Sofie Channel

Sofie Channel

Anonymous 0x281
said (9mo ago #1754 ✔️ ✔️ 83% ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1755 >>1758 >>1759 >>1760 >>1762 >>1833 >>1853:

Going to bat for "hard materialism"

The saying goes that any discussion eventually becomes about Hitler, but over in the blood and soil thread, it's become about metaphysics. Specifically the valuation of a quantitative worldview, or even "hard materialism", relative to a more holistic quality-aware worldview: >>1753 >>1752 >>1751 >>1750

In discussions like this the "materialist" is usually not present, and has to be represented by a straw man. Because materialism is playing the role of a dumb punching bag instead of a serious hypothesis, no serious alternative paradigm is present either. "No true materialism" and cheap dismissal are common. At no point does anyone get a clear idea of what we are actually supposed to believe, only that materialism is for dumb-dumbs.

So I'll go to bat for the "hard materialist" worldview and challenge you all to come at it with something other than FUD.

Hard materialism says there is a simple and deterministic (up to randomness but not reverse-causality) layer of physical law underlying all phenomena. All complex high-level phenomena can be reduced to, explained, engineered, and even simulated (when computational feasible) in terms of the base layer reality, or are confusions that dissolve on inspection. This has been the basic trend in science for the past couple thousand years. Let's nuance this to dodge a few of the usual straw-men:

* This is a paradigm, not a-priori deduction or even a particular concrete hypothesis. The claim is that it is consistent with observation and correct in practice to assume that all phenomena have material reduction.

* This does not claim that the warm redness of the sunset doesn't exist, but that it is explainable in basic physical terms.

* This is not a theory of subjective practical phenomenology. We don't experience or understand the world in terms of basic physics. The claim is that all other concepts we use (can) have a particular kind of relation to basic physics, that of "reduction".

* Concepts are material patterns of connection and behavior which live in the mind, which is itself a pattern of behavior of (carefully arranged) matter reducible to physical action. They don't have any absolute existence separate from matter.

* Math etc is special concepts built on the observation that matter is predictable by "abstract" analogy, not just direct physical repeat.

* "Matter" is subject to various quantum field nuance. I'm using it informally to refer to whatever substances, fields, or other substrate we believe in today.

* Our subjective experience is real and physical, encoded in the action of whatever (physical) substrate encodes the mind. There are some paradoxes and gaps in how the mind reflects on itself, but these are akin to limits on provability or knowability, not a paradoxes for the theory.

* Free will refers to the fact that our decisions determine the future (ymmv) and are not pre-determined by any process other than the decision process itself. It is not related to physical determinism.

* This does not claim that "quantity" (eg of people) has any moral primacy over "quality" (eg a hungry tiger) or vice versa. Nor does it claim that "material" things like cars are more valuable than experiences or knowledge.

Despite the above, I want to be sympathetic to those with non-materialist worldviews. I just don't know what they actually mean at this level of detail. What is the actual alternative to this?

The saying goes that (hidden image) ✔️ ✔️ 83% ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (9mo ago #1755 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1754
One obvious alternative is a simple agnosticism. Just deny the first claim, that you find this plausible or useful. Proceed through the world normally without strongly systematized views on what's going on with "reality" and how its apparent parts are related. But I find this unsatisfying. I want to "get to the bottom of things".

An even stronger claim suggests itself from this: that "materialism" as above is simply the will to understand reality systematically. As soon as you're trying to unify your understanding into one systematic whole, you've already implicitly taken on most of the above assumptions, with the rest being relatively non-central particular speculations. The implication is that there is no real alternative but agnosticism, which is just the absence of thought.

I don't necessarily believe this, but I want to see it actually falsified by example.

One obvious alternat (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (9mo ago #1759 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1761 >>1833:

>>1754
> ... there is a simple and deterministic (up to randomness but not reverse-causality) layer of physical law underlying all phenomena.

I believe there really are fundamental, deterministic physical laws. (At least, modulo the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics. However, I don't lean on the latter for higher-level conclusions, so I'm willing to bracket it for most further analysis.)

> All complex high-level phenomena can be reduced to, explained, engineered, and even simulated (when computational feasible) in terms of the base layer reality, or are confusions that dissolve on inspection.

This is the actual content of the qualifier "hard." Two points: 1) This reducibility thesis does not follow from the prior statement of physical laws; it really is a separate thesis. 2) I believe it is false, both substantively and practically.

I believe reducibility is false for many reasons. Here is a quick pointer to just one of them, a discussion of the "copper atom argument" from David Deutsch's book The Fabric of Reality.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxetn9332kg

I should emphasis that the falsehood of reducibility is completely orthogonal to any concept the "supernatural." This is a discussion about how science actually works within the realm of nature.

I believe there real (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (9mo ago #1760 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1754
> ... there is a simple and deterministic (up to randomness but not reverse-causality) layer of physical law underlying all phenomena.

Separate "semantic" point, but adding to what I said above, I think "materialism" is just a horrible name for this position. It historically has more to do with early Enlightenment metaphysics than with science, and it's super misleading. Modern fundamental physical laws, both general relativity and quantum field theory, have more to do with energy fields than with "matter." (In fact, it's a bit tricky to say precisely what "matter" is in quantum field theory.)

A better term, widely used in philosophy of science since the 1930's, is "physicalism."

Separate "semantic" (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (9mo ago #1761 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1759
>copper atom argument
That video was rambling but I take it the argument is that "some people built a statue because of the war, which is why that copper atom is there" is a better practical explanation than "muh big bang. muh physical laws". Indeed. The claim of hard materialism isn't that it's never useful to use any other set of concepts other than the base material, or that the most zoomed out possible general account of reality is the only one you need, it's that those other concepts, if real, will always in principle have a reduction relation to the physical-lawful action of base matter. In this case, a bunch of physical beings acting according to their physical nature and built a physical statue. I don't see the issue.

Again it really seems what's going on here is that materialism or physicalism or whatever is standing in for a bunch of unrelated philosophical errors that may not even exist in the wild outside of insincere new atheist shill arguments from 2007.

>I believe it is false, both substantively and practically.
I would like to see good examples of phenomena that plausibly don't have physical explanations in principle.

>I think "materialism" is just a horrible name for this position.
Fair enough but that's what people call it when they are trying to refute it. "Physicalism" may be better, but this seems more a point of fashionable jargon than actual conceptual distinction, if the problem with materialism is just that "matter" breaks down in certain exotic high energy regimes. Not everything has nonzero rest mass blah blah blah but that's a physicist problem not a philosopher problem.

That video was rambl (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (9mo ago #1763 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1764:

>>1762
>So “being right wing” isn’t really any more correct than “being left wing,” and if for some reason one set of mental states leads to “better” outcomes or more aesthetic outcomes, it is entirely historically contingent (in the same sense our evolutionary history is), and so there are really no grounds to object to the present state of the world.
>In fact, it claims exactly nothing. It does not preclude the worship of yeast life nor the creation of higher life.
yes.jpg. There are no metaphysically determined objectively correct value judgements. However, you may find that the kind of being you are and/or want to be demands certain aesthetic and moral judgements or acts of will. You may find that Gnon smashes certain configurations of matter and heaps rewards on others, and you may find that (by act of instinctive will) that you'd rather be the one rather than the other. You may find that you don't want to maximize GDP, but actually want to create higher life.

