Nephil Thief

Just finished: The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin). I last read this in high school, and I had forgotten how good it was. I'm just a little sad that it's over now.

Just started: brain candy, The Rhesus Chart (Charles Stross). Hmm... The Computational Demonology conceit is starting to wear a bit thin, especially now that it's been tempered with more typical magic. Bob Howard is starting to irritate me (I know he's supposed to be very Joe Average, but still). And vampires, feh... Because urban fantasy trends, more feh. But hey, it will probably be entertaining, which will help with the next item...

Waiting for it to arrive: anti brain candy, Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies, and Revolution (Laurie Penny). I will read this. Really. The whole thing. Might take a while, but I need to know this stuff. I will face my fear, I will let it flow through me, etc. etc.

Apocalypse, no, but it's already a humanitarian disaster. Over 3000 deaths, and last I heard the projected death toll 6 months from now was something like 40,000. Mind, this is in countries that already have terrible healthcare and infrastructure, and just the quarantine measures etc. are making life even harder.

(The Onion recently ran an article about how we're still "50 or so white people away from an Ebola vaccine." I thought that was depressingly accurate.)

Gah, sorry about that!

To be sure it's still a fun read, I just don't feel it's up to the amazing measure of the earlier books.

Well The Hydrogen Sonata turned out to be pretty Hollywood. I mean, it was an entertaining read, but I feel kind of sad how far that series fell since the first few novels.

Uhh yeah, I think it's important to step in here and say that the existence of an oligarchy doesn't negate other forms of social privilege.

Edit: also not sure where you get the idea about "large and diverse groups." I'm not in the habit of deliberately prejudging people, regardless of privilege.

Whatever, I'd better shut up before this veers off topic.

Personal experiences, hmm.

I took a Soc/WS class in my (roughly) third year of college. It grabbed my attention to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, and led to me studying some of the ideas on my own; particularly radical feminist concepts, e.g. that hetero relationships in a patriarchal society pose inherent ethical problems.

I've always been a... progressive, I guess? A humanist, sort of? And I've always been kind of disgusted by the way men tend to treat women. (Very, very long story there.) But I didn't realize quite how far it extended, I took certain things for granted; and moreover, I didn't realize how much I was part of it, and how utterly hypocritical and damaging I was.

I basically got progressively more depressed until, around the start of the next semester, I became pretty much suicidal and got myself admitted to a mental institution. I wound up getting diagnosed (incorrectly) with a mood disorder, and jettisoned from the place one week later. I spent the next few years largely nonfunctional, doing volunteer work and such in my better moods. Eventually I got a temporary job, then a full-time one, which I'm still (thank whatever) holding on to.

These days, I don't know where I am. I'll admit some anger towards the philosophical concepts that did me in, so to speak, but that's useless; once you've seen truth, you can't unsee it. It's not the fault of those advocating those ideas, it's my fault for having been unethical (and, sometimes, still being unethical). I sometimes entertain a glimmer of hope that those ideas are wrong, but I know I'm fooling myself.

I'm still basically a wreck, but I think I'm a better person for it. Even if the only people who seem to understand that are a very small minority of personalities I correspond with online. Most people either think I'm being "irrational," displaying symptoms of mental illness, brainwashed, being overly hard on myself, being a drama llama, showing off a martyr complex, etc.

... Also people keep telling me not to feel guilty, in spite of everything, because that won't help anyone. Well, yeah, but "don't feel guilty" in the face of being a serial exploiter of other human beings is a pretty tall order, IMO. There are still days when I still feel like the planet would be a better place without me. Not so often now, but yeah.

So there is my maybe-too-personal story. Hope it's useful. It would be nice if people could be educated about this stuff without being injured in the process like I was.

@nikki. One finds like minds in the strangest places. I have to admit I've gotten less capable over the years of suspending my disbelief for Bradbury's stories - perhaps that's the point? - but I still love his prose.

(As for PKD, I read part of Androids once and it completely freaked me out, so I know the guy was doing something right... Oh, might I also recommend "Faith of Our Fathers"? Though it's been a while since I've read it, for probably obvious reasons.)

