Better tools of decision-theoretic rationality?
Compare the metaphysical individualism presupposed by the technically excellent LessWrong FAQ (cf. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2rWKkWuPrgTMpLRbp/lesswrong-faq) with the richer conception of decision-theoretic rationality employed by a God-like full-spectrum superintelligence that could impartially access all possible first-person perspectives and act accordingly (cf. https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#individualism).
So how can biological humans develop such tools of God-like rationality?
As you say, it’s a monumental challenge. Forgive me for ducking it here. — David Pearce

Thank you for your in depth answer. I hope you don't mind me following up on (only) this one point:

By contrast, the fleeting synchronic unity of the self is real, scientifically unexplained (cf. the binding problem) and genetically adaptive. How a pack of supposedly decohered membrane-bound neurons achieves a classically impossible feat of virtual world-making leads us into deep philosophical waters. But whatever the explanation, I think empty individualism is true. Thus I share with my namesakes – the authors of The Hedonistic Imperative (1995) – the view that we ought to abolish the biology of suffering in favour of genetically-programmed gradients of superhuman bliss. Yet my namesakes elsewhere in tenselessly existing space-time (or Hilbert space) physically differ from the multiple David Pearces (DPs) responding to your question. Using numerical superscripts, e.g. DP564356, DP54346 (etc), might be less inappropriate than using a single name. But even “DP” here is misleading because such usage suggests an enduring carrier of identity. No such enduring carrier exists, merely modestly dynamically stable patterns of fundamental quantum fields. Primitive primate minds were not designed to “carve Nature at the joints”. — David Pearce, Quora Answers by David Pierce

(above quote from linked document for context)

The interpretive emphasis on the human body physically simulating that body's self awareness is well taken. I would like to take that simulation idea and push on its boundaries - the boundaries of the body, when the body is seen as a space-time process.

I was wondering if you had any comments regarding the scope of that process of simulation cf the extended mind thesis? And possibly an ethical challenge this raises to the primacy of biogenetic intervention in the reduction of long term suffering: if the human mind's simulation process is saturated with environmental processes, why is the body a privileged locus of intervention for suffering reduction and not its environment?

Also in that context of the philosophical puzzles of gene : environment interaction, what challenges and opportunities do you think the heritability of epigenetic effects raise for the elimination of suffering through biogenetic science?

I thought I already had done a lot of work but you, 108, and Willow of Darkness keep reminding me of aspects I had not considered. I keep having to start all over again. — Valentinus

Me too. "The best way to learn a subject is to teach it".

What kind of interaction creates consciousness?" — Eugen

If you want the type, I've given you some kind of answer to that - the interaction of ideas associated with a body; the human mind = the idea of the human body. If you want the how? As in: give the mechanism of the interaction of ideas which suffices to produce a human mind - for Spinoza? I'll quote at length, but I don't think it will be satisfying to you:

PROP. XV. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Proof.—The idea constituting the actual being of the human mind is the idea of the body (II. xiii.), which (Post. i.) is composed of a great number of complex individual parts. But there is necessarily in God the idea of each individual part whereof the body is composed (II. viii. Coroll.); therefore (II. vii.), the idea of the human body is composed of these numerous ideas of its component parts. Q.E.D.

PROP. XVI. The idea of every mode, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, must involve the nature of the human body, and also the nature of the external body.

Proof.—All the modes, in which any given body is affected, follow from the nature of the body affected, and also from the nature of the affecting body (by Ax. i., after the Coroll. of Lemma iii.), wherefore their idea also necessarily (by I. Ax. iv.) involves the nature of both bodies; therefore, the idea of every mode, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, involves the nature of the human body and of the external body. Q.E.D.

Corollary I.—Hence it follows, first, that the human mind perceives the nature of a variety of bodies, together with the nature of its own.

Corollary II.—It follows, secondly, that the ideas, which we have of external bodies, indicate rather the constitution of our own body than the nature of external bodies. I have amply illustrated this in the Appendix to Part I.

PROP. XVII. If the human body is affected in a manner which involves the nature of any external body, the human mind will regard the said external body as actually existing, or as present to itself, until the human body be affected in such a way, as to exclude the existence or the presence of the said external body.

Proof.—This proposition is self—evident, for so long as the human body continues to be thus affected, so long will the human mind (II. xii.) regard this modification of the body—that is (by the last Prop.), it will have the idea of the mode as actually existing, and this idea involves the nature of the external body. In other words, it will have the idea which does not exclude, but postulates the existence or presence of the nature of the external body; therefore the mind (by II. xvi., Coroll. i.) will regard the external body as actually existing, until it is affected, &c. Q.E.D. — Spinoza, Ethics, Part II

Okay so:

(1) The mind is the idea of the body.
(2) And this idea is pretty expansive, it's got a lot of moving parts, as does the body;

"PROP. XVI. The idea of every mode, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, must involve the nature of the human body, and also the nature of the external body."

The human mode stays together in all the different aspects, so to speak.

