ageedizzle

Treating observation as fact-generating seems to force either an arbitrary stopping point or an infinite hierarchy of observers.

Can you explain? I don’t understand

Care to elaborate?

Edit: never mind, i got it… lol

One option discussed in the article is pitching a tent in the room to avoid being seen. Sounds extreme but honestly might be worth it as these cameras get harder and harder to spot

Reddit and Lemmy doesn’t have any thing that curates what you see based on your habits

I’m pretty sure Reddit curates the content of r/popular based on your browser history.

Loops too. It’s the fediverse version of TikTok. Would it also be illegal?

The way you’re discussing ‘models’ seems to assume two points: (1) that all useful models will be physical models, and (2) that we have models that work in this context. Neither of these assumptions are correct.

For the first point, arguably the most popular model of consciousness we have at the moment is Integrated Information Theory (IIT). IIT is explicitly a panpsychist theory (all matter has some non-zero quantity of consciousness). This lends itself very well to non-physicalist interpretations (where consciousness is a fundamental constituent of the universe, irreducible to matter).

For the second point, all this discussion of models is largely besides the point. Because there is currently no model of conscious experience that works. No theory is widely accepted. And the theories that were once popular (global workspace theory and even IIT) seem to not the supported by evidence (proponents of these theories have tried to modify them to fit the data, but you can only do that so many times before things start to looks sketchy). So whether we use a model or not, it’s not really relevant to this discussion, because we currently have no scientific models of consciousness that work.

But there’s no reason to think it isn’t.

That’s not the case. This is a very active area in academic philosophy and there are, objectively speaking, several reasons to think that consciousness is not solely a material process (whether or not you think these are good reasons is for you to decide). For an accessible introduction to this topic I recommend Facing up to the problem of consciousness by David Chalmers. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Knowledge Argument is also a good intro if you are looking to dive right into something a bit more technical.

That’s awesome. Is this growth mostly driven by Reddit outreach?

I know I’m preaching to the choir here but, in general Canada (with the exception of Quebec) consumes way too much American media. The whole world consumes a lot of American media, of course, but with our proximity and prior cultural similarities this is an especially insidious problem for us. Because the end result is the spreading of American culture and values at the expense of our own. For example it’s not uncommon to come across someone who knows more about American politics than Canadian politics, or who knows more about the NYC mayoral run (or something trendy like that) than the local elections happening in their own city. In this kind of information environment it’s not surprising that our politics would gradually become Americanized.

Fixing this problem is tricky, and any full solution will need to attack it from multiple angles. But part of the solution is having more Canadian spaces where we can talk about distinctly Canadian issues and share distinctly Canadian media (even if it’s something as trivial as Heated Rivalry or The Trailer Park Boys). And the fediverse is of course great for that. Lemmy.ca, mstdn.ca, piefed.ca, etc, these are all distinctly Canadian spaces. So let’s help these places grow by participating in them and sharing them with others. Let’s get more of our fellow Canadians in these Canadian spaces. The more popular these spaces are the less we will need to rely on American alternatives, and the less we rely on American alternatives the less influence America will have on our politics and culture more generally.

Was this information about his bank transactions released in the Epstein files?

Okay thanks for the heads up

Yeah. I think having no responsibilities would eventually get really depressing

This is exactly why I don’t want to lie to my kids about Santa. I saw my younger sibling get really upset when he discovered the truth. Seems like an avoidable problem. But people tend to think I’m a grinch for not wanting to do the whole Santa thing

How did you manage to get your kids to believe in Santa without lying about it to them first? I also don’t want to lie to my kids so I wanted to do away with the whole Santa thing, but my wife wants to keep him around so we decided on some sort of compromise position where we keep Santa but don’t explicitly say he’s real. To me this seems untenable, but apparently not. So I’m interested to hear how you did it.

My younger brother had the same reaction. My dad told him that he was the one putting presents under the tree and my brother was like “you mean you’re Sa ta?”

Thank you!

How do we know the information they make public isn’t cherry picked to make them look good? It takes a lot of trust in the Chinese government take the cases they do publicize at face value and assume that nothing else is going on, because without the total numbers it’s impossible to know how many cases are being omitted.

I don’t think I could bring myself up to that level of trust. It’s not even anything against the Chinese government in particular; I don’t know if I’d trust any government to that degree.

but I’m not going to say the PRC is executing people willy-nilly.

But how do you know that if they keep the numbers secret?

It does sound interesting. Where do I start?

The execution thing does seem backwards though, no? The death penalty in general seems pretty backwards. It’s no less barbaric when China does it than when the US does it. Most civilized countries do not kill their own citizens.