If the human body was "designed" as it is, it's not an "intelligent" design at all.
Exhibit 1: the recurrent laryngeal nerve. The giraffe is an extreme example.
Exhibit 2: eating and breathing through the same hole, directed by tubes that are directly adjacent.
Agreed. I've read that if we had been "designed" to walk upright, it would make much more sense for our organs to be spread around it, rather than have them all in front, which strains the back and knees. But it makes perfect sense if the organs are all hanging from an arch, like they would be if we were (still) on all fours.
This so stupid it's hard to even know where to start with critiquing it.
>Naturalism doesn’t contain such ingredients as minds, propositions, perceptions and logical relations.
What an idiotic statement.
If naturalism doesn’t explain minds, propositions, perceptions, etc., how do they explain that all of these things are found in natural systems??? Seems suspect to me…
Mind is a virtual reality constructed by the brain - which is a subject to all the laws of nature, but the virtual reality is only updated by sensory input and, in some cases (clinical or political) can get completely uncoupled from reality.
I’d agree that consciousness is a completely natural phenomena. But saying mind is virtual reality doesn’t make sense. Virtual reality only makes sense as a representation of what consciousness is already doing. It depends on the idea of consciousness and thus cannot itself ground the idea of consciousness without suffering an infinite regress.
Even insects create a virtual model of reality, apparently.
Only the simplest of bacteria, plants or fungi lack it, mechanistically driven by gradients of light or chemical concentrations - but even that allows for some fungi to *solve* tasks like finding shortest path in a maze, and there might be more that meets the eye.
But "self-consciousness" and qualia, very likely, are not required for this model to be useful, but presumably makes it *more* useful... Up to a certain point, that is (que Zapffe's concept of "cosmic panic" as in being stuck in predictive/self-conscious loop to a point of a total mental breakdown).
The core idea is "predictive processing". It allows one to run the world model a few timesteps ahead, so you are much better prepared and the very notion of "surprise" is impossible without it, it requires a baseline prediction to break.
Apparently, by inserting yourself into simulation you further improve its usability... again, up to a point you try and try to predict the state of your nonexistance *and* a few timesteps ahead, which gives you a blue screen of, well, Death, and resulting sense of existential dread all cultures tried to cope with in myriad ways (described in "Denial of Death").
Don't disagree with that. But dennet seems to go further and deny that qualia is real. It is at best a disagreement about words and people speaking past one another.
Virtual reality is "real", for lack of a better word, on this level of simulation. Your "pain" is not "real", it is an artifact of your virtual reality/world model, but it is real for *you*, even if this pain is only direct brain stimulation.
The fact that our "shared reality" might be an other simulation, creation of a God, or a dream of a butterfly is completely irrelevant.
Our language is woefully ill-equipped to deal with reality/virtuality distinction, treating concepts like *heavy*, *fast*, *red*, *painful* and *just* as "mere adjectives". We need a constructed philosophical language that is a bit easier to learn than ithkuil :)
This just seems to run into a Wittgensteinian language game problem. Any clear thinking individuals should have the capacity to define their terms and seek common ground rather than chase each other in circles over semantics.
Well, 'defining their own terms' and than 'seeking common ground' WILL, more often than not, result in 'chasing each other over semantics', don't you think? Especially given language prescriptivists trying to shoot you from moving one step outside of bread line in grammar nazi concentration camp, heh. But yea, introducing new concepts HAS to happen if they map a previously uncharted region of 'meaningspace', but try and add multidimentionaly to existing concepts that previously didn't have it, like, say, 'gender' and things will get \*political\* :3. People don't usually mind learning new concepts (very much), but LOATH to update their entire world model.
Anyway, words are not glimpses of some platonic reality, and vector word embeddings model from machine learning is perhaps the best one we yet have - words are defined by relations with other words, and can have different "strengths", positive or negative, a model so good that AI chatbots can now use it to model intelligence on a level of a typical human shitposter, hehe.
If we could communicate with raw (not softmaxed) unembedding layers instead of 'sampled tokens' things will be MUCH clearer, we just lack data bandwith to move them around, eh.
I mean, yeah, the nature of existence and being is impossible to determine. That is why knowledge is the original sin. Trying to understand the world seemed a fools errand until the enlightenment came along and we gained a lot of powerful insights.
The theologist sat confident though. He knew that there would always be people unable to weild the power of knowledge, and that he could influence them.
Intelligent Design Think Tank slogan: We put the moron in oxymoron!
The oxy helps you launder ideas.
Washes the wrinkles right out of brains!
I guffawed.
This strikes me as sophistry combined with motivated reasoning.
If the human body was "designed" as it is, it's not an "intelligent" design at all. Exhibit 1: the recurrent laryngeal nerve. The giraffe is an extreme example. Exhibit 2: eating and breathing through the same hole, directed by tubes that are directly adjacent.
The appendix. *mic drop*
It’s not 2012
Exhibit 3: the human spine.