(3) When those moving parts of the body "move" - be it a body acting as a cause or an idea acting as a pattern generator/logical inference - they bring with them corresponding ideas of the body. (4) Those ideas in their conjunction are "the idea of the body", ie the mind.

I believe you will find that unsatisfying, because it isn't an answer to the question of "how does human consciousness arise from inanimate matter?", it's an answer to the question of "how does human consciousness arise from the human body?". If you want an answer to the first question, see our previous discussion, if you want an answer to the second, I've given you an extremely abbreviated sketch of it.

I'll quote again at length:

PROP. II. Body cannot determine mind to think, neither can mind determine body to motion or rest or any state different from these, if such there be.

Proof.—All modes of thinking have for their cause God, by virtue of his being a thinking thing, and not by virtue of his being displayed under any other attribute (II. vi.). That, therefore, which determines the mind to thought is a mode of thought, and not a mode of extension; that is (II. Def. i.), it is not body. This was our first point. Again, the motion and rest of a body must arise from another body, which has also been determined to a state of motion or rest by a third body, and absolutely everything which takes place in a body must spring from God, in so far as he is regarded as affected by some mode of extension, and not by some mode of thought (II. vi.); that is, it cannot spring from the mind, which is a mode of thought. This was our second point. Therefore body cannot determine mind, &c. Q.E.D.

Note.—This is made more clear by what was said in the note to II. vii., namely, that mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension. Thus it follows that the order or concatenation of things is identical, whether nature be conceived under the one attribute or the other; consequently the order of states of activity and passivity in our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of states of activity and passivity in the mind. The same conclusion is evident from the manner in which we proved II. xii.

I believe one reason why none of this is landing is that, how to put it, I think you're expecting Spinoza's ideas to be continuous with your own intuitions, whereas learning Spinoza requires learning how to reconfigure those intuitions. There's no substitute for actually doing the work.

This is what Spinoza agree or disagree with? — Eugen

I think he agrees with that claim. Ideas interact with ideas. Bodies interact with bodies. You don't get causal chains like "this mindless stuff interacts with that mindless stuff and makes a thought", you get causal chains like "this mindless stuff interacts with that mindless stuff and makes more mindless stuff" logical associations of ideas like "this idea interacts with that idea and makes more ideas", and the logical associations mirror the causal chains somehow.

A. Is a "complex mode" (human) a combination of other modes - the extension/body is composed of smaller extensions and the human mind (consciousness) is composed of other minds? — Eugen

I think the difficulty you're having is trying to understand Spinoza's perspective without shifting your own frame of interpretation. When people interpret things, they interpret within a context they bring to the interpretation. There's an art to shifting one's way of thinking to productively engage with a text or body of ideas.

EG, if someone says "Abortion is wrong because it's murder", the contextual information that the fetus is a human being that ought to be considered to have the legal rights of the person is doing all the work. But someone could equally say "Abortion has nothing to do with the womb or the baby, it has to do with bodily control" as a retort. That retort would attack the framing of the abortion issue by shifting it. Those two people could argues cross purposes forever and never understand the other's view.

In a similar fashion, the frame you're bringing to interpreting Spinoza, trying to see "where he stands" on those two problems (hard problem, combination problem), is in the context of his thought reframing a few of his key ideas in the attempt to apply his thought to those problems

(1) You seem to be imagining that something material must "produce" thoughts, feelings, perceptions etc, like a stimulus response chain, physical -> mental, that's something Spinoza rejects early on in the Ethics. Ideas lead to and combine with ideas, bodies lead to and combine with bodies.
(2) You seem to be imagining that ideas are "protoconscious", like they're little bits of consciousness that somehow combine into a bit consciousness, or alternatively that "inert matter" somehow combines into a conscious being - those operations, of making a conscious aggregate from little. In Spinoza's terms, none of those little ideas or interacting particles are "thinking things". He is quite quiet (IIRC) on the specific "amount of functional complexity" (so to speak) required for ideas to aggregate into a thinking thing, but it's really a non problem for him because man is already a thinking thing due to how its body works. The problems he cares about "start" at a different point, so to speak.

And it might not necessarily be you that thinks these things, it might be that the perspective you're getting from looking at Spinoza in the context of these two problems you really like is distorting him. What I'd recommend is trying to study his original work in some form - primary and secondary philosophy literature, rather than infotainment summaries. Try to get a feel for what he cares about, rather than these two problems you won't find dealt with in his work.

I recommend that because studying Spinoza's work is an exhilarating shift in perspective (life changing IMO), and you're selling yourself short by being sufficiently curious to engage with us like this and seemingly not to read the original text (or reputable secondary literature guides)!

:up:

I didn't intend to give the impression that I was criticising your exegesis, I think we agree on "Spinoza 101" things! My intention was to reference your posts to provide a kind of "united front" for @Eugen here to engage with.

If I asked S. ''How come you have the attribute of mind in the first place?'' and ''How come some combinations of matter (modes) have consciousness and others don't", he would give me the same answer as a dualist would give me when asked about the interaction issue, namely ''They just do". So in both cases, it is a primary assumption with no other grounds. Am I right? — Eugen

If you asked Spinoza "how come God has the attribute of mind?" he'd respond like he does in the Ethics:

PROP. I. Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing.