>there are physical means by which values can be changed.
Yes you can do LSD and become retarded, for example.

>So aesthetic judgments, moral judgments, and so on are all strictly emergent from some configuration of matter?
Yes. You have instincts that give you feelings of value or compulsion in response to certain imagined or perceived situations, or something like that. Which is not to say these are arbitrary. If you have the wrong instincts, generally you die and leave no children. The aesthetic instinct may actually refer to (physical) realities, like that certain landscapes really are more fertile, or habitable, or filled with novelty, or whatever it is that you're seeing when you're attracted to that landscape. Some people you perceive as having botched souls may actually be dangerously malformed such that they can't get along with you or others.

>“Thinking machines” do not access anything beyond the physical in any meaningful sense, when we refer among one another to a concept we are referring to a mental state we believe we hold in common to a good approximation and nothing more
We are using a common mental language, but referring (ideally) to physical reality. Sometimes we are referring to shared imagination.

>Giving up on mathematical Platonism but privileging a specific set of mental phenomena seems tortured — is our more general experience of logical necessity physical in its origin?
I'm not privileging some other set of mental phenomena. The point is that there is this neat physical regularity, which is that certain kinds of analogies hold, and certain ways of manipulating those analogies preserve the same correspondence. This is nothing to do with mental states. An unthinking machine could count with pebbles or compute a similar triangle in sand or something and it still works. Math is what we call the tradition of concepts which reliably refer to the behavior of these analogies.

>It makes me angry to lose my faith in the independent existence of mathematical objects and concepts of beauty.
Kill your sacred cows, anon.

yes.jpg. There are n (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x287
said (9mo ago #1764 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1765 >>1799:

>>1763

>want to create higher life

"Higher life?" What's that? Something at a higher trophic level than whatever level we currently occupy? An organism that is more symmetrical? Something with higher energy requirements?

"Dealer's choice?" There's no room for "vision" here, since whatever you happen to want is fine, and the self shouldn't bothering warring with the self under these assumptions.

>If you have the wrong instincts, generally you die and leave no children. The aesthetic instinct may actually refer to (physical) realities, like that certain landscapes really are more fertile, or habitable, or filled with novelty, or whatever it is that you're seeing when you're attracted to that landscape. Some people you perceive as having botched souls may actually be dangerously malformed such that they can't get along with you or others.

Anyone who successfully reproduces is A-OK then, for as long as they continue to do so. Global favela world is A-OK so long as it does not collapse. If I dislike global favela world, I can drop acid repeatedly until I am OK with it, or I can just cope and seethe. So long as I am dead before the arrival of global favela world, it should not matter to me, because I will not experience it.

>Kill your sacred cows, anon.

Trust me, I'm trying, that's why I want to be honest about my anger, as it seems to me that is the first step.

But supposing one just outright accepts all this, why discuss it? Why log on here? Why do much of anything beyond the minimum required to stay sane and healthy? Almost everything under this lens becomes something of a surrogate activity to use TK's words.

Would you agree there is no inherent reason to try to create "systems" of knowledge i.e. all truth is defined by its utility (in fact if you take the "meaningful = possible worlds" and "truthful = this world" stance on statements, then you don't care about meaning, meaning is a spook, you only care about truth)? Never worry about the generating process for the facts unless you absolutely must or it is extremely beneficial, most of the time a lookup table of the facts will do. Philosophizing (broadly construed, including most theory-building in the natural sciences) is a pathology under this view of life, yes?

Ragnar Redbeard-tier individualism is the only way to live under this set of beliefs, do you agree or disagree?

"Higher life?" What' (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (9mo ago #1765 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1766 >>1799:

>>1764
> There's no room for "vision" here, since whatever you happen to want is fine

Absolutely correct, on this hypothesis.

> Anyone who successfully reproduces is A-OK then ...

It's worse than that. No reason even to prefer reproduction, exactly as we are seeing among many today.

> Global favela world is A-OK ...

Absolutely correct, which is precisely why we're heading there.

> But supposing one just outright accepts all this, why discuss it? Why log on here?

No reason. Just goon, take LSD, commit suicide, whatever. The matter doesn't care, right?

> Ragnar Redbeard-tier individualism is the only way to live under this set of beliefs ...

It's worse than that. There's no objective reason to prefer even Ragnar Redbeard. That's just one arbitrary preference among all the others. The matter doesn't care.

All the above, of course, is "on this hypothesis." To be clear, I reject this hypothesis. The world we actually live in is not one of undifferentiated matter. It is a world of highly structured and formed physical beings, and it's the structure and form where all the interesting things happens.

A protein is an exquisitely complex molecule with corresponding function. One protein can differ greatly from another. If you break them down into their atomic elements, they are all just the same (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur), but that is irrelevant. Their "matter" doesn't tell you what they are or what they do; only their form does. That's why computing protein folding is such a big deal.

The exact same thing is true of atoms in relation to their subatomic particles. It's the form of an atom, not its "matter," that tells you what it is and what it does. The same is true up the ladder of biological structures, to cells, organs, and then plants and animals.

And when you start attending to the forms of physical things, and understand them to be real and primary, then you also see that function is real and primary, and not at all arbitrary. "The matter does not care," but that's just fine, because we aren't talking about the matter. We're talking about real physical things, which do have real preferences.

Materialism is false and blinding. Not because there are things that "aren't physical," which is a thought-stopping canard. Rather, materialism is false because it is not descriptive of the real physical world.

Absolutely correct, (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x288
said (9mo ago #1766 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1767 >>1799:

>>1765

I like the track that you're on but how do you arrive at the conclusion that the physical world has a "preference" for certain forms over others along the lines of natural law? Arrangements of proteins and other forms of matter may determine their characteristics, but the differentiation of matter does not impart any bearing on whether certain forms are more desirable.

There is more complexity and more hiearchies of more complex forms over others (i.e. in cells), but when you scale this up you can see that inversions of this order are almost built-in at the trophic level. The ticks that drain the beautiful moose are just as integral to the system as favela-world is to civilization.

I like the track tha (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (9mo ago #1767 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1800:

>>1766

A great way to confuse yourself is to try to jump between the highest and lowest levels of the system and see at one glance how they relate. That's not how science works. That's not how any rigorous thought works. You can't just pick out big-picture features at a glance.

> ... how do you arrive at the conclusion that the physical world has a "preference" ...

Physical things (an atom, a protein, a lion) have form. Form determines functions. Function performs particular actions and not others. THAT, right there, is preference, the picking out of particular possibilities.

Don't confuse yourself by thinking "But that doesn't tell me what I should dedicate my life to" or any other such question of human life. My claim is not that we can easily or simply read big-picture answers off of my account. There is still much hard intellectual work to do. My claim is simply that we should not cripple that work in advance by adopting a perspective according to which such questions become unintelligible.

And yes, I think that the ticks, literally and figurative, play a functional role in the ecosystem. I also observe that you and I are not ticks.

