To get a broad acquaintance with the history of the field and its range of thoughts, I think these are probably the most important authors to read:

Socrates (via Plato)
Plato
Aristotle
Aquinas
Descartes
Locke
Kant

And then you should acquaint yourself with the foremost thinkers in the fields of:

Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Art
Philosophy of Mathematics
Ontology / Metaphysics
Philosophy of Mind
Epistemology
Philosophy of Education
Philosophy of Religion
Metaethics
Philosophy of will
Ethics (especially utilitarians and deontologists)
Political philosophy
Existentialism / “philosophy of life”

In my formal education I overlooked the middle of that historical list (Aquinas and the Scholastic generally) and the beginning and end of that topic list (the first three and the last one), and only later realized their place in the big picture and wished I could go back and give myself this general study structure to work from.

Xtrix makes a very good point, and also if I am recalling correctly, Chomsky has been open about not thinking that he personally knows the exact correct political system, but only that he has well-founded criticisms of existing systems and proposals that together point in the general direction of where a better system may be found. I think this falliblilist, falsificationist approach is the right one: we progress in any field not by building up from nothing to the one certain and perfect solution, but by ruling out swathes of possibilities and narrowing in on a smaller and smaller range of remaining possibilities. Chomsky gives sound arguments why the correct solution cannot be statist or capitalist and probably narrows in even further in the realm of libertarian socialism, but so far as I know never claims that some exact political structure is definitely the sole best one.

I figured that’s what you meant, my response was directed more at John than you.

Fun fact: iron working wasn’t unknown in the bronze age, it’s just that bronze was a better metal, but people switched to iron when bronze became prohibitively expensive.

You’re arguing against something I didn’t say. Think of a Venn diagram. The left circle is “something”. The right circle is “not everything”. The slice of the left circle that’s not in the right is “everything” (not not everything). The slice of the right circle that’s not in the left is “nothing” (not something). The intersection in the middle is something but not everything, for which we don’t have a special word.

Anarchy means “no rulers”, not “no rules”. No rules would be anomie.

I’m disappointed that nobody in this thread seems to know what anarchy actually is.

It’s not disorder or chaos or lawlessness. It is radically democratic, egalitarian, decentralized governance. It’s not the absence if governance, but the absence of a state, and the perfection of governance into a stateless form.

Our current landfills will become mines of resources to be recycled, creating a circular economy, as soon as it is easier to extract those resources from garbage than from where we currently get them. That can happen either by inventing new technologies that make recycling easier, or else by default it will happen when easier-to-get resources become prohibitively scarce.

:100:

Terms have have overlapping but no one coextensive meaning. “Something” just means “not nothing”; “everything” just means “nothing not”. If nothing is not whatever, but not nothing is whatever, then something is whatever and everything is whatever; but it could instead be that something is whatever, and something is not whatever.

The same relationship holds between:
some and all
something and everything
possibility and necessity
permission and obligation
disjunction and conjunction

These are all DeMorgan duals, where each is equivalent to the negation of the other of a negation. E.g. something is = not everything isn’t. Etc.

I didn’t realize I was creating an inconsistency, so I leave it up to another poster (first comer) to decide to reject either my axiom or John’s.

None = not some = all not = not nall not
Some = not none = not all not = nall not
All = none not = not some not = not nall
Nall = not all = some not = not none not

Also look up DeMorgan duality for more on these kinds of relationships.

The product of any two integers is omega. (Where omega is the first number bigger than any integers).

I wasn’t suggesting that a particular company necessarily has to be good to its employees to be highly profitable right now, but that actual overall economic efficiency (of an entire society across its history) often coincides with being good to the workers. Like how a more deadly bacterium may be individually more successful but its species be less fit because it wipes out all its hosts, or how a species may be highly successful at exploiting its environment moment to moment but then drive itself into extinction by over-exploiting it in the long term. Long term big picture success requires the powerful to see to the success of those they depend upon, lest they run out, or burn out, and the powerful who depend on them then have none to depend on. Short term parochial success is not prohibited by this trend, but focusing only on that is the literal definition of shortsightedness, and thus folly.

You could get efficiency gains by [...] extending the working week to 60 hours — Baden

Actually from what I've read, the longer the shift the lower the efficiency (work per time).

