felixmeziere

> But the argument is weak. A philosophical zombie would claim to know what subjective experience is; otherwise, it would be empirically distinguishable from a human. Chalmers’s point is that the existence of the hypothetical, irreducible consciousness of which he speaks is something we can be convinced of only by introspection. During introspection, physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well. If this is true, can I believe my own conclusion of having this mysterious non-physical experience, knowing that if I were a zombie, I would be convinced of the same without actually having it? The argument is self-defeating.

My reaction here: it seems to me that the p-zombie by construction doesn't have a "me" to be convinced, so "physical processes in my brain convince me of my consciousness. The same would theoretically happen in the zombie brain, convincing it of having consciousness as well." doesn't make sense.

Therefore the demonstration that the argument is self-defeating fell appart, and I stopped finding the article insightful.

Can someone help me see what I'm missing?

So doing this in python is ok (fastest way to check if a key is in a dict is catching KeyError for example, if I remember correctly)

So far we have built an airbnb-like platform (https://www.greengo.voyage) with a host selection component, but we have big plans to differentiate thanks to a recent 1.6M funding round. People who want to embark on this mission don't hesitate to contact me at felix@greengo.voyage :-)

Not sure why what I described previously is relevant if this assertion is true in itself, however let's double-check this in what I wrote above: "whether its solid and liquid garbage (leading to wiping out 60% of wildlife in 50 years, spilling the phosphorus of our soils into the sea -making them sterile and killing life in the sea- etc etc), or gas garbage (typically greenhouse gases)", "all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points" <= are these not imminent problems? Actually the main problems I've been describing in this post are precisely not climate change, to try and de-center the debate from just this, I'm not sure how you have been reading this...

> to your 1), food supply is a moot point as population will stagnate. The West often overproduces as it stands and is poised to reduce food waste.

Looking at how things currently work is a very bad indicator: since we are depleting resources faster than they can regenerate themselves (earth overshoot day was a few days ago), if we keep doing things as we are doing right now, even with constant population, even with a bit of improvement from technology, even with current overproduction, the food system WILL collapse. My point is: in all matters environment, the current way we do things leads us to collapse even if everything remains constant.

>to your 2), we're nowhere near depletion of resources, and there's no reason to believe the average person's purchasing power will not only greatly increase to allow for inordinate amount of consumption, but that it would outpace technological innovation which minimizes and recycles materials.

This is just not true, wether we stay on a carbon-powered society or if we transition towards a battery/renewables-powered society. And again, there is no need to account for future "increases of things", things are bad enough at the current rate.

> Fusion, to the extent.... The amount of energy person has not increased in the last several decades in developed countries.

> "More and more people" necessarily ends at "all of them".

Absolutely. But don't worry, earth will have burnt long, long, long before even half of the world's population has accessed American middle class levels of comfort, so don't worry about getting to "all of them".

> Technology to reduce is in it's infancy.

What makes you think you can bet on technology reaching levels to reduce it that are acceptable? What if we miss the target and collapse because of this bet? It's a risky one...

> Necessity is the mother of invention. These externalities were never much of concern to the oligarchic, financial and political classes - that is changing.

The necessity has been here for decades but nothing has been done, again, I wouldn't bet too much on the fact that the effect of this is going to be enough to compensate our hunger for freely-available resource extraction and depletion.

> We know we can make it by limiting population growth.

I don't know which credible source on the matter says this but certainly most don't. Sources say that much more than just limiting population growth is needed to make it.

2) Energy being the limiting factor is in itself a huge problem, given the amount of energy your problem requires: the amount of energy required to get the original quality raw materials back from an iPhone is orders of magnitude bigger than the one that was needed to extract them from nature in the first place. It seems irrational to bet on this as a means for getting to a sustainable model in the short term (30-50 years).

The gap we need to bridge is to harvest in such a less destructive manner that 1) they can regenerate themselves at the same rate as we harvest them, making our civilisation actually sustainable 2) they don't harm us directly indeed.

Can we bridge that gap by harvesting in a less destructive manner?

1) How is the phosphorus - vital for our current food system - that we harvest in mines concentrated for us during billions of years going to regenerate? Same for oil, gas, rare metals, all the silicon and metal that we disperse in our devices etc etc going to regenerate themselves? Should we bet on our ability to figure that out in the next 30-50 years? 2) so far the rate at which we harm ourselves due to the amount of garbage we throw at nature (i.e. everything we make, build and reject) has only increased with progress. Should we bet we are going to reverse that just with technology in the next 30-50 years?

