This section allows you to view all posts made by this member. Note that you can only see posts made in areas you currently have access to.
Messages - More Than Mortal
Pages: 1 ... 155156157 158159 ... 502
4681
« on: June 22, 2015, 02:37:47 PM »
I know what "forum" means, but if you want Verbatim's response primarily, why not just PM him?
Because his response will be much more interesting if it can take place in the context of an open discussion.
4682
« on: June 22, 2015, 02:31:16 PM »
Although, I'm not quite sure why Meta doesn't just PM Verb if the question is for him...
forum ˈfɔːrəm/Submit noun 1. a meeting or medium where ideas and views on a particular issue can be exchanged. Spoiler Also, I like to air my dirty laundry.
4683
« on: June 22, 2015, 01:39:07 PM »
Nostalgia Critic is awful
^
4684
« on: June 22, 2015, 12:26:57 PM »
Let's say, in some rural part of a developed country, a woman gives birth to a child in some isolated log cabin. The only person there with her is her only friend-cum-midwife. Nobody else has any knowledge of the birth, and the moment her friend steps out of the log cabin to go home she is hit by a tanker and killed immediately.
So the mother is the only human being on the planet with the knowledge of the baby's existence. She settles down, and reads some Arthur Schopenhauer, David Benatar and Peter Zapffe. Accordingly, she becomes convinced that life has an aggregate, objective disutility and thus procreation is immoral.
So she smothers the newborn as it sleeps. Is this morally permissible/justified.
4685
« on: June 22, 2015, 12:20:57 PM »
What? 147 African Americans were killed by law enforcement in 2013, as opposed to 300 whites.
And my first statistic encompasses between 1999 and 2013, not last year, I apologize. Still, I'm not incorrect.
Crude rate for whites in 2013 alone is 0.14. Crude rate for blacks in the same year is 0.34. Blacks are still die during legal intervention at a disproportionate rate.
4686
« on: June 22, 2015, 12:09:23 PM »
one could be both an anti-natalist and a nihilist, no?
I can't say I agree with Verbatim's more colourful conclusions in the OP, but this would still be a contradiction in terminus. Being an anti-natalist requires the attribution of objective disutility to life.
4687
« on: June 22, 2015, 12:07:55 PM »
http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_us.html
I get a different statistic from the CDC. (Select Legal intervention between 1999 and 2013 and choose either whites or blacks. It won't allow me to directly link the data.)
Crude rate is still higher for blacks.
4688
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:45:04 AM »
This thread is probably going to go up in flames, so I'm just going to bow out while I can.
4689
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:42:27 AM »
And how do you think that compares to 4000 odd whites shot by police in comparison to 1000 blacks last year?
Hmm, come on man. You and I probably agree on most things, especially when it comes to culture, but using the absolute numbers isn't very satisfying. What we should care about is if black people are dying disproportionately at the hands of the police, which they are:  And why that's happening.
4690
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:40:06 AM »
No it isn't. There's just far less.
I'm not here to debate whether institutional racism is dead or not--there's pretty interesting evidence from both sides. I'm just pointing out to the OP that people aren't claiming racism, in itself, is dead. Like, if anybody is claiming that they're either liars or insane.
4691
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:38:35 AM »
I'm getting pretty sick of the left pulling the race card to try and further their agenda.
While I agree that seizing upon the instance to pursue specific liberal policies or legitimise identity politics is in poor taste, I don't think you can accuse them of "pulling the race card". People were murdered because they were black, that's pretty much the whole story.
4692
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:36:51 AM »
Yeah, OP, nobody claims racism is dead.
The point is that institutional racism is effectively dead.
4693
« on: June 22, 2015, 11:35:45 AM »
What's there to talk about?
>White kid guns down 9 people in a church
>Isn't reduced to a pile of swiss cheese by police
>"He's just sick in the head and needed more help.avi"
>Black man sneezes
>Officer down shots fired call in backup
>Black man reduced to black pudding by police officers
>"Just another thug.avi"
Seems a bit reductionist. I don't think anybody calling for his mental health to be reviewed would be I) unhappy if he was shot by police or II) not calling for the same were it a black man.
4694
« on: June 22, 2015, 08:03:01 AM »
I think that makes sense. But, in the case of moral realism, would a nihilist be rejecting the moral precepts laid out (namely, that we can derive prescriptive norms from descriptive facts about experience) or would they be rejecting the assertion that experiences have descriptive value altogether?
If it's the latter, then wouldn't it be a case of conflating metaphysical value with empirical value? Because it's quite clear that experiences have values, at least in a subjective sense, in that some are more or less desirable than others. I don't know how a nihilist could dispute that without falling back on metaphysics.
I don't know; this is one of the reasons I eventually left nihilism for existentialism.
4695
« on: June 22, 2015, 07:34:42 AM »
Hmm, wouldn't that take it outside the realm of meta-ethics, then?
Not really, for the same reason that metaphysical nihilism is still a part of metaphysics or that epistemological nihilism is still part of epistemology. The fact that they reject the very existence of ethical properties is still a meta-ethical claim.
4696
« on: June 22, 2015, 07:21:58 AM »
My problem with moral nihilism (speaking as a former nihilist, no less) is its complete unwillingness to make the presuppositions necessary to reach moral facts. Or indeed any facts. The whole of epistemology is a presupposition, the point is making the right presuppositions.
And when it comes to morality, you either make the presupposition or you don't. And if you don't, you're either religious or a nihilist.
4697
« on: June 22, 2015, 07:18:50 AM »
Aren't you a nihilist though?
Oh God, let's not.