A great way to confu (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1799 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1764
>"Higher life?" What's that?
Take the ideal of the aristocratic man, the lion, the wolf, the giant tree, the eagle. Take his relationship to the rest of nature, his relationship to God, and his relationship to the masses, and purify it. Push it even further beyond. That is higher life. This concept is deep in our culture or perhaps our blood. Does this offend you?

>since whatever you happen to want is fine, and the self shouldn't bothering warring with the self under these assumptions.
You only have your own instincts and your own rational will to order those instincts. The self is not naturally harmonious but needs to be ordered by the will by "the self warring with the self". I'm curious how you derive apathy of will from materialism though. I think you're just reacting emotionally to an idea that threatens comfortable lies.

>Anyone who successfully reproduces is A-OK then
To who? To you? Why would you be so undiscriminating? Most who reproduce are trash who compete with you and with higher life for space. Why would you think this is OK? Your problem is that you are denying your own agency and interests, trying to pass them off as metaphysical facts when they are actually your own judgements. I propose to be honest about the status of these as our own judgements, and not compromise our understanding of reality for the sake of moralistic propaganda.

>So long as I am dead before the arrival of global favela world, it should not matter to me, because I will not experience it.
Where does this weird solipsism come from? Where in a materialistic doctrine do you find any support at all for the idea that inner experience is the only thing that matters? I would suggest it is the opposite: your inner experience is irrelevant, given value only by its relationship to material reality, which is primary. Again you are emoting, not thinking.

>Philosophizing (broadly construed, including most theory-building in the natural sciences) is a pathology under this view of life, yes?
No. Why would it be? Philosophy is the essential combat art of forming a perspective viable for life. If you have a will to live a certain way in this world, one of the very material artifacts you must have possession of is a clear worldview. We do philosophy to sharpen our worldviews so that we can muster our own wills and coordinate each other's wills towards a viable shared vision of life.

>Ragnar Redbeard-tier individualism is the only way to live under this set of beliefs, do you agree or disagree?
It's worse. Where do you find "the individual" in this view? The individual, the race, the polis, the faith, the vision, the leader etc are products of philosophy as it constructs the will into a coherent form. There is no implication for any particular construction of the will. The existential question who we are and what we want is difficult and like all life can only be answered in a somewhat circular and supra-rational fashion: I want to live this way because that's the kind of being I am.

>>1765
>more emoting, less thought
Try to actually apply yourself, anon.

>It is a world of highly structured and formed physical beings, and it's the structure and form where all the interesting things happens.
Agreed. It's strange you thing materialism contradicts this when I said explicitly it does not deny that other concepts are useful, it only claims that they can be reduced to physical-material phenomena.

>Their "matter" doesn't tell you what they are or what they do; only their form does. That's why computing protein folding is such a big deal.
And yet, in principle, the arrangement of their matter and the nature of the matter (ie physical laws) is sufficient to fully describe their behavior, hence the possibility of protein structure prediction. This is exactly the materialist claim.

>>1766
>the physical world has a "preference" for certain forms over others along the lines of natural law
I think he meant that physical beings have preferences as one of their physical behaviors. Natural law is a whole other topic.

Take the ideal of th (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1800 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1802:

>>1767
>Don't confuse yourself by thinking "But that doesn't tell me what I should dedicate my life to" or any other such question of human life. My claim is not that we can easily or simply read big-picture answers off of my account.
Our account of reality need not tell us directly who we are and what we should want. That is a separate task. The purpose of our account of reality is to tell us what is real and connect our understandings to each other in a common language of real existence.

>And yes, I think that the ticks, literally and figurative, play a functional role in the ecosystem. I also observe that you and I are not ticks.
Exactly. We don't need to value ticks when they mostly just cause trouble for us, even if they have a role in the bigger picture (which is perhaps only to cause stimulating trouble for us).

>My claim is simply that we should not cripple that work in advance by adopting a perspective according to which such questions become unintelligible.
This is the key disagreement. As far as I can tell we're seeing things the same way, but you are misreading what I mean by materialism. It does not make questions of form unintelligible, but gives them structure. Form is arrangement of matter. It is only intelligible with a clear idea of what is being arranged, and how it behaves under composition. Chase those abstractions downwards and you find a unified material reality at the base which you must not forget, even if for practical work we use towering abstractions of form, or don't know how they are constructed.

The key claim is that the more abstract physical things are constructed out of simpler things, bottoming out in some kind of base material on whose behavior the whole thing can be reconstructed. For some reason people (ITT and elsewhere) keep conflating this with various moral confusions or pathological atheism about all abstraction concepts. I created this thread to challenge the idea that this idea is identifiable with these various stupidities.

Our account of reali (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1802 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1806 >>1834:

>>1800
> This is the key disagreement.

Yes, I agree that this is the key disagreement.

> [Materialism] does not make questions of form unintelligible, but gives them structure. Form is arrangement of matter.

The crucial insight is that form is a real principle, not merely a secondary or derivative one. It is a "primitive," to use the computer science term, not merely "syntactic sugar" defined in terms of some other primitive.

This is NOT the claim that forms are real "things," separate from other things, as in some construals of Platonism. A principle need not be a thing. A primitive can be an operation, not just a data value. But you cannot reduce operations to data values.

> [Form] is only intelligible with a clear idea of what is being arranged, and how it behaves under composition.

You need to attend to all real principles to understand a thing, and here that means both matter and form distinctly. Form is not reducible to matter.

I do think your mention of composition is correct. How a thing behaves under composition is crucial to form. (It might even ultimately be all of form.) But that still is not reducible to matter.

> Chase those abstractions downwards and you find a unified material reality at the base which you must not forget, even if for practical work we use towering abstractions of form, or don't know how they are constructed.

There is no material base of reality in which form is absent. Form literally goes all the way down, even below the atomic level, even below the level of protons and neutrons. Take a look at table below of the Standard Model. This is absolutely as far down as modern physics has been able to figure things out. It is an illustration, not chiefly of matter, but of form.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Standard_Model_of_Elementary_Particles.svg

Yes, I agree that th (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1806 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1808:

>>1802
Ok fair enough. This feels like a semantic disagreement. Who would define matter in a way that doesn't include its capacity to be formed and the forms it gets put into? The point about data without instructions is good, but matter without form seems to me more like trying to talk about instructions without programs; it would be missing something that isn't just essential to practice, but almost necessarily following from the concept itself and essential to why you cared to define it in the first place.

Whether you think form is a separate ontological primitive (your view?) or whether it is implied in the concept of materialist reduction (my view), is that matter and form are a total system of reality. All other realities can be accounted for in this reality, even if we use other concepts for them. Consciousness, value, free will, life, have answers that are about our understanding of matter and form. We do not need to lift these mysteries into having fundamental ontological status, but can treat them as temporary blank spots on our map of matter and form to be explored at our leisure.

Ok fair enough. This (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1808 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1811:

>>1806

> Who would define matter in a way that doesn't include its capacity to be formed and the forms it gets put into?

I agree it would be silly to define matter that way. But I think that much Enlightenment materialism, and much popular materialism today, pretty much does this. There is a prevalent, quasi-Newtonian view of matter as undifferentiated "stuff" with form as "mere" arrangement. You hear this in pop science and philosophy all the time. And it is literally false, whether you look at the table of the Standard Model, the table of periodic elements, organic chemistry, or many higher levels.