I would expect that in many cases, overall efficiency of production coincides with worker well-being, because healthy, happy people do better work, and poorer people spend more of their income so paying more to the poor and working classes instead of the upper classes means more demand and higher profits for businesses, and so on. The people on top treating the people on bottom poorly is irrational behavior that fails to look at what a detriment it makes in the big picture, because being rich and powerful doesn't necessarily mean you're a smart, systemic, forward-thinker.

Today's Existential Comic reminded me of this old conversation:

Oh, I thought you were going to say, "rather than bravely engaging in life". — Athena

That is the correct attitude to take, but if one finds oneself fixated on death and unable to just live like that, distracting oneself to break the fixation and get on with living is wiser than what some people portray as bravely staring death in the face. I understand that when thus fixated trying not to be feels like cowardice, but when not thus fixated such fixation looks like foolishness. Pitiable, for those who remember what it’s like to be so foolish themselves, but foolishness nevertheless.

I hope this is tongue in cheek. — John Gill

Unfortunately I see a high probability that it is not. Existential dread seems a much realer and more widespread thing than I thought for most of my life thus far, having only begun to suffer from it myself just over a year ago.

Unless your hope is that this poor person is not sincerely trying to merely distract himself from death rather than bravely staring it in the face. I think that that attitude (the one that sees honor in masochistically obsessing over death) the main cause of existential problems. Worrying about things you can’t do anything about is pointless and so in a sense irrational—impractical at least—and if distractions help break someone out of that loop then they’re a useful tool.

I’m not sure I’ve ever heard language games described as such a distraction, though.

It’s been a long time since I read it but that was my takeaway from it and where I first got that idea of bullshit being different from lies.

Agreed. As I summarized earlier, the liar is intentionally trying to make people believe something false, whereas the bullshitter doesn’t care if the claim is true or false, only that it is believed. If it happens to be true, all the better for the bullshitter, but the liar would be disturbed to learn that what he himself believed was false and what he thought a falsehood was true.

Invest it in or loan it to people starting businesses doing what? Manually doing all the things the robots are already doing, bringing us back to a pre-robot economy?

The point is that if the robots produce all the food and other basic necessities, and need nothing from the humans, and don’t just serve the humans all equally but only serve some minority of humans who barely need anything from other humans because they have robots to do everything, then what are all of the other humans going to trade to the robots (or their owners) to get that food and other necessities? One trillionaire’s entertainment budget isn’t going to keep a billion YouTubers gainfully employed.

If robot ownership is widely distributed there’s no problem, so this isn’t an argument against automation, but against concentrated ownership of the automatons. And yes, the existing concentration of ownership of existing automatons (and other less advanced means of production) is already causing a less severe version of the same problem. Total automation is just the most severe case that most highlights the problems of capitalism.

I think in the very long term that’s probably correct, but in the shorter term that would come about through the ways I already listed. My scenario 4 basically is the rich/poor division going away on its own, and as already described I foresee 2 transitioning to 3 and 3 to 4 over time, plus I can also see a direct 2 to 4 transition as even a few generous rich people give automatons to the poor who then give them to other poor until everyone’s rich, and even in scenario 1, the worst of them all, after the carnage all the survivors will be rich so there will be no division going forward from there either.

So basically in the end there will be a world of everyone living happily in fully automated luxury space communism one way or another, the question is only who gets to survive to see it and how painful is the transition from here to there.

That would count as art yes, and it would be highly successful from the artists POV, but not from the patrons POV, who did not intend to have that reaction invoked in them.

The whole point of Moore’s paradox is that it is not logically contradictory for something to be true and yet someone believes otherwise, but if that someone SAYS that it’s true but that they believe otherwise, it sure SOUNDS like a contradiction even though it’s logically not.

My resolution to the paradox is to differentiate between asserting or as I say “impressing” opinions, and expressing opinions. When you say that something is true, you impress to the listener that it is true, but also express your own belief that it is true. If you then follow that up with impressing on the listener that you believe otherwise, that impression contradicts the preceding expression, even though it doesn’t contradict the preceding impression.

Would that make concern trolling a kind of bullshitting? Pretending to care when you don’t?

I mentioned this already when you brought it up in another thread, but my objection to your answer to the problem of evil is that it hinges on the human mind working a certain way, and God would have the power to make it not work that way, and so not require suffering on Earth. It’s also not clear that heaven could even be enjoyable long-term even with suffering on Earth unless God modifies the minds of the people there anyway, in which case he may as well have modified them from the beginning and eliminated the necessity of suffering.

