EI's Shortform
Oct 21, 20211
EI
-36
1
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Language itself is part of the self-awareness program. The statements of a language don't make sense unless it has a context of the speaker itself in relation to whatever it is speaking to. It's a way to express the functions of one's own algorithms. If you say speaking a language is a form of communication, then you might even argue that quantum superposition is a form of communication too if you break down language this way. What's to say the difference between consciousness and physical phenomenon. One of the downsides to being human is that we don't know how to think without language. Even if we do, we wouldn't know how to... (read more)
The mirror test seems to me like a decent proxy for at least one item on that list
This is merely a bias on our own part as humans. I think people are confusing consciousness with self-awareness. They are completely different things. Consciousness is the OS that runs on the meat machine. Self-awareness is an algorithm that runs on the OS. All meat machines that run this OS have different algorithms for different functions. Some may not have any self-awareness algorithm running, some may have something similar but not exactly the same as our own self-awareness algorithm. That's where the mirror test fails. We can only observe the who-knows-how-many-levels of causality that lead... (read more)
You don't talk about because you want others to accept your position. You talk about it, so others have a chance to convince you to abandon that position, either for you to take theirs or something entirely different. How do you know that you've read everything to take up your position if you don't bother giving others who have put into their own time and thoughts into this a chance to present their arguments? But at the end of the day, we just gotta what we gotta do that makes us happy.
I feel like people on here are just picking apart each other's arguments without really dealing with the main arguments present. A lot of times it's not very clear what the focus is on anyways. I think he's just referring to a different perspective he's read regarding one way to look at things. Your example of obsession is only used to discredit the legitimacy of that perspective instead of actually adding value to the conversation.
In both cases of US local and global understanding of the word, it limits the scope of the discussion to be had. Once you start categorizing actions regarding specific issues in this way, you inadvertently start drawing boundaries in relations to other issues that are related to the issue at hand. It's a failure of methods, not language. For instance, the issue of abortion is closely tied to the issue of personal beliefs, which is also tied to the beliefs and laws regarding the preservation of life. The method is merely a simplification for the political machinery that take actions on resolving these issues. US has its own local political climate, but it's not to say that when other countries use the same rhetoric for the same functions, they would be much different other than the details.
There is really no incentive to take care of these problems, else we would have solved them a long time ago if it were ever aligned with the goals of human civilization to minimize the suffering of the masses. We dream of these utopia as new technologies come to light and improve our lives a little bit at a time, but we focus so much on everything else that run counter to this dream, climate change is a good example, well it's just such an easy example to use. I'm rather convinced that we have been operating on the evolution paradigm all this time, and it really doesn't seem like it's going... (read more)
I think the the self-reflective part of evolution brought us the revelation of suffering to our understandings. The self-unaware computations simply operate on pain as a carrot/stick system as they were initially evolved to function as. Most of the laws of civilization is about reducing suffering in the populations. Such realization in evolution has introduced new concepts regarding the relationship between ourselves as an individual self-contained computation and these smaller chunks of functions/computations that exist within us. Because of the carrot/stick functionality, by minimizing suffering, we also achieve what the function was originally designed to do, to help us with our self-preservation. This is the first level of the self-referential loop.
In the... (read more)
I'm sorry I wasn't saying you personally. I don't know who you are. I was referring to the writing I replied to. Maybe it was someone else who brought up the topic, I didn't read enough up the thread, that's my bad. I will try to be careful next time.
Your failure starts with summarizing everything under one single label, here we are dealing with the word "liberalism." Most of us on this platform live in societies where such term have quite a ubiquitous understanding of the issues the word encompasses. The correct way to go about this is to stop grouping different issues under specific political policy memes. Instead of countering the social dynamics that has manifested on equal footings the word "conservatism," we need to simply look at the issues themselves without associating any forms of political leaning into the discussion. Such social dynamic provides no productive values to actually discussing and solving the issues themselves.
Of course by public discourse,... (read more)
The reason why the surveillance dudes fucked with my call to the insurance company is because they know just how much I thought about it before while consciously making the decision to not to check up on the status just to see how things would play out. When you put threats of good times with this type of dynamics, you can't help but not care anymore.
I don't think those guys were aware of what they were doing. They were probably just trying to play games with me given that they have information that you guys don't have. They are normal people bored of their jobs trying to do something that excite them.... (read more)
Emotional investment is probably a more accurate form of currency than anything else. Probably the hardest thing to be self-aware of in terms of having control over your own life.
The ones who matter wouldn't care anyways.