> ... matter and form are a total system of reality. All other realities can be accounted for in this reality ...

I agree with this. But I also think that when you accept form as a real principle, it changes how you think about higher-level concepts. Some of the forms described by higher-level concepts could themselves be real –– not separate from matter, but nonetheless real. I have in mind some of the thermodynamic principles involved in life and evolution, for example.

I agree it would be (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1811 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1814:

>>1808
>I also think that when you accept form as a real principle, it changes how you think about higher-level concepts. Some of the forms described by higher-level concepts could themselves be real –– not separate from matter, but nonetheless real. I have in mind some of the thermodynamic principles involved in life and evolution, for example.
I like this idea and would like to see it developed further. I don't think it contradicts OP but it would be a useful refinement if fleshed out into a first class theory. Write a new thread about it?

I like this idea and (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1817 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1818 >>1820 >>1821:

>>1814
I deny a significant distinction between a matter+form view and a physicalist/materialist view. Identities don't contradict, and aren't valued differently. Why prefer 2+2 instead of 4?

I'd like to see you guys demonstrate that enlightenment metaphysics actually threw out form in a significant way. How would that even work? There's matter but it's not arranged into any shape? Of course we've all heard teenage atheists talk about "it's all just particles bopping around you don't really exist therefore buttsex" and so on, but this hardly even rises to the dignity of philosophical error. I deny that anyone takes such ideas seriously.

And while I haven't seen it on this board, this is all still uncomfortably close to the usual motte and bailey maneuver where "materialism" is "refuted" with minor technicalities like "well actually matter is arranged into form checkmate atheists", but then this very narrow refutation of "materialism" is taken as license for all manner of superstitious woo and ontological slop regarding consciousness and so on.

Again the main point of this view we're working with here, whatever we call it, isn't to split fine hairs between matter and form, but to assert the non-magical nature of phenomena like life, consciousness, free will, morality, etc. It asserts that these are not mysterious, supernatural, unphysical, or beyond known law. They are just physical phenomena like everything else, and can be understood, accounted for, and even engineered. Like some kind of lost technology, they may not be fully understood, but they are not unphysical.

I'll concede that "physicalism" is a better term if it keeps off the autism about matter vs form. But quoth Wikipedia "Physicalism is closely related to materialism, and has evolved from materialism...The terms "physicalism" and "materialism" are often used interchangeably..."

What I find urgently fascinating is that despite "physicalism [being] the majority view among philosophers" as far as I can tell it has not been taken seriously in its moral implications. We're still screwing around with enlightenment era superstitions like human rights, the equal dignity of all men, unphysical gender, and the greatest happiness for the greatest number of conscious beings. Where in physical nature do we find grounding for these concepts? Nowhere. They are woo.

For those of us with some ambition to overturn the fake superstitions of our age, this is a ripe situation. We should be doubling down on moral physicalism, and driving it to its conclusion. We should not be shying away because we think it might disrupt our petty moral pretensions.

I propose that the Dark Enlightenment should be continued and driven to its end. Darwinistic moral naturalism is the Truth, and it salivates at the prospect of escaping its cage, shredding its decrepit captors, and establishing a new order. Our job is to let it out and do its intellectual dirty work. I'll do some thinking and start a new thread when I've got the next step.

I deny a significant (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1820 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1821:

>>1817
> I'd like to see you guys demonstrate that enlightenment metaphysics actually threw out form in a significant way.

Francis Bacon is pretty explicit about this and was widely followed, most immediately by Hobbes.

> How would that even work? There's matter but it's not arranged into any shape?

The fact that one cannot fail to observe that matter is arranged is not at all the same as understanding the significance of form. The whole point of my reference to the table of the Standard Model, etc., is to hammer the point that form "goes all the way down," even below the level of atoms. We literally nowhere observe anything one could call "matter" in which form is not playing an absolutely fundamental role. This is the sense in which it is "primitive." I deny this principle is any sort of autism.

> Of course we've all heard teenage atheists talk about "it's all just particles bopping around you don't really exist therefore buttsex" and so on, but this hardly even rises to the dignity of philosophical error. I deny that anyone takes such ideas seriously.

You're just flatly wrong. Just one example: I've been doing a careful read-through of Nietzsche in a group chat, and there are large stretches in Human, All Too Human where he argues exactly in the manner you describe. Of course, he uses very stylish German, not the dur dur style of Reddit, but it really is exactly this position. Of course, there are other parts of Nietzsche where he says far more intelligent and insightful things.

> ... the usual motte and bailey maneuver where "materialism" is "refuted" with minor technicalities ...

I've presented no motte and bailey, and I deny that the consideration of form is a minor technicalities. Your concerns about what someone else has said are not mine.

> ... then this very narrow refutation of "materialism" is taken as license for all manner of superstitious woo and ontological slop regarding consciousness ...

I abjure all superstitious woo, whether about consciousness or anything else.

Having said that, I am cautious about what our science does not yet actually encompass. In reading much 19th and 20th century philosophy and science that identifies with "materialism," I see a naive presumption that our science is far more complete than it actually is. My conclusion from that is not "therefore, woo." It is things like "might there be fundamental thermodynamic drivers of evolution that we don't yet understand?"

> ... the main point ... isn't to split fine hairs between matter and form ...

It's not a fine hair.

> ... but to assert the non-magical nature of phenomena like life, consciousness, free will, morality, etc.

I'm happy to assert the non-magical nature of these things.

> It asserts that these are not mysterious, supernatural, unphysical, or beyond known law.

Sorry, now you're the one being very sloppy. I'm happy to assert that they aren't "supernatural" or "unphysical," since those words just mean "apart from phusis" and I think they can indeed be accounted for within human nature.

"Mysterious" just means you don't yet understand something. I'm quite sure that there any many natural phenomena that we don't yet understand and in that sense are indeed "mysterious." "Beyond known law" obviously depends on what laws are in fact known at a given time. You're confident that we already know all physical laws? I'm quite confident that we don't, starting with the laws of quantum gravity but also including many, many higher level things.

Overall, I think you've gotten way over-indexed on the fear of superstitious woo, and you're allowing it to warp your thinking. That stuff is just error, just like a lot of COVID stuff was just error. We need to reject it, but not let it warp our thinking elsewhere.

> We're still screwing around with enlightenment era superstitions like human rights, the equal dignity of all men, unphysical gender, ... They are woo.

I entirely agree with this. But it's precisely form that helps us refute these errors.

Francis Bacon is pre (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1821 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1823:

>>1820
>The fact that one cannot fail to observe that matter is arranged is not at all the same as understanding the significance of form.
Well I look forward to your exposition of the significance of form, because I don't understand the distinction you're making. I really mean that, too. This is the only objection I've heard to the OP ideas that doesn't just seem like thought-stopping FUD.

>might there be fundamental thermodynamic drivers of evolution that we don't yet understand?
I have had similar thoughts for a long time and I think there are some very significant new laws (of the mathematical/empirical or "form" variety, not the "matter" variety) to be figured out there. I think much of teleology and some very important insights about life and intelligence could be reconstructed on a physical basis there. I enjoyed Teilhard de Chardin as an attempt on that front. I don't think it's precisely thermodynamics, but somewhere in that interface between darwinism, probability/information theory, thermodynamics, computation, and intelligence it feels like there's a new unifying theory of life to be had.