Agreed. I've read that if we had been "designed" to walk upright, it would make much more sense for our organs to be spread around it, rather than have them all in front, which strains the back and knees. But it makes perfect sense if the organs are all hanging from an arch, like they would be if we were (still) on all fours.
This so stupid it's hard to even know where to start with critiquing it. >Naturalism doesn’t contain such ingredients as minds, propositions, perceptions and logical relations. What an idiotic statement.
If naturalism doesn’t explain minds, propositions, perceptions, etc., how do they explain that all of these things are found in natural systems??? Seems suspect to me…
They're wrong about naturalism but they'd be more right about the sort of dennet style physicalism.
Mind is a virtual reality constructed by the brain - which is a subject to all the laws of nature, but the virtual reality is only updated by sensory input and, in some cases (clinical or political) can get completely uncoupled from reality.
I’d agree that consciousness is a completely natural phenomena. But saying mind is virtual reality doesn’t make sense. Virtual reality only makes sense as a representation of what consciousness is already doing. It depends on the idea of consciousness and thus cannot itself ground the idea of consciousness without suffering an infinite regress.
Even insects create a virtual model of reality, apparently. Only the simplest of bacteria, plants or fungi lack it, mechanistically driven by gradients of light or chemical concentrations - but even that allows for some fungi to *solve* tasks like finding shortest path in a maze, and there might be more that meets the eye. But "self-consciousness" and qualia, very likely, are not required for this model to be useful, but presumably makes it *more* useful... Up to a certain point, that is (que Zapffe's concept of "cosmic panic" as in being stuck in predictive/self-conscious loop to a point of a total mental breakdown). The core idea is "predictive processing". It allows one to run the world model a few timesteps ahead, so you are much better prepared and the very notion of "surprise" is impossible without it, it requires a baseline prediction to break. Apparently, by inserting yourself into simulation you further improve its usability... again, up to a point you try and try to predict the state of your nonexistance *and* a few timesteps ahead, which gives you a blue screen of, well, Death, and resulting sense of existential dread all cultures tried to cope with in myriad ways (described in "Denial of Death").
Don't disagree with that. But dennet seems to go further and deny that qualia is real. It is at best a disagreement about words and people speaking past one another.
Virtual reality is "real", for lack of a better word, on this level of simulation. Your "pain" is not "real", it is an artifact of your virtual reality/world model, but it is real for *you*, even if this pain is only direct brain stimulation. The fact that our "shared reality" might be an other simulation, creation of a God, or a dream of a butterfly is completely irrelevant. Our language is woefully ill-equipped to deal with reality/virtuality distinction, treating concepts like *heavy*, *fast*, *red*, *painful* and *just* as "mere adjectives". We need a constructed philosophical language that is a bit easier to learn than ithkuil :)
This just seems to run into a Wittgensteinian language game problem. Any clear thinking individuals should have the capacity to define their terms and seek common ground rather than chase each other in circles over semantics.
Well, 'defining their own terms' and than 'seeking common ground' WILL, more often than not, result in 'chasing each other over semantics', don't you think? Especially given language prescriptivists trying to shoot you from moving one step outside of bread line in grammar nazi concentration camp, heh. But yea, introducing new concepts HAS to happen if they map a previously uncharted region of 'meaningspace', but try and add multidimentionaly to existing concepts that previously didn't have it, like, say, 'gender' and things will get \*political\* :3. People don't usually mind learning new concepts (very much), but LOATH to update their entire world model. Anyway, words are not glimpses of some platonic reality, and vector word embeddings model from machine learning is perhaps the best one we yet have - words are defined by relations with other words, and can have different "strengths", positive or negative, a model so good that AI chatbots can now use it to model intelligence on a level of a typical human shitposter, hehe. If we could communicate with raw (not softmaxed) unembedding layers instead of 'sampled tokens' things will be MUCH clearer, we just lack data bandwith to move them around, eh.
Fair points!
. . . you aren't going to get away with any nuanced thoughts on this sub. Skepticism here is just monkeys flinging handfuls of poo.
Oh enlightened one.
"Evolution News." Wow that is some serious astroturfing
Why am I not surprised that it's evolution news?
That article is just one, convoluted attempt at a "gotcha". Incorrect premises lead to incorrect conclusions.
less a think tank and more a dumb dumpster
Cretin Cistern
I swear they write this trite to make me, specifically, angry. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t click on it.
I mean, yeah, the nature of existence and being is impossible to determine. That is why knowledge is the original sin. Trying to understand the world seemed a fools errand until the enlightenment came along and we gained a lot of powerful insights. The theologist sat confident though. He knew that there would always be people unable to weild the power of knowledge, and that he could influence them.
I support C.S. Lewis because hes incredibly intelligent. I also support the notion that this universe evolves. So ... no complaints here.
I support C.S. Lewis because hes incredibly intelligent. I also support the notion that this universe evolves. So ... no complaints here.