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.

Let me try to simplify too, because when there are these increasingly long posts, no-one's reading or engaging.

My position is simply that when it comes to subjective experience there remains a large explanatory gap; questions we cannot answer and would like to, with actual practical implications.

I think noAxioms, because you've started this thread from a position of "I don't know why there's all the fuss about...", you're responding to the problems and questions somewhat flippantly. Either with your best guess -- which is meaningless here, if the conclusion is not coming from a specific model or description it's not a solution, and we have no reason to think it's right.

Or pointing out that there's no reason to suppose something non-physical is going on -- which is fine, but is also not an answer.
It's like saying "What's all the fuss about why some people have long covid, while some are even asymptomatic...there's no reason to suppose it's not physical" -- it's an irrelevant excuse to handwave the problem.

We have a reaction to a negative input. It is a choice of language to describe that process as involving pain or not. Perhaps it is a choice of language to describe it as negative or not. — noAxioms

This is backwards. The input is not inherently negative; it's just data. It's as subject to interpretation as all other sensory data.
The experience is negative, and that's the difficult thing for us to explain here.
If someone were to peel off your skin, it's not a choice of language that you call that a negative experience -- the brain somehow generates an extremely unpleasant experience using a mechanism that as yet we don't understand.

It's not like there's a 4th set of nerves coming from the eye, lacking any 4th-color cones to sense, so they remain ever unstimulated. If those unused nerves were there, then I suppose they could be artificially triggers to give the subject this experience he otherwise could never have. — noAxioms

Your claim was that science says there's no way we could conceive of what the world looks like to tetrachromats. Even if the cones of the eye stimulated color perception in a consistent mapping (and it isn't...it's contextual), it wouldn't rule out that we can imagine another primary color independent of stimulus.

Are there non-philosophical papers that conclude that something non-physical is going on, and that matter somewhere is doing something deliberate without any physical cause? That would be news indeed, a falsification of 'known physics is sufficient'. — noAxioms

No idea where that came from.
I've been speaking entirely from the perspective of neuroscience. If anyone has been claiming a soul, or anything beyond known physics, it isn't me.

Behaving as a human does when experienceing human pain? Seems unfair. It feels pain if it chooses to use that word to describe what it feels. — noAxioms

I can trivially program an agent then that feels pain. Pretty easy to make an AI that chooses to use expressions like "Owie! That's the worst pain ever" in response to the user issuing the command "feel pain". So am I now guilty of inflicting great suffering?

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid. — noAxioms

Avoiding stimuli does not entail having a negative experience. Indeed there are plenty of processes in your body that reflexively counter some stimulus without you experiencing pain. So these two things are not intrinsically coupled.

Now, one of the most popular hypotheses for why we have the negative experience of pain is that it allows us to make complex judgements. If cutting my arm reflexively made me pull away then I would not be able to hunt as effectively as someone able to consider the hunt more important than the "bad feeling" of having a slashed arm. I think this is likely correct.
However, understanding some of the reason that we evolved subjective experience is still not a model of what it actually is and how the brain creates experiences.

Exactly. Science acknowledges this impossibility [of describing a tetrochromats vision with words], and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'. — noAxioms

Several things here:
1. Science absolutely does not claim the impossibility of describing experiences with words. For all we know right now, it may be possible to induce someone to imagine a fourth primary color with some kind of description. The fact that this seems implausible is not a proof of anything.
2. Science absolutely does acknowledge the hard problem. It doesn't always call it that, because that's a philosophical framing, but even strictly googling "hard problem of consciousness" finds many papers in neuroscience journals.
3. I think you have a misconception about the distinction between science and philosophy. Many things that were once philosophy have become sciences as they made testable claims. Indeed all of science was once considered "natural philosophy".
Even if it were the case that the hard problem of consciousness were entirely confined to philosophical debate, that doesn't mean that the scientific community is rejecting it as a concept. Only that it wouldn't yet be something amenable to the scientific methodology.

The AI isn't going to feel human pain if that's what you're wondering. — noAxioms

That wasn't the question though. The question was how we could tell the difference between an agent being in pain and merely behaving as though it is in pain.

