@ByzantineMerc @hollowearthterf @TheHyland3r You're not doing so hot in your own lane if you think that one can be both a "heretic" and "not a Christian"
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sprawlrus
655 posts
sprawlrus
@sprawlrus
pervert/heretic
the belly of the beast Katılım Mayıs 2018
266 Takip Edilen64 Takipçiler
@hollowearthterf @TheHyland3r You’re not a Christian, shut up heretic and stay in your lane
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@alegator_cs @tdietterich @Endothermia If half a scientific paper contains sexually explicit fiction about goblins rather than mathematics, I will probably not read the other half, because I will make reasonable assumptions about its utility
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@tdietterich @Endothermia well typos are not errors they're noise that you can trivially filter, kind of like television ads
many obvious errors you can fix in your head on the fly
i don't care whether the author took time to run or analyze experiments, i only care whether the paper is useful
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Attention @arxiv authors: Our Code of Conduct states that by signing your name as an author of a paper, each author takes full responsibility for all its contents, irrespective of how the contents were generated. 1/
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@basedganyu @punished_bobda "the hypothetical is so remote as to not be useful in moral reasoning" > "the hypothetical is nonsensical and actually has no content because it contains an implicit contradiction"
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@basedganyu @punished_bobda This is a much better framing but plenty of people are making the argument at the level of, essentially, the formal semantics of counterfactual hypotheticals.
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This is a massive self report lmao. The ability to distinguish between valid and invalid hypotheticals is a higher order cognitive function than the ability to simply answer them. This is obvious, come on dude.
taoki@justalexoki
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@PalmyrPar @justalexoki @dyingscribe The problem is that people are grounding the disagreement in like, the formal semantics of which counterfactual hypotheticals are intelligible. Instead of just saying "this counterfactual is sufficiently remote that it is not useful for moral reasoning".
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Taoki I get you but I feel like you’re intentionally pretending the other position doesn’t make perfect sense in the specific context of lineage and consciousness. Like it’s a very easy thing to understand as being different or more difficult to separate than other similar hypotheticals.
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@Enkwelos @BrandonTheAdams @fleshofgrass @SyntheticAnima if you're just a hard determinist, are there any counterfactual hyptheticals that have semantic meaning for you? If so, how do you explain their intelligibility, given that necessarily nothing could ever have been other than it is?
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@BrandonTheAdams @fleshofgrass @SyntheticAnima I’m not sure what you’re arguing with me about.
I don’t personally really believe in souls. I don’t even really believe in “free will” as it is commonly envisioned, but more as a series of limited choices, imperfectly made.
But I also don’t believe in metaphysical “luck”.
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"Metaphysical claim on the nature of souls" vs "thought experiment to train basic empathy"
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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@blightersort @webdevMason like eriksen's claim isn't just "this hypothetical is not particularly meaningful or useful for reasoning about justice and moral desert" it is "this hypothetical is nonsense"
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@blightersort @webdevMason so then why instead of having this question in a moral-ethical register—and there's 50+ yrs of people arguing w Rawls in that register—are we doing all this shadowboxing about the formal semantic content of certain kinds of counterfactual hypotheticals?
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"What if you were a seagull?" is not a nonsense question
You can ask "what if a human mind that had all of your ideals and preferences were inside a seagull?" and it might not be a *useful* question, but it's kind of an interesting one and definitely not incoherent
Or you can ask "what would it be like to be a seagull?" which is also not hard to parse, if a little harder to answer reasonably. I guess you can argue that it's nothing to be like a seagull because seagulls aren't experiencers, but that's not terribly well supported
What taoki is presumably saying is that some lives seem awfully unpleasant, and like, yeah? They do? Working from extremely basic principles about pain and being prevented from fulfilling instinctual drives, we can say that it's probably not fun to be a rat that drowns in a bucket or a person whose babies all die or whatever
Devon Eriksen@Devon_Eriksen_
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.
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@wickedguide @MTabarrok @eigenrobot true, every human being is the sum total of the experiences that have shaped them and their biological makeup, and could not have been or indeed acted otherwise, as this supposes them to be other than they are. Anyways, how would you feel if you hadn't had breakfast this morning?
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@MTabarrok @eigenrobot Your very personality is the result of your parents' genes, which has then coloured the way you experience the events, which has then further formed your character. This is the foundational flaw of Rawls. You couldn't have been born somewhere else, it's literally impossible.
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john rawls and his consequences have been a disaster for the human race
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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@sprawlrus @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki The question is whether most people read it the same way you do or not. I don't think that people by and large read anything as a claim of formal semantics ':)
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@sprawlrus @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Here's my reply to Devon along a similar line as what you're asking, I think:
x.com/ir0nivan/statu…
ir0niv4n@ir0nivan
@Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki The question is ofc where you draw the line. Could you have been born slightly shorter/taller? Similar question to how much you are your past self. You are much closer to your past self than to anyone else, but still not 100 %. Nebulous like a cloud. But there's still in or out.
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki I don't disagree that veil of ignorance reasoning is much abused! But I think the stronger criticisms are better expressed in a moral/ethical register instead of as a claim about the formal semantics of counterfactuals
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@sprawlrus @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki I don't think Devon's goal was to be mathematically precise. I think the point here is to push back against this absurd blank-slateism that says "I could have been anyone". Rawl's veil of ignorance is getting abused for all sorts of things.
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki But instead it attempts to define what I think is this particular claim about how claims about origins or identity are per se not susceptible to counterfactual reasoning, which I just think is mistaken
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki If the OP just said "I think counterfactuals about different accidents of birth are so remote as to not be useful for moral reasoning" I wouldn't have this particular basket of criticisms
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki I can conceive of, e.g., how the last 24 hours would have gone if somebody had cut off my hand after lunch yesterday! I can tell a very sensible story about going to the hospital, calling out of work today, and struggling to eat hospital food with a single hand.
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki "what if I had one hand instead of two" seems perfectly intelligible and sensible to me despite me having the property of having two hands and thus by your semantics being conditioned on me being a person w two hands
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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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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki E.g., a theory about why the fact that I was born to parents in America is an essential property of "me" in a way that "I had breakfast this morning" is not, such that "I" ceases to be meaningful if we imagine a counterpart of me identical in every respect except birth in Tijuana
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@ir0nivan @Chungeoisie @Devon_Eriksen_ @justalexoki Again, what's needed is a substantive theory of why the nationality case is different that the breakfast case. And it can't just be that it posits something is otherwise than it is, because that proves too much.
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