Neuroscience has shown that our emotional and instinctive systems start the process of action before we even realize it. — Copernicus

I think it's more complex than that; it depends upon what action we're talking about.
And I think you'd likely agree that the subsconscious mind is also part of the person, so I think you're agreeing with me, but coming at it from a slightly different angle.
My position was that our "wiring" is such that we can go into a state where we appreciate that we are responsible for this important, fragile thing, and moment to moment we are not doing a cost/benefit analysis; there's no time for that.
You're suggesting we are internally motivated by our mind seeking particular activation for certain actions: yeah, I'd say those things are alternative descriptions of the same set of phenomena.

If a truly selfless act must have no internal motive at all, then it wouldn’t really be an act of will — it would just be something mechanical, like a leaf falling from a tree. — Copernicus

Agreed. It's also interesting that you throw in the concept of will here, because my main objection to the OP is the same as for the free will debate. But I'll avoid the temptation to tangent into it completely.

To call an act “selfless” just because the person wasn’t aware of its benefit is to confuse consciousness with motivation. Every voluntary act comes from within: from emotion, instinct, or belief — all of which exist because they help the self endure. — Copernicus

I was agreeing with you right to the end :)
Firstly, I don't think we should take the structure of the word that literally; I don't think it's understood as meaning literally absent the self. If a kind person does a kind action, and someone calls it "selfless", we're not saying it appeared from nowhere (which would make it as worthy of praise as being struck by lightning).

And secondly, no, I don't think all voluntary acts necessarily exist for helping the self endure.
Social species have group selection pressures, so there will be some behaviours that are not optimal or even to the detriment of the self. Plus just genetic drift will mean humans are likely saddled with some arbitrary proclivities.

And heck, a mother caring for her child is to the detriment of the self. Hear me out.
I know that parental love is such a strong thing, and a familiar thing to us all. And that all organisms prioritize reproducing above all else. So we casually consider reproducing and caring for the next generation to be aiding the self. And that we "live on".
But the next generation isn't the self.
Those behaviours evolved for the genes' benefit, not mine.
Again, we might not mind at all, because we get the benefit of feeling good about ourselves later. That doesn't make it the reason we behaved that way though.

The problem with this topic is in reasoning that if we find some benefit of an action, or a future beneficial state, that proves it's a selfish action.

But surely the intent matters here? If I help an old man cross the street, and he turns out to be a billionaire who buys me a car, that doesn't make it selfish, because that wasn't my reason for helping.

I know that's a silly example, but I just want to establish the distinction, because now we can take a look at an example from the OP:

The OP mentions a parent caring for their child and mentions things like self satisfaction. And sure, being a good parent feels good. Was that the reason for doing it though?
I would say: no. I wouldn't necessarily say it's "love" either.
I think there is a responsibility hat that we sometimes wear, instinctively. It's only occasionally that we get to stop and think about consequences of *not* looking after a child, or how much we love them or whatever. The rest of the time we're operating out of a sense of duty; someone is depending on us.

Of course, we can take this a step back and say that that instinct of duty exists for selfish (gene) reasons. But to me it's absurd if we're requiring selfless acts to go back beyond this level. We'd be implicitly defining "selfless" as "reasonless, and yet non random". Yes of course a nonsensical thing doesn't exist.

I object to violations of free speech rights on both sides of the political spectrum. If you don't live in the US, why are you defaulting to their oppositional binary?

If you care about free speech, you oppose all violations. — Jeremy Murray

I *do* oppose all violations, I am just focusing on the currently most widespread and dangerous.

As I said in my initial post in this thread, something akin to woke outrage has been the case for decades in the UK, under the banner of "political correctness gone MAD". It was almost always exaggerations if not outright bollocks, but it reliably sold newspapers. It's also made us vote against our own best interests several times (e.g. brexit).

And right now we're on the edge of the same cliff that the US is hurtling down. There's plenty of disinformation about migrants and trans etc in the UK, the latest one being that migrants are eating swans (why is that familiar)? We're in a weird place where accusing someone of racism is treated more seriously than actual racist propaganda.
Which has helped a far-right party lead in election polls. If they get in, I think it's just a matter of time before we have universities, journalists, broadcast media etc gagged in the name of "protecting" us from "woke".

That said, the UK is a more symmetrical situation than the situation in the US. There are things that the left (-ish) wing government has done that I strongly object to, like proscribing Palestine Action as a terrorist group, and the recent arrest of a screenwriter for offensive (but not illegal) views.
The 1 : 100 estimate of severity earlier was meant for the US.

And I have explained to you why, in detail: translocation is not a genotype. I even gave you room to say that this is not what you mean. You have not. I presume it is what you mean. Translocation is not a third genotype.