Anyway, for mine: I finally caved in and bought The Hydrogen Sonata. So far it's surprised me by being much better than I expected, though admittedly I've only been at it for a couple days (and will probably finish it in another few, har har). I'm entertaining hopes that the Culture will redeem itself a bit in my eyes, but to me it's become a very ambiguous utopia indeed.

I don't know, all I can see is criminals would then look before they leap.

I'm not sure about this, for a number of reasons.

1. Rationalization again: "It won't happen to me, I won't get caught!"

2. Heat-of-the-moment crimes. People fire a gun in anger or whatever, they don't for one moment think about consequences.

3. Death of one's self is hard to imagine. 20+ years stuck in a prison is (IMO) more immediately palpable.

4. In the US, at least: statistics. Last I checked on it (which was admittedly a while back), US states instituting the death penalty did not have lower murder rates relative to population size vs. states which opt for life imprisonment.

On a less depressing note, it's interesting how a bunch of people coming from completely different philosophical (and political) directions can largely agree on personal ethics.

1. Saying that free will is physically impossible is not some simple statement of fact. It's highly contentious, physically but even more so philosophically. And it seems just as dangerous to build any kind of system assuming the absence of free will as to assume its existence, if not more so. Fortunately, I think actually neither assumption really has any bearing on law or penal codes.

Fair enough, though I don't even begin to see how Free Will is possible without Dualism.

Also I guess I tend to cringe a little at the term "moral failing" in relation to law, because

1. I've personally seen people "fail morally" when mentally ill, or when overmedicated on drugs designed to treat such illness

2. Global society is one gigantic moral failure, to the point that taking both "human rights" and "punishment" seriously would itself present moral problems

I can't say I have much sympathy for those who deliberately harm and exploit others, but the fact is that with a little tweaking of brain chemistry, or even the wrong social influences, that could be anyone. Seriously, it is frightening how malleable people are.

2. In the absence of free will the penal system has the same tasks. Restrain the person incapable of resisting transgression so they cannot transgress again. Punish (publicly) so that other ids with such urges might be suppressed by better-armed egos cognizant of consequences. Rehabilitate so that eventually the transgressor will transgress no more. Free will doesn't enter into it.

I guess we agree on that much, though we might have different definitions of punishment. Sorry I jumped the gun, so to speak.

3. All of this misses the point. All crimes are urges that apparently weren't resisted. Saying pedophilia is a special category because some people cannot resist says nothing; murderousness is exactly the same. Most people quash antisocial behavior consistently. Some people can't. The presence of the urge is only of limited predictive value.

I didn't say pedophilia is a special category (see "or any other evildoer"). And I sure hope it didn't come across that way.

unfortunately this appears to be equally true of the free will required to resist incarcerating criminals in a pointlessly cruel penal system. oh well

 

(i don't even think "act as if you're the only person in the world with free will" is necessarily a bad moral principle for an individual to hold, but it doesn't scale up to civil ethics at all)

Don't get me wrong, I do consider free will a useful abstract concept (like Newtonian mechanics, c.f. the philosophy thread). But I think it already starts showing its flaws as soon as one starts talking about criminal justice.

Edit: maybe a better analogy is software? What I'm saying is, we can build concepts and stuff on top of the physical way that our brains work, but we forget what's underneath all that at our peril.

Re "act as if you're the only person in the world with free will," I don't (and I'm not sure it's possible for a human to do so). OTOH I could see where that might, just maybe, work. It sounds like Solipsism Lite, but it's also congruent with "Act as if you have infinite power and responsibility."

And yet we have no compunction about sentencing people with antisocial personality disorder (sociopaths/psychopaths) even though they, too, suffer from a mental illness. There is a difference, I agree, especially in that pedophilia is attraction to an unacceptable target of attraction. Resisting urges isn't easy, but failing to do so is a moral failure more than a psychiatric one. Pedophilia is a paraphilia, not an uncontrollable drive.