In this case though your deflection just serves to reinforce the point. If you're claiming that an AI would feel a different kind of pain to a human, what kind of pain is that, and how do you know?

It's always best with these things to bring it back to the practical.

The measure of how well we understand a phenomenon or system is what kind of useful predictions and inferences we can make about it.

When it comes to something like pain, say, we do understand very well the sensory inputs to the pain centres of the brain. But how the brain converts data into an unpleasant sensation remains quite mysterious.
This has practical implications -- it would be very useful to have some kind of direct measure of pain or some non-arbitrary way of understanding different kinds of pain. If we make a sentient AI one day, and it tells us it's in pain, how could we know if that's true or just saying that is part of its language model?

And we call it the "hard problem" because, right now, it doesn't seem feasible that a set of words could ever provide this understanding. How will words ever tell me what the extra colours that tetrachromats can see look like, when I can't tell a color blind from birth person what red looks like?
And indeed, how can I know whether an AI feels pain, when I can't know that you feel pain?

This is what makes it a "special" problem. The OP seems to basically acknowledge the main problem but seems to be shrugging it off in a "how could it be any other way" kind of perspective. But "how could it be any other way" doesn't give us any predictive or inferential power.

Because, the only thing we can know for sure about PC, from the transporter problem as it is usually phrased, is that an identical copy is a continuation of the self.
— Mijin

I don't think this is the case. The problem as it's usually phrase is designed to test your intuitions about what constitutes identity. — AmadeusD

I think this is the critical misunderstanding on your part, and is my response to all of your points in that post.
I was laying out what the personal continuity position is. The "you are transported" position.

No, it is not asking you to question whether an identical copy is you: that's the point of Parfit's transporter problem in the first place. PC is explicitly a response about such problems; it's making an explicit claim about what would happen.

Which, as I have quite clearly and distinctly laid out for you - does not have anythign to do with sex determination. Aberration doesn't change your sex — AmadeusD

Right and we're talking about how we determine sex. And your idea of using the SRY gene fails for at least these 3 reasons:

1. There are more than 2 genotypes for this gene -- it's not binary
2. How would we know what gene someone has, since their genitalia and secondary characteristics may not align. Call that an "aberration" or whatever other word you like. It remains impractical, since you balked at the idea of mandatory DNA testing, so how would it work in schools, prisons, hospitals etc?
3. Biologists do not define sex this way as it's completely arbitrary. I know you're happy to handwave everything that people who actually study this topic say, but it's a critical point for those of us who are not guided by conservative talking points over science.

This is pure nonsense. You brought it up. You deal with it. I didn't suggest we do that and no where did I intimate it was reasonable to suggest so. — AmadeusD

WTF? We were talking about gender being non-binary, and you brought up the SRY gene. Don't blame me if it's an indefensible position.

You can't avoid holding philosophical positions. And I find that often the people most dismissive of philosophy are the people trying to push their own (e.g. Creationist sites are often even more derisive of philosophy departments than they are of evolutionary biologists, say).

That said philosophy as a formal area of study does require certain cognitive skills and a lot of patience. Not everyone can do it.

I often regret not studying philosophy at Uni, but on the other hand, I do glaze over sometimes in very abstract discussions on definitions. And there are several topics in philosophy that I feel are pretty silly but have reached the threshold where you can't just question the whole premise any more.
I probably don't have the chops for it.

Many items on the list [of fascist traits] didn’t apply to Trump at all. — Fire Ologist

Like what? That was exactly the question I asked, so let's hear the one on the list that doesn't apply?
AFAICT the only one really debatable is the last on the list (launching a war of conquest) which is given as something common to fascism, not necessary. And there's still time...

And also you say that other leaders like Biden meet the items in the list. Let's hear that elaboration.