There are not three genotypes for SRY. There are not three genotypes for SRY. There are not three genotypes for SRY — AmadeusD

I have explained you that I am not talking about translocation; that's your word, not mine. I said the genotype and mentioned alleles.

And the part where your cite disputes your conclusion is this:

"Mutations [of the SRY gene] lead to a range of disorders of sex development with varying effects on an individual's phenotype and genotype"

So it's not binary. Now sure, you can, as this cite has, call all the other genotypes "disorders" but the point is, it hasn't got us any closer to a supposed binary gold standard.
If we're going to arbitrarily say we only accept two forms as "correct", then we could have just done that with genitals, chromosomes etc. The problem remains that you have millions of people worldwide that don't fit in the two boxes.

I've provided air-tight support for [SRY being the (binary) determinator of sex]. — AmadeusD

And then your own cites say:

"SRY is clearly important for the development of male sex, although in rare instances a male phenotype can develop in its absence"
"Most XX men who lack a Y chromosome do still have a copy of the SRY region on one of their X chromosomes. This copy accounts for their maleness" (emphasis added)

I don't understand why you don't read your own cites.
Look, I'm not your enemy here. Consider this helpful because one day you could be on a debate stage trying to defend these talking points.

Sorry man, I still don't. I included five links that are contrary to your generalization, two articles from John Turley who wrote this exhaustive review of free speech and rage politics in the US in 2024.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/199897939-the-indispensable-right

My links aren't long - why not consider them? — Jeremy Murray

You've linked a book here. I am not going to buy and read a book to try to find evidence for you.

I'm absolutely open to having my mind changed. I should mention by the way that I used to be a member of the Conservative party here in the UK, and still consider myself a centrist. But if we're talking about freedom of speech in the US, nothing that happened under Obama or even Biden (who was involved in some of the gagging of Palestinian protests) compares to what's happening under MAGA and project 2025.

It goes to show that all the stuff of "I may not like what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it" (or whatever the exact quote is), was bullshit. The people that whined about trans people choosing their own pronouns don't give a toss about people being deported, defunded, fired, imprisoned etc on the basis of their political views.

Wrong. This isn’t government impinging on speech. It’s government saying you can say whatever the hell you want, but that they won’t pay for it anymore. And I’m fine if the government decides not to give money to any college.

Got it yet? — Fire Ologist

I've "got it" that I think you're a hypocrite, because this thread is about you and others losing your shit over things that are orders of magnitude less invasive and less restrictive on speech than what MAGA is doing daily.

And I even forgot some pretty significant stuff, like student visas being revoked on the basis of political views, and academics who tweeted negatively about trump not being allowed into the country.

You quoted the bit about government funding and ignored the rest because that was the one comeback you could think of. And I call BS even on that -- that you'd be excusing a left-wing government making funding of all major institutions provisional on political views.

That just means the taxpayers aren’t going to be forced to pay for whatever the college wants to say and promote. It has zero impact on freedom. — Fire Ologist

And you'd be saying that if it was the other way round, with conservative ideas banned and liberal ideas explicitly mandated under financial penalty?

I didn't mention the threats to the media because we were talking about colleges for that example, but in the context of also pulling licenses, it seems government is pulling every lever to restrict speech.
So what is even the point of the first amendment?

I’m sure you are right about some improper arrests. Point one out. Who was arrested for speech? — Fire Ologist

Almost all of the arrests are for "criminal trespass" and disorder, hence why Human Rights Watch described it as an assault on free speech and free assembly. But if you consider those arrests "proper" then it was 100% proper for those two conservative guys to have been considered to have been trespassing and disorderly.

We are talking about kids K-12. These are almost entirely minors. Ok? Kids. — Fire Ologist

No I was talking about the "stop WOKE act" impinging on the freedom of higher education institutions. I just quoted the press release that also happened to mention it included K-12. I don't expect it to make much of any difference at that level, since CRT wasn't taught to kids anyway. But it may have a chilling effect on teachers who may choose to just avoid topics like slavery outright.

State funded colleges and universities? Or all of them? If all of them, the laws are a problem. If state funded, be brave my anxious friend. — Fire Ologist

So again, you don't care about the government impinging on free speech as long as it's your side and your ideology.
I'll hold you to this. If a Democratic government comes in, and forces universities to push "woke" content (whatever that means), and ban conservative ideas about immigration or marriage, say, or get their funding cut, you don't get to say anything. It's all fine, and not a problem for freedom of speech, according to you.

Studies have found that people who use AI have lower cognitive ability than people who don't, you're making yourself worse off for using it. — Darkneos

I'd like to see those studies; I would be very skeptical of a causal link. Especially for such a broad term like "cognitive ability".