If we lose the bet, the consequences are never seen in history.... I'd rather bet on more reliable methods to survive...

I’m not talking about telling stories to people but about changing theses stories they already tell themselves that have been implanted into them by a system

If we keep the same consumerist and expansionist culture and add more energy to the mix (even if it’s climate-friendly energy), i.e. more capacity to extract resources deeper and deeper, become more dependent on them and disperse them in our constructions, devices, ground, water and atmosphere, what do you think will happen?

Energy will be key in amortizing the pains of de-growth, but de-growth will happen on a planet with finite resources, whether we want it or not.

Using the past to try and predict the future, in particular unusual and impactful events is a reliable way to constantly miss the main events of history.

Also there is no equivalent to the current disaster claim… and contrary to previous ones you can already observe the beginning of the effects of the current one… even though we are just at the beginning of its exponential-driven effects.

Long story short: that’s fine if you are still skeptical we’ll start working on it and in 5-10 years the people who are still skeptical will join us once they are more convinced by what’s happening in the world, down to their neighborhood.

As you said so far we have observed it has only made the problem worse, year after year after year! And with the little margin we have left, it’s irrational to take the bet it’ll change by itself and just “improving”.

We need to invent a new storytelling for society to have an organized energetic and material de-growth, so that we don’t have to undergo a disorganized one, forced upon us by nature, that would be orders of magnitude worse.

Technology can be a huge help in organizing this de-growth, so I guess HN could be a great forum for collectively imagining how to do it!

> This means that the imminent concern in the capacity of sustainability (exacerbation of climate change) is largely addressed, save for the carbon capture / cooling aspect we will want.

This seems to show that you have a climate-only lens to look at the problem, even though the point that fusion would greatly disrupt CO2 emissions is 100% correct. The imminent concern is not just exacerbation of climate change.

1) This lens is incomplete because even if we completely stopped emitting CO2 right now we would still go to a destabilisation of the physical world around us due to all the other planetary boundaries being crossed https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound.... For example food supply would be disrupted by the artificialization of soils and disruption of the Phosphorus Cycle, many if not most food chains on which we depend will collapse due to the fact that we are killing or consuming most animal species, among which vital insects (the 6th mass extinction has started and is much faster than previous mass extinctions), water supply will be disrupted more and more etc.

2) It's also incomplete because it doesn't account for the other end of the problem : the depletion of ressources. Fusion means we can extract more and more resources, deeper and deeper, creating an even more unbalanced system if it's not done in a way were resources can regenerate themselves at the same rate we extract them.

With what we have done every time we got additional energy so far, it is likely that getting fusion will increase pressure on planetary boundaries that are not CO2 emissions : you fix a problem by worsening the others.

> it makes no sense to assume the same level of depletion. It's a function of demand.

Good point. It's a function of demand, therefore it makes sense to assume the same level of depletion will increase, since more and more people will get access to middle-class (or more) lifestyle, which is the main driver of demand for resources (as opposed to population growth, which is less of a driver if it's population growth in countries without a middle class).

> This also doesn't take into account technological innovation.

As I said this could be a factor that helps with depleting less resources but so far we have observed the impact technology has been to dramatically increase ressource use and waste overall, not reduce them.

> The rich are too few in number and they're primarily rich by virtue of everyone else's consumption. Notwithstanding that their own practices can be very damaging, it doesn't meet that scale.

We are talking about middle classes here, which are massive and meant to become even more massive. It is also true that the richer you are the more you emit but that's a side phenomenon to understand why the amount of middle-class matters.

> There's no evidence that a zero-carbon world with improved energy efficiency would necessarily lead to environmental destruction.

Then you haven't read or studied resources like https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... to begin with a simple/mainstream one for example, you haven't looked at the impact of mining and the orders of magnitude of resources we would need for a world where societies keep having the same behaviour as today, with just the "carbon-free" component added.

Anyway this is a bet: there is no proof it would work either, and if it does not the population will completely collapse. Which way do you want to try? An organised de-growth (in terms of GDP, not total wealth if we account for the destruction of nature) were we know we can make it at the expense of less comfort and consumerism, or try to keep growing and just become net zero carbon, with the hope that we can make it, to the risk of collapsing and making the earth uninhabitable?

One more resource you can look at in case you didn't know about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth#:~:text=T...

