our culture is at war with. As materialists, we continually deny that such a thing could be. My argument is that we should seriously think about this idea.

I'm no religious scholar, though I practice zen. I certainly have some things wrong and am happy to be corrected.

I would just ask you to imagine the world you are going to get if you think "growth at all cost" is what is necessary to survive. Won't it eventually be a world in which it's no longer possible to grow?

I'm definitely piggybacking on what growth made possible. I wouldn't have been born otherwise. But I can still see a shitty situation and call it what it is.

Finally, technology is tool-making. We make tools to improve our lives. However, some tools grow too large and come to dominate us. At some point continually "adapting" to outsized tools becomes a fools game.

I saw the ideas presented as one of a long stream of similar ideas which have been presented, all of which shape a narrative that obscures more than it reveals. I happened to make a comment on this instance. It's great that you don't see a conflict or have any issues with the ideas presented...I'm a different person.

One thing that's happened regarding Buddhism is that western people have picked up the things they like and ignored the rest. In reality, Buddhists think that the experience of Oneness that they reach is real. They may give it different names. But I haven't heard it said by them that the experience is limited to the mind (by which you must mean an individual brain in a head). I think western "apologists" for Buddhism have done that, in order to curry favor...to win over a handful of materialists.

They are wasting their time. A materialist is already someone who staked out the least courageous position of engagement in life. What good is their approval?

Thanks, no.

I also like for humanity to strive for better and better things. But do you get that mostly, "better" has just meant that someone else pays the cost?

My point is that a real look into "better" will often (probably! Not necessarily!) lead a person to minimize his or her ill effects. Naturally, being decent, they'll try to maximize their good effects. I pointed to a tradition like zen to evoke minimalism, to evoke noticing the smallest details. There are certainly many ways to improve.

I guess I spoke in a strong way so that my words wouldn't be immediately lost. If it sounds like I'm devaluing too many just plain good aspects of humanity then I can say I didn't mean to say that.

Now...I do quibble with the set of facts you offer that indicate the now is the best. Yes, life is so good for so many. Though we are clearly not in balance. We are heating up the atmosphere and we don't have a solution. That is an actual problem, right? Yes, it's easy to ignore. Easy to hope that "something" comes along. But I don't call it responsible.

Yes, good point. The enlightenment experience can't be explained in tidy bullet points. It doesn't even seem interesting to most people. You can't help but use paradox in your words, and then folks even get offended.

I admit that we may just be at a dead end with our current consciousnesses in the mass. Some individuals find a way "through," but on the whole most of us will be happy denying most of reality and we'll burn out because of that (resource depletion).

I guess it just chaps my hide to see somebody who is a "professional knower" about this stuff being smug and on top of the world when he obfuscates far more than he explains. I'll hit the hay :).

I think we should have room for people with many different preferences and intellectual interests.

I would never ask someone to do a thing or live a way that they don't agree with. I'd only ask them to fully understand what their way is...how it affects the fabric of the world. If they pursue their interest with full depth, they'll eventually understand. And then they'll do the right thing.

I can't agree more! A big problem here is that merely to point to reasons for religions to come about (for example, that they solve real problems at the time of their appearance) is to "condone" every terrible thing that ever happened that could be ascribed to religion. Hint to the wise: the doers of terrible things always align the reason for their actions with the current moral authority. Which in this day is likely to be efficient market operations. Their predations may yet be more harmful...we don't have that much history yet in post-religion.

In these discussions, to try and talk about religion as something other than "grotesque superstition" has a hackle-raising effect on people invested in our current cultural totems. The only thing to do for them (the heroic thing), is to fight tooth and claw against those irrational forces trying to coagulate into a new Dark Age of superstition.

Because of this, any real attempts to understand religion are few and far between. It's certainly true that "religion" as experienced by most is a social institution constructed by people of mixed understanding and motivations, and therefore, depressingly, is just as broken as every other organization people create.

These organizations are only the structure erected around a spark that remains almost as mysterious as consciousness itself: the mystical experience of the Divine. I do think philosophy, if it's meaningful at all, should investigate that initial spark. Because it does lead to those good things camelNotation is talking about: inclusion for outsiders; Myth as a durable storage medium for the mores of a culture; Ritual that supports embodied existence, with all it's imperfections and requirements to deal with real suffering.

Personally, I think there is plenty of complexity and intricate thought in that space to keep a generation of technically minded people interested. But alas, they mostly make jokes about a "Sky God" and deny the complexity which they have even inside themselves.

Here is a starting thought: paradoxical language is used in religion precisely because it "stuns" the intellect, forcing it to switch context in ways it doesn't yet understand, but in time, will. It's a kind of interrupt.

A deep inner experience of religion is something that happens on earth because people must endure the unendurable. To pontificate that "oh, they evolved denial, problem solved" is to throw white paint over a breathtaking chiaroscuro. It may be merely an "evolved response," but it deserves more respect.

The only thing our world needs now is a reorientation away from growth at all costs into a mode of life that values the simple, the close by, the cheap.

I don't see this guy giving a damn about that problem. Instead he tosses off bon mots about Popper and Gödel, and intones comfortably that in his view his peers have the right idea because they converge on atheism/agnosticism. Wow. The world is saved.

There is a class of people who value a "small life," the kind we all need to adopt: zen monks. Unfortunately, such people are afflicted by the disease of irrationalism in their ideas about God, or some similar concept that offends the sensibility of the excessively rational so much that they can only paint Belief in the most lurid colors.

Highly unfashionable to study such people. Instead, a professional philosopher keeps giving interviews, attending conferences and publishing papers. I'll be glad when we can no longer afford them. I also apologize for my lack of charity but there it is.