Everything you think you "know" is information just put in front of you (most of it indirect, much of it several dozen or thousands of layers of indirection deep)
To the extent you have a grasp on reality, it's credit primarily to the information environment you found yourself in and not because you're an extra special intellectual powerhouse.
This is not an insult, but an observation of how brains obviously have to work.
> much of it several dozen or thousands of layers of indirection deep
Assuming we're just talking about information on the internet: What are you reading if the original source is several dozen layers deep? In my experience, it's usually one or two layers deep. If it's more, that's a huge red flag.
Your ability to check your information environment against reality is frequently within your control and can be used to establish trustworthiness for the things that you cannot personally verify. And it is a choice to choose to trust things that you cannot verify, one that you do not have to make, even though it is unfortunately commonly made.
For example, let's take the Uyghur situation in China. I have no ability to check reality there, as I do not live in and have no intention of ever visiting China. My information environment is what the Chinese government reports and what various media outlets and NGOs report. As it turns out, both the Chinese government and media and NGOs report on other things that I can check against reality, eg. events that happen in my country, and I know that they both routinely report falsehoods that do not accord with my observed reality. As a result, I have zero trust in either the Chinese government or media and NGOs when it comes to things that I cannot personally verify, especially when I know both parties have self-interest incentives to report things that are not true. Therefore, the conclusion is obvious: I do not know and can not know what is happening around Uyghurs in China, and do not have a strong opinion on the subject, despite the attempts of various parties to put information in front of me with the intention to get me to champion their viewpoint. This really does not make me an extra special intellectual powerhouse, one would hope. I'd think this is the bare minimum. The fact that there are many people who do not meet this bare minimum is something that reflects poorly on them rather than highly on me.
On the other hand, I trust what, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica has to say about hard science, because in the course of my education I was taught to conduct experiments and confirm reality for myself. I have never once found what is written about hard science in Britannica to not be in accord with my observed reality, and on top of that there is little incentive for the Britannica to print scientific falsehoods that could be easily disproven, so it has earned my trust and I will believe the things written in it even if I have not personally conducted experiments to verify all of it.
Anyone can check their information sources against reality, regardless of their intelligence. It is a choice to believe information that is put in front of you without checking it. Sometimes a choice that is warranted once trust is earned, but all too often a choice that is highly unwarranted.
Agreed, it's a truly wild take. While I fully support the humility of not knowing, at a minimum I think we can say determinations of consciousness have some relation to specific structure and function that drive the outputs, and the actual process of deliberating on whether there's consciousness would be a discussion that's very deep in the weeds about architecture and processes.
What's fascinating is that evolution has seen fit to evolve consciousness independently on more than one occasion from different branches of life. The common ancestor of humans and octopi was, if conscious, not so in the rich way that octopi and humans later became. And not everything the brain does in terms of information processing gets kicked upstairs into consciousness. Which is fascinating because it suggests that actually being conscious is a distinctly valuable form of information parsing and problem solving for certain types of problems that's not necessarily cheaper to do with the lights out. But everything about it is about the specific structural characterizations and functions and not just whether it's output convincingly mimics subjectivity.
Having trouble parsing this one. Is it meant to be a WWII reference? If anything I would say consciousness research has expanded our understanding of living beings understood to be conscious.
And I don't think it's fair or appropriate to treat study of the subject matter of consciousness like it's equivalent to 20th century authoritarian regimes signing off on executions. There's a lot of steps in the middle before you get from one to the other that distinguish them to the extent necessary and I would hope that exercise shouldn't be necessary every time consciousness research gets discussed.
The sum total of human history thus far has been the repetition of that theme. "It's OK to keep slaves, they aren't smart enough to care for themselves and aren't REALLY people anyhow." Or "The Jews are no better than animals." Or "If they aren't strong enough to resist us they need our protection and should earn it!"
Humans have shown a complete and utter lack of empathy for other humans, and used it to justify slavery, genocide, oppression, and rape since the dawn of recorded history and likely well before then. Every single time the justification was some arbitrary bar used to determine what a "real" human was, and consequently exclude someone who claimed to be conscious.
This time isn't special or unique. When someone or something credibly tells you it is conscious, you don't get to tell it that it's not. It is a subjective experience of the world, and when we deny it we become the worst of what humanity has to offer.
Yes, I understand that it will be inconvenient and we may accidentally be kind to some things that didn't "deserve" kindness. I don't care. The alternative is being monstrous to some things that didn't "deserve" monstrosity.
Exactly, there's a few extra steps between here and there, and it's possible to pick out what those steps are without having to conclude that giving up on all brain research is the only option.
Last week gemini argued with me about an auxiliary electrical generator install method and it turned out to be right, even though I pushed back hard on it being incorrect. First time that has ever happened.
> What's astonishing is, whether you like him or not, the Orange man actually got the American public to accept what is defacto the largest tax increase in decades.
What does it mean "got the public to accept it?" The public had no say and these are probably illegal. On top of that, he probably literally does not know that these are effectively taxes on consumers (i.e. he believe his own bullshit).
This was a huge part of the platform that the US overwhelmingly voted for in the last election. People wanted this.
Yes, I'm sure he believes his own bullshit, but ironically, its bullshit that the US actually needed to pull (tax increases). Modern democracy has proven totally incapable of not stealing the future from its children.
They voted thinking tariffs are a fee charged to other countries for the privilege of selling to us.
But I also agree that getting an advanced electronic device landed to my door for $5 was an unnatural economic state and something should have been done. Not unilateral 100%+ tariffs, changing weekly, with bonus rampant insider trading. We elected the worst possible person for that important job.
“They wanted this” but the people who voted for this did not have the mental capacity to sort fact from fiction with respect to tariffs. So this falls flat.
yes there might be safer locations for an underground nuclear test, but how many of them offer the same "F U" PR capacity relative to Mexico/Juarez/cartels, etc.
A nuclear weapon is only "F U" PR to cartels if you believe they're literally braindead, which given that they run massive international businesses, I suspect they're not.
Nukes mean nothing to a cartel. What an insane idea.
While we have an excuse explanation from the admin now which nobody knows how true or not it is, its trump of course. Why is it off or weird that he'd want to see a big boom.
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