Chase
2.7K posts
Chase
@ChaseMann
Brand Partnerships @SpaceX (formerly @XAI formerly @X formerly @Twitter)
Katılım Mart 2014
1.2K Takip Edilen1.4K Takipçiler
I really go back and forth on this. Especially lately now that I've been raising such a variety of animals.
Animals obviously have some kind of divine spark. They are ensouled. Anyone can see this.
But it really is to a shockingly lesser extent... you can see this too
˚♡⋆mimi ˚♡⋆｡☆∴@mimi10v3
when people admit factory farming is evil and vegans are correct but they're going to eat meat anyway because "it tastes good and i'm lazy ," they are vice signaling they're not good people. honesty points do not outweigh the antisocial weight of "i know i'm causing suffering and idgaf"
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pride is a sin. you should instead be grateful, satisfied, pleased, etc etc.
But never pride.
taoki@justalexoki
i don't think you should be proud to be white. or black. or gay. or straight. i don't get the idea of being proud of things you had nothing to do with
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I agree, it is entirely possible, that you and I don’t have a true, ontological existence — that we are just linguistic fictions like a boat or a chair.
But if you do exist, then you must be a substrate independent mind. An observer that persists across time despite its ever-changing substrate. And if that’s true, then it does make sense to imagine you could have been instantiated in a very different substrate.
And I argue we should run with that assumption unless proven otherwise, as the alternative is the ultimate black pill. If we are fictions, that’s not just an interesting fact that can be swept aside, it would be a fact that means nothing matters. It would mean you have no true investment in the future. It would mean your body is inhabited by a series of ontologically distinct moments of awareness that only believe they are identical to the previous inhabitant because they share their memories.
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This car has one more mile on the odometer than it did one minute ago. Is it a different car?
Ship-of-Theseus-style language games go nowhere because language itself necessarily fails.
A prefrontal cortex consists of some 10^25 atoms arranged in a far greater number of quantum states. We can’t measure that, let alone convey it in conversation. So people invented concepts like “me” and “self” that represent the stable-ish outward invariants.
If you dig far enough, these concepts fail because and are logical fictions. But there’s no deep meaning in that.
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@iamstilicho @Liberty_Vegan @romanhelmetguy Well aren’t you lucky, then, that the initial state of the universe was such a way as to inevitably lead to such a nice outcome for you?
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@Liberty_Vegan @romanhelmetguy Luck is a post-facto idiot rationalisation for an inevitable outcome you liked.
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You have to take this argument to its logical conclusion. There are ten quadrillion termites on Earth. There was a 99.99% chance that your parents would've given birth to a termite. You're very lucky that you -- literally, physically you -- weren't born a termite.
taoki@justalexoki
this is an argument i will never get. "it's deserved" i didn't do shit to get born here. it's not deserved. it's luck. and most people are unlucky as hell
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@Jaboolie @Liberty_Vegan @romanhelmetguy You’re confusing what you are with what you have. You are not your eyes. If your eyes were removed, you’d still be you.
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@Liberty_Vegan @romanhelmetguy There's no luck. There's no reliquary of being you get snatched from as you're conceived.
You can't affect your eye color before being born either, but it isn't luck when two White blue eyed parents have a blue eyed kid instead of a black kid with brown eyes.
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@ChaseMann @QuetzalPhoenix It doesn't work at all, it's no more meaningful than saying "what if you were born a worm"
If I was a worm I would not be me, I'd be a worm
You are your physical body and the genetics that created it, we are not souls inhabiting a meatsack, shoved in from the soul assembly line
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"I refuse to play along with a hypothetical made specifically to disenfranchise me, I deserve what I have"
Ok, but what if you were not you, you wouldn't deserve it then, huh? Bet you didnt think of that! This is why you need a billion immigrants. I am very smart!
Slazac 🇪🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼🌐@TrueSlazac
“What if you were born in Sudan” “But I was born in America” “I know, it’s a hypothetical, how would you feel if you were born in Sudan” “But that’s impossible, I was born in America”
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You're right that's silly. It's silly because Apple Pie is not a real ontological entity. It exists as a unique object only as a fiction created by humans. And we only call it apple pie when it’s made with apples.
Now, are *you* a fiction? Do *you* exist as a real, time-persistent being? If so, you are not identical to your current brain state, as that is changing constantly. So whatever you are, it must be able to be instantiated across various different physical substrate, because that is what's currently happening.
And if *you* do exist and are substrate independent, then it is no longer silly to ask what it would be like for you to be instantiated in a different form/substrate, like it would be for apple pie.
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@ChaseMann @QuetzalPhoenix "What if you baked an apple pie with peaches instead of apples?"
"It wouldn't be an apple pie, it would be a peach pie."
"No, but in this hypothetical it's an apple pie, with peaches instead of apples."
Profound intellectual tactics on display.
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@amodprop @RokoMijic @justalexoki Well, your prefrontal cortex is slightly different now than it was when you wrote this reply. Are you a different person now? Like, literally, ontologically a different person than the one who replied to me 27 minutes ago?
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@ChaseMann @RokoMijic @justalexoki > Instead I'd want to say what makes you "you" is your first person conscious experience. The observer watching the movie.