Proof.—Particular thoughts, or this and that thought, are modes which, in a certain conditioned manner, express the nature of God (Pt. i., Prop. xxv., Coroll.). God therefore possesses the attribute (Pt. i., Def. v.) of which the concept is involved in all particular thoughts, which latter are conceived thereby. Thought, therefore, is one of the infinite attributes of God, which express God's eternal and infinite essence (Pt. i., Def. vi.). In other words, God is a thinking thing. Q.E.D. — "Spinoza,

That's a much different question from "why is this particular being conscious and that being is not?". For Spinoza:

PROP. XV. The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas.

Proof.—The idea constituting the actual being of the human mind is the idea of the body (II. xiii.), which (Post. i.) is composed of a great number of complex individual parts. But there is necessarily in God the idea of each individual part whereof the body is composed (II. viii. Coroll.); therefore (II. vii.), the idea of the human body is composed of these numerous ideas of its component parts. Q.E.D. — Spinoza Ethics Part II

Pace @180 Proof, you're gonna get some kind of appeal to "sufficient functional complexity", or the "compound(ing) of a great number of ideas" being constitutive of the mind (mind = idea of the body), for an account of the nature of our (human) agent-hood/mindedness, but if you really wanted to zoom in on "are those individual ideas conscious? If they're not, how do they combine to produce a conscious agent?", you're probably running orthogonal to Spinoza's concerns; he's got some "bunch of ideas interact to produce a mind" thing going on, but not "bunch of particles interact to produce a mind" thing going on, nor a "bunch of little tiny conscious/pre-conscious things interacting to produce a conscious thing" going on. Imputing those latter two goings on to Spinoza misinterprets him. Minds are ideas interacting, but those ideas are not thinking things, they're the product of thinking things per definition III in Part II:

DEFINITION III. By idea, I mean the mental conception which is formed by the mind as a thinking thing. — Spinoza, Ethics Part II

It is like one would ask a dualist ''How come matter and soul interact?" and the dualist would reply with: ''They just do". Right? — Eugen

Well, there's an argument for why they can't interact causally at the start of Spinoza's Ethics. It's not as axiomatic as I stated it to you, but it is "close" to the axioms so to speak.

So my question still remains. How come some modes have thoughts and others don't? — Eugen

Bluntly, I think for Spinoza "they just do", thought is part of the essence of God, rather than a derivative property coming from the combination of finite modes (like neurons and tissues in our bodies).

I also think it's the case that "how do finite modes combine together in order to express the attribute of mind" would be seen as a category error in Spinoza's terms, things of one attribute (extension) don't interact together to produce another (thought). Things (modes) with both aspects can interact, but the extension of one doesn't cause the thought of another, so to speak. Contrast a doctrine like emergence, which says that if you get enough of the right kind of matter doing the right kind of thing, you get consciousness. In emergence you get the aggregate interaction of bodies causing thought. In Spinoza, that would make the attributes productively interact, so that logic of non-delimitation would come into play.

I think, much more tentatively here than before:

Spinoza says no to: Stuff interacts in a human body alone to produce thought.
Spinoza says yes to: Stuff interacts in a human mode during the production of thoughts.

Why no to the first and yes to the second? A human considered as a mode is both a thinking thing and an extended thing, the human body with the mind truncated out of it - a mass of interacting tissues and electrochemical signals - isn't a thinking thing, it's the body of a thinking thing.

Note.—Before going any further, I wish to recall to mind what has been pointed out above—namely, that whatsoever can be perceived by the infinite intellect as constituting the essence of substance, belongs altogether only to one substance: consequently, substance thinking and substance extended are one and the same substance, comprehended now through one attribute, now through the other. So, also, a mode of extension and the idea of that mode are one and the same thing, though expressed in two ways. This truth seems to have been dimly recognized by those Jews who maintained that God, God's intellect, and the things understood by God are identical. For instance, a circle existing in nature, and the idea of a circle existing, which is also in God, are one and the same thing displayed through different attributes. Thus, whether we conceive nature under the attribute of extension, or under the attribute of thought, or under any other attribute, we shall find the same order, or one and the same chain of causes—that is, the same things following in either case.

I said that God is the cause of an idea—for instance, of the idea of a circle,—in so far as he is a thinking thing; and of a circle, in so far as he is an extended thing, simply because the actual being of the idea of a circle can only be perceived as a proximate cause through another mode of thinking, and that again through another, and so on to infinity; so that, so long as we consider things as modes of thinking, we must explain the order of the whole of nature, or the whole chain of causes, through the attribute of thought only. And, in so far as we consider things as modes of extension, we must explain the order of the whole of nature through the attributes of extension only; and so on, in the case of the other attributes. Wherefore of things as they are in themselves God is really the cause, inasmuch as he consists of infinite attributes. I cannot for the present explain my meaning more clearly. — Spinoza, Ethics

What's the fundamental difference between a human being and a rock in Spinoza's view?

