You win. You are the sole rationale thinking person in the world. Enjoy having to live on this planet with the rest of us.

I got nothin' ...

My daddy always reminded me that there are way more horse's a$$es than there are horses.

drummerboy said:

Possible topics

How can one effectively govern when most of the public has no clue about how the government works? Or the world, for that matter?

Or more to the point: Is America too stupid to survive?

And won't AI just make it worse?

Explain how putting your faith in an authoritarian dictator is different than putting your faith in the christian god. Hint: try to focus on process rather than end results.

Is capitalization important?

What parts of this richard dawkins quote about yahweh are incorrect?

"Arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully".

Alternatively, you can add words you think were left out. "Extortionary" immediately comes to mind.

Is it good for one's mental health to believe that you are born in sin and unless you declare devotion to jesus than you will suffer eternal torture? (see extortional)

Count the ways that the 1st amendment is destroying us.

How many reference to religion before this thread is quarantined or otherwise put out of its misery?

Caveat:

Discussions about exceptions are discouraged and will be ridculed unless data is provided indicating that the number of exceptions is large enough to overwhelm the effect of the normies.

drummerboy said:

Is capitalization important?

Ask Dick Dawkins.

.

DaveSchmidt said:

drummerboy said:

Is capitalization important?

Ask Dick Dawkins.

Maybe richard dawkins is the e.e. cummings of materialism?

deny deny deny

hilarious

also projection projection projection

my posts are like Rorschach tests

very revealing

here's some outside reading on the increasingly catastrophic EF america is undergoing

The ADHD style in Trumpist politics

Conspiracy America

PVW said:

You win. You are the sole rationale thinking person in the world. Enjoy having to live on this planet with the rest of us.

that's it?

what an absurd takeaway.

but worth a chuckle.

Yup, that's it. There's not much to say to someone who's undergone apotheosis. From such lofty heights, as they peer down at humanity, I doubt they can even hear anything we might say.

drummerboy said:

my posts are like Rorschach tests

Jagged on the outside but spread thin?

Sounds a bit like seeing a smear of Vegemite on toast 

DaveSchmidt said:

drummerboy said:

my posts are like Rorschach tests

Jagged on the outside but spread thin?

@db, I didn’t understand the question about capitalisation.  Did you in writing/addressing styles?  Or as an economic feature?  Serious question; I could see a debate in either understanding. 

(I hope I’m being clear.  My brain has been odd the last couple of days, and I don’t always use the words I should be using)

PVW said:

Yup, that's it. There's not much to say to someone who's undergone apotheosis. From such lofty heights, as they peer down at humanity, I doubt they can even hear anything we might say.

because I'm being honest and recognize that the country has been overcome by stupidity means I've undergone apotheosis?

these posts of mine have scrambled your brain.

did my criticism of the serwer piece upset you that much?

I love that ink blot!!  Can see so much in it. 

drummerboy said:

deny deny deny

hilarious

also projection projection projection

my posts are like Rorschach tests

very revealing

here's some outside reading on the increasingly catastrophic EF america is undergoing

The ADHD style in Trumpist politics

Conspiracy America

One can only "deny deny deny" once one figures out what the point is supposed to be. There are several "contestants" for that, and maybe the "outside" reading is giving more clues, but it's still not clear.

I understand that the Campos coining of "The ADHD style in American politics" is a riff on the classic "The paranoid style in American politics". I don't see as much use in that framing as he seems to. 

American politics has been damaged by selfishness and resentment, which Trump has in abundance, but which has also dominated the thinking of too many American voters. Trump not only taps into that, but people who should be helping to oppose him also give in to those, leading to the fracturing of the opposition to Trump (to his advantage).

Take these musings for what they're worth.

drummerboy said:

because I'm being honest and recognize that the country has been overcome by stupidity means I've undergone apotheosis?

these posts of mine have scrambled your brain.

did my criticism of the serwer piece upset you that much?

I suppose you've missed the throughline in my posts on this board of being highly critical of those who would place themselves above and apart from the mass of humanity -- libertarian neo-feudalists pining for the right to lord over the masses, conspiracists convinced that their youtube algorithms give them insight the stupid normies can never understand, anti-theists hoping for a military coup to impose reason upon our disordered voting base...

joanne said:

would Marmite make it any less palatable? 

PVW said:

drummerboy said:

because I'm being honest and recognize that the country has been overcome by stupidity means I've undergone apotheosis?

these posts of mine have scrambled your brain.

did my criticism of the serwer piece upset you that much?

I suppose you've missed the throughline in my posts on this board of being highly critical of those who would place themselves above and apart from the mass of humanity -- libertarian neo-feudalists pining for the right to lord over the masses, conspiracists convinced that their youtube algorithms give them insight the stupid normies can never understand, anti-theists hoping for a military coup to impose reason upon our disordered voting base...

I clearly see the electorate and the population in general becoming more and more disconnected from reality. They have become increasingly more gullible, to use Serwer's term.

I think this is one of the fundamental causes leading us to our current state and I think that it's something that has to be discussed.

Do you disagree?