To elaborate, consider the common objection that heaven sounds boring, and being bored is a kind of suffering — indeed, ennui, the milder form of existential dread, is the French word for boredom — so a perfectly blissful heaven is impossible. Also consider that here on Earth people tend back toward a base level of happiness regardless of their circumstances, and some people can go back to being happy even after a horrible tragedy that they still nominally suffer from, while others can go back to being miserable even after they hit the jackpot and solved all of their nominal problems. The solution to both of those is to make human minds work differently, make people more inclined to be happy with and interested in whatever they currently have indefinitely and not get bored or tired of it and sink into bad feelings for no good reason. If God could do that, which he should be able to do, then he could also make humans in such a way that they would fully appreciate heaven even without having suffered, and so an Earth full of suffering would be unnecessarily.

In my proof the rules I used were modus ponens (for step 3) and reductio ad absurdum (for step 4).

Given a equals not a, if we suppose a, we can conclude not a, and therefore conclude both a (which we supposed as a premise) and not a, a contradiction.

I’m treating equality as equivalent to if-and-only-if for these purposes.

1. a = ~a
2. *a
3. .: ~a
4. .: a ^ ~a

Science tells us what solutions are possible, engineers have to actually make those solutions happen, entrepreneurs have to fund those engineers in order for them to be able to do so, and politics has to create the proper systemic incentives (some combination of carrots and sticks) to make it more obviously in those entrepreneurs best interests to pay the engineers to use the science to fix the damn problem already.

Found art, sure. (It wasn’t made to be art, but it can be presented as such).

Thanks for your responses!

I wasn't meaning to offer criticism, just pointing at some people who have written on the topic you're asking about.

As I see it there are basically four possible outcomes of complete automation:

- The rich own all the automatons, including killbots, and nobody else stands a chance of doing anything about it, so everyone else either starves to death or dies fighting killbots in an effort to not starve to death.

- The rich own all the automatons, and aren't all completely heartless bastards, so they "charitably" give enough of their bots' excess produce to keep everyone else alive and "grateful" to them for "providing" all of that, so long as nobody steps out of line or does anything to show themselves to be "unworthy" of their lords' "grace".

- Before either of those happen, a (pseudo-)democratic state seizes control of the automated means of production, and then basically does the same thing as scenario two, except rather than some private owners everyone has to appease, it's the politicians and whoever they're beholden to through whatever vaguely democratic or representational political system is in place.

- Rather than a state forcefully seizing the automated means of production and controlling it all centrally like that, somehow ownership of it becomes widely distributed and decentralized, and we all individually and collectively enjoy the labor-free bounty that it produces without having to be beholden to anyone else to receive that.

If I had to wager on the probably outcome it would be somewhere between scenarios two and three. The first and last both seem extremely unlikely, although I could see the second gradually evolving to the third ("look everyone stop bothering me for things, just vote one person to be in charge of figuring out what you all want and I'll rubber-stamp it!"), and the third gradually evolving to the last (as people use whatever political voice they have to gradually reform society for the better, now that there's no good reason not to).

We only need loans because some people have all the wealth and other people need to borrow it from them. This is a remedy for that situation.

But to the extent that loans remain necessary for a society, they can be offered as a social service by society: instead of a for-profit private bank, a credit union, owned by its members, can choose to offer interest-free loans to its members, collectively from its members.

And inflation is not some inevitable natural phenomenon. We make inflation happen on purpose, to encourage investment and discourage hording. We don't have to make inflation happen, and my proposal also encourages investment and discourages hording.

I was disappointed (when I first saw that video, back when it came out) that it didn't end up actually listing all the numbers. In fact, it left out almost all of them, limiting itself only to real numbers. I was hoping it would build up to surreals, and hypercomplex numbers at least up to octonions, maybe even crazy wild stuff like suroctonions.

The libertarian socialist / left-libertarian trend of solutions is to change what rights to property are acknowledged, where we're not taking things away from people who have them and giving them to be the property of others, but rather just not enforcing anyone's claims to them (while continuing to enforce things like laws against assault and battery, so people can't just enforce their own claims to things that we're socially not recognizing). Like how we don't enforce claims of ownership over people: we don't take the slaves away from people and give them back to themselves or something, we just say "you have no legitimate claim of ownership here" and then treat actions trying to defend such illegitimate claims of ownership as the violence that they are, to be stopped.

