Entries tagged with philosophy

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Still playing Nine Sols

For most of this game, I've been unable to tease an obvious, pat, moral out of the plot. The Taoists correctly predicted that the Sols (technology-loving atheists) would become tyrants, which would seem to be a point for the Taoists. But the ways in which the Sols went bad seem to involve mimicking Taoists. There's a Sol who believes life is suffering, a Sol who emphasizes respecting your elders, a Sol based on the philosopher who dreamt of being a butterfly . . . And of course, the protag is a Sol who's trying to fix all this and still believes in the power of rationalism and technological advancement. There's a decent chance this will stay nuanced, something that rarely happens in video games that try to have a theme.

There's also a decent chance this will end up hammering in that the one deathist Taoist was right about everything and the Sols should have just laid down and died. In which case, fuck Red Candle Games in particular.

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philosophy

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Stoics: I must not mind. Minding is the mind-killer.

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If there’s one argument I wish I could make and have an impact with, it’s this: just because something feels emotionally true doesn’t mean it’s true. Like, I’ve seen a few variants of “going to outer space gives astronauts spiritual feelings. Therefore, outer space gives people spiritual insight.” And you could just as easily say “Outer space breaks people’s brains,” with just as much or as little evidence to support it.

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philosophy

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A while back, a certain blogger quoted Philip K. Dick that reality is what doesn’t go away if you stop believing in it. This blogger had tried so hard to disbelieve when the spirit of Death started talking to him in his head, but it wouldn’t go away, so he had no choice but to treat it as reality.

You do what you have to, but I think Dick was wrong. Reality doesn’t go away when you stop noticing it. Something can be rammed into your head so hard you have no way to dislodge it, but still not be real, and something can be real even if there’s no way for you to see it.

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Reading radfem posts

Shit, it’s fucking virtue ethics. “Morality is about being the kind of person who embodies virtues. If you spank someone, you’re not embodying virtue.” Fuck you and the ancient Greek chariot you rode in on.

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A mental trap: asserting that human-created meaning exists outside of humans. For instance, wavelengths of light exist, but humans are the ones who categorize some wavelengths as “yellow.” If you talk about yellow as an objective property and philosophize about the true nature of yellow, you’re overprivileging the human perspective.

Also a mental trap: thinking that someone is asserting human-created meaning when they’re not. Someone talks about the wavelengths of light that are commonly considered “yellow,” and you get mad and lecture them about how yellow isn’t real. They weren’t trying to assert yellow as real; they were just trying to talk about the properties of light in a concise and easy to understand way.

Both mental traps constantly snap shut when people talk about sex chromosomes.

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Hey, you. Tumblr user who’s arguing that the Trolley Problem is meant to brainwash people into normalizing the government’s control over people’s lives and deaths. The argument you’re thinking of is called the Ticking Time Bomb Problem, and it’s fucking intolerable.

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philosophy

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Older philosophers’ love of Plato is probably part of why the field is full of dumb word games. Plato believed that things like courage existed as objective entities in the realm of forms, which opens up questions about which definition of courage is the real, existing courage and which definitions are false shadows of courage. There’s a parallel to modern philosophers debating which definition of yellow is the real yellow.

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philosophy

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I’m not mad at you for believing in free will. After all, I don’t believe you can make a free-willed choice to believe otherwise.

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The Truth

It's surprising how little I miss having eyes.

( Read more... )

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philosophy

Weird thoughts about LLMs, part 2

I saw an argument that the Chinese Room may have a consciousness separate from the human within it. The human doesn’t “mean” what they say, but the room means it. Therefore, an LLM might have a consciousness and mean what it says.

I think the point is made more clearly if, instead of using the Chinese Room for the comparison, you use No is Yes for the comparison. The girl says “No” and means “Yes.” It would be absurd to argue that her words create an independent consciousness that means “No.” The word “No” has simply been unmoored from its original meaning.

You can argue that there’s something within an LLM that “thinks.” Presumably, it goes “I want to make this text similar to the text I’ve read.” But the LLM doesn’t mean “No” when it mimics a text that says “No,” because the word “No” has been unmoored.

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philosophy

Weird thoughts about LLMs, part 1

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, you can get into an argument about whether other-dimensional spirits qualify as “people.” One of your possible arguments is that spirits, in the Dragon Age cosmology, are fundamentally reflections. They mimic the emotions they see, and they can’t feel anything a human hasn’t felt first.

The other guy argues that humans also impact and change each other. If this argument changes your mind, does that mean you’re not a person because you reflected him?

