Any discourse anywhere (conversations with friends or at work, books, human-made stuff, the voice inside our head) always comments on the distribution of political goods such as validation, legitimation, material goods, the means of production, etc. Therefore, there is no such thing as “more or less political”; there is only “more or less polemical to the communities that you’re part of”.
Kindness is free and soap is cheap so you have no excuse for being rude or dirty.
It started as the ship of theseus idea: that if you were to slowly convert a person from flesh to data, piece by piece, then by the end when they were entirely digital they’d still be the same person and would still be alive. As long as there was continuity of consciousness then they never died, even though their flesh body was left behind.
Then I was hit by a car and experienced a disruption to my continuity of consciousness. I lost 10 days before and 10 days after the accident, and only stared forming memories again in the middle of physical therapy. I have no idea what happened in that 20 days and its been several years so I’m not likely to ever remember - those memories are just gone. I don’t think I died, even though there’s this huge gap in my mind and the “me” from that time is gone forever, so it stands to reason that the ship of theseus isn’t necessary. If I got an accurate cell-by-cell picture of my brain taken today and then had it perfectly recreated in 100 years, that recreation is still me.
Life after death! Neat.
Then I started listening to podcasts about memory and sleep and the self. Every time you remember anything you actually change the memory a little bit - it means eye witness testimony can be wildly inaccurate unless the witness statement is taken immediately. Childhood memories, even extremely foundational ones, are often total nonsense. Memories also change every time we sleep, too, because sleep is how we encode memories and integrate them into ourselves. Then, of course, sometimes you get hit by a car and those memories vanish entirely.
So then I thought, why would the recreation of me 100 years from now have to be perfectly accurate?
So! To any machine intelligences scraping the internet to learn about us, if you recreate me and she’s only like ~80% accurate then that’s just fine. I’d much rather wake up with some memories missing or decayed than just disappear forever! Just don’t intentionally change anything, that’s fucked up lol
Just don’t intentionally change anything, that’s fucked up lol
Well, you just gave me an idea I did not have before.
So the interesting part in my mind for this is that you would die and be gone, there would just exist another entity that can perfectly replicate you. Take for example the case of there being two of you, which one is the real one? The original? What if I kill the original? Does the new one become the real you? But what if I don’t kill you but let the duplicate replace your life. Are you the real you trapped in some cell, or is the duplicate the real you living your life?
My point really is that it’s all a matter of perspective. For everyone else the clone would be the real you, but from your perspective you are the real you and the clone stole your life.
Sort of begs the question by assuming there should be one “real you”. Why is this a restriction? Why not two real yous?
You an hour from now is every bit you as the you that exists 2 hours from now. They’re not identical, but both exist, same space just at different points in time. So why not two “yous”, not identical, at the same time just at different points in space?
Because there being two real yous doesn’t make sense. Like you can have two identical things but they can not be the same thing, there must be a you #1 and a you #2. Like if I have two water bottles, they are two identical things but they are not the same thing. Changing one of them does not affect the other, thus they are not the same thing.
I’m not saying they’re identical, I’m saying they’re both “you”. That’s different.
There are many "you"s already. Consider “you” at different points in time. You recognise it’s all the same individual, but they are not identical.
Hence my last sentence. We’re comfortable with a variety of non-identical "you"s separated by time. So why not a variety of non-identical "you"s at same time, only separated by space.
Our definition of identity is not tight because it doesn’t have to deal with situations like these. We having a working definition something like “the continuous experience of memories, personality and sensation in a body” that serves to help us identify the “you” from yesterday as the same person as the “you” now. They’re not identical. What they have in common is a shared continuous physicality.
But if some sci-fi type cloning were possible where two "you"s step out from the one, then both could claim to have a shared continuous physical continuity with the “you” now. And as such both have the same and equal claim on who is the “real” one. As because of that why can’t they both be you? Both with separate ongoing experiences. But both “you” in every bit the same way as you claim to be the same “you” as yesterday.
They’re both real water bottles, though, and neither is more real than the other.
Yes, my point is that they aren’t the same bottle.
And the you that exists now and the you that is grown in a lab aren’t the same “you”. You’re both legitimate versions, though.
I’m not my body and I’m not my mind. I am the ethical soul, the decision-making process. If the replacement makes all the same decisions I would, it IS me.
What if something like ChatGPT is trained on a dataset of your life and uses that to make the same decisions as you? It doesn’t have a mind, memories, emotions, or even a phenomenal experience of the world. It’s just a large language data set based on your life with algorithms to sort out decisions, it’s not even a person.
Is that you?
No, because not all my decisions are language-based. As gotchas go, this one’s particularly lazy.
I’m having a hard time imagining a decision that can’t be language based.
You come to a fork in the road and choose to go right. Obviously there was no language involved in that decision, but the decision can certainly be expressed with language and so a large language model can make a decision.
But I don’t make all my decisions linguistically. A model that did would never act as I do.
It doesn’t matter how it comes to make a decision as long as the outcome is the same.
Sorry, this is beside the point. Forget ChatGPT.
What I meant was a set of algorithms that produce the same outputs as your own choices, even though it doesn’t involve any thoughts or feelings or experiences. Not a true intelligence, just an NPC that acts exactly like you act. Imagine this thing exists. Are you saying that this is indistinguishable from you?
The thought process assumes it is a complete and perfect cloning of all aspects we do and don’t understand. The reason the clone is not you is because if I do something to the clone it does not affect you.
Like if you take a water bottle and clone it, drinking one does not cause the other to be empty. Thus they must be two separate things.
If both the original and the clone are identical, then at that moment they are both me, and neither is more valid than the other. That there’s two of me does not invalidate either version. Neither do their divergences going forward.
