prometheus76

I don't know exactly what you mean by "support the Pope", but your simple binary division between "Roman Catholic or Protestant" ignores a lot of the historical tensions between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. There's also the whole issue with the Oriental Orthodox Church, which went into schism after the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was LONG before the Great Schism in 1054. How do they fit into your categorization?

You might find it interesting to study more details about the history of Christianity. It's not so simple as "Love Pope or Reject Pope."

Now you get into the tricky waters of defining "justified" and "true". It's a circular definition that does not settle anything.

Why did the person who posted this change the headline of the article ("Diffusion models are interesting") into a nonsensical question?

Yes. I'm no longer a Mormon, but I baptized around a dozen people on my mission and they were all found from knocking on doors. But this was also thirty years ago, before the internet was a thing for most people.

Less likely to speak English in my experience.

This was 30 years ago, so I'm sure a lot has changed since then. I was a missionary and the way we got into buildings in Toronto to knock on doors was to just pick the last name with the most letters from the directory, buzz them, and when they answered, we would just say "pizza delivery" and 95% of the time they buzzed the door open.

Rich people don't pay income taxes. They pay capital gains taxes. They typically don't have income, or very little income compared to capital gains.

I see it as a clash between people who are instinctually inclined towards philosophical nominalism (woke) and people who are instinctually inclined towards realism (not-woke). Dr. Nathan A. Jacobs lays out the details and the arguments for this way of defining our current culture war here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVmPIMg4St4

On further reflection, and a re-read after a night of sleep, I agree with you that my example at the end was not a clear indication of what I'm pointing at. I was trying to reveal that "reality" is more than just physical processes, and "mind", especially, maps onto physical processes, but only relationally.

A bird watching Fallout and pressing keys on your keyboard with its beak is not participating in the story of Fallout the way you are. You are watching a story and tracking a narrative and making decisions about which keys to press. But this is a bit of an obscure analogy.

Let me try a different one. You just sat down in your favorite chair after a long day of work, and you ask your young son to please bring you a cold drink from the refrigerator. He cheerfully runs to the refrigerator, grabs a beverage, and runs back to you, handing it to you.

The process of you vibrating your vocal cords which make a physical vibration of air that goes into his ear and vibrates his eardrum that then sends impulses to his brain and, later, his body that end up with you holding a cold beverage in your hand...those are all physical processes. But the relationships between sounds and "words", between words and sentences, between sentences and movement...none of that is physical. The relationship with your son obviously has a physical component, but the meaning behind your genetic connection to your son is largely metaphysical.

Another analogy: if a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound? I am firmly in the camp of "no". Does the tree create vibrating air waves when it falls and hits the ground? Of course. But a "sound" is an abstraction that forms in the mind of someone who is there watching (and more importantly, hearing!) the tree hit the ground. That "sound" is a metaphysical concept that we map onto the physical world, and the ability to make these distinctions, to categorize our incoming sensory input, is what enables us to perceive anything at all. Without that structuring, categorizing, and filtering of incoming data, the world would be overwhelming and we would be paralyzed.

Am I a solipsist who only believes that what is in my mind is "real" and that the physical world around me is an illusion? No. The first and best lesson I ever had that the physical world is real is getting punched in the face. That will knock solipsism right off the list of being a possible worldview.

I believe reality is an interplay of concepts and physical, "potential" or "raw" matter.

One more analogy: cooking. When I want to make bread, for example, I have a recipe, which is a concept. It is an abstract concept of how to transform raw materials into a new thing: bread. So you gather raw ingredients, and you combine them following a particular order. You let the yeast feed on the sugars and make nice little CO2 bubbles in your dough, causing it to rise. You then put it in the oven and after some heat and time, you remove what used to be flour, water, and yeast, and you put it on the counter to cool. It has been transformed and you call it "bread".

The classic materialist move is to now just say "yeah but it's just flour, water, and yeast." Which is physically true. However, those ingredients have specific interactions that happen when combined, and further interactions that happen when exposed to high heat for a certain duration of time, and when we remove it from the oven, we don't say "come get some flour, water, and yeast that have been transformed through chemical processes, heat, and time!" No. It has a new name now. It has switched categories. It has changed ontological levels and changed from three ingredients into a new identity: bread.

Now I'm hungry for some toast.

Numbers are not physical, but you see three objects all over the place. A number is a category. The number "three" exists as a property that I can use to group physical objects (or even other categories). So I can group together three pencils or three cars. The only physical properties that cars and pencils have in common is that their both physical...maybe they're the same color...but I have grouped three pencils and I have grouped three cars, so now they share a property of "three", but "three" is not an intrinsic physical property of pencils, nor cars. It's a potential metaphysical property, but only becomes manifested once an observer groups three pencils.

My argument is that a "mind" cannot be a purely physical process in the same way that a video game is a purely physical process. The computer instructions are stored in my hard drive and encoded, and it's a physical process for my computer to retrieve those instructions and follow them, but the game itself is something the user interacts with by watching what's happening on the screen an interacting with it. The computer program of course has a physical component, but lives mostly in the layers of abstraction from 1s and 0s up to "flashy lights on screen", but none of those things mean anything if a mind isn't watching the screen, paying attention, and interacting with it.

Here's a question that boils down what I'm trying to say: If you have a pet bird that sits next to you as you play Fallout New Vegas, and taps the keyboard occasionally, is your bird playing Fallout? Is playing Fallout a purely physical process?

A pattern still overlays a physical object. You can abstractly describe the pattern of a crystal without looking at a crystal.

Numbers are metaphysical, as is music. They both can manifest physically (three cars and three cats, or a Bach concerto making sound waves that vibrate my eardrum). But what makes music musical is that it's a pattern of sounds over time. Patterns are not physical. Patterns map to the physical, but they are above the physical. You, too, are a pattern that plays out over time. You are mapped to your physical body, but you are the pattern that is embedded in the body. You are a pattern.