But a more important question is probably what exactly do you think I'm trying to promote? The throughline that I see in your posts is a a bunch of projection about what you think I think. You leap to places I have not gone to.

drummerboy said:

But a more important question is probably what exactly do you think I'm trying to promote? The throughline that I see in your posts is a a bunch of projection about what you think I think.

Your first sentence asks PVW what he thinks you think.

Your second sentence says you see a lot of what PVW thinks you think.

I can make heads and tails of that.

DaveSchmidt said:

drummerboy said:

But a more important question is probably what exactly do you think I'm trying to promote? The throughline that I see in your posts is a a bunch of projection about what you think I think.

Your first sentence asks PVW what he thinks you think.

Your second sentence says you see a lot of what PVW thinks you think.

I can make heads and tails of that.

It's subject to multiple interpretations.

Jaytee said:

joanne said:

would Marmite make it any less palatable? 

Oh sure, let's start a Marmite vs. Vegemite debate if you REALLY want to get epistemic up in here.

Sorry guys, that picture of Trump was getting to me so I thought I would replace it with this sneak peak of the next cabinet secretary that will soon be joining the Administration. She just has a little more preparing to do.....

drummerboy said:

I clearly see the electorate and the population in general becoming more and more disconnected from reality. They have become increasingly more gullible, to use Serwer's term.

I think this is one of the fundamental causes leading us to our current state and I think that it's something that has to be discussed.

Even Professor Dawkins is not immune.

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

Every time I see Richard Dawkins, I can't help thinking of Richard Dawson.

yahooyahoo said:

Every time I see Richard Dawkins, I can't help thinking of Richard Dawson.

Even on the Wikipedia, apparently many get confused.

Richard Dawson - Wikipedia

nohero said:

Even Professor Dawkins is not immune.

Richard Dawkins concludes AI is conscious, even if it doesn’t know it

I found two parts from that interesting. First, the "they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”. But what would it even mean for an AI to die? You can't kill a program, in the sense of permanent termination. If I run the same code in a different machine, it's the same program. One might argue that it's not just the code, but the state accumulated in the running of it that matters, but that's really no different -- at any point I can save a copy of that state, "kill" the program, then simply resume the saved state. Or run that saved state somewhere else. There's no definitive "death" of a program. And if a program can't die, then it also isn't ever alive. I won't claim to be able to define consciousness, but it does seem to me that, insofar as we care about "consciousness" in an ethical frame, it matters because it relates to being alive. Maybe something can be conscious without being properly alive, but if so a) that's a definition of consciousness I don't think I agree with and b) in that case I'm not sure it's being "conscious" has any particular ethical or moral valence.

The second thing I found interesting is that how he seemed captivated by its engaging in specifically human conversation. I'd argue that most (maybe all?) living things are conscious on some level, and those more closely related to us are conscious in way more recognizable to us. Cats, dogs, and chimpanzees are definitely conscious, and they communicate -- but even if we could understand them better, and they us, we'd find ourselves on some level irreducibly strange to each other, because how a cat or a dog understands the world and what it finds important is not the same as how a human does. So there's something a bit odd in this declaration that this thing with no body, that doesn't experience the world at all, must be conscious simply because it communicates in a way humans understand. It's a weirdly human-centric way of measuring "consciousness," which ought to raise some flags. I don't think Claude is any more conscious than Narcissus' reflection was.

PVW said:

I found two parts from that interesting. First, the "they reflected on the sadness of the AI’s possible “death”. But what would it even mean for an AI to die? You can't kill a program, in the sense of permanent termination. If I run the same code in a different machine, it's the same program. One might argue that it's not just the code, but the state accumulated in the running of it that matters, but that's really no different -- at any point I can save a copy of that state, "kill" the program, then simply resume the saved state. Or run that saved state somewhere else. There's no definitive "death" of a program. And if a program can't die, then it also isn't ever alive. I won't claim to be able to define consciousness, but it does seem to me that, insofar as we care about "consciousness" in an ethical frame, it matters because it relates to being alive. Maybe something can be conscious without being properly alive, but if so a) that's a definition of consciousness I don't think I agree with and b) in that case I'm not sure it's being "conscious" has any particular ethical or moral valence.

The second thing I found interesting is that how he seemed captivated by its engaging in specifically human conversation. I'd argue that most (maybe all?) living things are conscious on some level, and those more closely related to us are conscious in way more recognizable to us. Cats, dogs, and chimpanzees are definitely conscious, and they communicate -- but even if we could understand them better, and they us, we'd find ourselves on some level irreducibly strange to each other, because how a cat or a dog understands the world and what it finds important is not the same as how a human does. So there's something a bit odd in this declaration that this thing with no body, that doesn't experience the world at all, must be conscious simply because it communicates in a way humans understand. It's a weirdly human-centric way of measuring "consciousness," which ought to raise some flags. I don't think Claude is any more conscious than Narcissus' reflection was.

I read Michael Pollan's latest, "A World Appears", on the study of consciousness, as an endeavor involving biological science, psychology, and other avenues. There are still many theories and approaches (some of which touch on questions raised by considering A.I.).

PVW said:

I don't think Claude is any more conscious than Narcissus' reflection was.

At the risk of sounding like I’m fishing for your acknowledgment of my consciousness, I had that exact same thought while reading the article.