Between physics and semantics there can be no bridge law, only correlation.
A physical process can correlate with a semantic event, but it can never translate into or cause it. The relationship between brain and mind is therefore not causal, but correlative — two complementary descriptions of one and the same dynamic viewed from different epistemic perspectives.

That is why such theories can never be verified even in principle. There is no possible experiment that could demonstrate a causal transition from a physical process to a semantic or experiential one. — Wolfgang

OK, I think I 90% agree with you.

As I have been saying in the parallel thread on the hard problem of consciousness, the problem of explaining subjective experience in a scientific model looks intractable.

I can't imagine a set of words I could write on a page that would enable a person with no color vision to experience red. Or for me to imagine what ultraviolet looks like to birds.
These things seem absurd, yet the problem of trying to explain experience itself in a scientific model is pretty much the same. Note: the experience itself, not the correlates of the experience.

I think the areas of disagreement, would be first of all I can't claim that it's impossible. It seems highly implausible that some words could make me imagine a new color say, but I am not aware of a proof from first principles. And generally we should be careful not to prematurely claim that things are impossible.

Secondly, and this might not be a disagreement as such, but the level of verification that is possible for these models remains very high, even if experience itself remains a black box. For instance, we could find a particular neural structure in the brain that is essential to triggering pain, and not only that but be able to make testable predictions of how much pain someone will experience based on the pattern of activation and their own specific neural structure.
(In principle I mean, I know measuring individual neurons in vivo is basically not a thing yet)

So I don't see it as either "solve the hard problem of consciousness" or "worthless". Figuring out the neural correlates can get us knocking on the door of consciousness (and indeed be medically and scientifically useful). Even if the door looks more like a brick wall.

Theories of consciousness usually start with an unproven assumption and then build a theory around it. This assumption is neither empirically confirmed nor even verifiable – and therefore such a theory is not only unscientific but also epistemically useless.
[...]
The Integrated Information Theory (IIT) claims that consciousness arises from and is identical with integrated information.

The second example is Predictive Coding [...] [it] claims that organisms minimize uncertainty. — Wolfgang

Thanks for clarifying. I would say this:

All scientific models include assertions and assumptions.
The assertions are the actual claims of the model and are the things we are going to test.
And the assumptions should be minimized to just known established facts and reasonable extrapolations -- these are also indirectly tested.

I don't think the things you are calling assumptions are assumptions, I think they are the actual assertions of the model.

So it comes down to the testability of these hypotheses.

If these hypotheses are not testable for now, that's fine, because we are still in the early phases of trying to create a model of consciousness.
At the frontier of science, it's always the case that we start with speculation, and trying to firm up our speculation into something testable. Then we create a testable model. Then we test the model and refute it or gain confidence in it.
If we shut down all speculation because it's not testable then we can't even get started.

If you're saying both of these hypotheses are never testable, even in principle, then can you focus on that part of the proof please? Because I have not seen how you've demonstrated this.

No. I'll quote myself:

There is no third option. There are not three genotypes for SRY.
— AmadeusD

I note you also quoted this, and then charged me with saying something very much different. — AmadeusD

I am not "charging you" with anything. I am pointing out that your own cite said there are more than two genotypes for this gene, and you think just asserting that there isn't is a refutation.

You have also just conflated gender and sex. Unsure if you've noted that. We are talking about sex. Gender is another discussion, but if one takes hte position that gender does not vary independent of sex, then that's all that person would want to argue. I agree gender is a different thing. We're not discussing it — AmadeusD

The only reason that we're discussing sex is because of the context of the gender discussion; your position seems to require asserting that the underlying sex is binary, and you're failing to find support for that assertion.

Secondly, it doesn't 'override' anything at all. It is the determining factor for sex in humans. — AmadeusD

Cite please: an actual biologist, not your misreading of what chat gpt told you.

Let's do these one-by-one because the longer posts are, the less likely people are to read them IME

Right wingers want to talk ideas at a university (you know, a university, where ideas are talked about and minds are supposed to be challenged). https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/maga-debate-group-at-tennessee-state-university-escorted-off-campus-after-chaos-erupts/ar-AA1NeoqB
And the media calls it "escorted off" - meaning threatened, bullied and scared into running for their lives. — Fire Ologist

I don't see any evidence of violence, it looks like the students exercising their free speech; the same reception left wing journalists get at Trump rallies.

But let's just give you this one: let's say that those guys were physically threatened and intimidated off campus. Let's put that on one side of the ledger as evidence of the left wing shutting down speech on college campuses.

What do we have on the other side, of the right wing shutting down speech?