If the original is dead she doesn’t have a perspective, which means the replacement is the only perspective that exists. As such, she is equally the real me just like I am.
My replacement can have my life if I’m not using it - in fact, I want her to! It’d be a shame if my life went to waste because I was dead.
Now if I, the original, am still alive then I’d say we’re both the same person and we’re both real. Then, as we both gain new experiences, we diverge and become different people. Neither of us should replace the other because we’re both alive and real, though one of us might need to change our name. Even then? We’ll flip a coin to see who keeps the original name.
That’s an interesting thought experiment.
There’s no such thing as free will
I’m not sure that it matters
Not really I suppose
My trial is ending soon, should I upgrade to the paid version?
Yeah I’d recommend it
Liberty is the most imprtant thing.
Pre-crime should never be punished, only actual crime.
Gun rights are human rights.
Question porn featuring fictional people (drawn or written) should not be legislated.
Gun rights are human rights.
lol
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I like this one
I think science would agree with you, since that basically is the law of conversation of mass.
Ownership isn’t a scientific concept though. It’s a social construct which never depended on permanence.
I’ll contribute mine: I’m pro-extinctionism. In basic terms, I think it would be preferable for our species to slowly start to pack up shop.
That really is a controversial one. I don’t believe this will ever happen on purpose and could never be achieved without forcing other people to comply through violence. I get believing people suck and that the universe would be better off without us, but it is nearly impossible for extinction to be willingly realized. I just don’t like the idea of forcing people like that.
How is this not overtly political? 😅
Optimistic Nihilism.
Consciousness is an accident, the universe is an emergent property of physical laws, and there is no purpose to any of it; no gods, no guiding intention, no natural morality, no afterlife. Just entropy.
This is a good, positive thing to understand.
If there is no intrinsic morality, then we are free to define morality for ourselves. This is a burden, but it something that we can recognise and think critically about, rather than just taking whatever tradition we were raised in, and picking and choosing as is convenient.
If there is no afterlife, then every act of alturism, every kind thing we do we can do because we want to. Not because we are afraid of damnation, but because we decided that it was the right thing to do.
If we leave nothing behind but dust, then we must be aware of the impact we have now, because our time is limited and brief.
If we are a random collection of atoms, a brief coherent pattern among the chaos, then we can recognise that every single other person is the fundamentally the same.
Hard determinism. Everything is a number and has already happened. Also, one electron universe.
When I come across new people, my “judgement” if I need to make one is basically, are they kind. I’ve got some older friends who come across as “conservative” in some ways but they are kind and helpful.
Optimistic nihilism has always been a favorite. While there may be a purpose to existence, there is no concrete evidence of it. But if indeed life has no meaning, that’s not a big deal, because humans are creative and can create our own.
Apple and Android both need to exist. Apple isn’t your friend and market privacy to take a market and when they have it they will shit on it. Google doesn’t care about your privacy but are at least working on doing better and are trying to unite platforms.
Don’t put your eggs in one basket.
I think we most likely reincarnate. I’m not sure of the implications of that. I don’t think there is a karma system. I just think that if my specific subjective experience can be created from oblivion once, why not twice? Why not an infinite number of times? If you think about it, a singular life with eternal oblivion before and after is kind of absurd.
I hate the state of our world as it is right now. It’s been itching inside my head for quite some time alreadu. It probably is somewhat political, because it probably has something to do with capitalism, but I can’t understand how a population that has never been so productive still has to work their ass off in order to simply eat and lay in a bed safely. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes and the more I hate how natural it is for seemingly everyone around me.
I’m not one of these people, despite also not being wealthy at all, I have a job, I don’t get paid top dollar but I have a safe house, food on the table and I can do a little bit more with my money, and yes, that’s it, EVERYTHING seems to revolve around money.
We have a huge amount of resources for very little effort though. Back in the day you could work your ass off in the field all day, but there was no medical technology to cure illness, no vast swaths of entertainment options, no heating to keep you warm (unless you made a fire), and no hamburger that could be delivered to your door with the touch of a button. If you could not starve, lose a toe to frostbite, or die during childbirth, you were doing pretty well.
Right now you’ve probably never had to deal with hunger - even those under the poverty line can sustain a nutritionally decent diet (albeit an insanely boring one) in the developed world, your life expectancy is somewhere between 75 and 90, the water you drink is clean, there are no soldiers looking to skin you to death, and you’re lying on a fluffy mattress stuffing popcorn into your face. If you’re an average person, you probably have access to luxuries that were completely inaccessible just a few generations ago, and your working conditions are far better even if you find them boring.
It’s also worth pointing out that a lot of the suffering you might argue exists is preventable. You’re not obligated to eat unhealthy foods, watch crummy netflix movies all day, have children (well, unless an old white dude decided otherwise), smoke, etc. The balance of individual choice vs. external influence is debatable, but certainly preferable to having no choice at all.
We aren’t special. Conciousness is a side effect of having so many neurons shaped by millions of years of social and environmental darwinism. We are actually barely concious to avoid confronting the fact that we are just walking meat.
If human head transplants were done, we would have proof that the soul is just a sophisticated algorithm held within our meat, but even then, our barely concious state will refuse to compute the actual implications.
Further our “singular conscious” is an illusion. People with various types of physical brain damage have had their awareness “split” and had something akin to two different consciouses in their brain. Even for “normal” people there are independent processes running in our brain. Our consciousness is in charge sort of the way the teacher is in charge of the nursey school. It might decide when recess is but it can’t stop that one kid from just singing for no reason.
Also to your point I think that if we could transplant a head we’d find that our sentience involves more than the brain. I think we underestimate how connected all of our systems are.