LLMs are reflections. You show one a bunch of fantasy novels, and it reproduces the general style of fantasy novels. Show it a bunch of 4chan posts, and it reproduces 4chan posts. So in a way, that argument about spirits is also an argument about LLMs.

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philosophy

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People say Wittgenstein exposed how much philosophy is meaningless word games pretending to be logic. So I tried reading Tractatus, and guys, it’s meaningless word games pretending to be logic.

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In the long term, I think utils bottom out a lot lower than they top out, thanks to the hedonic treadmill. If person A gets maximum positive utils from giving B maximum negative utils, it’s a net negative. And I think a lot of the things that give positive utils are more replaceable than things that prevent negative utils. If you have the preference to be safe, you won’t be happy while you’re forced to fight in an arena, but I don’t think someone who watches an arena fight inherently enjoys it more than watching a video game tournament. So my concern is less with making some people really happy, and more with giving people the basics like food and shelter to prevent the worst cases of misery.

This isn’t always as fair as it sounds. I think it’s basically tolerable if some people are rich and some people have enough to get by. But people shouldn’t be rich so long as others are starving.

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philosophy

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I read an article about why The Good Place sucks. The author kept saying that it became “less interesting” without really explaining why, until he eventually happened upon the idea that it’s vapid to argue that nobody deserves eternal torment. Then he wandered back to “less interesting” and stayed there. I think the actual reason the author doesn’t like The Good Place is that he thinks some people deserve eternal torment, and the rest of the essay is just to make that disagreement sound profound.

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philosophy

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If your brain is in one place, Dennett asks, and your body is in another, where are you?

I think the answer’s simple. Your brain is you. Your body is your reach. It’s like having an incredibly long arm.

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My hot take on the “people would be more moral if they had English degrees” posts is that English degrees teach you the morals of the authors whose work you read in English class. Most authors in English class don’t have my morals, so I don’t think English class makes you more moral by my standards, which are the standards I care about because I’m me.

Now, philosophy class teaches my morals, but they’re usually treated as an obsolete historical curiosity.

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philosophy

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More thinking about The Pillars of Reality. I previously speculated that in this setting, all minds are scattered fragments of the original mind. I have an addendum from the later books: the way old-style mages are trained makes them psychologically incapable of coming up with this idea on their own.

Basically, mages trained in the old style lose the ability to divide an object into functional parts. For instance, they can’t learn to pull the trigger on a gun, because they only conceive of the gun as a whole and can’t conceive of the trigger as an individual part of it. This doesn’t make a lot of sense and contradicts earlier books (e.g. mages in earlier books can conceive of a lock as a specific part of a door), but it’s canon now, so I’ll roll with it.

That’s why old-style mages ended up as solipsists. They recognized the existence of the one true mind, but couldn’t conceive of it being broken into parts, because they couldn’t conceive of parts in the first place. The only conclusion each individual mage could come to was that they, themselves, were the one true mind, and other mages were just hallucinations that helped the mind understand the delusional state it was trapped in.

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An Arknights thought

Even on the misinterpreting-fiction website, I never see anyone misinterpret or miss the point of Platinum’s backstory. People always get exactly what it means, even if they don’t have the words to describe it.

To try to sum it up myself, there’s an idea Rationalists call Moloch. Imagine a society where everyone makes what seem to be rational decisions, but they combine into an overall situation that hurts everyone. Everyone would be better off if society changed, but nobody can coordinate well enough to change it. This society, intended by no one, is the same result you’d get if a demon intended to create a society where everyone suffered for his amusement, and Moloch is the name used for the metaphorical demon. Doing things that entrench this society even further is referred to as “serving Moloch.”

Platinum’s backstory is about her realizing that every level of power and influence in her society has been consumed by Moloch, from ordinary people up to the leaders. There is never a point where you climb high enough to be happy or safe, and both people like Platinum who serve Moloch and people like her bosses who initially seem to be Moloch are just cogs in the system.

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philosophy

Inspired by a Transformers fanfic

When you’re starving, I don’t think it matters if the person who gives you money is a hypocrite.

Sure, if they give you food because they think that’s all you need, and they don’t listen when you tell them you also need shoes and diapers and textbooks, that’s a problem. It’s a problem if they won’t give you money unless you attend their sermon, or they won’t give you money because you don’t look noble and dignified enough for their standards. But if they’re masturbating their sense of righteousness, or they’re acting like you’d be helpless without their aid, their bills are still as green as any others. If their money can get you a room where the ceiling doesn’t leak, they’re as good as an ATM.

I don’t think the world needs good people in order for good to be done. If every person acts for their selfish gratification, but it gratifies them to provide actual help, that alone solves the problems at hand.