Is it? Why? I mean, you’ve got to use a pronoun and these days any pick you make is likely to trigger a response in someone. Use “he”? Paternalistic. Use “she”? “Interesting”. Use “they”? Woke.
Also, what does the pride flag have anything to do with it?
The man has wasted his precious time on earth trying to explain the meaning of life without accepting the existence of the soul. It makes total sense that he can be fooled by AI nonsense.
To be 85 and lack basic wisdom is quite an astonishing achievement.
Neither existence nor nonexistence is obvious. Ergo, differences of opinion. Militants on both sides are problematic. I strongly dislike Dawkins, in the same way as I do people knocking on my door trying to convert me to any other religion.
At least the zealots who knockon my door. I've had a few good conversations.
Ditto for LLM sentience. We have no evidence either way.
I think a coherent framing is to imagine that the soul is a perceptual construct built into the hardware layer of human perception.
Sort of like how the collection of particles you see as a tree doesn’t look like that without being passed through a bunch of brain hardware. If we want to be pedantic we can accurately say that trees don’t exist, but given that physical object and tree are constructs in the human brain it’s pretty convenient to just treat them as “real”, while at the same time understanding that at some granular level they aren’t truly “real” (and at some further granularity we actually have no clue what’s real).
And the older I get, this does make sense to me. Belief in a soul doesn't really require proof for me. I understand that this may not be satisfying in an academic way for some, but "humans have souls and machines probably don't" strikes me as the wisest default position until we have some other very strong proof otherwise.
What evidence is there for humans having souls to support your "wisest default"? What would constitute "strong proof otherwise" in the case of machines?
Wouldn't the wise position be that since there is no evidence of souls at all that the default should be that both humans and machines do not contain a soul until proven otherwise?
Not to me. The wise position starts from "Humans are mysterious, but I am one and I see that others are like me, so I think we have souls." along with "I get what a machine is from first principles and based on all I know, they don't feel."
I get that this isn't as rigorous as one might like, but I think in the real world it's wise.
I think so, personally. I wouldn't bank a lot on "the soul" per se, but Dawkins is absolutely one of those "smart but not wise" people.
I imagine people don't dig it because it can be woo and vibey, but the older I get the more I understand the value of the "imprecise" metaphysical/religious/etc whatever you want to call it.
Someone in this space who handles this very well, unlike Dawkins, is Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Quite a few people appear to have voted against Harris because they thought Biden didn't do enough to help the Palestinians. I can't imagine how they thought Trump would be better, but somehow they did.
He hinted at it on twitter. But looking now claims he voted for a third party candidate ( https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1910066542399967268 ) . Doesn't make it much better because of the first-past the post voting system.
Also he has a bit of influence and when he hints Trump is better on the Palestine issue, people might make this influence their decision ( https://x.com/nntaleb/status/1841515651820576902 ).
( Also note the "Trump comes out against regime change in Iran: We can’t get totally involved…We can’t even run ourselves" thing in the first post, lol)
Yeah, I'll grant you that one. I don't think he necessarily voted for Trump, and for me he did a good job of explaining Trump's appeal.
But also, there is some sadly common brand of stupid that Taleb fell victim to when it came to thinking about Harris v. Trump on matters in the Middle East.
It could be worth it if the cost is on the lower end of that. Iran is a major source of instability in the world through all the proxy groups they support. And they have a theocratic authoritarian government that isn’t great for Iranians either.
Someone put together a list of what has been achieved:
On the one hand this may have been the time to do it, there was a confluence of factors that seemed to make Iran vulnerable.
But it seems weird to take a victory lap on most of the objectives. No one thought the USA was incapable of bombing Iran back to the Stone Age. So while I think some of the points about the region abandoning Iran are cogent, it wasn’t the first year after starting the war anyone was worried about, it was the next twenty.
‘In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings.’
Amazing. I wonder if similar studies were conducted between Nazis and Jews in the 1940s? Could ayahuasca or MDMA have stopped the Holocaust?
My first digital camera was a Sony with a whopping 1MP image size and it cost $100 for a 128Mb card. It also had this cool night vision that, when paired with a special lens filter, could be used for IR photography in daylight. It too could see through clothes, something I found out accidentally when photographing my then girlfriend at the local beach. We joked about it being the best camera for perverts.
To be clear, this wasn’t a video camera but a digital camera. Different from the one mentioned in the article, and this was in 2001 so a few years later.
Nostalgia, I won a Year 10's schools gardening competition with the schools Sony Camera that used a Floppy Disk. The clunk made when you slotted the disk in was satisfying.
The era of resonating with computer hardware is at its end.
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