I would strongly disagree with this on the basis that the Free Will required to resist "moral failings" is a social abstraction, and in reality physically impossible. Rationalization is always tempting; but there is no reason that a pedophile - or any other evildoer - couldn't know that his or her impulses were wrong, and nonetheless be incapable of resisting them. People just like to refuse to believe that, because they don't wish to entertain the possibility that the same could happen to them - that they would do something horrible, and be incapable of avoiding it, no matter how much they knew it was wrong.

I realize that a legal system which doesn't respect the concept of Free Will might sound horrible, but I don't think it would be necessarily, provided that concepts related to vengeance didn't make their way in

Anyway now that I've opened my big mouth...

Healthcare, education: yes. People in a technological society can't function without these.

Torture: prohibited, period. I know there are ethical arguments against this. There are some things I will not budge on, ever.

Voluntary euthanasia: bit of a story here...

1. Insurance companies could (and would) easily try to force people into it if they stood to make a profit. This is yet another reason IMO that for-profit medical systems are abhorrent.

2. Clinical depression, personal experience thereof. Wanting euthanasia doesn't mean it's the best choice for you.

I don't believe people who are suffering, and cannot be helped, should be forced to endure. But I don't think life should be taken for granted either. This one is one of the few things I consider legitimately "shades of gray."

Death penalty: originally I said only for crimes against humanity, on the simplistic premise that wannabe Hitlers and Stalins are too dangerous to keep alive, but really I'm not so sure. For others... well, of course I want serial killers etc. to be put to death, but wanting it on a gut level doesn't make it right.

In any case though, I feel very strongly that the way capital punishment is handled in my country is absolutely wrong, regardless of whether it's socially necessary.

(Side note: I've seen it pointed out that the terms "penalty" and "punishment" are euphemisms here, because the point of a punishment is to change someone's behavior. A criminal who is executed is not "punished," they are killed, and I can only see this being justified if said person is dangerous beyond any possibility of containment.)

Abortion, beginning of human rights: I put down "birth." And no, I don't think it's wholly arbitrary, because it is the point at which a fetus stops effectively being an endoparasite.

Nuclear weapons: I don't think warfare is ethical, period, and in particular I don't think total war against civilian populations is ethical. Doesn't matter if it's necessary; necessary evils are still, by definition, evil. Being forced to commit atrocities doesn't exempt you of responsibility.

Okay, at risk of being flamed...

[soapbox]

No offense, but re abortion I'm more than a bit sickened by the idea of male-bodied people having any say in it at all. Our bodies cannot host a fetus, and we don't get to dictate anything to those whose bodies can.

[/soapbox]

Wow. This was unexpected.

I kind of wish I could explain my responses, but I feel like that would start a flamefest and get the thread locked... So I'll hold off for now.

I'm going to avoid taking this test because I'll inevitably feel horrible about the results.

(Which probably says more about my personality than the test would anyway... )

Hmm. What sounds typically trigger crashes on Win7?

This is interesting because I found something similar with Wine, a while back. Spell related sounds (fireball whoosh, etc.) would freeze the game immediately when using the ALSA sound engine. More recent versions of Wine don't have that issue, but I've seen other glitches between sound and graphics; e.g. one where certain sounds cause the menu bar to fill up the entire window.

Anyway if the same thing happens in Windows 7 and in Wine, I'm thinking it points to a BoE bug, not a Wine bug...

—Alorael, who read that essay on thalience and was left unimpressed. Hypothesizing forms of thinking or logic inaccessible to humans does not make them true, and is not evidence for them.

The limit is in practice, not in theory, if the brain is Turing-complete. My remake re "rational thought" was comparing to other known logics.

And I do have an example of a "thought" that a human could not think: a modern web browser. Executing Firefox in one's own head is pretty much impossible due to attention span limits. Doing it with pen and paper would probably be theoretically possible, but would also probably take a few thousand years.

... Or you could run it on your desktop computer. Just because we're unable to think something doesn't mean our tools are.

1. What is your age? (Be approximate, if you'd like)

Twentysomething

2. What part of the world do you live in? In which part of the world were you born? What countries have you lived in?

USA, Northeast coast.

