phil mickelson, easily the most famous left handed golfer, is right-handed but plays lefty because he would stand across from his dad and mirror his swing as a kid
fun fact: vs the US, golf stores in Canada carry more left-handed clubs because a right handed hockey player has their right hand higher on the stick which is the same orientation as the grip for left-handed golfers.
or the imprisonment of Galileo or the persecution of Socrates or the crucifixion of Christ or the legal charges against James Comey or even interpersonal dynamics in the corporate world. politically powerful insecure people swinging a stick at those who challenge them.
i’m convinced a significant number of that majority just thought it’d be cool as hell if lightning was in fact gods fighting, which i can respect. at that time: what’re they supposed to do with knowledge of lightning and electricity? might as well prefer the better story.
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
or
"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
Mencken's cynicism and mockery were arguably the type of thing Kierkegaard lamented, and perhaps in a sense were more a cause of social breakdown more than a consequence.
From reading his journals the editor of the Corsair publicly mocked him and used the paper to hide behind (in the name of journalism). His lamentations on journalism are very much due to this personal attack and he does name the perpetrator in his writings.
Kierkegaard himself had his targets for cynicism, primarily the state church (Danish Lutheran) that he attacked endlessly in his writings.
Isn't what makes the experience of love special the experience of love? a robot can hold hands and kiss and bring flowers home far more efficiently than i can. is that what love is? A robot CAN write a poem about how the redness of a flower reminds them of their mother’s funeral. But the outward signal of grief is not evidence of an internal experience of it.
I’ll bite the bullet: if a robot has a complicated enough internal representation of the world, it may very well develop a concept of love (or “care”, or “noticing”, or “intention”. Love is such a slippery word…) that we would have to trust.
Imagine a cat-sitting robot. The robot can differentiate between individual cats. It learns how to play with the cats and feed them in in their preferred way. The cats grow to trust the robot and enjoy its company. When the cats become sick and old the robot knows how to help them and ease their pain. Over decades The robot remembers cats in its care that have died, and new cats spark recognition of previous cats it has known. It becomes better at caring for a wider range of cats as its experience grows. The cats cry out when it leaves. When there are no cats around the robot remains motionless, but springs into action and play as soon as cats are around. Children would describe the robot as “happy”.
If after some decades I smash it with a hammer and recycle the pieces, am I killing something? Are its internal representations and control systems not a kind of thing that produces “qualia”?
This - as usual - confuses behaviour with consciousness.
Humans bonded with ELIZA, but that didn't mean ELIZA was conscious. ELIZA was an automaton that mimicked certain behaviours that triggered certain emotional responses.
If you scale that up you get an LLM and/or a social media bot farm, both of which are much better at triggering responses than ELIZA was.
It's now trivial to create an automaton that play acts various moods, and if you give it a memory it will mimic relationship-related conversations.
But it doesn't need to be conscious to do that, and the parsimonious Occam's razor explanation of its behaviours is that it's more economic and credible to assume it's still an automaton with no self-awareness.
Otherwise you have to argue that much simpler systems, like PID thermostats, and pretty much every computer system, are conscious because they "experience" qualia that represent a varying state of the world, with memory.
The sneakiness in your example is choosing an example which mimics emotional bonding. Rhetorically that makes it look like a hypothetical robot is acting emotionally, which is one of the covert signals us mammals tend to associate with consciousness.
But the criticism stands. Feigning emotions well enough to fool other mammals isn't at all the same as experiencing them.
To really experience emotions you need a self-image quale which includes an emotional component. And since subjective experiences have no objective element that can be measured, we can never say for sure whether anything or anyone else actually is conscious.
We assume we are, because we experience it, and we assume others are by implication.
But there's a point where that assumption stops being reasonable, and that's where your cat robot exists.
I guess where I am coming from with my cat robot is that I believe behavior begets consciousness. Whatever behavior is happening, that must mean some internal representation of the world is driving it. Robots will never have human emotions but I believe that some robots /already/ have their own goals and internal representations of reality and models of themselves worth considering on their own terms. A roomba must know where it is in space. Just because it doesn’t feel ennui as well is hardly a shortcoming.
Our brains are very complicated models of the world that attempt to mirror reality. That is what it means to be able to navigate physical space and provide for ourselves in nature. Our nature includes an incredibly complex social sphere and we have emotions to help us better navigate it. Animals we domesticate are clued into human emotions, others are not. I bet slugs have less of a sense of “I” but they still have some kind of an experience. I bet a tree has even less. It’s a sliding scale—each organism has just enough awareness for the task at hand.
The fact that we have a large emotional catalogue and a (some could say overly developed) sense of self is a curiosity more than a hard problem. It’s “I am a strange loop”, not “I am an ineffable indescribable inscrutable untouchable loop”.