Doubtlessly you will find this answer unsatisfying, but the human being is a thinking thing and the rock isn't.

I don't know if you're going to find "bodies interacting to produce thoughts" in Spinoza, to my mind his metaphysics is in part a clever attempt to neuter that issue!

Could Spinoza's idea survive if the hard problem or the combination problem were true? What do you think, ↪fdrake ? — Eugen

I don't think the hard problem or combination problem are particularly relevant to Spinoza's thought. The claims that "bodies can interact to produce thoughts", or "thoughts are only derivatives of the motion of unthinking substance", or "little conscious things interact to produce big ones" are already in contention with his system. If you take his system at face value, neither the combination problem nor the hard problem could be articulated without a category error. If you take the hard problem and the combination problem as genuine problems, you're already thinking in a manner opposed to Spinoza's philosophy.

Thanks for the effort to explain, I really appreciate it. My problem is that English is not my native language, and complicated sentences can confuse me. That is why, very often, the answers on this forum are confusing to me. Some interpret my insistence as an attempt to criticize an ideology, but in fact, I am only interested in better understanding a phenomenon. Unfortunately, I may not have understood much of the last answer you wrote to me, so feel free to call me an idiot, but I give you my word that I don't want to be malicious of Spinoza. — Eugen

It's not really your fault that you're being misinterpreted, people have a habit of "not understanding" something as a means of criticising it. Expressing lack of comprehension is an effective way of disavowing something and belittling it. And I can't understand how anyone would think otherwise. :wink:

Can the universe have a thought like "I am the universe"? — Eugen

The universe "has" thoughts like the thought I just had about dinner.

It isn't the universe that thinks like a human being, the universe has the attribute of mind which is conceived through us. This goes back to the first comment I made to you regarding Spinoza's attributes and Spinoza's modes, to say that substance "has" the attribute of thought is to say that thought's part of the essence of universe, it's not to say that substance has thoughts like "omg I can't wait for the next season of Witcher on Netflix" as a whole being, which would be a mode of thought - a particular thought.

Spinoza says no to: "I want eggs tonight" the universe thought.
Spinoza says yes to: ("I want eggs tonight" I thought) is something the universe did.

So, the universe can "have" thoughts if the thought of an agent like me is considered as one of its modes, like my thought "omg I can't wait for the next season of the Witcher on Netflix" is still part of the universe. The universe thinks as thinking beings, the thoughts of thinking beings occur as part of it. Those thoughts express the attribute of mind.

Which is what he's doing: Just yet another authoritarian know-it-all with an utopian bent ... — baker

I think that's an uncharitable interpretation of @Pfhorrest, but I do understand the vibe.

I read multiple sources, and most of them indicate Spinoza was a panpsychist. In this OP, many argued he wasn't. Therefore, what's the fundamental difference between panpsychism and his metaphysics? — Eugen

Panpsychism has everything being conscious or exhibiting consciousness to some degree. Spinoza's metaphysics does not have everything being conscious or exhibiting consciousness, exhibiting the attribute of mind; being grasped ideally; isn't the same thing as exhibiting a degree of consciousness; having a degree of awareness like an individual agent.

So when Spinoza says: "PROP. I. Thought is an attribute of God, or God is a thinking thing." He proves it with:

Proof.—Particular thoughts, or this and that thought, are modes which, in a certain conditioned manner, express the nature of God (Pt. i., Prop. xxv., Coroll.). God therefore possesses the attribute (Pt. i., Def. v.) of which the concept is involved in all particular thoughts, which latter are conceived thereby. Thought, therefore, is one of the infinite attributes of God, which express God's eternal and infinite essence (Pt. i., Def. vi.). In other words, God is a thinking thing. Q.E.D.

The movement is:
(1) Particular thoughts (in a conditioned way) express the nature of God.
(2) (1) Implies that God therefore possesses the attribute of thought.
(3) that attribute then facilitates the apprehension of the chain of inference from (1) to (2) - from expression to possession, God as the simultaneous generator and sine qua non of that attribute.

tl;dr: a mode expressing the attribute of thought doesn't imply that it exhibits any degree consciousness. A particular thought, like my enjoyment of last night's Scotch bonnet chillis, exemplifies the attribute of mind/thought but is not itself conscious.

There are lots of good practical reasons not to care to pay attention to particular things, but given that you're paying attention to something already, it's kind of shocking to see someone so explicitly act like it doesn't matter whether they're right or wrong about it. — Pfhorrest

Maybe?

Hostility to the frame something is presented in can look a lot like hostility to the truth. I think, based on skim reading and brainfarts, that this is the suspicion @baker is leveraging. If someone'(you, or Wayfarer earlier) seems to be presenting what looks like a totalising system that decides what's right and wrong, and to them the system+person appears to purport that they've found the rational kernel/essence of right and wrong... I mean, they're gonna wanna reject that, it's gonna look absolutely nuts.