----------------------------------

In terms of the central thread topic of "wokeism" though, nobody knows what point you're trying to make, least of all you.
You write that "I see pretty clearly what woke is", and yet here's a selection of the changing, arbitrary ways you've defined it:

- Wokeism is a type of totalitarian fascism
- Woke teaches me that there is a difference between white people and everyone else, and that all white people must be reeducated about their implicit biases and privileges
- The word “woke” as a class of people is itself a bit anti-woke, elitist, oppressive
- the woke have to bring their own facts to the table, and they don’t seem to care about or need real proof
- The woke coined the term “woke”. Which is ironic now that they flee from the term. It’s CRT.
- Woke says people are doomed and chained to their biases, and have to be told by the enlightened what their real motivations are
- Wokeism makes everything political
- They want to include trans, so they exclude cis-gender. They want to include black women, so they exclude white men. It's been happening with great progressive success for 40 years. To the wokeist, I must be living in a different world
- From what I can tell, woke principles are in need of discussion (like, what does woke mean?) — Fire Ologist

And then the icing on the cake: "Not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke".
So are you woke? :scream:

What is funny is that the same people who can’t see what wokeness is, somehow see with absolute clarity that Kirk was racist. — Fire Ologist

Yep. You think "woke" means everything has to be relative or subjective or something?
No wonder you're so against it!
Have you taken a moment to consider the possibility that maybe the problem is with your understanding?

Or Trump is a fascist dictator. — Fire Ologist

Definitely fascist. Once again: which of the things in this list does not fit trump?

"Dictator" though is a status, not merely an ideology. He wants to be a dictator, that's for sure, but he's not there yet.

Not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke. — Fire Ologist

If you had meant this as a joke, I'd salute you as thread winner.
But, sadly, it seems more likely that you're being serious.

the US might be 'less woke' in some respects, but it is also woke ground zero in the only considerations that matter. I mean, the philosophical roots are international, Marx, Foucault, Marcuse, Friere, etc.

But CRT and the vast majority of modern 'wokeness' come from US universities — Jeremy Murray

That's not a relevant point though, CRT is a college level topic in the US, where's the evidence of US schools being "woke"? Indeed *more woke than German, Kiwi, Spanish schools etc* to make sense of this talking point of wokeness being the problem?

I am puzzled, tbh, by you guys. You genuinely don't think wokeness is a problem? Do you endorse elements of the practice? — Jeremy Murray

It largely doesn't even make sense as a coherent concept, and in general I am suspicious about content aimed at provoking outrage.
Let me explain where I am coming from.

Here in the UK we've had a long history of calling things "woke", except that actual term didn't exist so it was "political correctness gone MAD".
Headlines about how you couldn't say Christmas any more, or that blackouts were becoming brownouts. They always turned out to be exaggerations, misconceptions or just outright bollocks. But they reliably sold newspapers: people love that feeling of outrage.

Unfortunately it spilled over into the UK shooting itself in the foot and voting to leave the EU, as a huge proportion of Brits believed that "crazy rules from Brussels" were responsible for all the problems in society. Now that we've left the EU and the UK economy remains stagnant, no one can point to a single mad law that we've supposedly extricated ourselves from.

And there's a worse element to this, because now even reporting accurate information about US history is being labeled "woke", and censored. Or it's "woke" to point out that immigrants eating dogs or being part of a crime wave is lies. It's being used as an excuse to lie to people, and keep them ignorant.

So anyway, yes if there's an example of a DEI policy that went too far or whatever, of course I'll call it out. But in general when someone's ranting about "woke" my finger is hovering over the Google button because I know 9/10 it will be pure bull.

It's also in the context of Trump saying he'll come for the other late night shows next and government threats against universities, corporations and private individuals based on their speech or protests.

But nah let's handwave it all, and "whatabout" to the imaginary time when supposedly something anywhere comparable happened to conservative voices.

Does your wife still teach? It's a tough gig, primarily because of appalling behaviour, regular violence, tolerance of disruption, etc. I was told thirty years back, during my b. ed, that we didn't need to 'worry' about discipline, because good lessons, culturally relevant material, etc would solve all the problems.

Wokeness has been the defining philosophical approach of public education for decades. Even the insistence on whole language over phonics is 'woke'. — Jeremy Murray

But the US is far less "woke" than most of Europe and the anglosphere, so by this logic we should all be envying the remarkably peaceful and disciplined American schools.