• $400 million of funding cut from Columbia Uni, with an additional $5 billion under review, for not "protecting Jewish students from antisemitism" i.e. not shutting down the protests against Israel.
  Anyone that doubts this interpretation, is free to look at the list of demands for restoring funding, which were about shutting down protests and introducing more conservative content and precisely nothing about prosecuting assaults or whatever.
  Columbia was also forced to expand it's definition of antisemitism to include basically anything "anti-zionist" i.e. anti-Israel.
  
  Harvard, Brown and UCLA have had funding cut for the same reason, all for over $500 million.
  
  An additional 60 universities were threatened with the same fate as Columbia if they do not comply.
  
• There have been 3,100 arrests of Palestine protestors, including many faculty members. Human rights watch has condemned this as a "campaign of draconian campus arrests".
  
• Trump's Compact for Academic Excellence requires universities to sign up to a list of demands including "Restrictions on “divisive concepts” such as systemic racism, critical race theory (CRT), and gender ideology" otherwise also face funding cuts and other sanctions.
  
• Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” (2022), expanded in 2024–2025, bans CRT-related content in both K–12 and public university curricula.
  
• Trump's executive order 14149 (2025) — “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” — directs federal agencies to audit universities accused of “Marxist indoctrination.” and again, withdraw funding from “divisive race or gender ideologies.”
  
• So far under this government over 20 states (e.g., Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Idaho, and North Dakota) have passed or proposed laws restricting how colleges teach race, privilege, and history.

BTW @Jeremy Murray do you appreciate now why the 1% figure was not a number plucked from nowhere; it was an attempt to weigh up the attacks on freedom of speech, leaning towards being generous towards the MAGA side.

Each theory interprets optical illusions differently, since all are underdetermined, i.e. they have no empirical explanatory power. — Wolfgang

Ok, but do you disagree or agree with my point?
That is, that it does not follow, in the abstract, it is not necessarily the case that we need to make a toy consciousness to verify / refute different models of consciousness.
After all, we have already used many observations about human consciousness to test our predictions and inferences.

Or have I misunderstood you: are you simply saying that, in your view, the only way to distinguish between these specific models is with a generated system? But in that case, I don't understand why we're narrowing our focus in that way; another model could come along tomorrow and be verified purely by observations on/by humans.

A good paper, I agree with the main points, in as far as I understood.

My only disagreement would be the position that the only means of verifying a model is generative.

The important thing in science is having a model that has predictive / inferential power. And given this, there are already plenty of things we understand about consciousness. I can display a particular kind of image to you, and predict you will see an optical illusion in your "mind's eye", thus verifying that particular understanding of how the brain constructs that aspect of consciousness.

I would not see it as impossible that a model of the neurological basis of consciousness could nonetheless be verified purely with tests of this kind.

Bear in mind also that there are some pretty fundamental aspects of consciousness that are still wide open for explanation: sleeping, dreaming, anaesthesia etc. Let me be clear that I don't consider these part of the "hard problem" of consciousness, and I actually get a bit annoyed when people take the problem of consciousness to just be whether someone is awake, alert etc.
However, I think our understanding of these phenomena remains quite weak so it is plausible to me that a model that explains subjective experience could also revolutionize our understanding of these too. And these aspects may have very trivial ways to test in vivo.

Evidence of what woke is? Are you serious? — Fire Ologist

Any evidence of the injustices and suppression of free speech and free assembly that you're saying is a significant problem on the left, right now.
Preferably comparable to what is happening in the real world, with ICE protestors being brutally put down, an executive order basically saying left wing ideology is terrorism and a speech to the military making it clear that ideological loyalty is a requirement. And this is just in the last few days.

My proof Trump is not a fascist is the fact that he stepped down from office in 2020 all while he seems to have believed the election was stolen from him. — Fire Ologist

Haha, that's hilarious.
You know, you and I have had our differences, but with wit like that, you're all right @Fire Ologist, you're all right.

This reminds me a bit of the canard "There's no such thing as the supernatural; if it exists, it's natural"
Which misses the point that supernatural typically means inexplicable using the natural laws as we know them. Very obviously believers in such things (FTR: not me) accept that supernatural phenomena would belong to the set of things which exist / are real.

Of course, this isn't what the OP is doing but it is another definition error IMO. "Magic" means something pretty close to "supernatural". It doesn't mean you can't even put the phenomenon in a sentence like "when the magician reaches into the hat, a rabbit appears"; that would be absurd.
By that definition a genie emerging from a lamp and granting my wishes doesn't count as magic, because we have a predictive model: "When I say a wish, that thing manifests".
Instead it means we don't have a predictive model based on known natural laws.

I think the title was cryptic enough to put off clicks :)

It's an interesting topic, I would actually come at it from the other side though.