Systematising ethics (right/wrong) like that can have a very "this drunk came up to me on the street and told me the way to find God" feel to it! That seems quite vindicated to me, as any such system is an attempt to reconfigure how values are seen and norms are related to, a lot like our drunken messiah's aspirations.

That’s a degree of truth that matters, even if an absolute degree of it doesn’t. — Pfhorrest

Degree of truth -> truth value is no longer boolean -> doesn't resemble usual conceptions of truth. If you needed to parry the attack on "absolute truth" into a discussion which admits of degrees of truth in its operative concept, we're going to talk cross purposes if I engage without highlighting that. I'm specifically talking about when truth values are being treated as boolean.

If you have any concern at all for avoiding falsehood, even if that’s not an absolute and all-defeating concern, then you have some concern for truth. — Pfhorrest

I don't really want to play the "pin the assumptions on the philosopher" game. I'm sure we could go around the merry go round for a long time with you portraying that I have some nascent commitment to the truth (in some conception) and me trying to distance myself from it.

If you're willing to assert that it's "degree of truth" that matters and that how the degree matters depends upon practical/epistemic context, we're already dealing with a notion of truth that is more epistemic and pragmatic, and thus probably agree for practical purposes.

Two thrusts of research in the last half century have been the thorough chronicling of how human rationality is riddled with irremovable biases and how extremely powerful artificial intelligences may nevertheless have incommensurable value systems with humans. It seems we are broken tools that make broken tools; we evaluate wrongly and thus teach machines to value wrongly.

What role, if any, do you see a re-evaluation of rationality and decision making logics playing in the transhumanist project? How ought we go about that? And how do we get around the problem of using broken tools to make only more powerful broken tools?

A few things you might want to read around: "ressentiment" in Nietzsche from the blowhards can use this to punch down angle. "bourgeoise morality" is a Marxoid concept for the blowhards to punch up with. The idea of a "justification narrative" is useful in that regard too.

Also, a word of unsolicited advice, don't think you're above and untouched by these things just because you can recognise them for what they are. You're implicated, like I am. No values escape rhetorical context.

Y'know, it has often seemed to me that far too many people show too much disdain for truth, but it's rare that any of them straight up admit it like this. — Pfhorrest

I have a lot of contempt for truth. It's extremely over-rated, it needs a lot of scaffolding to emerge, and whenever it really, truly is what it is - it's so small and marginal that the forceps used to grasp it distort it beyond recognition but usher it into utility (and you can always ask "whose?" there). The truth of something does fuck all about that truth, and it's rarely necessary to know the truth to find one's way about. For the same reason as you don't need to know the exact shape of a car to know you should try not to be hit by them. Truth is a needlessly high standard.

Cookies specifically? No idea.

The books "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism", Christopher Wylie's "Mindfuck", and reading about nudges might help you get a broader idea of how they work societally.

The specifics of the algorithms are notoriously "black box", so over and above suggestions (like in Mindfuck) that people try to estimate Big 5 personality traits from posts, and perform automatic advertising controlled experiments on their platforms (eg Amazon and Facebook) to maximise click through and conversion rates... I don't think that can be said. Exactly what the AI thinks is hard to tell, even if you're the analyst that's fit the model.

Unless Google etc. are sitting on unprecedented "interpretable AI" advances, it'll be mostly blackboxes tuned by controlled experiments on social media, Amazon, credit ratings stuff... Depends who's sharing what with who really, but we have no idea eh?

Edit: you'll probably see that the above isn't really talking about minds, it's talking about observables that human agents generate. How well those observables can be combined to model the agent depends upon the observables, the model, and the agent. And even then, the model's to predict stuff like click through rates and what ads people should be shown, not like... "how does this person react to stress?" or other character traits' manifestations in context.

It's more about writing and organising it, dates etc. We need multiple people to be quite attentive all at once while we have a guest (so we need multiple buy ins from staff), and it needs to be at a time the prospective guest can actually do it.

We also need to negotiate the format with them. These things take time.

Eliminating all labor through automation would be a colossal blunder on the part of capitalism. We are aware, are we not, that capitalists are perfectly capable of Colossal Blunders? They would destroy the model that creates their wealth and power--without another model in sight. They might fantasize a world of Alpha Plus people (Brave New World) without the plague of betas, deltas, and epsilons, but achieving it would be inordinately messy. — Bitter Crank

:up:

I think CEO tech bros might fantasise that workless world, but other people don't (in the short term). Sweat shops don't seem to automate like factories do - so long as it's prohibitively expensive or pointless to automate in these places, the global circuit of production will redistribute value created by labour.

I think it comes down to a question of whether the fever dreams of Elon Musk resemble reality more than 1800's factory-scapes with loads of worker control.

Does this scheme invalidate Marx's theory of labor value? *** — Bitter Crank

But I think, closer to the OP, the scheme hypothetically would invalidate the labour theory of value; that theory seems to require that some people are working. In a hypothetical world where supply chains are all fully automated, that doesn't seem to hold.

