iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

"Neoliberalism has a specific definition" followed by a rather poor definition of neoliberalism is always a funny bit. You're not a neoliberal if and only if you advocate for some form of deregulation or if you defend in an abstract way some outcome you think relates to deregulation having occurred.

210

Computers were invented by humans with their evolved brains, and one way of thinking about this that routinely shows up in science fiction literature is that our reasoning machines exist as an extension of our evolutionary chain.

010

This “call everything I don‘t like neoliberalism” trait is a quirk of online far left subculture, so that’s how you get the “specific kind of communist” jab.

2100

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 12h

He’s definitely not a neoliberal, yet you called him the “harbinger of neoliberal fangirling,” so I’m not 100% on your claim about assumptions here.

180

Not the biggest thing, but that’s not really Hume’s position.

070

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 13h

People mistakenly think this argument makes a strong case to hold existential claims false unless otherwise proven, but this really only works when you have reason to think evidence would be apparent if the claim were true and/or you know something about how such objects are produced.

020

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 13h

Ghosts could just be physical entities with queer features, but even if not, the substance dualist version of ghosts isn't logically incoherent. It presents the interaction problem you highlight here, but that issue isn't one of logical possibility.

110

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 13h

The reason we conclude that is that we know something about the production of teapots and its incongruence with that being found floating around the asteroid belt. If we didn't, you would be forced into a position of agnosticism.

120

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 16h

I have a hard time seeing how logical coherence arguments would be effective on ghosts. I'm familiar with these arguments in atheology with respect to classical theism, and theologians have effective counters there where the case would be much stronger.

100

"AI is conscious vs. I don't believe you" is a different debate than "AI is not conscious vs. How do you know?" for the same reason, "People are being abducted by aliens vs. I don't believe you" has different evidential burdens than "Extraterrestrial life does not exist vs. How do you know?" does.

110

I think this is perfectly doable, but people pratfall on it because it's not a topic people are used to carefully thinking about. And requiring some familiarity with basic arguments and where intuitions might go wrong is no barrier to trying to get your dunks in one microblog post at a time.

1111

"AI is not conscious" does not work like this. If you're going to claim it, you do need some affirmative case and what that case is going to look like is an object that is conscious would likely display properties 1...n, which AI does not.

291

When you combine these two together, you get a compelling case that ghosts aren't real in the same way you can be confident a teacup isn't orbiting Jupiter. It's not simply a default position, as the default is we don't know.

1101

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 19h

There's two prongs to the argument that ghosts do not exist. The 1st is evidence we'd expect to have not obtaining if ghosts were real. This, unto itself, is weak because we can imagine ghosts that wouldn't leave evidence. The 2nd is reason to think ghosts are the product of human imagination.

291

I'll add here that I find it weird that you'd take what is a minority position and act as though merely vaguely referencing it as a windmill slam QED on the topic. "Have you considered something most professionals have considered and rejected?!" Yes, but why's that your checkmate?

130

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 19h

I'm not sure what you are even taking issue with here. If you think something that is describeable in deterministic math cannot be said to have a mind, it's incumbent on you to establish that, and while there are a few lines of argument meant to show just that, they're not successful, so good luck?

230

EAll @ealluia.bsky.social · 23h

So if I get a crack at one expert to look at this before I have to use it, I want someone who is best positioned to verify the AI isn't cheating the testing environment, which probably isn't a medical doctor. But aside from this, my confidence is already probably fairly high that things are safe.

000

Once you accept this part of the thought experiment, it's really just testing to what extent you trust the AI isn't behaving in a malevolent manner to kill early adopters/manipulating testing. Otherwise, it's no different than any other scaling up of testing of a black box drug that seems to work.

100

There are a variety of psychotropics where while we have a decent idea of the mechanism of action, we don't really understand *why* they work. We just know they do from results.

100

It is a "being" in the sense of "a thing that exists" where in this case its mental status is in question. I don't think current generation LLM's are conscious, but "something describable in terms of deterministic math cannot be conscious" is a dubious position.

There are people who don't know what it is like to experience a sunset. I think you are trying to say it lacks subjectivity. My reply is just that this is complicated and I caution against picking specific experiences or skills humans have and arbitrarily locating phenomenal experience in that.

1110

Adams, Harrison, and Bush all come to mind.

120

Anyway, when you're trying to get all poetic with seeing sunsets, that's like talking about recognizing faces. If you want to make an argument about qualia or something, you need to be more direct.

1200

If someone were to say, "you cannot be know what it's like to have someone you know stare back at you and feel their love for you" to explain why someone doesn't have mind-like qualities, the proper response is to wonder why that matters. And the arguments about this get complicated.