How does the robot work? Sound like there's some knowledge accumulated in there, and you'd be being destructive, like burning books, but the robot doesn't create ideas. Qualia, I couldn't comment on. Well, it seems the term refers to private ideas that can't be communicated. So, no.
at the risk of jumping the shark into full-on “woo woo”: what does it mean to “create ideas”? are ideas created or revealed? if ideas are created where do they come from? if ideas are revealed, then does that necessarily imply a determinism? if the robot devises a novel solution to a technical problem, isn’t that an idea? or is the robot’s solution actually the unavoidable result of the entire history of analytical thought? if the novel solution isn’t the creation of an idea, then what makes an idea an idea? if Michelangelo’s David was sculpted by an automaton, is it less beautiful? If so, why? If not, why not?
no you didn’t kill it, it was never alive. the same way my dishwasher or vacuum aren’t killed when they break and i replace them. even if the robot “remembers”, who cares? when i bin my phone did i kill siri because she sometimes remembered things for me?
Thanks. It’s mostly a distillation of thoughts I have had from reading the various spats through the years between Chalmers and Dennett. I think Dennett is much more convincing to me.
My personal take: it’s easy to imagine a robot that has a single sense, like a thermostat. As humans we don’t have a single sense, we may have millions of senses. But I bet that none of those individual systems is much more complicated than the thermostat. Consciousness is not truly differentiable from a complicated response to a complicated environment, and all things in this definition have consciousness to a degree. Even a rock “remembers” through how it has been weathered. We are not special, we are just very complicated.
What's really a head trip is that I don't actually know another human is experiencing grief either. They could be a sociopath and not actually feel emotions, but are pretending to in order to benefit them in some way.
More than that - I think that people who are grieving may not know how they "should" be grieving. Consider that some cultures (literally) perform grief by - for example - wailing at the grave. Others may wear a particular colour of clothing, etc.
You can say to yourself "I am grieving" but still have the nagging suspicion that you are not doing it 'right' in some sense. Similarly (I think) for many emotions - how happy should I be in this moment? How excited?
On the flip side, there are people who (seemingly) over-dramatize every event - but are they pretending, or do they really feel things that keenly? I suspect that most emotion is some combination of raw/organic emotion, and the more cultural/performative/learned emotional response.
Is that so trippy? They can also lie about other things. Where they were in 2013, what's in their pockets, whether they've been eating vegetables. You may never feel sure, but you can form a theory from clues eventually.
What are emotions, really? It’s a bit easier than consciousness to research but still many theories exist. A popular one is that emotions always appear because the work(ed) to one’s benefit. They are always meant to manipulate the environment.
With sociopaths, do they simulate, generate, push away, ignore, control, their emotions, more or less than others? Also psychopathy/sociopathy is difficult to research because it’s hard to measure anything; even if you trust what they may be claiming, how do you know how they experience them.
One perspective is that some may not feel emotions because emotions did not successfully manipulate their environment in childhood. So why develop them. If anger worked to manipulate your environment, you may become angry easily later on, in an attempt to replicate the successful manipulation. If grief worked, you will experience grief. If “coldness” worked, you will react coldly. If “empathy” worked to manipulate to your benefit, you will be tuned to try empathy.
“Normal” only shows what typically works in a society, not what is “healthy” or “natural”. We’re all highly adaptive individuals, learning how to survive in whatever environment we grow up in. We all become master manipulators, because that’s how we survive. Some forms of manipulation may be more socially accepted than others, within a given culture, others less so. Sociopathy doesn’t exist outside of a culture’s value system. It is a disorder only once you define what order is. In a society of narcissists, the empath is the sick one.
We really only have our own experience, and the words of others to compare it to.
Emotions do seem to act as signaling, but is that the same as an attempt at manipulation for the benefit of the individual?
It seems conceivable in social groups that having an honest accounting of how people are feeling (via emotions) available to the group might benefit the group in achieving their goals while not always benefiting the individual.
To give one perspective of many, Marshall Rosenberg spent his life researching emotions and violence, and from his point of view, anything you do can ultimately be traced back to your own goals. In his view, it’s more useful to allow this idea and explore it, without judging it as negative. Survival/benefit of the group can be your very own personal (long term) goal. For example, a typical tradeoff is your (very own) need to belong, since your survival literally depends on it. No need to see it as either-or; to resolve the inner conflict, one can own both sides of the argument.
Making your emotional state transparent to the group can in that sense again benefit yourself (and the group), but to think that is always the case and that everybody will comply (or even be able to) will lead to disappointment (disillusion), out of principle, since you are installing a moral rule that doesn’t match reality. The verbal sharing of your emotions might successfully (and openly) manipulate the group to include your own goals, and/or the actions you take (taking your emotions into account or not) might.