The end result of this potential process would be solely automated production. But, this in turn would transform the Labor Theory of Value as well into something applicable in a post-Capitalist society when living labor i.e. the working class is rendered moot in the production process. — Maw

I think that's true of Marx, but do we have any reason to believe it's true of reality?

This contradiction leads to a material condition which can "blow this foundation sky-high", in other words the Labor Theory of Value becomes irrelevant, we've moved past it to something else! A Theory of Value based on automated machine power. — Maw

If we grant that there is a tendency toward automation (which there seems to be) and that this does reduce the amount of productive* labour required for the reproduction of the working class as much as it can, that still leaves open the possibility that there is a lower limit of that process of production - a non-zero asymptotic socially necessary labour time for the labourer's good basket, which suffices to sustain the dynamics modelled by the labour theory of value long term - keeping the engine of capitalism going.

*constraining productive to be meant in a physicalist sense since the SNLT reduction is unambiguously true in that sense - stuff which counts as a commodity has a physical body => productive labour produces expendable goods.

So:

The function of repeatability is to check the reliability of the experimental result. — bert1

:up: (IMO)

Up to precisely what's meant by "reliability", anyway.

The function of repeatability in experiments is NOT to confirm a hypothesis. — bert1

:up:

If you repeat a measurement under the same conditions in an experiment, the goal of that is usually to take an average; establishing concordance and forming a variance reduced estimate of the true value you're measuring.

If you repeat a measurement under different conditions in an experiment, in part that's trying to find out how the measured response varies with the stimulus/treatment, in part that's trying to find out how that response varies with contextual factors, in part (nowadays) that's trying to assess whether and how the stimulus/treatment's response itself varies with contextual factors. On this level, "repeating a measurement" is pretty much the core of a controlled experiment.

If you're repeating an entire experiment, there's some wiggle room in practice regarding what counts as a repeat. There's the hypothetical "exact replication", which is where you do literally everything the same, the "conceptual replication", which is where you try to ape the experimental conditions to be the same but can't do it exactly. I doubt those are an exhaustive typology of replication results, but the purpose of both isn't easily reducible to confirming or testing a previously held hypothesis in most cases, and that follows just because the overall set up in the initial experiment isn't identical, or necessarily even equivalent in all relevant respects, to the replication attempt.

That "lack of identity" (arguably) shows up in the difference in replication rates between papers where the initial researcher group is represented in the reproduction team and where they are not.

The function of repeatability is to check the reliability of the experimental result. — bert1

:up: Largely, I think so, at least up to what's intended by "reliability".

I would make the claim that the function of reproduction attempts/replication attempts in science isn't to check the reliability of any individual result; most results are false and over-simplifications and everyone knows this; the overall function is to make the process of scientific discovery in the aggregate not spend too long on "clear" falsehoods and inaccuracies, it's a quality control thing. What counts as a "clear falsehood" only makes sense in light of reproducibility.

Another angle on repeatability is that if you're repeating the experiment, manage it exactly, and the effect doesn't show up the same as before, that doesn't necessarily mean the conclusions of the initial experiment were false - it might be that the response is contextually variable, it might be a contextual interaction - both experiments could be samples of a distribution associated with the "true effect" indexed by contexts and their variables. The latter approach, to my understanding, is the one favoured by Gelman and his group.

A single unrepeated experiment, if reliable, is enough to refute a hypothesis. You don't have to do it again. — bert1

I think that depends too, the role of a non-repeat, if you see it in the context of a contextually variable interaction, it's not a refutation but evidence that the effect is contextual if it exists (and that starts a process of compensation of making it smaller compared to context induced imprecision, "exaggeration factors" "the garden of forking paths", and analysing true power of the study/broader scientific endeavour), if you see it in the context of everything's really set up exactly the same, the effect's probably not there as it was theorised - but if the "exact replication" must reproduce the contextual ambiguities of the initial one? It still doesn't mean the effect's not there/is 0* if the second one comes out, it could be that the ambiguities realised differently in both experiments.

In that kind of case, if the ambiguities are enough to swamp the signal, it's reasonable to say the treatment as intended or the effect as theorised has little to no evidence that it exists... Probably.

Edit*: its expectation could be 0, but it could still have high contextual variability...

Will automation render workers superfluous or irrelevant? — Bitter Crank

Lemme give you a value theory answer: no, so long as human labour is required in the production process, that socially necessary labour will be distributed/re-appropriated through the ownership of automatons.

Lemme give you a less value theory answer: probably not, so long as labour's price is kept down by disciplinary measures. Lots of work being done now could be automated, but it's cheaper for owners (short term) not to.

Stahp.

I am also sorry you found my thread poorly written — Joe0082

That's okay! Try again some other time. @Baden has a really nice OP writing guide here.

GOOD NIGHT, GO BACK TO YOUR MENTAL CASKET. — Joe0082

Good night, Joe.

I'm moderating a philosophy board because I have the ability to respond even handedly to people who are upset with me.