The observer IS your prefrontal cortex. The physical cells and connections that constitute it. There is no other possible instantiation of it.
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The bundle theory works as a matter of practicality when considering other agents. But ontologically, do you think there is a unified "you" that persists across time as your brain changes over the years?
If not, then what's the point of anything? And if so, then what are its properties? The only property I can think of that would make it meaningfully true that you are the same ontological entity across time would be if you are the same observer. The same watcher of the movie. the same subject experiencing the tea you are drinking now that experienced your scraped knee a few years back.
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well memory comes in different forms, we remember things that happened but we also learn habits and heuristics and develop tastes etc
IMO identity is the information bundle of memories, habits, goals, tastes, heuristics, self-image, capacities (such as the ability to ride a bicycle).
If someone loses all of that but their physical body still works, then yes they are dead and a zombie impostor has replaced them
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“What if you were born in Sudan”
“But I was born in America”
“I know, it’s a hypothetical, how would you feel if you were born in Sudan”
“But that’s impossible, I was born in America”
taoki@justalexoki
this is an argument i will never get. "it's deserved" i didn't do shit to get born here. it's not deserved. it's luck. and most people are unlucky as hell
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How are you guys being so fucking obtuse about this? "Phenomenology is easy to explain, it's when your parents have sex" oh ok okay sure thank you
Jeremy Kauffman 🦔🌲🌕@jeremykauffman
It's not "luck" that you were born in America or the west. It's the specific choices of your ancestors. You are not a soul placed randomly into a body. You are the product of intentional choices going back generations.
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@RokoMijic @TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac does memory = identity in your view? If someone gets amnesia, is that equivalent to them dying? And then if their memory returns to them later, are they resurrected?
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@ChaseMann @TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac you can't remember what it was like to not understand English without actually causing brain damage that destroys your understanding of English
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@RokoMijic @TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac yeah, but if i have you in a full dive VR neural lace, can't I make your neurons fire just as you are describing? At least in principle?
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@ChaseMann @TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac when you remember something, you're not watching a fpv movie, you're actually re-living the experience with the exact same neural circuits that originally experienced it
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@RokoMijic @TimTrytitle @TrueSlazac WHAT. Roko how can you do this to me? You are supposed to be my fellow Singularitarian. You don't think we are going to be able to do some wild full dive VR shenanigans? You're the Basilisk guy for God's sake!
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I think it's metaphysically impossible to do this because human memories aren't like movies; they replay experiences using the same circuits that were used to actually have those experiences. If you rewire someone's brain so that they're a completely different person and then undo that, you'll also delete most of the memories they made.
E.g. when you learn a new language as an adult, it's genuinely hard to remember what it was like to not be able to understand that language in a visceral sense
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> But I cannot be one in any coherently possible universe, because I am, by definition, me.
That depends on what “you” are though. If you are a particular arrangement neurons, then substrate independence is false, and you are not the same person you were last year, as the brain is ever-changing.
In fact you aren’t even really the same person you were when you wrote this post. There is no “you”. Your body is inhabited by a series of ontologically distinct moments of awareness that each only thinks it is identical to the previous inhabitant because he shares their memories.
If we want to rescue the idea of a time-persistent identify, we have to embrace substrate independence. “You” are the observer. The one watching the movie. Right now you are watching the Devon Eriksen movie. But it is at least metaphysically conceivable that you could instead be watching the Chase Mann movie. Or even the seagull movie.
Or it might be the case that time-persistent identity really doesn’t exist. But that would be the ultimate black pill and mean nothing matters, so we might as well operate under the assumption that that’s not what’s going on unless proven otherwise.
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Put a 100 marbles in a jar, 14 blue marbles to represent the population of the West, and 86 red marbles to represent everyone else.
If you draw a marble, blindly and at random, from the jar, you have a 14% chance of drawing a blue marble.
This how @justalexoki sees the moment of conception.
He thinks he is a random generic soul, fresh from the Well of Random Generic Souls, drawing a marble from the jar. 14% blue, 86% red.
But you don't draw the marble. You are the marble.
A blue marble only has a 14% chance of being selection in a random draw. But, in or out of the jar, a blue marble has a 100% chance of being blue.
This is the Seagull Test, which is an inversion of the Breakfast Test.
The Breakfast Test requires you to describe a hypothetical timeline where you skipped breakfast this morning, to prove you can imagine hypotheticals.
The Seagull Test requires you to reject the question "What if you were a seagull?" as a nonsense question, to prove that you understand the difference between valid and nonsense hypotheticals.
You can skip breakfast and still be you, but there is no version of you that can be a seagull, and no seagull that can, in any meaningful way, be you.
To pass the Seagull Test, you must reject the question and refuse to answer, or, better yet, reframe the question so that it asks for the intended information in a coherent way, i.e. "What does it feel like to be a seagull?"
Which is a very, very different question.
I can, with good observational data and some intelligent speculation, possibly understand the thoughts and feelings of a Pakistani brick layer.
But I cannot be one in any coherently possible universe, because I am, by definition, me.
A blue marble.
taoki@justalexoki
this is an argument i will never get. "it's deserved" i didn't do shit to get born here. it's not deserved. it's luck. and most people are unlucky as hell
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