The reality is that it's the ways that the US genuinely is an outlier that makes schools more chaotic. Poor public funding, genuine poverty, a violent culture and parents who are suspicious of experts and science.

A personal bugbear for me is also how high schools are depicted on US TV. Every single time, even if it's a Disney movie or whatever, bullying is a significant plot point.
Don't get me wrong; kids are people and some people are jerks. Bullying happens. But having it central to the high school experience seems to normalize it IMO. Other countries manage to tell stories about kids that don't have to center around that behavior.

Well that was what I found odd about his reply to me, purpose not existing in the objective sense doesn't mean that we don't know anything or such. — Darkneos

I couldn't quite follow what was going on in the linked thread, but he may have been alluding to "pre-supposition" arguments.
Pre-sup has become really popular in the context of philosophical / theological debates. The debater basically argues that the other person cannot say anything because they have no foundation of knowledge.

I could write a lot about why I think these arguments are flawed (frankly they remind me a lot of sovereign citizens, trying to define themselves into victory), but it would be a hijack for this thread.
I'm just making you aware that that might be where the person in the Quora thread was going if you're not familiar with this phenomenon.

Agree with 180 proof.

We do not *know* there is no objective meaning to life, there's just no good evidence for such a thing at this time.

The OP is right though that that doesn't entail everything being meaningless let alone impacting epistemology. You can decide on your own meaning. And you can value this life for what it is.

Unless you want to say something more about how DEI leads to a diverse workforce and more profits. — Fire Ologist

Sure, here's a detailed analysis by McKinsey.

How about deny a claim if the insured isn’t able to demonstrate compliance with the law? — Fire Ologist

Sure -- which is very different to your original claim. The law doesn't say to get a DEI officer, only (in some jurisdictions) that you submit a summary of diversity policy; something which would normally be well within scope of an organization's legal and HR team.

Look, I think it's great that you hired a DEI officer, but do not claim that an insurer made you do that (or offered you cheaper insurance if you would), because that would go out of scope of what insurers can ask for, and would be open to litigation.

Why are we making an issue of the term "woke"? Discussing the behavior might be more productive? But arguing about the meaning of the word, is like a dog chasing its own tail. It seems obvious the word can mean anything a person wants it to mean. But what is the social value we are talking about? — Athena

Yep. As I say, in recent days the president has claimed that the reason that the US did not have a victory in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq etc was because of "woke".
Good luck to anyone trying to make sense of that. Were we trying to teach CRT to the viet cong?

One thing they can do is name a DEI officer to be responsible for compliance, to figure out how to train, etc. Looks really good on paper. Saves money on premium. — Fire Ologist

Brilliant, this is the claim I am asking you to support. Any link to any insurer suggesting that they will reduce their price if you hire a DEI officer? Remember, you're the one ranting about how common and severe "woke" is, so this should be easy to find.

No one has been “gagged”. Everyone is free to print whatever news is fit to print. — Fire Ologist

False. What planet have you been living on? These are the most widespread assaults on free speech that the US has ever seen; much worse than McCarthyism.

You are being a baby. Like the news media. And your average college professor. — Fire Ologist

Yes, pointing out the myriad ways that government is deporting, imprisoning and defunding people on the basis of speech is babyish...what we should be getting concerned about is an anecdote one person shared of years ago some women saying mean things about men.

I never said requirement or legal requirement to get insurance. You said that. I said we had to do it to get good insurance. — Fire Ologist

So to try to lay the groundwork for climbing down from your claim you take the unbelievable step of cutting a piece of a sentence to pretend to have misunderstood the question?

This was the whole sentence, including the bit you disingenuously cut:

Let's get it straight: are you maintaining that it was a requirement of a particular insurer / package that you hire a DEI officer? — Mijin

So no, I did not say, that you had said, that it was a legal requirement for insurance. I am exactly responding to the claim that it was necessary for "good" insurance.

So, I'll ask again: are you maintaining that a given insurer, or a particular insurance package, mandated that you hire a DEI officer?