I decided to close your thread for a few reasons:
(1) Evolution denial is pseudoscience.
(2) It also wasn't a philosophical angle on "limits of evolution" so to speak (eg, mind of god = patterns+natural order, cosmological argument grist), or treating evolution philosophically, it was...
(3) An attempt at criticism of ideas with a series of largely decontextualised rhetorical questions, which you can tell attempt to criticise evolution by the tone, but can't sufficiently easily reconstruct the argument from the offerings.
(4) If it was thematically appropriate for the site it wasn't transparently so, see (3).

This is the OP:

Aristotle in my humble opinion missed one important type of fallacy, which is Partial Truth Taken As Full Truth. A perfect example being evolution. Nobody doubts that it is partially true but is it the Full Truth? Evolution is at best a crude and uncertain tool in Nature's hands. To believe that Nature managed to turn bacteria into human bodies consisting of 10 trillion cells, each of which is an amazing little factory, seems like a little bit of a stretch to me. And there are just too many inexplicable features in animals and humans to believe it all happened only through evolution, like the eye, and like self-aware intelligence, and many more. Why did the Neanderthals not evolve, but remained pretty much the same for two hundred thousand years, never even inventing the bow and arrow (or for that matter the throwing spear)? Why have chimps not evolved into higher organisms? There are a thousand reasons why evolution seems only a partial truth, and only really one reason to believe it is the full truth, namely scientific conformity and fear of being branded unscientific.

In a nutshell, it was simultaneously not something generally thematically welcome on the site, and it wasn't particularly strongly written. If it was more thematically welcome, I'd've shown more lenience on the writing and left it open.

Closing this.

Am I right in thinking that the major distinction you're drawing between national identity and race is that, ultimately, national identity is a contingent property of a person and race is a necessary one?

I think that holds when hewing close to the categories as they're theorised, or on their own terms, but in terms of their observed function - precisely who counts as Aryan, white, black, depends on the political weather. The essentialist ontology of race is time varying in practice.

What I am keeping an eye on is the fracturing of a common American identity and a progression towards a society where identity is more based along racial, ethnic, or ideological lines and conflict is not so much perceived as acceptable disagreement and instead more perceived as war. — BitconnectCarlos

On what basis are you separating out the national identity stuff from the racial, ethnic and ideological stuff? What makes national identity less suspicious and dangerous than those?

I'm not prepared to just cede nationalism to the far right. — BitconnectCarlos

I think what you're not prepared to cede is the "good heart" of protectionist policies; which ultimately is taking care of a community and protecting it from predators. That's orthogonal to nationalism, which is a way of deciding -usually based on sentiment- who the predators are.

It's really just a jumping off point, nothing else. — BitconnectCarlos

It's a slope, yes. The nationalism enables the bad stuff so well it gets branded (rightly) the same.

f I were to travel to the UK and spot someone with a Boston Red Sox hat in a bar that would make me more likely to try to establish rapport with them, but it doesn't make us best friends. It's really just a jumping off point, nothing else. — BitconnectCarlos

Your framing makes it look like that is all nationalism tends to be. I think you know it's not!

So why is Nationalism still tolerated and even lauded? Why is the British flag allowed to be be waved all over the place, but the Nazi flag not so much? (Feel free to substitute your own local good and bad flags here.) — unenlightened

As a neo-marxist, postmodern destroyer of freedom who broadly agrees with you, I still wouldn't mod a nationalist like a racist since there are socially acceptable ways to be a nationalist, but no ways of being a racist. Yes, logically this makes no sense if nationalism is a (more or less) disguised in-group favouritism narrative - which it is -, but you can't tell that to people and expect them to believe it just because it's true.

As for why it's more socially acceptable to be a nationalist than a racist or an ethnocentrist? I'd guess that because national identity isn't explicitly articulated in terms of race or ethnicity, the comparison goes under the radar. It seems to require a certain social+intellectual distance from the narratives of national identity to see it for what it is. It's a question of history informing aesthetic/moral taste.

Seeing it for what it is is still much different from ceasing to embody it/be effected by it though...

1. Why call it mind? I see no reason. Why not ping-pong? — Eugen

He explains this in the Ethics:

If intellect belongs to the divine nature, it cannot be in nature, as ours is generally thought to be, posterior to, or simultaneous with the things understood, inasmuch as God is prior to all things by reason of his causality (Prop. xvi., Coroll. i.). On the contrary, the truth and formal essence of things is as it is, because it exists by representation as such in the intellect of God. Wherefore the intellect of God, in so far as it is conceived to constitute God's essence, is, in reality, the cause of things, both of their essence and of their existence. This seems to have been recognized by those who have asserted, that God's intellect, God's will, and God's power, are one and the same.

tl;dr-the divine intellect is the clockwork of the universe, its thoughts are the formation of patterns and what it means to be patterned in any way, it unfolds inexorably, an unstoppable force, as anything that could stop it would be part of it.

So far, spinozism sounds very weird to me. — Eugen

Yes. Grappling with his ideas more thoroughly will make what you previously thought seem weird to you. :razz:

I think it fucks. But it doesnt do any embodied fucking. — Joshs

:chin: :fear:

I assume by ‘phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man, you mean Das Man? — Joshs

I meant Dasein. It can't fuck. It can't even fuck its wife!