Apologies for any implication that any of you are engaging in the woo. Like I said I haven't seen it here. But I have seen a lot of it from otherwise very smart people otherwise very much in our intellectual sphere. One of the ways it happens is that nuanced high quality constructive criticism of "materialism" as you are doing is taken by other participants as tribal cheering for low quality antimaterialism, and this impression is insufficiently dispelled. The reason I made this thread is to force a rigor of critique that will dispel that conflation and re-orient the discussion towards constructive rigor. It seems to have worked, because we have identified at least three directions of further development that I'm excited to pursue (exposition of form as ontologically significant beyond just derived arrangement of matter, thermodynamic-darwinian unifying theory, and moral naturalism as I mentioned in >>1817).

>there are large stretches in Human, All Too Human where he argues exactly in the manner you describe

I'm surprised. I haven't read that one but I'll have to go have a look.

>You're confident that we already know all physical laws? I'm quite confident that we don't, starting with the laws of quantum gravity but also including many, many higher level things.
Obviously we don't have the complete physical law, nor a complete understanding of its implications. To be more precise, the error I'm criticizing is where the mysteriousness of some phenomenon (which you are right is just ignorance) is reified as ontologically basic or somehow a refutation of what we otherwise know about the world. cf "consciousness/mind/qualia therefore AI is impossible".

If we had an actual physical anomaly that actually contradicted known law, we would have a very different situation and I would be singing a different tune. Blank spots on the map are distinct from problems with the mapping paradigm.

Well I look forward (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1823 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1824:

>>1821
> ... I don't understand the distinction you're making. I really mean that, too.

If you look at the table of the Standard Model, and ask "How are these different entities characterized?," the answer has nothing to do with "matter" in any sense that Newton and his contemporaries would have understood (which was something like undifferentiated "stuff" with no feature but mass). Rather, the answer has to do with highly structured interactions that require sophisticated mathematics to describe.

My claim is that this isn't a minor detail. It's a profound fact about nature, one that holds at the bottom and "runs upward" to high-level things like evolution.

> ... teleology and some very important insights about life and intelligence could be reconstructed ... in that interface between darwinism, probability/information theory, thermodynamics, computation, and intelligence ...

Agree completely. This is exactly where I'm pointing.

If you look at the t (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1824 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1825:

>>1823
>ask "How are these different entities characterized?," the answer has nothing to do with "matter" in any sense that Newton and his contemporaries would have understood (which was something like undifferentiated "stuff" with no feature but mass).
We have different types of matter with different properties like charge and spin and weak/strong interaction and whatnot. Matter can't be characterized just by mass, and its interactions and behaviors depend on what forms it takes. The higher level forms like "monkey" are built out of the lower level forms like "cell" "molecule" and "quark". You are saying it's the forms that matter and how they interact and compose, more than what they are made of (or at least "as well as")?

I think we agree that the higher level forms are composed of lower level forms, and that the higher level behaviors can in principle be predicted from the way the lower level forms are composed together. What this disallows is various types of "magic" where new behaviors emerge from higher level forms that can't be accounted for by the behavior and interactions of their parts.

We have different ty (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1825 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1826:

>>1824
> You are saying it's the forms that matter and how they interact and compose, more than what they are made of (or at least "as well as")?

Yes, the precise structure of the interaction and composition are what is important, and this is what I mean by form. This is so true that if you keep drilling the analysis of form down, from the "monkey" down to the Standard Model, you finally arrive at a level where there's not much to say about about any undifferentiated "matter."

That doesn't mean anything like "matter isn't real." But it does mean that "materialism" is bad characterization of how science actually works.

> What this disallows is various types of "magic" where new behaviors emerge from higher level forms that can't be accounted for by the behavior and interactions of their parts.

I agree that "magic" of that sort doesn't make sense. But it's not really something I worry about. Suppose some great physicist came up with a new theory of quantum gravity that seemed to experimentally check out. And suppose it posited some new fundamental field that we hadn't previously known about. We wouldn't say, "that's magic." We would just say, "there's now a brand new field in our best theory of physics," which is fine. To me, the important line is not between "magic" and non-magic. It's between good science and bad/non-science. I think trying to discern good science does all the filtering we need. I worry that, when we try to filter more strongly than that, we're actually trying to dictate in advance what good science "should" look like, and that's a mistake.

Yes, the precise str (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1826 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1827:

>>1825
>That doesn't mean anything like "matter isn't real." But it does mean that "materialism" is bad characterization of how science actually works.
It still feels like this is just a word-choice issue. I take it you think "materialism" over-emphasizes "matter" at the expense of form. I see what you mean but it feels more like a clarity issue than a correctness issue. What word would you use to call this position? Physicalism? Reductionism? "Reductionism" has similar problems (which I am similarly unconcerned with) to "materialism". Physicalism is well accepted in academic philosophy, at least, though as I noted above it's basically a synonym for materialism. I'll happily switch to physicalism or whatever you can argue is superior, but I'm effectively just swapping labels on the OP idea, and perhaps adding some nuance emphasizing forms and composition over reduction to base material.

Whatever we call this position, I don't think we actually disagree. I'd like to hear from those who actually disagree with it, because there are plenty of them around, even most of the people I've worked with for the past 10 years, especially if you include the implicit anti-physicalism of most moral, political, theological, and psychological thought.

Another approach here is to crush the meta levels and start asserting object level consequences: AGI is possible and all moralism is superstitious woo. I'm bored with the former, but the latter seems of profound political significance.

>We would just say, "there's now a brand new field in our best theory of physics," which is fine.
Yes but new physics discovered from actual anomalies by good science isn't what the anti-physicalists are proposing. In any case it would preserve the basic compositional property in how forms are constructed from interacting subforms, and therefore preserve the paradigm.

It still feels like (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1827 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1826
>all moralism is superstitious woo
This is a sloppy and over-extended statement of it. I'll start a new thread with a tighter statement of what I mean when I work out a bit more of it.

This is a sloppy and (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1828 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

> AGI is possible ...

I think AGI is certainly possible.

> ... all moralism is superstitious woo.

I'm no fan of moralism, but I think it has more to do with ideological capture than with what we've been discussing. You seem to have an intuition that "materialism prevents this," but I don't that's correct. Plenty of people, such as Marx, have espoused materialism but also adopted moral views that one might just consider different moralisms.

My perspective on morality is that, if you're willing to assume some very basic things like, "we're human, so it's good for humans to survive and thrive in ways consistent with human nature," then without any appeal to magic, you can derive good and bad ways to act from facts about the world that really are true, and that's what I mean by morality.

I think AGI is certa (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1830 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1831 >>1834:

> I'd like to hear from those who actually disagree with it.
Sure. I disagree very strongly with this:
> The claim is that all other concepts we use (can) have a particular kind of relation to basic physics, that of "reduction".

My counterclaim is that all the concepts we know have a particular kind of relation to the aesthetic experience of agents, which itself is not reducible to the lawful-physical action of matter. Rather, the content of what you call "the lawful-physical action of matter" is the product of an agent operating in nature and relating to it. Obviously this does not mean you are constructing a _false_ picture of reality in doing so, but rather that your model does not actually step outside the way you as an agent relate to the world.