Note how I am using “manipulation” in its original/neutral form, which means “to move”/influence. Typically, we use the word to convey a judgement - some forms of attempted influence we see as good/acceptable, others we see as negative. But that judgement is based on our own values, and somebody else will have different values. We can see this in how our cultures judge lying (and how that judgement changes over time). Is not sharing all you know a lie (of omission)? Is it acceptable to not always share all your thoughts? In many cultures (families), it is deemed offensive to tell certain truths; there is an expectation to lie! Once there is an expectation, it is not considered manipulation. In some hacker communities, sharing your emotions is considered offensive and an unacceptable attempt of manipulation!
A simplistic perspective which you can check for yourself and compare with others: Anger means you experience something you judge as wrong and possible to influence. Sadness means you experience something you judge as wrong but outside of your sphere of influence. Fear is a judgement of danger. The judgement is real; the situation itself may not actually be dangerous (today). It’s a signal, but it’s not based on reality/facts but your own judgement of it. You can tune the signal and thus your experience by investigating and changing your judgments - without sacrificing any of your needs or goals. Emotional reprogramming takes time, but it’s not outside of your control, nor is it driven by some higher truth than your own judgments, based on your prior experiences.
Bingo what? "The human ability to tie our senses so deeply together synthetically and into our emotion[s] and memory" was an explanation. "Ooh individual experience, it's freaky, let's all say how freaky it is" is not.
even saying that our senses are "tied" together with/into our memory and emotions is expressing a dualism. that's the challenge and that's the gap to leap.
the quote from the article is just a contrived tautology that misunderstands the nature of the problem. the dualism problem is not about finding an explanation for why what we call a cat is what we call a cat. it's that you can measure anything you want but nevertheless despite confidently establishing the size of a cat, the appearance of a cat, the behavior of cats, a sophisticated taxonomy of related species labeled "felines", surveying people to find out what cats are to them, what a cat is to me is not what a cat is to you
I'm not particularly well-versed in philosophy, but what's the dualism here?
Of course what a cat _is_ to me is not what a cat _is_ to you, because we necessarily have different memories of interactions with cat-like beings. If you show some babies a cat for the first time, they'll necessarily see it from different viewing perspectives. Even if you put VR glasses on them and show the exact same video, they'll have different contexts: "I first saw a cat when I was sitting next to my friend", "I first saw a cat when I was thinking of ice cream", etc.
But they all saw the same cat, they'll see many other cats, who are all similar. So everyone will understand that "things like these are cats", but everyone will have their own understanding of a "cat" because their memory is different.
I don't have the energy at present to fully develop my thoughts but one thing I'll say is that in my view they did *not* see the same cat. It was the same collection of flesh & bone on four legs, certainly. But it is not the same cat.
Heidegger best revealed to me the limitations of supposedly "objective" thinking.
Heraclitus: "No man steps in the same river twice"
> a religious or spiritualist meaning to it, which is far from the truth. It's a question that arises from scientific curiosity that we hope to answer one day.
a) it is wrong to say definitively that it is untrue. there is no acid test for the existence of God nor of spirit.
b) religious and spiritual traditions have wrangled with this very question for at least 3000 years. it is not a 'scientific curiosity'. It is one of the most fundamental questions of human experience.
a) there's an infinite amount of things that can't be proven/disproven and this includes all sorts of human imagination. We should focus on things that we can actually prove or disprove. The source of a god is human imagination, so you can't even prove that any god exists because you just don't know what it is (iow what exactly you're trying to prove).
b) This being a fundamental question proves scientific curiosity. We wouldn't have achieved current technology if not for scientific curiosity.
Virtually every community excludes people in one form or another. Describing this as a fault of “socially excluded nerds” is a weak ad hominem. Subcultures have a right to be monocultures if they like.
The Boy Scouts of America, for instance, were weak & foolish to allow girls to join. Men’s clubs exist for a reason, just as women’s clubs do. Sanctimoniously valorizing “everyone is welcome” as an unqualified good is foolhardy.
I personally loathe the kind of shithead bullies highlighted in the article. It's not a crowd I like and it's not the kind of crowd I associate with and in fact they're the kind of dickheads that I have a rather consistent streak of dismissing and actively degrading. In that, I am the majority. These shitheels have little genuine clout or influence in broader communities. The wheat tends to separate itself from the chaff. Isolating a few social media examples of pig-headedness ought not be used as a broader indictment. If some fellas wanna start a discord called "real gamers no wannabes no sluts" then, well, I hope they find some sort of satisfaction there.
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