Being obsessed with carbon creates blindspots with respect to all the other planetary limits, our oceans are being emptied of life because of what we have done so far with abundant energy. The earth system is being destabilised in many other ways than just climate change. We need a global systemic solution, not to fix the problems one by one separately, because by doing that you will often make other problems worse by fixing one.

I'm not saying we don't need more abundant energy, I'm saying we need to change our philosophy, the way we organise ourselves and what we do with it first.

The 2 questions now are: 1) what allowed us to reach this amount of population? 2) can this amount of population remain stable with the current inputs given to the system or not?

My two answers:

1) Energy. Abundant energy is what allowed population to reach such heights (x7 in 200 years). In a nutshell it did so by enabling us to get abundant resources, food, medicine and comfort, the first stages of Maslow basically. It did so at scales that would have defied imagination in previous centuries.

2) There are two possible answers here:

- Yes, it is sustainable, meaning we don't deplete earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, situation which will get better with the improvement of technology and will compensate for more and more people getting into the middle class (i.e. more consumers).

- No, it is not sustainable, meaning we are depleting earth's resources faster than they renew themselves, and this situation will get worse with more and more people accessing the middle class (or worse: higher classes) and so the population will collapse at some point due to shortages of food/pandemics/wars etc.

Data to help answer the questions:

- all serious scientific reports (IPCC, https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound... and others) say that we are currently depleting earth's resources much faster than it can renew them and destabilising many natural systems like climate/life etc to irreversible points

- the average american currently emits 16 tons of CO2/year, the average human emits 4 tons/year, we need to get to under 2 tons/year to make sure the climate does not blow up too much => consequence of this: 5 billion people with a lifestyle a bit closer to the one of americans (i.e. a growing middle class) is much worse than 10 billion with the living standard of people in say, south-east asia or Africa => the living standard is much more important as a factor than the amount of people, if we get more energy with the same amount of people, we'll just keep giving more and more comfort to more and more people, trust me that energy won't stay unused on the side nicely.

- Similar idea to previous point: there is a direct correlation between living standard and amount of destruction of the environment. The rich destroy the planet incredibly more than normal people, even in developped country (symbolised extremely by Brandson & friends). More and more rich/middle class people = more and more energy consumption. This factor is much more powerful than population growth.

- [To be fact checked] I don't remember exactly the numbers but in the past 50 years, optimisations thanks to technology have divided the consumption of machines by 2, while emissions have been multiplied by 4 or 5: so far with what we observe, technology is not a silver bullet to reduce the problem. It is more the cause of the problem by enabling us to do always more and more, with our clumsy, human ways and therefore disrupting nature always more and more.

What are your answers?

Life is literally as affordable for people as the amount of energy that is available to them, that's the main factor (a bit of optimization of processes also plays but at a more minor order). Food used to be 25% of households' spending early XXth century, when someone would go buy eggs from the local market or farmer. Today it is 10% if you count the margins of industrials, distributors etc. But if you just look at the price of the eggs, then it's probably less than 1%.

What allowed this? Energy! Energy allowed for abundant food, a long life, studying and the general tertiarisation of the economy (giving birth to tech) and of course consumerism. The more energy the cheaper everything is the more people consume, at least as long as we persuade people that buying things is the greatest pleasure in life.

Translation of "middle class": class of mass consumers.

I wouldn't uses "prices" here as a framing. If you plot the graphs of worldwide energy usage and worldwide garbage emissions (let's take greenhouse gases or amount of artificialized soil as examples), you will see that they are correlated. We have grown to this gigantic population solely thanks to our mastery of energy, that's the one factor that enabled all the rest (abundant food, time to go to college instead of farming, developments in medicine to make your life longer, retirements, consumerism etc.).

What I'm saying is that, looking at what we've done so far with energy, it's not entirely sure more energy will be good for our prospects of survival. We need to have a collective philosophical revolution first.

- Designing things to be durable and recyclable in the first place is probably more economical and sustainable (both can be combined though, no problem)

- Recycling is not a silver bullet. Extracting and re-combining all the microscopic parts of different metals in an iPhone to get back the original metal is incredibly expensive or unfeasible, compared to just extracting that metal from nature

- Unlimited energy makes it easier to go deeper and deeper extract resources from earth's crust, generating more and more garbage. What do you think we'll do, when you observe what we've done so far?

I'm not saying I don't want fusion, I'm saying that without getting much better at deciding collectively what to do with it then those graphs will stay coupled, taking us to a sure doom.

Anyway it's likely we'll get there before fusion so it should not distract us from all other necessary transformations the system needs.