We have extremely similar ends so I'm not going to disagree much on the direction and conclusions that you're attempting to get to from physicalism. My problem is that I don't believe that the material supervenes on man. If you center equations as falling out from the agentic-relative experience of men then they are primarily engineering trade-offs based on quality of approximation for the agent's needs, not a necessary consequence of his parts.

The philosophy of organism breaks free from the Baconian dragnet Land places around our necks. The Enlightenment happened in part because natural science had outrun the Cathedral—will you run, or stay trapped in the Dark?

Sure. I disagree ver (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1831 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1830
>Rather, the content of what you call "the lawful-physical action of matter" is the product of an agent operating in nature and relating to it.
Of course our theories are subjective, being artifacts of how we relate to the world. But within that way of relating, there are different ways to relate the concepts to each other and to what we speculate may exist "out there" beyond our own subjectivity. What is the problem with having a unifying theory that relates all our reality concepts to a common framework of hypothesized physicality?

>My problem is that I don't believe that the material supervenes on man.
Why not? What is it that man does that escapes physical determination?

> If you center equations as falling out from the agentic-relative experience of men then they are primarily engineering trade-offs based on quality of approximation for the agent's needs, not a necessary consequence of his parts.
I agree with this completely. The equations and other concepts are products of our agency for our practical purposes. Why would they be a consequence of man's parts? (Except in the trivial sense that they are encoded in the arrangement of those parts.)

Is the crux here that you don't see agency as a physical phenomenon?

>The philosophy of organism
Who wrote on that again?

Of course our theori (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1832 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

> Why not? What is it that man does that escapes physical determination?
I do not believe my aesthetic experience can be explained completely by reference to the physical as the physicality of the world, while real, is only revealed in my aesthetic experience. Following Whitehead I hold a panexperientialism, though not a panpsychism.

> Who wrote on that again?
Lately I've primarily been drawing on Whitehead, but you can see parts of this in the enactivists, Bergsonian vitalists, Wilhelm Reich, and Robert Rosen to name a few.

Reich in particular is ripe for a Nietzschean reading. I will post a thread At Some Point.

I do not believe my (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2b1
said (8mo ago #1833 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1834:

>>1754
>All complex high-level phenomena can be reduced to, explained, engineered, and even simulated (when computational feasible) in terms of the base layer reality, or are confusions that dissolve on inspection.

I agree with >>1759. I used to think that this was possible, and indeed I very much wanted it to be true, until I realized that it was just not possible. As mentioned in the copper atom video at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wxetn9332kg

>to actually do that predicting, [one needs] an oracle with the full knowledge of the laws of physics. well this oracle is basically the omniscient theistic god the god that knows everything that's going to happen the god that created the universe and knows everything that's going to happen

The whole problem is that once you have three bodies in a physical system the only being who really knows what the interaction term is is Gnon, and so on all the way up. In the helium atom it's the two electrons interacting (and from there all that is emergent in chemistry and biology), we can say the same about gravitational systems, though I'm less familiar with those. We can do our best to probe what the interaction term is, to higher and higher degrees of accuracy, even to the point of being able to engineer new medicines, do gravitational slingshots, etc. But I'm skeptical that knowledge of the fundamental laws of physics necessarily leads to us being able to derive emergent laws.

I agree with >>1759. (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1834 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1833
>The whole problem is that once you have three bodies in a physical system the only being who really knows what the interaction term is is Gnon, and so on all the way up.
The OP is perhaps an overstatement of what we can do in practice, but this is just classic chaos theory and computational irreducibility. We can demonstrate these exact same epistemic issues in systems that are known with certainty to be reducible in the sense that materialists mean it, because we built them. See fractals, cellular automata, and the halting problem. Even the three body problem is not some extra empirical anomaly but a deductively derivable mathematical property of newton's laws as defined (you can prove mathematically that small errors diverge exponentially). To say that the well understood epistemic limits on prediction of general systems poses problems for a materialist-reductionist worldview is to miss the point of what materialism is saying. It's not saying that in practice everything can be short-circuited by feasible calculation from basic law, it's saying that everything can in principle be accounted for as consequence of basic law in the same way that the mandelbrot set is the consequence of its basic law. These epistemic issues are profound and important, but they limit rational calculation and knowledge, not in-principle cause and effect.

The best argument against this species of materialism would be that it makes itself irrelevant in practice because of computational irreducibility, but this is not even true. The fact that we know that the motion of heavenly bodies is bounded (modulo relativity) by newton's laws means we can strongly bound even the unpredictable behaviors statistically. N bodies in space that can collide can't just do anything. In fact in a broad swath of scenarios they are overwhelmingly likely to settle into a rotating disk with a central mass and satellites of various sizes. A bounded amount of mass can be expelled at bounded energy. The temperature, momentum, and energy of the remainder can be strongly bounded. We can predict this from the fact that they follow basic law, even if we can't compute the chaotic contingent details.

Likewise, the human mind and consciousness is subject to information-theoretic limits on knowledge and inference, subject to computational power limits, limited in its influence to physical interaction, subject to physical and therefore spiritual destruction upon death and degradation upon physical damage, subject to reverse engineering of its principle of operation and therefore replication on an alternate substrate, and ultimately physical in nature and the consequence of particular forms of information interaction. Stuff like this is the implication of materialism regardless of chaotic unpredictable details.

Maybe none of you disagree with these implications, but many do, and I think they are just wrong. The best of them rise to the level of saying "yes the mind is nonmaterial and not in principle limited by any of that, therefore I'm going to get cognitive superpowers by spiritual training and in fact can in principle train anybody to do this". Of course they are still wrong, but I appreciate the honest attempt to establish an alternative and work on its profound implications.

If anyone cares to actually put up *that* kind of challenge to materialism, I'd like to hear it, because they tend to be interesting. I've heard a lot of it over the years, but never convincingly. Most responses here and elsewhere seem confident materialism and/or physicalism is wrong, but always by some inner definition-monkeying equivalent of a syntax error or inappropriate emphasis, not an actual alternate paradigm with important implications for what can and cannot be done. Anon #2 comes closest with posts like >>1802, but as I've been arguing this just feels like a different (and perhaps superior) formalization of the same basic idea. I'm not even sure >>1830 disagrees with it, but I'll leave that up to him.

The OP is perhaps an (hidden image) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1837 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1838:

> Likewise, the human mind and consciousness is subject to information-theoretic limits on knowledge and inference, subject to computational power limits, limited in its influence to physical interaction, subject to physical and therefore spiritual destruction upon death and degradation upon physical damage, subject to reverse engineering of its principle of operation and therefore replication on an alternate substrate
This assertion makes me doubt your commitment to hard materialism. If the principle of operation of an organism is supervened by its material properties, then its mind must be a property of that material. In order to believe it can be replicated on an alternate substrate you would first need to assert that a mind is a form of material-forms such that material of similar forms can be substituted while retaining the same overall form. (This step seems to be required for most material-forms to make sense, which is why the reification of form is appealing.) The second step is to show that the alternate substrate satisfies the necessary form requirements. Not only has this not been done in your previous essays on the topic, the entire extropian/singulatarian community has completely failed to demonstrate that the material of semiconductors has the correct form to build a mind out of. In fact a materialist analysis of semiconductors would note the myriad of ways in which they are *deficient* in motility, binding ability, re-configurability, etc. Meanwhile powerful information-theoretic constructs like Active Inference climb up a tower of abstract forms to the point where it says next to nothing about the actual material realization of inference. The same goes for trying to reduce life to thermodynamics: the statistical mechanics of heat underdetermines realizable forms.