OTOH if your claim is that the insurance was advertized as cheaper if you have a DEI officer, that's worse because that would be public information that we could all google.

Which is it?

So some gagging is terrible, but gagging Athena wasn’t. — Fire Ologist

Lol, "some gagging" == universities, government agencies including health agencies, the judiciary, the free press and millions of Americans' right to protest.
While "gagging athena" == an anecdote from one guy, from an unknown number of years ago, about something absolutely inconsequential even if not embellished.

Is there any point in this where you are going to pause and wonder if you've got the priorities right?

So are corporate profits and capitalism good to you? Because that’s not woke - that’s exploitation and greed and builds oligarchies and permanent underclasses. — Fire Ologist

I'm responding to your point. You were saying that if diverse workforces were more profitable then the market would ensure that workplaces would indeed be more diverse.
I was illustrating why that doesn't follow -- because human nature and corporate inertia gets in the way. Workplaces are becoming more diverse, but there is still competitive advantage in being more diverse than the average, and it's still taking DEI to make it happen within our lifetimes.

I don’t want to proceed unless you tell me what woke actually is to you - if you don’t think it’s a thing, a force, a set of policies, a philosophic worldview, then we will never build a conversation. — Fire Ologist

Then don't proceed. Because my position is that it's a nebulous scare word for people who don't want to think. I'm not going to do the work for you in turning the concept (as RW media uses it) into something coherent.

It's like you saying you don't want to address whether the emperor has no clothes until I describe in detail the fine silks I think he lacks.

You might not know what you are talking about. Maybe there is no basis to accuse me of exaggerating. Google some more.. There are lots of ways to meet insurance underwriting requirements. There are lots of ways insurers can hike up your premium. There are lots of ways insurers can deny your claims? You really might want to talk to some business owners about what they actually do, what they have to do, what they do that is above and beyond the law and insurance requirements, and why they do it. — Fire Ologist

An impressively evasive response.

Let's get it straight: are you maintaining that it was a requirement of a particular insurer / package that you hire a DEI officer? Or are you withdrawing that claim?

We have a DEI officer because we can’t get good employment insurance without it. — Fire Ologist

BTW, from some googling around it would seem requring a business to hire a DEI officer would go way beyond the bounds of what insurers can request and would invite legal challenges. Some (minority) of insurers require a declaration of what the DEI policy is, but they can't ask you to hire someone.

See what I mean about needing to exaggerate, versus the real and present attacks of freedom in the name of "fighting the woke"?

In terms of the example you're quoting from athena, it's pretty weak sauce.
We don't get to hear their side of it, and it just sounds like the typical exaggerated with each retelling "I worked at the worst place ever" story.

Even if were entirely true (and to be clear: I don't believe it is), we have...what? Misandry, based on the accurate observation that men are far more likely to be the abusers. And athena's disgust that they were not being bigoted towards gay men?

Oh my god! This story from "years ago" is so much worse than the gagging of universities, government departments, journalists etc that right now is happening under the pretext of fighting woke! Eyes opened.

You don’t really think a company that wants profit isn’t trying to draw from the widest pool possible to gain more profit? — Fire Ologist

No because markets are not perfectly efficient and human nature gets in the way.
Think how much money was left on the table for decades by keeping women out of senior roles.

If I were to point you to the data that more diverse workforces are associated with higher profitability, would it change your view on DEI? If not then there's your answer.

Wokeism is a type of totalitarian fascism. Can we acknowledge that first on a thread about the end of woke? — Fire Ologist

I'm baffled that you would even ask me that. Are you reading my responses?

My position is that "woke" is a boogieman of the political right. It's manufactured grievances and culture wars, put under a single umbrella so that people can turn their brains off and just boo when the flashing sign tells them to.

Just today, the president of the united states blamed all of the US military victories since WW2 on being "wokey". That's the level of bullshit we're talking about here.
24 carat bullshit.

Now, in terms of your specific question, I don't think the word "woke" even has a coherent meaning in the way that RW media uses it. So it's as much "totalitarian fascism" as it is a cabbage, or a dream of electric sheep.
But in terms of the definition you cited earlier, the answer is clearly "no".