kibiz0r @ kibiz0r @midwest.social

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1,543

Joined

2 yr. ago

I don’t see anything worth ditching an original for, but it does seem like a worthy successor.

Pick two communities.

Probably a “more accurate but less popular” community and a “less accurate but more popular” community.

Post in the “more accurate but less popular” one. Cross-post that to the “less accurate but more popular” one.

PS: Given your name, I’d expect you to have an opinion already.

claiming it’s unsustainable due to long-term obligations exceeding tax revenue.

Dude literally took over the system that allows the government to create money out of thin air, tellin us the government’s gonna run out of money.

Also, your fake department is named after the first meme coin. Which you tried to pump-and-dump on live TV. Ponzi-scheming motherfucker.

Gotcha. Yeah, I can endorse that viewpoint.

To me, “engineer” implies confidence in the specific result of what you’re making.

So like, you can produce an ambiguous image like The Dress by accident, but that’s not engineering it.

The researchers who made the Socks and Crocs images did engineer them.

Privacy doesn't mean that nobody can tell what you're thinking. It means that you will always be more justified in believing yourself to be conscious than in believing others are conscious. There will always be an asymmetry there.

Replaying neural activity is impressive, but it doesn't prove the original recorded subject was conscious quite as robustly as my daily subjective experience proves my own consciousness to myself. For example, you could conceivably fabricate an entirely original neural recording of a person who never existed at all.

I added some episodes of Walden Pod to my comment, so check those out if you wanna go deeper, but I'll still give a tl;dl here.

Privacy of consciousness is simply that there's a permanent asymmetry of how well you can know your own mind vs. the minds of others, no matter how sophisticated you get with physical tools. You will always have a different level of doubt about the sentience of others, compared to your own sentience.

Phenomenal transparency is the idea that your internal experiences (like what pain feels like) are "transparent", where transparency means you can fully understand something's nature through cognition alone and not needing to measure anything in the physical world to complete your understanding. For example, the concept of a triangle or that 2+2=4 are transparent. Water is opaque, because you have to inspect it with material tools to understand the nature of what you're referring to.

You probably immediately have some questions or objections, and that's where I'll encourage you to check out those episodes. There's a good reason they're longer than 5 sentences.

If you wanna continue down the rabbit hole, I added some good stuff to my original comment. But if you're leaning towards epiphenomenalism, might I recommend this one: https://audioboom.com/posts/8389860-71-against-epiphenomenalism

Edit: I thought of another couple of things for this comment.

You mentioned consciousness not being well-defined. It actually is, and the go-to definition is from 1974. Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

It’s a pretty easy read, as are all of the essays in his book Mortal Questions, so if you have a mild interest in this stuff you might enjoy that book.

Very Bad Wizards has at least one episode on it, too. (Link tbd)

Speaking of Very Bad Wizards, they have an episode about sex robots (link tbd) where (IIRC) they talk about the moral problems with having a convincing human replica that can’t actually consent, and that doesn’t even require bringing consciousness into the argument.

Could just say:

If you accept either privacy of consciousness or phenomenal transparency then philosophical zombies must be conceivable and therefore physicalism is wrong and you can’t engineer consciousness by mimicking brain states.

Edit:

I guess I should've expected this, but I'm glad to see multiple people wanted to dive deep into this!

I don't have the expertise or time to truly do it justice myself, so if you want to go deep on this topic I'm going to recommend my favorite communicator on non-materialist (but also non-religious) takes on consciousness, Emerson Green:

• The Hidden Mind: For Privacy and Against Illusionism
• Zombies
• Phenomenal Transparency
• Interview with Philip Goff, talking about all of the above

But I'm trying to give a tl;dl to the first few replies at least.

I’ve been using Orion on iOS for a while. It’s not bad.

If only this country could’ve been founded by people who knew the heartbreak of losing a child to a preventable disease.

In 1736, I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the small-pox, taken in the common way. I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation. This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if the child died under it: my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen. -Benjamin Franklin

Historically, journalism was about sifting through the different things that multiple people say are true, in order to figure out what actually is true.

But now it can just be about what one person says is true, and the internet can figure out what’s actually true!

While cranking up the cost of imports for consumers

It has to be small in order to fit through the doorways to invade your bedroom, doctor’s office, school, and workplace.

Yeeep.

For anyone wondering how this all works, this article lays it out: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/02/trump-news-are-we-in-dictatorship-yet.html

For criminal contempt, but not civil.

RFK’s brainworm says cancer is good for you, now get back to your ADHD camp.

It's not just a preference. Taxation is what gives the currency value.

The government can create and destroy dollars. It spends dollars into existence, and it taxes them into nothingness.

But if it receives BTC, it can't destroy the BTC. Same with any foreign currency.

It needs to be able to destroy the tax money after you pay it.

I think the key thing here is the myth that money was invented to optimize an unwieldy barter economy. Money isn't actually a tool for ad hoc person-to-person trade, but for trade among members of a community.

And in that setting, it's less about the mechanics of measuring the value of individual items and more about balancing the number of favors owed to/from each member of the community. The magnitude of those favors definitely scale according to the material value of the items flowing through the favors -- but it's a secondary, not primary, concern.

It's true that money can be anything we decide to agree upon, but it's not as a stand-in for valuable goods. It's as a stand-in for "credit against my debt of favors owed".

Your country could accept cryptocurrency for your taxes, if just chooses not to.

Not really. It would have to sell the crypto for its sovereign currency. The whole point of issuing+taxing currency is to get citizens to do favors for the government.

If you're paying citizens for favors in USD, but accepting BTC to clear out "favors owed", nobody has any incentive to chase USD, because any amount of BTC usage is going to dilute the value of their USD.

Unless you keep the amount of BTC you accept tied to its current market value in USD. But that's not really "accepting" crypto, that's just selling it on their behalf as a convenience.