This assertion makes (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1838 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1841 >>1853:

>>1837
Here I'm not making claims about current gen silicon as a substrate for minds. You are correct this has not been demonstrated. Largely this is just the absence of your first requirement which is a scientific theory of mind. We simply aren't there yet and there probably won't be theoretical demonstrations of feasibility until well after it's been accomplished physically. Engineering is running well ahead of theory on this stuff. Materialism as such only implies that there is some class of physical substrates out of which minds can be built.

In the absence of a real physical theory of mind within materialism, we are proceeding on the provisional hypothesis that it is about information, and that it's computable. If that hypothesis holds, then a mind can be implemented on any sufficiently large general purpose computer (by the church turing thesis). Computability would be the substrate-class of your second requirement. Silicon is just our best existing general computation substrate, despite its notable inefficiencies. (I'll just tag the embodiment issue here to note I don't think it's either a fundamental barrier nor a contradiction of this view). I'd be very interested in real reasons to doubt this hypothesis that aren't just "we haven't proven out its big implication by building true AGI yet".

In any case I'm not sure why this would make you doubt that I'm applying materialism, as this seems like the straightforward implication: if the mind or more exactly the sense-mind-muscle-environment feedback system is fully physical, it is probably some combination of computable and mechanical in the usual way and therefore substrate independent.

(Just to be clear I'm making no claim about *particular* minds being transferrable or the mind being somehow "the same" or whatever on a different substrate. I was referring to replication of the principle the way a bird's wing can be reverse engineered in its various aspects and then those principles replicated in technology. The mind may likewise end up disaggregated through such a process, as airplane tech separates lift from propulsion for example. Artificial minds may separate intelligence from agency from knowledge in ways which are entirely familiar in computer science but unusual to psychology.)

Here I'm not making (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1841 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1838
> ... we are proceeding on the provisional hypothesis that it is about information, and that it's computable.

I have no objection to this hypothesis.

But (at the risk of sounding like a broken record), I consider this hypothesis unrelated to and very confusing to call "materialism."*

Information is all about form, not matter. It literally has "form" in the name, and not by coincidence!

*People insist on using "materialism" to mean "no supernatural entities in the ontology," but that's just a horrible usage, when everything turns on there being principles in the ontology (i.e., form) that are not matter.

I have no objection (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1845 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1846 >>1853:

A Turing machine can be implemented on pen and paper. In fact, it is absolutely essential that the Turing machine be materially bound to pen and paper: it attempts to form-alize the rote activities of symbolic calculation that we used to rely on mentats for.

The material properties of metals and semiconductors enabled the calculation and transmission of these symbols much faster than any human could. In actualizing the form of the silicon computer, the nature of the material enabled some things (and not others.)

In the agentic-relative perspective the *constructed artifact* status of the computer is clear. In fact the entire profession of the engineer is the craft of constructive proof.

The engineer of course does not create the constructive proof ex nihilo. He starts with an aesthetic creative vision for this work, then works up from existing constructive proofs towards his goal. One of the things I like about how Whitehead foregrounds creative experience is that it actually naturalizes this, the most important task of the engineer.

That man, upon expanding his powers, should turn this new way of relating back towards himself is an entirely natural consequence. Using the new model to generate new insights is good and right.

However, a problem with reductionist mindsets is that it's possible to attempt to reduce the content of nature down to a point of absurdity. Obviously this doesn't itself mean reduction is wrong, but:
a) "My body operates in a manner that can be related to the operation of a computer" is a fine statement to begin the task of building something more like our body.
b) "I can reduce the operation of intelligence to computation that operates under information-theoretic constraints that I am capable of meaningfully encoding in a newer, better version of my computer" is mostly said by people who haven't spent years building humility in the art of computers.

This is made most clear when investigating the material form of man, the structures and processes that make him up! The form of the Turing machine, an artifact of man, is ultimately a poor fit for man himself: he contains many more multitudes.

A Turing machine can (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1846 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1847 >>1849 >>1853:

>>1845
You'll have to say more about why you think b) is wrong and what's the difference to a). In both cases we're looking at man as an engineered artifact (with the engineer being Gnon), and asking what it would take to reverse engineer him and replicate or improve on his essential capabilities. In other words, is it within the capacities of man to engineer superior man (the ubermensch)? Is this in fact an engineering task or is it some other kind of task (magic, politics, breeding, impossible, etc)? Separately there are questions about whether computers (machines that can simulate a large finite turing machine) are a viable substrate for the mind of this hypothetical engineered ubermensch. My argument has been yes and yes. Yes, the way man approaches the world through engineering is adequate to create the ubermensch, though we are still a ways off. And yes, computers and robotics is a viable substrate for the mind of the super-man.

Now I'm about to say the least materialist thing I've said here, which is that this cannot be done in its most interesting extent *purely* by man's hand and will (contra Yudkowsky et al), but requires active blessing and assistance from Gnon. (Though I would argue this is true of all engineering). Specifically, it is not within the capacity of man to make no errors, and any finite engineer needs empirical feedback to correct his errors. But even more pointedly, even if man made no subjective errors, his perspective itself contains errors and the only way out is actually to make some subjective errors deliberately if necessary and allow Gnon to correct him by selecting the actual best result from among them. This is the secret meaning of the random errors step in evolution, and the only way our subjective values stay grounded in reality. Thus engineering is a species of divination and a working design contains divine revelation. For man to create something truly superior to himself, he would have to do so in error. The program of engineering the ubermensch is inherently and must be a sort of fatal leap into the unknown, putting not just yourself but your whole system of values at the mercy of nature.

Since we've brought up selection, we might as well discuss the other hypothesized path to the ubermensch, which is selective breeding of a race of supermen. Eugenics as an art will have the same fundamental limitation as engineering: you *must* accidentally or deliberately cultivate a certain level of error and feedback-from-reality to allow the will of Gnon to impinge on your breeding program. Especially because you're running this program on yourself, the alternative is you end up with a race of homogeneous type-bred retards.

You'll have to say m (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1847 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1848 >>1853:

>>1846
> what's the difference to a)
The first acknowledges that a computer has some properties as we made it that way. The second takes those properties outside of the agent-relative viewpoint and makes computation as more fundamental than it is.

> Yes, the way man approaches the world through engineering is adequate to create the ubermensch, though we are still a ways off.
I agree with this in the Teilhardian way but not the Yudkowskian way: yes to the direction, no to this specific implementation.

> yes, computers and robotics is a viable substrate for the mind of the super-man.
I genuinely don't know how to communicate my extremely strong intuition in this regard to you. From inside the physicalist system I know the material structure of computers well and enough about the material structure of organisms to perceive a vast chasm between the two. I don't think it's impossible for man to construct some sort of bridge between his computational artifacts and biological organisms, but that the way will be done has basically zero relevance to the AGI debate.

