corsac

Do people instinctively anthropomorphize? I bet the existence of that instinct has far less empirical support than the pain consciousness of newborn babies. Be that as it may, these comparisons to parents' "anthropomorphising" of their kids are not apples-to-apples.

Chatbots and machines programmed to show feeling responses are mimicry. People can be tricked. If you want to fool ships with a fake iceberg, you won't bother with more than the tip. But if you're a glaciologist, examples of sailors getting spooked by fake plastic iceberg tips would not lead you to question whether natural icy marine bodies (especially ones that usually develop into icebergs!) have any mass below sea-level. Or if you're studying carcinization, the fact that robot crab decoys can pass for real tells you exactly nothing about why unrelated phylogenetic lines independently develop crab-like features.

And the "people" in "dead people" refers to real people, who die. A corpse is a "dead person" like a puddle of water is "melted ice". Mourning, including respectful treatment of remains, is symbolic. None of that is anthropomorphism.

It is established that human babies develop into human adults. Their pain and other distinctly human responses resemble the adult forms profoundly. Are babies "a system [that] responds to painful stimulus" but feels no pain? Occam's Razor says no. I see zero downside to reckoning that possibility out of the moral calculus.

Thank you for "Word Rotator".

As someone who values the liberal humanities, I wish "support for philosophy and the arts" were implicitly understood as support for leisure time for people in general, rather than funding special arts programming or individual institution-pleasers. If arts and philosophy are not flourishing as they should be, it is not because the Kennedy Center (or whatever) needs any more money, but because people can't afford basic needs like housing without spending all their time working, and so have no time for it.

And if any AI ever produces great writing, it will only be because it has become capable of genuine originality, as many human beings already are and will continue to be no matter what AI does. Rare perspectives aren't going to get exhausted, either by AI or by an increasing human population with more literacy and leisure time. For every piece of low-hanging fruit that gets plucked, several seeds get scattered and new trees spring up.

First, there is abundant and solid evidence of Chinese violent oppression against Uigurs. Second, why do people (you) assert that awareness of human rights abuses in one country blinds people to abuses in another country? On the contrary, the more intolerable I find China's imprisonment of Uigurs and others, the more intolerable I find America's awful, useless wars and huge prison population. I don't get where you're coming from.

I clicked on this and ended up reading it through in an unsuccessful effort to persuade myself that it was parody of TED-talk-y self-help word salad. I don't want to disparage anyone's work (especially in a second language), but stuff like this irks me. The whole post seems untethered from reality or even linguistic sense – some sentences don't mean anything at all if you parse them, while others make baldly unsupportable claims; the transition words are dutifully in place but nothing he says follows from what came before. Rene Girard's mimetic desire, concept maps, and behavioral econ jargon are all trotted out in no particular order to persuade "us" (who presumably did not know) that there is more to life than Netflix.

Yet I keep seeing this particular flavor of self-improvement being shared and discussed in places with decent standards of discourse like it was something valid. Is there something I'm just not getting?