I think people mostly do speak to AI like chat gpt as if it is a person. I certainly do; I basically speak to it as a friend, congratulate it when it came up with a particularly good solution etc.

And I think there's danger in *that* because people might soon rely on basically pretend relationships with friends that aren't real, while gradually losing the ability to form real friendships.

Also, you might be alluding to the common concern in sci fi of AI being treated as an appliance when it is actually conscious, and so creating a new kind of slavery without even realizing (the Orville did this well with the Kaylon origin story).
It's possible, but I think we're hyper alert to the possibility of consciousness and with AI likely surpassing us at things we consider as evidence of intelligence, I think we're much more likely to treat a general intelligence as star trek treated Commander data. (Or indeed, Isaac on Orville)

On inequality: sorry, it seems I was wrong. The world got much wealthier in the industrial revolution, and so the typical subsistence farmer moving to the city was better off. But the owners of capital were tremendously better off. So inequality actually increased.

On AI progress; as I say @javi2541997, I use AI daily to help me with work and personal tasks, as do my friends. Why don't you think it counts as progress?

Mijin was saying woke is just a word used to scare people. That woke is not a real thing. I disagree with that.

I’m saying if woke wasn’t a real thing, it wouldn’t function to raise fear like it does. But it is real. Obviously. — Fire Ologist

I know I said I'd bow out, but if someone @s me then I am summoned again.

I have asked you multiple times, at least half a dozen times now, for evidence. And the fact that you fall back to basically "lots of people believe this" is telling. It's the same argument used about the "stolen" 2020 election. Or the MMR vaccine causing autism.

Lots of people can believe false things, especially when it's a message being pushed in the circle in which they get their "news".

I've got here late but still want to reply to the OP...

I’ve always been sort of a skeptic when it comes to new tech most my because given human history we aren’t exactly good at using it to our betterment (looking at social media and the Industrial Revolution). — Darkneos

The vast majority of tech is a net benefit; it's just humans figuring out ways to do things.

Firstly bear in mind that everything we construct is tech....we tend to use tech as shorthand for things in the digital space from the last few decades, but speaking more fundamentally about tech, as you are, then the clothes you are wearing are technology, as is the building you're probably sitting in. Not merely the device that you're reading this on.

Secondly I'd dispute even your examples. The industrial revolution brought a lot of benefits, and although there was huge inequality, and a lot of pollution, in most cases the inequality was less than the agrarian society it displaced, and we have ameliorated a lot of the pollution. And it utterly transformed our quality of life.

Not to say there aren't still big problems, like climate change, but hands down it's been a net benefit to humans.

It seems that, like social media, AI is catering to our worst and basest impulses for immediate rewards and nothing thinking about the long term. — Darkneos

I would disagree with that. e.g. LLMs and the like are being used in most cases to create things and get advice. I don't see this as base impulses.

What’s gonna happen when you replace most jobs with AI, how will people live? — Darkneos

It's not a given that unemployment will increase. Technology tends to displace jobs and replace them with something else, hence why US unemployment has bounced around the same average for decades even as we've been in the information age.

In any case, jobs exist to fulfill human needs. If there are no jobs, that implies a post-scarcity environment. If we're saying only the rich can afford robots or whatever, then there are still jobs for human maids. You can't have tech that both no-one can afford and yet be maximally disruptive.

(Well, I don't actually think it's that simple, I am expecting a lot of social unrest and probably the unemployment rate will increase. Countries with a weak welfare safety net are going to suffer a lot. I am just trying to push back against the assumption of the OP)

So far AI just seems to benefit the wealthiest among us and not the Everyman — Darkneos

I use AI every day and I doubt I'd be the wealthiest guy in a soup kitchen.

What would be the point of planning if you only ever live for a heartbeat? I don't think you believe NC yourself, so why would you respond in this thread when you won't even get to see the reaction yourself? — SolarWind

Firstly your point obviously has nothing to do with whether it is true or not.
Lots of things in the universe are either unpleasant or unintuitve, it doesn't make them false.

But secondly, I haven't claimed to know the NC position is correct, I have only said that it is the position that stands up best to the counter-arguments right now. It is not rational based only on that tentative judgement, to give up on life immediately.
But in fact, even if I knew that NC is correct it, doesn't give me any basis to not do anything either, so I may as well continue to play along, for this millisecond that I'm alive.

Thanks brother :fist_bump:

You know what though @Fire Ologist you are right that I think I've said my piece for this thread.

I think the premise the OP is based on is false. And I think "woke" is a meaningless scare word.

I've already explained why in multiple posts, so I may as well bid everyone goodday and bow out.