4698
« on: June 22, 2015, 07:14:43 AM »
Moral nihilism is, if I've got this right, a meta-ethical position; that's to say, it rejects moral universals in metaphysics or divine command theory. It doesn't necessarily reject moral realism, and I think the two can happily coexist, actually.
I don't think so. Moral nihilism is, by definition, an anti-realist philosophy in meta-ethics. It doesn't just reject moral universals, it rejects all positive moral claims.
4699
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:57:47 PM »
what's odd is that you're only taking issue with it now on this particular subject
Probably because I don't think I've ever seen you make a certain temporal statement before. Like, saying with certainty that something isn't true? Fine. But saying something will never happen even when the logical possibility exists? No, that just doesn't really sit right with me. Plus, I love sci-fi.
4700
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:46:48 PM »
You mean other than the statistical improbability of being hit by a meteor. and that's really not much of a basis anyway
Well, it is if you aren't >50pc of the sample size. Which you aren't.
4701
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:45:55 PM »
i think our brain chemistry is too complex to be replicated
But this is my issue. You haven't justified I) why you're using our own connections as the metric for neural complexity or II) why you think it's too complex either way. If it was just a passing "Oh, I don't really think it'll happen" then fine. I, myself, would say it almost definitely won't happen within this century, and there's a good chance our own sense of self-preservation would lead to some kind of transhumanism before we give a sentient AI free reign. But both of those are a far-cry from flat-out asserting "AIs will never be sentient".
4702
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:24:25 PM »
but i have no basis for it whatsoever
You mean other than the statistical improbability of being hit by a meteor.
4703
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:23:47 PM »
like, i can't definitively answer "yes" or "no" to that question without logically contradicting the very nature of spontaneity.
making it a pointless question.
You're using the wrong definition of spontaneous, which is my fault really for not clarifying. Definition: BIOLOGY
(of movement or activity in an organism) instinctive or involuntary. What I mean is that the initial development of sentience in the machine will be an involuntary process. Let's do away with the word spontaneous and phrase it like this: upon reaching a certain degree of neural complexity, the machine will develop sentience as a result. However, the establishment of this complexity will not be as a result of deliberate, on-the-spot human programming.
4704
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:18:51 PM »
that just seems a little bit too silly
Not really. . .
4705
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:17:42 PM »
why must i justify something that you already believe Because humans being unable to deliberately programme a machine with sentience =/= a machine being able to be sentient. Pendulate and I have stated several times that if sentience arises in machines, it will be spontaneous and not the result of some on-the-spot programming, yet you still appear to have an issue with this proposition. just because sentience is the result of our specific neural network That's not what I said; human sentience has no bearing on potential machine sentience other than that the two would presumably be connected by the simple fact that sentience is the result of complex neural networks. If you do accept that this is the likely cause of sentience--as current neuroscientific research would suggest--then you also have to accept that a sufficiently complex machine could also develop sentience.
4706
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:10:34 PM »
ad infinitum
there would never be a point where you couldn't logically ask the "what if" at the end of the experiment
Not quite; I should qualify my statements by saying "prove =/= 100pc" certainty. But Bayesian inference tells us that, at some point, an absence of evidence is equal to evidence of absence. Like claiming there's an invisible unicorn in your shed. I could set up infra-red cameras and demonstrate a lack of evidence which is equal to evidence of absence, and the only way you could escape it is by defining the unicorn into something non-empirical and therefore meaningless anyway. But that has no bearing on this conversation.
4707
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:08:03 PM »
but that's not gonna convince you of anything, is it
No, because we've already established numerous times that my claim has nothing to do with humans deliberately programming a machine to be sentient.
4708
« on: June 21, 2015, 05:04:38 PM »
i wouldn't be able to show you how our sentience came to be, but it involved evolution for over four billion years And there's absolutely no justification for assuming the same must be true of AGIs, especially considering the initial jumping-off point of our own technological development, which the AGI will have access to from the beginning, and the potentiality of recursive self-improvement. making it so an AI can feel would be an imitation of our sentience I doubt we will ever have the capacity to grant something the ability to feel anyway; if it arises, it will arise spontaneously. saying "not not" is a double negative, which would make it a positive
you can't just play word games with logic And neither can you. Saying "sentience is not the result of complex neural/computational networks" is logically equivalent to the positive claim that "sentience is composed of something other than just complex neural/computational networks". You still have an onus on that claim.
4709
« on: June 21, 2015, 04:50:36 PM »
where Here: If you accept that our brains are nothing more than complex networks of information processing i don't
i said we can't imitate it As Pendulate and I have already said, imitation has nothing to do with it. and besides, that's still a negative statement either way Okay, computers have the capacity to be not not sentient. Am I off the hook because I worded it negatively? The fact that you're making a "negative" proposition doesn't make the proposition void of content, not does it stop you from being able to support it. The idea that "you can't prove a negative" is just folk logic. I mean, if I were to say "our best hypotheses in economics support the benefits of free trade" and you were to claim that isn't the case; yeah, you're making a negative statement, but you're not off the hook for justifying why you claim it.
4710
« on: June 21, 2015, 04:38:17 PM »
And you're yet to demonstrate why artificial intelligences would be excluded from the ability to perceive, feel or be self-aware. it's not my job to
that which can be presented w/o evidence can be dismissed without evidence
the onus is on the person who's making the positive assertion--and i'm making no positive assertions
i know you don't agree with that logic, because it's inconvenient, but
Except you are. You've quite clearly claimed that sentience is not the result of complex neural/computational networks, which is currently our best hypothesis for the existence of sentience/conciousness. You've made a positive claim which draws the distinct conclusion that machines are exempt from such sentience, and I'm waiting for you to justify it.
Pages: 1 ... 155156157 158159 ... 502
|
Show Posts