That’s right. Philosophy is widely hated because it is the most foundational human pursuit of all. And also because it is difficult, if you are doing it usefully and correctly.
(Not surprisingly, embedding Mastodon taunts in WordPress does not work correctly.)
That’s a great observation. It leads one to wonder why we became so fearful. And why we collectively decided that all relationships are only about power. I’ve heard people posit it was due to increased precarity, but that doesn’t ring true to me. That’s a pat answer that only touches the surface.
There’s no single explanation of course, but I believe this retrogression has more to do with smartphones, social media and the exaggerated performativity they inject into the sociocultural landscape than it does with the socioeconomic concerns. Essentially, by compressing us back into de facto small communities again with Instagram, Facebook and those other evils, we’ve been forced to resume the mores and norms of a medieval village. That is, a now-virtualized non-locality where everyone knows or can easily discover your business and pass judgment upon you, sometimes with devastating consequences.
We are not cognitively set up to handle this compression of all of us into one tiny yet vast mental conurbation, so we adapt in various ways — most of which are actually maladaptive to any end goal of human happiness or eudaimonia. The solution isn’t to retreat to a past that would no longer be composable with now-novel minds never seen in human history but to tame the beasts of tech and moral overreach to make our tools serve us rather than have us further bent to their whims and limitations.
At least, we should do this. We probably will not and instead will stumble along until something breaks. But change will occur either way. That, at least, is certain.
It takes a lot of artifice to make something that looks real.
Estimable utility functions themselves require the existence of agentic consciousnesses with well-defined, bounded goals. There is no evidence of this. The evolutionarily-optimal nebulously-adaptable fulfillment of needs and wants means a constant dance of homeostatic internal states of infinite possible configurations with other beings also participating (even without realizing) in the same gavotte.
Thus, a combinatorial explosion of infinitely-uncountable utility adjustment and maximization, ever in flux and doomed always to be beyond the grasp of any mathematical formalism.
As AI infiltrates the world, the AI infection even alters those items AI has not touched directly. TV shows and music already shows signs of this corruption; vapid, stale insipid play-doh writing paves everything from background to horizon with gray concretions of intellectual blindsight. The direct effects are dwarfed by the shrapnel spalling out all around from the blast. McLuhan had no way to predict the effects of the subordination of the intellect to machine disequilibrium and paramnestic confabulations.
Thus, a darkness descends upon our minds as once again the machines exist not to serve us, but rather we become the tools of a will without Will and into dreaming descend, condemned by lack of vision to see only the permitted apparitions, to only explore the possibility space of the finitely computable.
This is because much of leftism is fundamentally an expression of unexamined and inexpressible religious feelings. This religiosity seems to be a human universal, but since leftists don’t have any framework for handling these urges, they reimplement them in a harmful and hamfisted way that alienates all but the most devout or mentally-deficient.
Degrowth, much of contemporary environmentalism and even a lot of NIMBYism is more about reinventing religion poorly than it has to do with anything else. Confessing with extreme joy about how much you are going to take away from people and how lovely you think that is will never be any path to victory. But of course, it’s not about winning. It’s about making the declaimer of deprivation feel good and just.
In important ways, “reality” TV is more artificial than the scripted alternative. That is because the act of having a camera pointed at you and microphones gathering your every utterance alters your behavior and very thoughts in a way that having a script to guide your words and actions constrains.
Thus, the reality yearned for by viewers is far more illusive than it first appears. Nothing observed remains unaltered, and nothing is revealed by an examination under the condition of surveillance. The artificiality of this simulacrum of reality is assured because the camera itself causes those exposed to it to act like they believe versions of themselves would act in such a situation.
It becomes a simulation all the way down — and up, right on to the viewer, whose reactions also become those of the ones they imagine a viewer like them should have, and would have if the contestants on screen could but observe them too.
Philosophy is the core of science because in its ideal from it integrates the limitations of human perception and understanding with the underlying realities of the universe. All else is false certitude and misperception of what is possible.