I know Trump and Christians, and old white men are authoritarian and they hate free speech — Fire Ologist

You make it sound like just a couple of random guys. Trump is president, Project 2025 includes making America an explicitly Christian nation, and much of project 2025 has already been rolled out, right up to soldiers in the streets and executive orders describing people being "anti-christian" as terrorists.

That discussion requires some sort of working definition of “woke” - that is how one could demonstrate how, for instance, the Vietnam thing sounds stupid — Fire Ologist

Nope. Again, that would be like saying I can't say the emperor has no clothes unless I define exactly the fine silks which I believe he lacks.
It's trivial to point out that conservatives have used "woke" to mean anything and everything and thus it's a nonsense term. Why would the hopeless task of trying to forge a new word with a concrete meaning and get everyone to use it be on me?

I think you want to disagree with me no matter what. — Fire Ologist

The topic hasn't shifted in several pages, and I don't think you have presented me with any argument to even attempt to change my mind, so yes of course the disagreement stands.

I bet it is because woke ideology is so authoritarian and so destructive of freedom and free speech. So I agree with much he says here.

But you don’t seem to see any fascism coming from left/progressive/woke - you seem to be more interested in showing how “woke” is a strawman (which undercuts the entire OP) and more interested in showing how the right spreads fascism. — Fire Ologist

Correct -- my position is that what the left is doing in terms of free speech is not even 1% of the threat of the right wing currently. Serious estimate. This does not always have to be true for all time. A different government, a different culture, things can change. But that's the reality right now, and I've asked you many times for examples that would convince an objective observer otherwise.

How is that more relevant than what I am trying to talk about on a thread call “The End of Woke”? — Fire Ologist

Because the OP is about what's happening in terms of authoritarian policies and freedom of expression. I doubt what he wanted was dozens of pages of definition debate.
And in any case, I've put to you that the people most against "woke", have used it to mean just about anything from why we lost Vietnam to vaccine mandates. You're not interested in discussing that, so if you won't engage in that issue with defining woke, why should I continue to engage in your hijack?

Right, you want to talk about something else. Not what woke has done. — Fire Ologist

I am asking you, what evidence you have of your so-called "woke" that compares to what's happening in the real world, like an executive order that now labels ideological dissent as terrorism at the same time as the military is being sent to Democratic cities.
As I say, it's farcical. We're living in the early stages of Project 2025 and you think the real problem is someone who got his feelings hurt by a woman in 1994 or whatever. If you've got better than that anecdote, let's hear it.

They both agree on the same underlying fact: there is no continuity beyond the perception of it. NC adds the additional idea: therefore, we are always dying. — hypericin

Call it "adding on", or call it different. Maybe it's just semantics?

But personally I would maintain it's actually a different position. PC says I am the same person as the Mijin of 10 years ago (numerically the same of course, not qualitatively). NC says I am not, in either sense.

When it comes to the imperfect transporter, PC has the difficult problem of establishing where the line is of numerical identity. It's like "heap" problems where there is the problem of which hair you remove that transitions a person from "full head of hair" to "balding". Except that the classical heap problem is fairly trivial IMHO, being largely a matter of a third person making an arbitrary choice. But the imperfect transporter actually matters, to the first person, because it's whether you are alive or dead.

NC doesn't care about the imperfect transporter; it has no applicability or relevance.

If there is no continuous consciousness, then what is it that is doing the dying? — hypericin

Conscious experience. In a sense NC is saying that consciousness does have a lifespan; it's as long as a unified conscious experience, so probably something around 1/10th of a second. Not more than a few seconds anyway. After that, you can call it dying, or ending, it doesn't matter. The point is, it isn't the "three score and ten" of a human body's lifespan.

As I've said in past threads; I think there is a linguistic issue with the word "nothing", in English, that is often right at the core of the issue.
People will say things like "nothing is still something" and "how can 'nothing' have a property of existing", which I think are meaningless statements.

In English, the words "no" and "thing" have been concatenated into a noun: "nothing". But it's a special noun. If I say "There's nothing to be afraid of", I am not saying we should be afraid of one thing, that we're labeling "nothing". I am saying there are zero things to be afraid of: we should not be afraid.

And likewise with the universe. If we say there was nothing before this universe, that is not positing a state where a thing we're labeling "nothing" has the property of existence. Not usually anyway.

If we were going to go down the road of trying to make a "real" noun of "nothing", then sure we can demonstrate "nothing" easily. It occupies zero space, so right now there's an infinity of "nothings" in any volume of space.

Sure we do. Q3 is easy. The ball-catching robot was one. A fly evading a swat is another. If one is searching for a model, you start simple and work your way up to something as complex as how our experience works. — noAxioms

But I reject the breakdown into those three questions, if you're going to insist that neuroscience cannot ask Q2.

The hard problem is Q2 and it is legitimate for science to want to know how a neural net can have experiences.

