The philosophy thread (reminder philosophy is not politics nor conspiracy theories)

#183

Hey,

Thanks for yet another highly informative response. I’ll have a good think about all this and let it digest.

Caelan

#184

Ugh here I go…I’ll just keep it to bullet points because I dont want to get all soapbox dogma manifesto towards other people, I’d rather people have their own unique opinions then ideological conformity.

  1. Politics is being sold as the new religion in america every time I watch the news.

  2. I went to go play outside recently and what a stark contrast.

  3. I realize everyone has a different situation

  4. Everyone is just trying to get by.

  5. Dont see the need to be at each others throats.

  6. As adults we shouldnt need a nanny to tell us how to behave or play kindergarten cop when we dont get along and may put us in a time out until we do. But we do apparently need a nanny sometimes.

  7. I’m an asshole dont respond to my post.

  8. Why did I post, I saw someone talk about ideology and to me politics should be about compromise of ideological differences ideally…and not wwe. But whateves.

  9. I get a sense of deja vu posting on idmf, I apologize for deja vu posting.

#185

not quite extremist but I see what you did there

#187

My understanding is different than your understanding, how we interpret the communication of our understanding is determined by our perception…

Cats are cool because they can see in the light and they can see in the dark…dont get me wrong dogs can too but cats are more independent even the feral cats that have evolved to become domesticated they never lost the ability to take care of themselves.

#188

everything is and has always been subjective with regards to how our senses feed our salty skull-sponge information.

of course that’s just my subjective opinion though

#189

How fucking amazing is it that 3lbs of pudding fat is a bio electric conscious binary supercomputer fucking lmao…

Fml is like reddit shower thoughts.

#190

Sorry marxists but communism doesnt work because of darwinism…its is because of darwinism that communism will always revert back to a feudal system…

I hate to break it to you che Guevara fans but che wasnt a revolutionary…he was a hellhound…

Capitalism works better because more allowance for social mobility and also the system is based on merit.

If anything socialist policies are nothing but a check to capitalism left unregulated because it leads to unsustainable growth.

#191

Hypocrisy is human…cause of hypocrisy it makes certain things relative by comparison…and because certain things would be relative in comparison to argue certain things would be nonsense

I suck at giving examples.

#192

Carl Jung. The anima and his theory about personalities.

Imo everyone differs in their base on the spectrum from there individual situational experience imo determines the rest.

#193

James baldwin interviews

#194

Human consciousness = collective consciousness of human cells.

High thoughts.

#195

Problem of evil…

God exists…
But if God is good why is there evil…
Imo
Because of free will.

Being that we have free will we can either choose to do good things or we can choose to do bad things.

Tangent:
Moral relativism can reveal some truths but can also lead a person down the path of immorality.

#196

Ooh, something where I can (hopefully) add to the value of the discussion.

@bfk - You may be speaking of free will in that detached sentence still in the context of Christianity. But, it’s an interesting topic: I don’t think we do have free will.

I’m not sure I can satisfyingly reduce this down to a significantly smaller size. I’m not sure what an appropriate level of abstraction is, as I don’t know what everybody else knows, and am unable to make too many assumptions. Here goes…

The first point I’d present is that it is very unlikely that the cognition in the brain depends on quantum noise, or non-computable mathematics. Roger Penrose is a genius, but his opinions on consciousness are not informed by a lifetime of research in general intelligence and cognition. There are a number of leading researchers in cognition and general intelligence that give good reasons to discount any idea that consciousness is non-computable.

However, even if cognition in the brain does depend on quantum physics, it still may not matter.

There are some very promising proposals that represent the universe as a kind of cellular automaton, but unlike conventional cellular automata, it is represented as a hypergraph (a graph with nodes and links between them, except a link can pass through multiple nodes, so a node can reference an entire-subgraph), and is subject to various rules that determine how the graph is manipulated.

You might ask the question, well, why do we happen to have this particular set of rules? Well, in this proposal, all possible rulesets are being applied to different regions of the resulting fractal, simultaneously.

Stephen Wolfram is making a lot of noise about his proposal, though he isn’t the first to go down this avenue, and nor is he the only reputable scientist going down this avenue right now (Gerard ’t Hooft may actually have a deeper and more refined theory, but I know more about Wolfram’s conception, but the point stands in either case). He’s already been able to derive much about relativity and quantum mechanics, which correspond to “pockets of computational reducibility”.