3. What is your native language? In what languages are you proficient?

I speak English, and have forgotten everything I knew of Latin. I really wish I knew more, but I've always been terrible with languages, and hate the process of learning them.

4. Describe your ancestry.

Oy.

5. Describe your gender identity and sexual orientation.

Vague.

6. Do you have any religious or spiritual beliefs? If so, describe them. In what religious tradition(s) were you raised, if any?

"Always do the right thing, even if it doesn't make sense." Also I think it's theoretically possible to live an ethical life without decieving one's self, which ironically constitutes a leap of faith on my part. Not sure if those qualify as spiritual... Anyway, religion was not really a part of my upbringing.

7. What is your relationship status? Do you have any children?

None and no.

8. Describe your social class. Have you always been in this class?

People treat me fairly most of the time, so I'm going to say "better off than most." And yes, that's always been the case.

9. Have you ever served in the military? If so, what division?

No. I have some very... controversial opinions on this stuff. Controversial to the point of getting me outright flamed by close friends. That's all I'm really going to say on it.

10. What is your occupation (or former occupation)? What is your highest level of education (and your degree, if applicable)?

I work in the IT department for a small company, and I'm a college dropout. Work is much more fun than college was.

If the human brain is Turing-complete, then lifespan and memory are the only limits. But the devil is in the details. Those are some pretty hefty limits, because the brain is slow - neural impulses move at something like 50 mph. And our lifespans are pretty short.

Memory is more vaguely defined with the brain. But our short-term memory is pretty shoddy too. Most people can IIRC recognize a maximum of 7 distinct objects at a glance, past that they have to count. And our attention spans are short... And brains do things that computers don't (e.g. deliberately introducing noise). Etc.

Anyway what I'm getting at is that - as with digital computers - there are thoughts that are physically impossible for a human to think, due to the architectural limits of the brain. And we don't know what those are because we can't think them. Assuming the universe wasn't designed from day one to suit human cognitive needs, I see no reason to assume that a Theory of Everything must be human-comprehensible.

So yeah, while I'm very dubious about IQ, I guess I basically agree with Goldengirl. Human "rationality," such as it is, occupies a tiny fraction of the modes and applications of logic that are possible.

Edit: BTW someone else had this idea first, and wrote it into a book that I read recently:

http://www.kschroeder.com/my-books/ventus/thalience

(I thought the book itself failed to break out of certain cliches, but hey, I should give credit where it's due.)

As it stands right now there's an undercurrent of raw and absolute chaos to the universe which lies outside mankind's capacity to ascribe any rudimentary order to in any sense.

I feel that's a bit inaccurate. QM rules are profoundly weird and unintuitive, but they're still rules (of a sort).

An electron cannot have both a definite position and a definite velocity, period. (IIRC there is mathematical evidence that "hidden values" for position, velocity, etc. cannot exist.) Likewise you cannot pull a virtual particle out of the vacuum, and then make it stick around forever in violation of conservation of mass; you have to put some mass/energy into it or it will go back to not existing. (c.f. Hawking radiation.)

'Course I was only in physics for a couple years back in college (and sidestepped into IT instead of graduating), so take this as thou wilt.

1. Free Will

It's the Newtonian Mechanics of philosophy: a useful abstraction that is technically incorrect, but necessary in practice.

Some people would call it an outright lie. To them I would say: do you factor in relativistic mass changes when calculating the kinetic energy of a baseball? Because if you use good old (1/2)mv^2, then by that definition, you're lying to yourself.

(On the other hand, as with Newtonian mechanics, relying on the concept of free will everywhere is a terrible idea.)

2. How should we gain knowledge?

Logic, empirical evidence, whatever; but make sure other people, with different ideas, vet your work.

If you want to get technical we can't really be certain of anything. Senses can be decieved, logic can be distorted by ingrained biases. I've seen people use this as a basis for saying that there is no reality external to our senses, we live in a "shared subjective reality" or somesuch. IMO this is a failure to acknowledge that distrusting all your senses by default is basically solipsism - if you can't trust your senses at all, you can't even trust that other people exist.