I agree that the AGI debate is boring though. I suggest this is because it orbits something that is fake and gay. The construction of the ubermensch shouldn't be so dull.

> Now I'm about to say the least materialist thing I've said here, which is that this cannot be done in its most interesting extent *purely* by man's hand and will (contra Yudkowsky et al), but requires active blessing and assistance from Gnon. (Though I would argue this is true of all engineering).
I find all of this compelling. Can you reduce Gnon to material?

The first acknowledg (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x281
said (8mo ago #1848 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1850 >>1852 >>1853:

>>1847
>a vast chasm between the two
I agree there is a vast chasm, especially right now. In particular, biolife is actually existing self-replicating self-repairing adaptive nanotechnology, and industrial computers are not. What properties are you referring to?

Any ubermensch that depends in an existential way on industrial production of his parts, stationary datacenters with electricity grid, internet, software as we know it, etc would be basically botched and defective, and probably would not be able to achieve self-sustaining autopoesis. For an AGI ubermensch to achieve any kind of autopeosis escape velocity would seem to require much higher technology levels than we have. But I think you could get a rather powerful AGI borg type of thing running on the existing industrial stack that could take increasing political, military, intellectual, and economic control as the technology of real autopoesis is developed. This seems like a significant possibility to me, even if most of the existing discussion around it is fake and gay.

This is what I mean by computers and robotics being a viable substrate. Not that current generation computers and robotics will be able to produce anything as impressive as a human being even given the perfect software, but that the "techno-capital" industrial stack plus AGI can eventually achieve autopoesis and develop itself in that direction. The result would be a new form of life that doesn't actually look much like current life and is much more genealogically related to computing+robotics. That's a much weaker statement than I implied, though.

Does that help you find something to respond to to communicate why you think computers aren't a viable substrate for minds or whatever it is?

>Can you reduce Gnon to material?
Somewhat. Can you reduce being to material? Gnon of course is "Nature or Nature's God" (let's all have a Xenosystems reading thread once the passage press edition has been out long enough for everyone to pick up a copy). So in a physicalist perspective, what's nature and what's God? God is easy enough to answer: God is the first cause by which the material universe was created, and which gives it a "normative" sort of structure (even just in the physical sense that some configurations of life work, and others are dashed against the rocks of viable existence). God is not material, because God is outside the material universe that He (or it or whatever) created. Materialism does not apply to the metaphysical outside, but we also know basically nothing about what's outside the universe, and such a concept may only be a syntactic sort of artifact.

Nature is an abstraction on the thing that was created (the physical world) and its inherent laws and tendencies. This is all present in the physicalist worldview, but reified formally as "nature" we can say a bunch about it that is inconvenient to say just in terms of base physicality even if again it can be reduced to the base physicality. Nature is different from other physical concepts in that it's much more abstract and "non-material" like the economy, the ecosystem, the community, etc. It's a conceptual shorthand that can always be cashed out in some physical cause or consequence, but is convenient to speak of abstractly.

The point about needing assistance from God or Nature to create new or superior life is a point about the relationship of man to the surrounding world, and the inherent limits on self-understanding and self-overcoming from within a subjective system. If we recognize that material beings like ourselves are strongly limited in what we can know (these limits being physical limits on possible knowledge which can be studied as such), then we need some empirical process to go beyond those limits. In other words, guess and check. But sometimes the guess is so big and the check so expensive that it becomes an existential leap of faith on something you know you have no way of knowing. Such is life.

I agree there is a v (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1850 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ):

>>1848
> Nature is an abstraction on the thing that was created (the physical world) ...

I don't believe in "nature" in this modern, abstracted sense. There is only the world. Any world-spanning abstraction analogous to "the economy" is superfluous.

But I very much believe in natures in the Greek sense of phusis. These are not abstractions (except in so far as they are in our minds as known). Rather, they are real principles in the things themselves. A dog literally has a canine nature. You can check this morphologically (although you need to be careful due to the possibility of convergent evolution). More reliably, you can check this via its genome, which is what gave rise to its canine nature.

Phusis is not material, but it is definitely physical. In fact, it's where we get the English word "physical."

I don't believe in " (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x2ab
said (8mo ago #1852 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1853 >>1854 >>1860:

>>1848
> Does that help you find something to respond to to communicate why you think computers aren't a viable substrate for minds or whatever it is?
Yes. I want to differentiate between circularity in self-production, and what I'll call "basal autopoiesis": the inherent circularity at the bottom of an organism.

A factory that produces robots which produce the factory does have a circularity to it that is similar to the way a man and a woman produce a baby. What silicon lacks is the stacking of autopoietic systems that characterize organism. At the base of organisms is this autopoiesis: that e.g. the material of lipids will self-organize into a vesicle is of utmost importance to the overall structure of organisms.

What I propose is happening in the mind is that these organic structures have taken the fundamental experiential nature of nature and concentrated it into a higher order form, and the process of basal autopoiesis is fundamental to this. It "comes from the bottom" in this sense. (I also believe it "comes from above" in another sense, but in way much more difficult to describe.)

Further, I think "intelligence" is a property that only makes sense to ascribe to beings that perform basal autopoiesis. At every level of an organism it is solving the fundamental problem of continuing to exist in the world, and it is this property that what we mean by "a goal that intelligence solves."

That silicon can augment basal autopoietic stacks, sure, that seems obviously the case.

> But I think you could get a rather powerful AGI borg type of thing running on the existing industrial stack that could take increasing political, military, intellectual, and economic control as the technology of real autopoesis is developed. This seems like a significant possibility to me
In the sense that actually existing (and novel) computing systems allow for a higher degree of control of a smaller group of men, I would agree with this.

That this is the case of course means that we must seize the crown before the Luciferians do. This task does not need yesterday's fantasies of robotic intelligence.

> Materialism does not apply to the metaphysical outside
While I don't think this is an incoherent belief I expect most people associate materialism with closing metaphysics to envelop only the physical.

> But sometimes the guess is so big and the check so expensive that it becomes an existential leap of faith on something you know you have no way of knowing.
Yes. I think this creativity is a fundamentally organic quality: our ancestors and us are constantly making existential leaps of faith, and sticking the landing is a constructive proof.

Yes. I want to diffe (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

Anonymous 0x285
said (8mo ago #1860 ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️ ), referenced by >>1862:

>>1852
> I want to differentiate between circularity in self-production, and what I'll call "basal autopoiesis": the inherent circularity at the bottom of an organism.

I agree that this notion is important for the delineation of life. I might call it "internal autopoiesis" rather than "basal," as I'm not sure the autopoesis has to be at the "bottom" of an organism. I'm not even sure that the "bottom" is well-defined. Why consider cells the bottom rather than proteins? (Of course, cells are where we first see autopoesis, but that's a circular observation.) The nonnegotiable bit seems to be it's internal to the system.

> I expect most people associate materialism with closing metaphysics to envelop only the physical.

I think most people mean at least this by "materialism."

I agree that this no (hidden) ✔️ ✔️ --- ✖️ ✖️

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