Anyway, the point is, despite the apparent quantum randomness we observe as emergent phenomena, there are good reasons to believe it is deterministic computation driving it all. This links into the issues with constructing systems that can compute continuous values, since you need infinitely many steps. It comes from the idea that things like Pi are values. They are not. They are functions, which have a value insofar as you have computed the function to a particular degree.

It may be the case that the underlying substrate of the universe is non-computable, and it’s just that as abstract objects of those non-computable operations, we are unable to access those underlying mechanics, and exploit them. However, the reasons to suggest this isn’t the case is that so far, we’ve been able to quantise much about physics. And if it is non-computable, how do we explain this? It makes the answer more complicated, and more mysterious than it needs to be. And frequently, the simple solution that makes the fewest assumptions is the right solution.

You might wonder about Quantum computers, and ask, well, how can they do things a normal computer can’t? Quantum computers do not necessarily break this rule of non-computable operations, it would just be that we are harnessing the inefficiency of the underlying computational substrate to accelerate our processing. Like accessing the universal supercomputer.

So, this links into the principle of computational equivalence. This essentially means that there are an infinite number of equivalent, but generalised ways that you can compute information. One such way a Turing machine. Another is cellular automata (which have been proven in principle to be capable of computing any function, if only you can find the right ruleset). Another is cognition. It is possible to model any one on any other. It is also possible to set up channels of water which perform computations, and you can compute anything you like should you only arrange them in the right way. This means that there are mappings between all general approaches. It is also possible to model a Turing machine on a cognitive system. It is just very difficult to keep the system coherent.

Linking it in further, in this automaton model, all constructible systems could be said to exist in some form, in some region of the fractal. But like Pi, it is infinite in how many constructible systems you can devise, so while there are infinitely many constructible systems, no one constructible system can be infinite. The only thing that is infinite is the potential degree to which you compute the fractal.

All together, this means that every possible configuration of the hypergraph is as determined as the digits of Pi.

To close with a somewhat positive note, I think we still have what is “effectively” free will. We feel like we do, even if we don’t, and we can’t predict the outcome anyway, as we can’t get access to the information nor build a computer large enough.

So, it doesn’t change how we should behave, even if all of this is true, as it would be incongruent with our nature to fight it.

For more information on cognition, consciousness, computability - and of course cellular automata - I highly recommend these videos…

Joscha Bach

Stephen Wolfram - (preview not showing for some reason, maybe not embeddable).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez773teNFYA

Stephen Wolfram second video

Also look into Ben Goertzel, too. He has some interesting things to say, as well as some whacky ideas about what we could do with AGI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpSmCKe27WE

Edit: just want to add another thought, it is possible to declare that we have no free will without a computational universe, in that quantum effects don’t influence the outcome of the function of the brain. But, this addresses potential doubts (even if rooted in misinterpretation) as to whether the apparent random/non-deterministic nature of quantum mechanics means we have free will.

#197

So to put it simply… the gist of what you are saying is that we are like red blood cells carrying out a function?

#198

@bfk - Haha, perhaps. Though through much more convoluted means.

I don’t feel right making certain statements without arguments to qualify it!

#199

@bfk

I mean, this is a philosophy thread.

I don’t claim to be any Kant, by any measure, but when has a philosopher ever been known for brevity?

Except maybe particularly eccentric characters like Diogenes! :stuck_out_tongue:

(I’m just a wannabe armchair philosopher, really, but I share the trait of verbosity)

#200

Ok👍

When i write sometimes it’s easier to Start out with a simple summary of my points…

And then state my arguement for the view ive expressed in the summary…

Which I’m glad you did as well cause if you didnt I wouldn’t of been able to follow…

Hey philosophy is better than politics.

#201

Yeah, that makes sense.

I have a feeling my autism has something to do with my verbosity.

I’ve literally always just dived into the deep end and walked around in the dark until I finally get a feel for the place.

It’s rooted in some deficiency in our ability for abstraction. But only in a special case, as I’m not incapable of abstract - but in that when converting a conceptual structure into language I struggle to consider one part of it in isolation, as in my own mind it’s too coupled to the other relations.

#202

Oh yes it is. You don’t frequently see philosophers lying and morally bankrupt.

#203

Jordan Peterson brilliant guy however…he wastes his time fighting people over nonsense…he debases himself by getting caught up in political nonsense.

If only he studied physics instead of psychology.