He may very well have located Witt’s work within a religious metaphysics akin to Kierkegaard. — Joshs

Points of commonality between late W and early Heidi:
(1) Holism, especially with regard to meaning.
(2) (allegedly) Attempting to hue close to the contextual aspects of language.
(3) W's "picture frame" metaphor is extremely similar to H's propositional/apophatic as-structure.
(4) Seeing-as in W is tightly related to as-structure in Heidegger. "How does this count as that?" so to speak is a central point of investigation in both, both bottom out in coupling convention to perception.
(5) Both have a rhetorical posture of attending to the every-day, rather than philosophical idealisations of the every day.
(6) Both have ambiguous roles for the individual.

These come with points of contrast.

(1) W's holism isn't unified conceptually into a single category - the "form of life" and boundaries of any given language game remain ambiguous -, in contrast Heidegger's holism is aggregate into temporality - as the unfolding of history is a generator and overcomer of conventions. Heidegger's a proto-historicist and proto-discourse analyst, W remains profoundly ahistorical in his analysis.
(2,5) Heidegger's simplifications in an attempt to hue close to context are politically+religiously coloured and romantic, W can't help but treat such rules as definite but largely ineffable, a "logic of things unsaid" so to speak. Both are huge simplifications and distort their topics of concern.
(3,4) The picture frame is seen as contingent and nothing more, it's something that can be picked up and is located as internal to philosophy/analysis - it's just something philosophers tend to do, Heidegger locates the dominance/over-emphasis of the propositional as-structure within the history of ideas (Descartes role in the forgetting of the question of the meaning of being). Both philosophers can be read as reacting to this over emphasis as a central concern.
(6) Idiosyncrasy poses a problem for conventional accounts of meaning but also phenomenology based on a bodiless and morose every-man. The latter requires analysing the conceptual structure of "mental furniture" and its behaviour - like a logical psychology or anthropology - the former requires attending to individual intentions and states. Both projects get royally undermined by human heterogeneity in bodies and frames.

All modes are under the attribute of mind, not just instances of human conciousness. — TheWillowOfDarkness

:up:

Note.—Some assert that God, like a man, consists of body and mind, and is susceptible of passions. How far such persons have strayed from the truth is sufficiently evident from what has been said. But these I pass over. For all who have in anywise reflected on the divine nature deny that God has a body. Of this they find excellent proof in the fact that we understand by body a definite quantity, so long, so broad, so deep, bounded by a certain shape, and it is the height of absurdity to predicate such a thing of God, a being absolutely infinite. But meanwhile by other reasons with which they try to prove their point, they show that they think corporeal or extended substance wholly apart from the divine nature, and say it was created by God. Wherefrom the divine nature can have been created, they are wholly ignorant; thus they clearly show, that they do not know the meaning of their own words. I myself have proved sufficiently clearly, at any rate in my own judgment (Coroll. Prop. vi, and note 2, Prop. viii.), that no substance can be produced or created by anything other than itself. Further, I showed (in Prop. xiv.), that besides God no substance can be granted or conceived. Hence we drew the conclusion that extended substance is one of the infinite attributes of God. — Spinoza, Ethics

What's the fundamental difference between things that have consciousness and things that don't? — Eugen

In terms of humans: the distinction between conscious beings and non-conscious ones doesn't parse according to Spinoza's categorisation of things. Consciousness isn't some magical faculty in Spinoza, it's just a way a human body's constitutive relation can be effected by stuff and effect itself. It's more homeostatic feedback, less light of the mind. It's more about being an agent - an effector of itself and other beings, and the aspects of being an agent (thoughts, feelings) are couched precisely in those terms of effectivity. Contrast this to a causally isolated Cartesian "soul" or a "free will" which is freed from materiality.

In terms of broader metaphysical categories, ideality vs materiality:

Note.—This is made more clear by what was said in the note to II. vii., namely, that mind and body are one and the same thing, conceived first under the attribute of thought, secondly, under the attribute of extension. Thus it follows that the order or concatenation of things is identical, whether nature be conceived under the one attribute or the other; consequently the order of states of activity and passivity in our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of states of activity and passivity in the mind. The same conclusion is evident from the manner in which we proved II. xii. — Spinoza, Ethics

For Spinoza, your mind and your body are both your processes, both expressions of you, neither body nor mind derives from or is subordinate to the other. Mind and Extension are both attributes of substance, ways of conceiving its nature. It is that they are attributes of substance that allows the following kind of example: (with some butchery), if you look at an alcoholic and see someone addressing their sorrows with booze, you see them in the attribute of Mind. If you look at an alcoholic and see an electrochemical process requiring ethanol, you see them in the attribute of Extension. Further for Spinoza, the two motivations of the alcoholic are structurally the same - both strivings, one of an electrochemical process for ethanol, one of a human being for consolation. They're the same being (mode), described under different aspects, neither more real or fundamental than the other, neither causally antecedent to the other.