1200

Indeed. I know someone who cannot recognize someone by appearance. She has severe apperceptive prosopagnosia. I've seen her mistake a child for an adult she knows. She cannot recognize herself. She uses cues like clothing. She'll never know what it's like to recognize a familiar face in a crowd.

2282

Humans don't know what it is like to have a blue whale's penis. It takes more than saying a being lacks access to a particular kind of experience or skill to say that being is therefore lacking in knowledge, awareness, etc. These kind of "warmth on my back" arguments are underbaked.

5311

And it's true that it has, but the facts on the ground probably do make those questions feel more pressing.

050

If an alien entity appeared in the sky, declared itself God, said, "Now Suffer! Muahahahah!" and then everyone fell to their knees in agony, you could say this poses no interesting questions because theology/philosophy of religion has already covered this kind of thing.

This is only true in the narrow sense that phil of mind has long anticipated the hypothetical existence of machines that until recently did not exist so the difficult questions were already there regardless.

160

No one can afford to buy a house anymore. Increasing supply doesn't work, because anytime someone builds one, people buy it right up.

060

Uh, people rather notoriously care very much about the value of their home growing and get extremely upset at the prospect of it outright falling. You're in a bubble if you think that doesn't produce pushback.

On the one hand, that probably would've caused a deep recession with a slow recovery that immiserated millions while also killing more people. On the other, then we'd get to say that people's net worth didn't come down a little as they spent down net savings. So who is to say which is better.

050

Do you think COVID stimulus was a mistake? Should we have not spent money to cushion an economic slow down due to people trying to avoid a deadly virus? Should we have encouraged people to go out and spend their money rather than save it during the height of the pandemic?

The severe discontent predates the Iran war, so probably not. You can always cherry pick the unusually high inflation input, though. Maybe a few years ago you were going on about eggs.

100

This does not sound like Trump. It sounds like a half-hearted attempt at Trump-voice.

020

On the one hand, it takes real skill to debate a smooth liar like Vance and Ossoff definitely has it, which would be a delight to watch. On the other, I almost guarantee the punditverse would treat it as a he-said/he-said affair instead of a liar getting dog-walked, which would drive me up the wall.

050

I like how you support vigilante murder and state-sponsored murder by leftist (or nominally leftist) regimes, but the suggestion that you might actually be expected to look at what you want done to see the gravity of these choices in watching a life snuffed out is just laughable.

000

The point of comparing to what annual inflation has been on average since the 1950's was just to point out that the current period isn't all that unusual, but the severity of discontent very much is.

210

You said it is currently at a low after a long string of high inflation. The former part of that isn't true. Inflation has upticked. The period of high inflation also wasn't that long in historical terms, nor is it true that people reliably continue to be upset about inflation 4 years afterwards.

100

I've of two minds about public executions. On the one hand, you don't want them to be spectacles of bloodlust, which is what this is attempting to be, but on the other, I think it is good that the public reckons with its decision to kill a person rather than keep it out of sight and out of mind.

120

? Inflation is recently up. It’s not at a low point. It was lower in 2024, lower than the majority of the time the Fed has had a 2% target in fact, and was lower in 2025 as well.

100

Half of it in any case. And holding that out as of high importance is not a traditional left of center view as inflation hawkishness can run at cross purposes with egalitarian goals.

100

There are many people who are doing more than "noticing prices" and are in fact arguing for strict focus on low inflation as a primary policy goal. Of those that are, they are almost never just wondering out loud what wages purchase now, and they often have wrong ideas about the answer.

100

You show every indication of just wanting to reason out from this sounding plausible to you to it being true, but this is the sort of theory you actually have to investigate in the real world to see if that it is what is happening. If it was, I'd be happy to read about it, which is why I asked.

100

Again, fertility rate is a measure of births per woman, not man. Men marrying and remarrying young wives in sequence, even assuming that's a major phenomenon in the top 10 percent, does not matter *unless* that affects how many children those women are having.

200

In order to remarry, you need to get divorced first, so rates of remarrying don't tell you how often a group is getting divorced and married again. And from there, you have to show that women in this specific subpopulation have higher birth rates to account for the variance.

100

If you did have support, that would be interesting as I have read a little in this area and your theory is not exactly what researchers I've read have looked at. Alas, you do not.

100

I didn't "argue against data" because there was no data to argue against. You have yet to support your point besides insisting that it is true if you just reason about it from first principles. Suffice to say, I don't think this is how to do social science.

110