anon_bwti

in thread "Going to bat for "hard materialism"":

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.)... 14mo ago

I believe there real

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 fundamenta... 14mo ago

Separate "semantic"

Absolutely correct, on this hypothesis.... 14mo ago

Absolutely correct,

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 featur... 14mo ago

A great way to confu

Yes, I agree that this is the key disagreement.... 14mo ago

Yes, I agree that th

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 "... 14mo ago

I agree it would be

Francis Bacon is pretty explicit about this and was widely followed, most immediately by Hobbes.... 14mo ago

Francis Bacon is pre

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 undifferen... 13mo ago

If you look at the t

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... 13mo ago

Yes, the precise str

I think AGI is certainly possible.... 13mo ago

I think AGI is certa

I have no objection to this hypothesis.... 13mo ago

I have no objection

This is an important point. We see the results of failing to cultivate feedback from reality in certain dog breeds that become increasingly fragile and ridiculous. 13mo ago

This is an important

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.... 13mo ago

I don't believe in "

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... 13mo ago

I agree that this no