mooseburger

I don't actually believe technology can save us, don't find the techno-utopias concocted by sci-fi authors to actually be utopias, and don't accept the thesis that we have progressed because we're better at satisfying bodily appetites to be compelling.

> would the concept of me and you as separate identities actually mean anything to us anymore?

Clearly yes. If your body is destroyed, I will stop experiencing your thoughts and your senses, and vice versa.

> You anyway go to sleep each night and awaken after a discontinuity. Why would this be significantly different?

I'm more interested in why it would be the same. As it stands, there is no account of what is the thing that persists through deep sleep, or more broadly, of why there is sentience to begin with. I'm perfectly ok with conjecturing that sentience is not physical, given that we can't observe it, like we can with the physical. And I don't expect we will find some physics redefining discovery in the brain that will allow us to see us. Some philosophers hold that the more interesting question is why do neuroscientific accounts of the brain seem insufficient to us, but at that point the jig's up, you're doing philosophy and not science. Which is the problem of mind uploading, there's no scientific surety to it, believing in it will be conditional on not thinking too much about it, or on taking the position that "the philosophy is settled!".

I wonder how many people will actually attempt mind uploads, or believe that completely computer generated agents are sentient. Especially since it seems like a lot of these technologists are willing to use duck typing to determine sentience, which obviously isn't good enough.

Seriously, how are you going to prove mind uploads will somehow be different from this: https://www.whompcomic.com/2013/06/19/pork-futures/

Even a Moravec transfer boils down to taking a leap of faith on the ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer, not to mention the inherent creepiness of the proposition of slowly replacing your brain with some foreign substance.

> What does it add? Why does it suggest itself?

What do you think it does? No idea where you're going with this.

Getting Epstein "suicide" vibes from this.

Virtue signaling.

Yeah, that was interesting. Apparently even being a female POC doesn't allow you to blaspheme against the nameless faith. It has evolved.

Regarding Garcia Martinez, I am still surprised "straight male" is such a disadvantage that being POC doesn't buy enough oppression points to allow you to criticize white women. Then again, maybe it's more that being Hispanic specifically isn't enough. I have a hard time imagining a black man getting fired for the same comments.

That isn't about grammar. Presumably, this "I" is real. Can you find it in the world? If you say it's the brain, there's only elementary particles there, same as everything else. We see no such "I" there. So where is this "I"?

He wrote a book called Two Hundred Years Together about the Jews in Russia. It wouldn't surprise me if it really is antisemitic, but it's utterly pathetic to give a damn about the thought-killing cliches of modernity such as antisemitism, racism, etc., so who cares?

> you experience discontinuity every night when you sleep

Something dubious about this. No one thinks they're annhiliated upon sleeping, then reconstituted upon waking.

Even adhering to materialism, the problem with mind uploads is the same problem as with teleportation: a copy is being made. Destroying the original does not mean a consciousness transfer then magically occurs from the original to the target. For mind uploads, the only plausible sounding way around this is the Moravec transfer, but even that is reliant on the Ship of Theseus thought experiment having a definite answer.

It's pretty lame they didn't name the app, it's clear some programmer(s) somewhere needs the wake up call.

Shouldn't you name and shame this guy in this comment? It doesn't seem like he deserves anonimity.

Interestingly, no, it isn't fully explained as of today. Schopenhauer's quote of "Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle" is still true today.

No, starting from beetle eggs does not count. They point is no one knows how to start from the inert chemicals that make up a beetle and cause them to assemble into a living beetle. More generally, abiogenesis has not been cracked.

Doesn't appear to be a pardon, which involves the conviction being expunged. Commuting a sentence means more like "you have been punished enough, but we were right to punish you". A pardon is "we were wrong to punish you".

