socrateswasone

Oooh scary, watch out for the Russian Boogeyman!

Oh goody. Living human tissue, mimicking an embryo if not a baby, without consciousness or soul, grown and molded for our purposes and pleasures in a lab. This is excellent news everyone. A clear sign that we're winning the fight against the Antichrist (per Peter Thiel). It does kind of make you wonder though, what life is going to be like when absolutely nothing is sacred.

I don't think being able to comment here is that valuable, GPS is fine but so were maps, curing cancer won't save anyone from dying anyway, surviving as a species is useless for an individual, mining space rocks won't stop fighting or polluting, I don't see how any of this would inspire children, etc etc. The answer should be obvious and easy to muster, instead we have to dig hard to come up with vague possibilities. That should tell you something.

Except for point 2 these are cliches. Thanks to science we pretty much know what's in space and it's not very interesting. So sure, we'll put weapons up there as "defence". But that's not very interesting is it?

It's predicting the next token by statistical approximation. Hallucination vs fact is an ad-hoc distinction we impose on the result to suit our purpose.

Nuclear weapons right?

Why are we going into space? Don't we already know what's there?

Who cares? We already know what's in space and there's nothing for us there.

This is great. I have my doubts about Trump but I have to admit, he is keeping his promises. I thought there was no way he would do something like this with the tech oligarchs swarming around him, but it seems they are firmly under his thumb. Sometimes you just need a Caesar.

Mosley was an anachronism but his time seems to be coming. Shying away from it isn't the answer. Young men are online a lot and they're seeing an appeal in traditional values and group identity in opposition to individualist and technocratic norms. The left is weak, and these spasms of violence like the Kirk assassination are symptoms of that. Let's hope this right wing energy can be released productively and some of their grievances addressed before it builds further.

I think what consciousness nominally means is an awareness of things in relation to a self, a subject-object relation. If there is such a thing as awareness without subject object content, I'd love to hear more, like how would you even know you have it.

Saying it might be on a continuum just obfuscates things. What do you mean exactly?

If there is no sense of self or personal identity, how is that different than a block of wood or a computer? That there might be "mental" functions performed doesn't give it subjectivity if there is no subject performing them. And if there is no persistent reflective self there is no subject. You could call instincts or trained behaviors mental, activities of a kind of mind if you wanted to. But if it's not self aware it's not a moral subject.

You don't need to know if it has a "subjectivity" to know if you can torture and kill it, you can rely on the writhing and squealing. Making up artificial distinctions and questions with no answers is just a conceit we get into, ultimately to justify whatever we want. There are too many people on the planet and we need to "process" a lot of life for our benefit.

Anyway, if there is no mind in the sense of a personal identity or a reflective thought process, then really you're just torturing and killing a set of sense perceptions, so what would be the basis of a morality that forbids that?

It's not like anything, a bat has no sense of self or personal history, it operates on instinct without a personal, reflective self. A bat having consciousness is as relevant as whether a sonar does.