It seems a bit pointless to me to keep deflecting from the hard problem to declare that there is no hard problem.

Let’s start over. — Fire Ologist

We've had at least a dozen pages of whining about the definition, can you please address some of the more relevant points, like all the infringements on free speech and other human rights that are orders of magnitude worse than any of the claims of what "woke" has done?

Many times. For example, in the podcast by JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Miller said:

"It is a vast domestic terror movement [...] We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organised campaign that led to this assassination"

The executive order is similarly in weakly veiled language: the groups and entities that perpetuate this [left-wing] extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations

A new topic. Avoids the issue. — Fire Ologist

Yes and you brought it up

It’s ok to call someone fascist. If they are fascist. But get us back on track. — Fire Ologist

Sure, and Trump fits the definition to a tee. I seem to remember someone, not sure if it was you, that tried to claim Democrats were more fascist but when asked what part of the definition is met by whom, no response was forthcoming. But ok, let's return to "woke".

You really need to deal with this: — Fire Ologist

I don't "need to" deal with anything. You've used woke to mean a dozen different things in this thread, and as I've repeatedly pointed out, so has MAGA media.

So more important than your (constantly shifting) claims about the word, is your repeated assertions of overreach in the name of woke. Do you have any examples of that? Something better than the anecdote of one guy who said some women were mean about men many years ago?
Or better yet; something even vaguely comparable to the silencing of universities, journalists, public protests etc happening under this administration?

And indeed, since the last time that I said that we've of course had an executive order, ostensibly about the "left-wing terrorist networks" that the government has claimed (without evidence) orchestrated Kirk's murder. But the order will crack down on groups that engage in anything deemed "anti-American," "anti-capitalism," or against "traditional American views,"
No problem there with free speech, eh? And nowhere near as bad as "something something woke".

But is the question whether “woke” is clearly defined? That’s what you want to talk about. Without pointing to any definition at all! — Fire Ologist

No it's not "what I want to talk about".

My position has been, and remains, that the word "woke" is a meaningless scare word that a certain audience has been conditioned to be triggered by.

My cites are firstly all the examples of conservative media using the word to mean everything and nothing, like that it's the reason the US military has lost wars, or vaccines are woke, or that teaching accurate history is woke etc etc. You repeatedly played dumb and ignored these examples.

The second cite is your flailing in this thread; where woke has been used to mean just about everything, but we're not allowed to say woke is ill-defined because "not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke".

Don’t be a baby. Put your big boy pants on. You can always refute something I said that matters. — Fire Ologist

OK, let's see, can we refute this?
You said "Keep losing elections, and hoping people shoot more fascists."

Firstly, no I don't want anyone hurt by political violence. So that remains a scurrilous accusation.

Secondly, you seem to be alluding to the word "fascist" as encouraging violence. But no-one calls his enemies "fascist" more often than Trump.

Is it OK when Trump does it? Or is Trump woke?

Nicely done. No such thing as woke. No way to define it. It doesn’t mean anything. Got it. — Fire Ologist

You have said it's not clearly defined, you stupid shit.

And the reason I'm calling you what you are now, is because your accusation that I am "hoping people shoot more fascists" is absolutely despicable.

No I don't think PC and NC are the same, and I just explained with a concrete example e.g. a proponent of NC does not believe there are rational grounds for either teleporting or not teleporting; either way they are about to die. That's not the same as the PC position.

Prepare yourself for some blunt answers, and understand I am having to literally wipe my brow each time i need to respond to something abjectly dishonest in this post: — AmadeusD

Bring it on. Let's see if you find even one inaccuracy.

It is either active or inactive. There is no third option. There are not three genotypes for SRY. You're probably talking about translocation, which, if active, has happened in a male. Swyer is a female disorder and 46,xx are both male disorders of sex development. — AmadeusD

So you're choosing to say that only two genotypes "count" as genotypes and anything else is an aberration? So how is this any different to the special pleading you're doing with all other aspects of gender? (essentially: "it's binary except for the exceptions, which don't count")

This has absolutely nothing to do with the facts. "how would we know" doesn't come close to even touching the security of the sex binary. — AmadeusD

The facts are that your definition of gender is not scientifically accepted and therefore is worthless.
I was also pointing out that it's completely unworkable as a definition of gender in society but if you want to put that other issue to one side, then fine.

Yes — biologists generally agree that SRY is the primary genetic determinant of male sex in humans. It acts as the initial switch that launches male sexual differentiation, though other genes and factors are also required to complete the process." — AmadeusD

So several issues here.
Firstly primary determinator does not mean only, secondly, once again, there are more than two genotypes for this gene.
And finally, it's farcical; you're saying if the SRY gene is male, that overrides everything else; it doesn't matter if the person was assigned female at birth, has breasts, a vagina, has lived as a woman and is married to a heterosexual man...this is the level people have to go to to avoid conceding that gender is more complex than we learned in high school.