I see that the global center of capital is continuing its millenia long westward migration. Past the US west coast, and into China. From Prometheus Rising:

> Brooks Adams also noted that centralized capital (the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few inter-related families) seems to have been moving steadily West throughout recorded history. The first major accumulations are to be found in Sumer; the center of money-power then shifted to Egypt, to Greece, to the Italian peninsula, to various parts of Germany, and then to London. At the time Brooks Adams was writing (c. 1900) he saw the balance teetering between London and New York, and he predicted that the decline of the English Empire would shift the balance to New York within the first half of the 20th Century. He seems to have been right. Brooks Adams had no theory as to why this Westward movement of wealth had been going on for 6000 years. He merely observed the pattern. The shift is still continuing, in the opinion of many. For instance, Carl Oglesby in The Cowboy vs. Yankee War, sees American politics since 1950 dominated by a struggle between “old Yankee wealth” (the New York-Boston axis, which replaced London after 1900) and “new Cowboy wealth” (Texas-California oil-and-aerospace billionaires). As of 1997, it looks like the Cowboys are winning; which is what one would expect if there were a real “law” behind Adams’ East-West migration of capital.

Californication has come and gone.

Critical thinking is supposed to be just one tool, everyone should have more than that in their mental toolbox. It's useless on its own, we need the capacity to build systems more than we need the ability to tear them down. It's also even harmful when only applied selectively (e.g. never to one's own, or to popular, positions(s)).

Can't change the heart with rioting either, and are you sure you know whose hearts need to change, and what change needs to occur? I think you could erase all racism from the hearts of humanity and end up with basically the same world, there's no reconciling the self-celebrating narcissism of moderns with universal love.

Can't take the mote out of your brother's eye until you remove the beam in your own. This applies to everyone, even anti-racists.

Once programmers become obsolete, it's likely a matter of days until the human race becomes obsolete.

There's a reason Jesus' reply to the first temptation of the Devil was "One does not live by bread alone": the world is not a problem to be solved, and as long as man continues to see it like that, their suffering will continue unabated.

This is what mankind should be shooting for: http://www.fiftytwostories.com/?p=270, not whatever goal the blind idiot god of capitalism spews forth.

The brain, like the objects you described, poses no mystery to physics. There isn't anything about the atoms in the brain that suggests there would be consciousness, or indeed, anything in physics that predicts consciousness arising, the way that the properties of any other macro object can be understood in terms of physics.

From what I remember of Laozi, he also describes entering an indescribable state of mind. Zhuangzu also explores themes of accepting the world as is, and accepting death.

Trying out belief systems is like choosing programming languages: rather hard to appraise them without actually trying to build something and run it in your wetware computer.

You don't have an impression of your own consciousness (your conscious awareness) to begin with. You just perceive stuff. How exactly could you not have conscious awareness?

Any example of that?

> Maybe that belief that I am conscious is flawed and merely an illusion

That's the Dennett nonsense. Of course our sense inputs are an illusion, it's that there is anything being perceived at all that is the mystery! :

DENNETT: So you see, Socrates, consciousness is an illusion.

SOCRATES: I see, but I need to clarify something. What do you mean by illusion?

DENNETT: An illusion is an appearance contrary to reality.

SOCRATES: And what is an appearance?

DENNETT: An appearance is something that is apprehended by an observer.

SOCRATES: So consciousness is something that is apprehended by an observer which is contrary to reality.

DENNETT: But that cannot be, because then the observer would have to be conscious.

SOCRATES: Therefore, consciousness cannot be an illusion!

> various physical and chemical elements can form ever more complex pattern-recognizing feedback loops

You're not being reductionist enough. The brain is just atoms. 'Feedback loops' is just a model, and not actually real. The problem is that physics never predicted that consciousness would arise, there is literally no physical model for what consciousness is.

It's conflating conscious awareness with the existence or non-existence of free will. It's conscious awareness that is the ineffable mystery, unless you believe the chair you're sitting on actually feels you sitting on it. I mean, it has to if you believe the mind is nothing but atoms, because the chair is also nothing but atoms. There isn't such a thing as emergent properties, or neurons, those are just models we use to understand bunches of atoms.

Heard of the China brain thought experiment? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain

Would such a brain be conscious? Why or why not?