Music has a physical component: sound waves vibrating your eardrum and your brain recognizes the sound. What makes it music is that it is a pattern of interwoven sounds that sound "harmonious" to you. You can physically measure that, but what makes it music is that it's a pattern that plays out over time. The concept of "pattern" is not physical. It's a concept. It's "metaphysical". You are not a bundle of atoms. You are a pattern that plays out over time.

Because you are more than atoms. You are a pattern. A pattern plays out over time. Like music. Music has a physical component, of course, but music is enjoyable because it's a pattern over time.

Categories, numbers, logic, grammar, etc. all map onto physical systems, but aren't necessarily directly linked. This is "metaphysics" in philosophy, and is essential in order to even reason about physical systems. Just the concept of a "physical system" is actually metaphysical, but without metaphysics, you can say nothing to anyone about anything. Metaphysics is just generally taken as a "given", but is worth evaluating itself.

Then you'll run into the "realism" vs. "nominalism" debate and you'll understand the philosophical underpinnings of the current culture wars in America.

If I copy the contents of an Apple II disk onto my pc and try to "run" it...nothing happens. Isn't mapped to the new hardware. So who is going to write the "human mind/consciousness" emulator that will map onto a hard drive? Will they simulate all the inputs from your body, nervous system, senses, etc.?

Wouldn't any change we make to who dies when also be natural? How is that not natural selection? Did earlier generations not attempt to stay alive?

Yesterday I went out for lunch. By myself. At a local Mexican restaurant. I ordered a burrito and a bottled coke. My bill was $18. Four years ago, that same meal at that same restaurant was $8. My salary has not doubled with inflation, but many of my costs have.

No fancy economics equations can compensate for continual sticker shock at the consumer level.

I will check it out, but it was a reference to an old Simpsons joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmtXpWsAdU

What anagrams does it produce for "Jeremy Irons"?

This is an excellent and insightful article, but it feels like it was speech-to-text and the author didn't take the time to clean it up before posting it. It's a little distracting.

It's very similar in the natural gas industry. The "dumb" pigs are a piece of foam that is shoved into the pipe at the "pig launcher" and they use air pressure to push the pig through the pipe, where it is then caught in the "pig catcher". All the debris from fabrication of the pipeline is scrubbed out by the pig and removed at the pig catcher.

Nowadays, they also have "smart pigs" that have sensors to detect gouges, dents, pipe wall that is too thin, etc. as the pig moves through the pipe, so that repairs can be made before the pipeline is filled with gas.

And if you have hard water, stainless steel will still oxidize (rust).

What you are talking about here (and you articulated it well), reminds me of The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. If you haven't read it, I think it would connect a lot of dots for you and I think you would find it very interesting and very relevant to your experience.

Their content policy is basically don't say anything illegal (inciting violence, etc.) and no porn. Their stance is that porn images are not speech.

I disagree with the part where you say "complex systems can be reduced to smaller and simpler ones where making a decision doesn't have to mean unleashing a cosmic horror."

That's the whole problem with reductionist thinking, which fails when analyzing a chaotic system or a complex system. The behavior of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts because of hidden interactions between the smaller parts of the system. There are too many variables to account for, and small variations in initial conditions rapidly became very divergent outcomes.

I get the sense that you may not have studied chaotic systems or complex systems in any level of detail. It might be a worthwhile effort to learn more about those systems, because they are essentially a refutation of reductionist thinking.

You may understand your codebase completely, but I assure you, if you released it to a large enough group of people, they could find errors and bugs in your code because they will try things that would never occur to you.

I am reminded of a video where a programmer spent three years training an ai model to beat an "impossible track" in trackmania, where he finds out that chaos built into the deterministic physics engine behind the game made his pursuit much more difficult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kojH8a7BW04

Have you ever seen Sorcerer's Apprentice from Fantasia? I haven't seen the movie, and the original poem it's based on is in French, so I only have seen it in the Disney form. That being said, it's the perfect analogy for what is a deliberate decision by the sorcerer's apprentice to enchant a broom and get it to start bringing water in from the well outside into the cistern in the room. The process starts, and everything is going well, but it's taking too long. So he finds a way to make two brooms. Then ten...etc. Things quickly get out of hand and he can't find how to stop the brooms, and the whole room gets filled with water (chaos). At the last minute, the actual sorcerer appears and sets everything aright, and chastises the apprentice for his foolhardy curiosity in meddling with things he doesn't understand.

We could use some of that humility with regard to interfering with complex systems. Most of the effects of perturbations of a complex or chaotic system are unpredictable, and great care should be exercised before making a change, and even with great care, most of the effects will be surprising and unpredictable.

So yes, on a superficial level, all decisions in software are deliberate, but the way those decisions interact, and the outcomes of those decisions are unpredictable and largely unknown when the decisions are made. Also, and you mentioned this in the article, many of the decisions are not made deliberately, after much reflection, but rather, on the fly and in the moment.

To hand-wave that all away by saying "but a human made it" seems pretty disingenuous, or at least extremely naive.

Yes, a robot has reality. Of course it has reality, especially if it can punch you in the face. Does it have a mind? That's a different question.

Do you believe that all humans share a human nature?

I understand that land can change levels over time due to magma. What is harder for me to understand is land doing so in a uniform way that maintains a flat floor and leaving intricate mosaic patterns intact. Especially when you take into account the earthquakes that would also be a part of a magma shift like that.

It's obviously possible, but hard to understand how the tensions would be spread evenly as the level raised up and down.

How do you account for someone else's unproven reality punching you in the face?