I’d posit that war is always atrocity, but sometimes it’s better than the other choices on offer. Pacifism has no answers, alas — it just means that those willing to dominate with force of arms and threat of violence do so with no consequences. The same destruction and genocide occur, just with no opposition even in principle.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about meta-evolution and the idea that evolution itself is constrained by the base instantiation of the universe to produce creatures that in individualized form tend to be war-like when combined with the ability to accrue resources that are durable over time.
Still pondering that one.
I disagree with this pretty strongly. With a good enough sex robot the illusion of desire will be indistinguishable from actual desire. This is all that most people will require. To expand that a bit, once the uncanny valley is crossed — and it will be — most men and most women will be content with “someone” who is always insatiably attracted to them, interested in them, and shares their kinks and predilections.
This is just obvious if you know even a little bit about human nature.
Peter Thiel said somewhere that the age of AI will favor those with strong social skills over those who are great at math. I reluctantly tend to agree with that, for various reasons.
The reality is that AI is only going to get better, even if you don’t believe in the Yudkowskian paperclip maximizer scenario (I do not; at least not for 300-500 years). We are merely in the early stages now. Already, AI is better at many things than 80% of people. In 3-7 years, AI will be better at even more things and beat 95% of people in those areas.
That’s true even if AI is currently overhyped (which it is). No, it won’t be useful in all areas and in some areas it will hardly be useful at all. But the reality is that most people are little better most of the time than a next-word predictor and AI will be replacing the majority of them. For instance, there’s not a single interaction I’ve had with Microsoft Azure support that a modern LLM could not have handled in a superior manner. And AI will of course also replace people in areas where it doesn’t actually work but an MBA thinks it does.
So that should be something.
I think people are going to be really disappointed in 50-100 years when robotics, LLMs, and custom reasoning systems become good enough to create an AI that is functionally and cognitively indistinguishable from the average human.
I do think this is possible, and likely. And it’ll show both how limited and how complex humans are. Especially the default model. There are no miracles within us. No, we must create those ourselves. Out there.
To better become ourselves, we’ve learned to become better disguises of ourselves. Circumspection resolved to paralysis; turning inward to singularity, none of us can in fact be singular strapped to an examination table.
The panopticon has become the pantechnicon. Radical freedom and radical constraint sit very close together indeed.
I do wonder if all the people who fall for absurd scams aren’t motivated by a similar cultural undercurrent as those who get tattoos: in a world where the self is commoditized and suppressed, in the case of obvious scams it seems that willingly handing off all your resources is a way of annihilating the last of one’s individual materiality, erasing the anchors to a staid, settled being and negating all you were before and making a last desperate grab for all you thought you could’ve been but were not and now never will be in an attempt at glorious resurrection. Tattoos are similar in that they are a way to paint over some past self and instantiate a new one.
It’s suicide by deception — both by the artifice of the scammer but also by the self-deception that must occur to allow such authorized self-destruction to proceed in the name of misguided but still-solipsistic charity. And as with tattoos, the person being scammed feels like this is who they were meant to become. But there is in fact no metamorphosis from a chrysalis-bound pupa of a human to some other, better, entity on the other side; in both cases there is only the self scoured, discarded, with only a husk of depersonalized façade retained.
The scammed and the tattoo victim emerge from their ordeal changed, different, lesser than they were before, both marked by trauma but not improved. The self they discarded grabs at their ankles from the grave, and with no new substantive individuality emergent in this nouveau faux-personage, this unformed psyche is pulled beneath the loamy soil, the person that once was subsumed in the chthonian realm they were not inevitably doomed to inhabit but chose de facto by belief in a rebirth that was never to be realized. Both new and old selves are disintegrated, therefore, leaving only void.
I think I finally understand content warnings now. They aren’t effective at what they’re actually supposed to do. Studies show that pretty clearly.
Therefore, why they exist is, like many human things, for the purpose of signaling. Content and trigger warnings are used to convey that you are courteous enough to be concerned with the viewer’s sensitivities about something. They also communicate that you are embedded enough in a particular culture to know what its triggers and concerns in fact are.
Thus, they are used both for courtesy and to express status (these two are always closely related) and make a lot more sense to me from that sociological angle.