There are different degrees of what kinds of ownership claims are supposed to be invalid, according to different thinkers. Some say only that natural resources not created by humans (such as land) cannot legitimately be owned. Others say the means of production, like factories, cannot legitimately be owned. The usual term there is "usufruct", in contrast to "property": things belong to whoever is using them, so factories belong to whoever works there, land belongs to whoever's living on it, etc. (Though another common terminological distinction is between "private property" and "personal property", where "personal property" is basically ownership of things you use, and "private property" is ownership of things others use; I think that terminology is needlessly confusing, though).

My own proposal is to keep claims to property per se, but limit the power to contract in a way that, most importantly among other things, makes contracts of rent and interest ("usury", a fee for use) illegitimate and so unenforceable, which makes them unsuitable as widespread economic instruments. With usury no longer a viable option, those who have more than they need (that they would otherwise be lending out usuriously) will have no more profitable option but to sell it instead, and nobody will be buying except people who need more than they have, so those sales will have to occur on terms that the latter group can manage, or else not at all, leaving the former group taking a total loss, which they obviously would not prefer. In this manner ownership of property will tend toward a more equitable distribution, with things being generally owned by those who use them, as in usufruct.

Proposed solutions based on money and ownership (UBI and socialism/communism) inevitably fail because they continue the social (financial) arrangements that produce the invisible hand. Nothing less than a new conception, (or possibly an old conception) of social relations including the property relation, and the nature of social virtue will suffice to remedy the situation. — unenlightened

Much of socialist or communist thought is all about reconceptualizing social relations, especially property relations. I suspect you're imagining "socialism/communism" to be Soviet Russia or the like, but that was explicitly (in its own terminology) state capitalist, ostensibly as a means to socialism and then communism, so if that's the target of your critique then it's spot on, but that's also the reason Soviet Russia is rejected an an exemplar of socialism or communism by most socialists and communists: it wasn't, and never claimed to be.

Bonus question: How do we get people to care about governance and justice and morality to begin with? — Pfhorrest

I call this task, the inspiration of the will to actively pursue the good, the moral, the just, or the state of the will being (or the process it of becoming) fully free or self-controlled, "empowerment". We cannot empower someone just by telling them what is good. We cannot simply tell them to operate their will some way either. We must somehow inspire them to exercise their will, show them opportunity and motive to take action themselves of their own accord. To do that we must show them that achieving goods is actually possible, and thus that there is hope for them if they try to do so themselves. But we must conversely be sparing in our direct help, lest they come to rely upon us, take our help for granted, and deem it unnecessary for them to try to do things themselves. Instead, we need to help people to help themselves, to require that they take initiative in trying to pursue their own goods, but to stand by and hold their hand while they get a bearing for it, to ensure that their early attempts are successful, and build in them the confidence and skill that they will need to continue pursuing good on their own.

At the same time, we must also show them that achieving good is not a foregone conclusion that someone else will always handle for them without any action on their own part, because if they thought that was the case they would have no motive to try to learn themselves. So to that end, we need to point out to them how any authorities on knowledge that they may be tempted to rely on are fallible, and that without their personal action such authorities may fail, not necessarily catastrophically or globally, but in any particular case, in which cases the individuals involved will need to be ready to pick up that slack and stand up to injustice themselves.

But helping not only oneself, but also others, can also help to cultivate that feeling of empowerment, the feeling that achieving justice oneself is both possible and necessary. So more than merely helping people to help themselves, we can also enlist them to help us help other people to help themselves, with the promise that doing so will in turn empower them, help them learn to help themselves, and in doing so begin to build the groundwork for the kind of joint, mutual pursuit of good necessary to underpin the kind of governmental structure I've previously outlined.

Unfortunately you cannot force someone else to consider only the rational content of your arguments. The best you can do is to try your best to make it as sound as possible, and then try your best to bypass anything that might make someone reject it for irrational reasons. Beyond that, you have to leave it up to the other person to consider the rational content of it on its true merits.

There are non-rational factors in communication, but it is not necessarily contra rationality to employ them to make your communication more successful. The analogy I like is a medicinal pill: people are more likely to swallow a pill that tastes good and goes down smooth, regardless of its medicinal content. So flavor and texture can be used to get people to swallow placebos or even poison. But that does not mean that flavor and texture should be disregarded by doctors or pharmacists, and people should be berated for not taking pills based solely on their medicinal value. It means that doctors and pharmacists should ensure that their medicine does not take the form of a bitter jagged pill, but instead one that’s easier to swallow.