What’s wrong with that? The thread must have two dozen viable senses of “woke” at this point. — Fire Ologist

Everything is wrong with that. Off the top of my head:

1. You are the person that is throwing out these ever-shifting meanings.
2. While at the same time complaining about people that don't have a clear idea of what "woke" is (and, hilariously, saying that not knowing what woke is, is woke )
3. When the point has been put to you of how much of a mess the concept of "woke" is on the political right, going all the way to the president saying that the US lost in Korea, Vietnam etc because of "woke", your response was...well, I don't think you ever did respond to it.

And that's specificially the problems with this definition war you're having with your own brain.
I think there are many other problems with your perspective, chiefly that we're focusing on this boogieman while at the same time as human rights and freedom of speech is being trampled on a mass scale.

I have no idea where you got any of that from.
What I am saying is that you are confusing the problem itself from the responses to the problem. We can super clarify it by putting it into three sections:

1. The original problem (Parfit's transporter)
A person steps into a transporter.
Their body is scanned and a perfect duplicate is made at some remote location, while, at the same time, the original body/person is killed.
What happens to the consciousness, the self, after this set of events?

2. Philosophical positions on personal identity
Bodily continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the physical substrate
Psychological continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the content of the mind -- the memories, the personality etc
No continuity -- there is never continuity of the self. It just feels as if there is because we inherit memories of previous entities

3. Therefore, what should a rational person do in the situation (1)?
BC says stay away; the transporter kills you -- the person at the destination is not you
PC says go ahead; you will arrive at the destination
NC says it doesn't matter what you do; you have 1 second to live either way

Now, there's a fourth section we can go into: counter-arguments; of which the "imperfect transporter" is just one. But I want to check you're on board with 1-3 first.

It's worse than that.
As I illustrated in my previous post, @Fire Ologist has used "woke" to mean at least a dozen different things in this thread, as well as wondering out loud about what it means.

So we're the problem for not having a clear idea of what "woke" means -- even though we're not the ones trying to rehabilitate the word / concept. But also, it's true that it's not clearly-defined. And also you can define it however you want for whatever rhetorical point you want to make in the moment.

Hope it's all clear now.

Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science. — noAxioms

Sure, but let's be very clear here. The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that.

The danger that some slip into, and I think from later in your response you do somewhat fall into this, is of assuming a third person description means just finding things correlated with experience. But that's a comparatively trivial problem. If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc.
What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from. Or any feelings at all.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. — noAxioms

Not only have you acknowledged many unsolved questions in your post, but you asked several of your own.

Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible. What I mean by that, is not that I believe any supernatural element or whatever, merely that it is a kind of phenomenon that does not seem amenable to the normal way we reduce and explain phenomena.
Before we knew what the immune system was we could still describe disease. But since we can't even describe the experience of red it looks very difficult to know where to start.
Not impossible; we have no reason to suppose that. But a different class of problem to those that science has previously deconstructed.

But you don't need to agree with that view. Just the fact that you are acknowledging many open questions, that are pretty fundamental to what the phenomenon is, already puts it in a special bracket.
Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down.

I guess I had hoped somebody (the article perhaps) would actually identify those questions and in particular, how physicalism fails in a way that their alternative does not. — noAxioms

I don't know why you're still framing this as a discussion of whether physicalism is true or not. In the OP, you describe yourself as "somebody who has no problem with all mental activity supervening on material interactions".
I have also stated that I think we have no reason to suppose anything non-physical is going on (indeed, my position is actually I don't think it would necessarily help with the hard problem of consciousness anyway).

So let's put that side topic to one side: let's assume physicalism for the basis of this thread: The hard problem of consciousness remains.
I don't normally drop in my bona fides, but I work in neuroscience research. In neuropathologies specifically, rather than consciousness, but still, I'm the last person to try to invoke a "spirit" or whatever. I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green", it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now.

In terms of the questions, I've been going through some of them: how does a neural net feel pain (or have any other experience), how we can know if an agent experiences pain, some pains are worse than others...what's the mechanism for these different kinds of negative experience, if I make an AI, how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.

Your answers have been either
1) Just make a judgement e.g. AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from. And, if we're saying it's a different kind of pain, what, exactly, is a "kind" of pain?
2) Just say that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences. That's not a solution though. That's pretty much just repeating the problem but adding an unearned shrug.

I think this response gets to the nub of the disagreement. I can respond to the other points you've made, if you like, but I think they're noise compared to the central issue.