Is it possible that I'm a Boltzmann Brain floating in a sea of hallucinations? Sure. But if I assume that, I might as well throw away everything. Given two equally likely assumptions, one of which can only be harmful and the other generally helpful, you might as well take the helpful one.

3. Abstract Notions

I don't think it even makes sense to talk of non-physical things existing, except as useful illusions/abstractions/whatever (see again Newtonian mechanics). No, numbers aren't real, nor concepts like monetary value, etc. I can't even say what they actually are physically. Certain patterns of neurons firing? But they're useful, so we keep them.

4-5. Ethics

My views on these are wildly inconsistent at the best of times, but personally I've developed a deep suspicion of ethical viewpoints that are internally consistent. I'm going to let this one pass, I think.

6. The Mind

I'm quite sure it's physical.

7. The Meaning of Life (and the Universe and Everything)

IMO the question is absurd. It's like asking what an atom "means," or a person, or a planet, only even bigger and more ridiculous.

@Sylae, personally I'd argue against assuming malice and stupidity when ignorance, rationalization, and fear might suffice.

i.e.

Ignorance: I was brought up with the idea that persecuting certain people was okay, and was never seriously motivated to question that ingrained belief.

Rationalization: If I'm unfairly persecuting someone, that would mean I was a bad person, and I cannot possibly be a bad person (because my intentions are good, I've done good things by people before, whatever).

Fear: If I'm doing the wrong thing, and therefore a bad person, I deserve bad things done to me.

Between those I think there's a lot incentive for essentially kind-hearted people to behave in a totally messed up fashion. That said I'm coming at this from pretty different different situation, so I might not quite get it.

@Lilith: I've met people who tend to dismiss injustice with a comment along the lines of, "life's unfair, deal with it." My usual response is that the whole point of human civilization is to make life more fair. So yeah, I really like that idea, especially the "including themselves" part.

OTOH I (personally) tend to shy away from anything outspokenly "anarcho" or "communist," mostly because of

a) How we get there from here. From what I've read and heard it typically is supposed to involve revolution, which has an extensive record of not working. Also I have a vested interest in not winding up with my head on a pike, seeing people I love murdered before my eyes, etc.

I know this isn't how all anarchist and communist outlooks work, but rationalization is universal; and "ends justify the means" thinking is common enough everywhere to make me a tad frightened when people talk about rapidly overthrowing the current social order, which brings me to

Rhetoric. Some people more or less on my side of the political spectrum are prone to talk about "destroying the institutions" and such. I get that this refers to the institutions of oppression, the system rather than the institutions of any government. But if we're going to look into the language and what it implies... Well, whenever I see someone using terminology evocative of violence, I have to wonder why, even if that person claims to be the most anti-war, anti-statist pacifist ever.

I guess I tend to think that the jargon is evocative of violence for the same reason that most curse words are evocative of sexism. Granted we're all influenced by bad ideas from time to time; but when the same terminology crops up again and again, I feel like some skepticism might be called for.

tl;dr I'm a wimpo-socialist. (And I hope I haven't gone too far into political territory with this post.)

Edit: and oh geeze I hope I don't look like I'm trying to intimidate you about your political viewpoints, because that was totally not my intent. Argh.

I would say representative democracy/republic, with many, many caveats, e.g.

- Stringent laws against jerrymandering and other such manipulations of the vote

- Very stringent regulation of what kind of information may be classified

- Likewise, utter prohibition of things like self-gagging gag orders (aka "super injunctions"), and classification of the fact that things are classified

- Health care and higher education as rights, not monetary privileges

- A reliable basic wellfare system, so that people can actually survive a stroke of bad luck

- No provisions for the declaration of martial law under any circumstance

There's more (I'm still working on it, honestly) but I think you get the idea. I believe that a working representative democracy is pretty much the best kind of realistic government you can hope for; but also that such systems need strong internal defenses against corruption, ideological takeover, and causes of civil unrest.

But note that

- I'm a fairly die-hard liberal

- I'm still working out my own political beliefs

so this is not necessarily set in stone.