Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week

[Dak]

More links as in, those who commit crimes tend to lack the mental capacity for moral consideration of the impact on others? If so, I think that makes perfect sense. Didn't have time to read the whole article.

Maybe lack the capacity for consideration, maybe lack the capacity to care about the consideration, etc. I'm not sure exactly how much the paper tells us beyond that moral cognition is complex and requires the "newer" parts of the brain to a significant degree.

If that is the case, seems a more practical alternative to the categorical imperative (which doesn't really care about the effects of immoral action, only that a moral code would be universally accepted).

Even if we were to leap to an extreme interpretation that more developed relevant portions of the brain = more morality, I'm not sure exactly how that would inform morality/ethics. Obviously there's more to it than that, but off the top of my head it makes a good argument for the value of religion. Fear of a omniscient "parent" is probably more salient to a self-interested simpleton in comparison with abstract arguments and metacognitions he lacks capacity for.

 

[Einherjar86]

https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-does-exist-and-is-amenable-to-scientific-investigation

The answer is that science does all this by rejecting antirealism. In fact, the self does exist. The phenomenal experience of having a self, the feelings of pain and of pleasure, of control, intentionality and agency, of self-governance, of acting according to one’s beliefs and desires, the sense of engaging with the physical world and the social world – all this offers evidence of the existence of the self. Furthermore, empirical research in the mind sciences provides robust reasons to deny antirealism. The self lends itself to scientific explanations and generalisations, and such scientific information can be used to understand disorders of the self, such as depression and schizophrenia, and to develop this self-understanding facilitates one’s ability to live a rich moral life.

Ugh, this kind of hack writing annoys the piss out of me. I'm not even all that interested in the author's theory of a "multitudinous self"--it's fine if that's the proposed solution or working approach. I have no problem with it. But I have a big problem with this black and white notion that the self is either an illusion (it doesn't exist) or it's real, and is evidenced by our experience of selfhood.

First of all, the claim that our experience of selfhood constitutes a self completely elides the structure of argument that critiques the metaphysics of selfhood. It's amateurish and ridiculous. Second of all, it completely dismisses the plethora of interesting questions that this line of inquiry raises: is selfhood an essence, or an experience (is there a difference)? if there is such a thing as a "real" self, but we can't logically prove it, does that make our experience of selfhood more meaningful than any abstract entity that we call "the self"--and if so, is it even worth discussing what "real" selfhood is? could we distinguish between real and counterfeit selfhood, if the experience of both is the same? Why the need to reify experience into an internal fabric or substance?

Finally, and most important, why is an antirealist approach hazardous to the notion of human being and experience? Just because people like Dennett argue for an antirealist philosophy of mind (not sure Dennett would use the term "antirealist"), this doesn't mean they see the experience of selfhood as a worthless phenomenon. Dennett himself has developed the notion of the "intentional stance," which he argues is instrumental and imperative for rational human functioning. The dismissal of what we used to think of as "selfhood" doesn't translate into a degradation of human experience.

These kinds of arguments make me think we need a new definition of selfhood and the self. The old debates are getting tiresome.

 

[Dak]

I'm not sure we can escape a Cartesian self. I mean, we can theorize alternatives, but we can't have a conversation with them.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm not sure we can escape a Cartesian self. I mean, we can theorize alternatives, but we can't have a conversation with them.

The point isn't whether we can escape it; it's whether we can separate the value of experiencing selfhood in a Cartesian fashion from presuming that that experience correlates to the metaphysical substance that we call "the self." The author of that article believes that the self exists because we experience it as such. This is the error, and it's a flaw in logic that phenomenologists continue to make.

In other news: http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=7875

Pastuzyn et al [link broken] of the University of Utah, have just shown that Arc is literally an infection: a tamed, repurposed virus that infected us a few hundred million years ago. Apparently it looks an awful lot like HIV. Pastuzyn et al speculate that Arc “may mediate intercellular signaling to control synaptic function”.

Memory is a virus. Or at least, memory depends on one.

Of course, everyone’s all over this. U of Utah trumpeted the accomplishment with a press release notable for, among other things, describing the most-junior contributor to this 13-author paper as the “senior” author. Newsweek picked up both the torch and the mistake, leading me to wonder if Kastalio Medrano is simply at the sloppy end of the scale or if it’s normal for “Science Writers” in popular magazines to not bother reading the paper they’re reporting on. (I mean, seriously, guys; the author list is right there under the title.) As far as I know I’m the first to quote Burroughs in this context (or to mention that Greg Bear played around a very similar premise in Darwin’s Radio), but when your work gets noticed by The Atlantic you know you’ve arrived.

Me, though, I can’t stop thinking about the fact that something which was once an infection is now such an integral part of our cognitive architecture. I can’t stop wondering what would happen if someone decided to reweaponise it.

The parts are still there, after all. Arc builds its own capsid, loads it up with genetic material, hops from one cell to another. The genes being transported don’t even have to come from Arc:

“If viral RNA is not present, Gag encapsulates host RNA, and any single-stranded nucleic acid longer than 20-30 nt can support capsid assembly … indicating a general propensity to bind abundant RNA.”

The delivery platform’s intact; indeed, the delivery platform is just as essential to its good role as it once was to its evil one. So what happens if you add a payload to that platform that, I dunno, fries intraneuronal machinery somehow?

I’ll tell you. You get a disease that spreads through the very act of thinking. The more you think, the more memories you lay down, the more the disease ravages you. The only way to slow its spread is to think as little as possible; the only way to save your intelligence is not to use it. Your only chance is to become willfully stupid.

fwiw Burroughs wrote that "Language is a virus from outer space."

Most likely true.

 

[CiG]

[smoothly segues into Alex Jones "the Egyptians were in contact with aliens" conspiracy theory]

 

[Einherjar86]

I know that's a joke, but the findings in that link are very different than any research Alex Jones has ever done.

 

[CiG]

fwiw Burroughs wrote that "Language is a virus from outer space."

Specifically playing off this bit, Mr. Salty.

 

[Einherjar86]

I'm sugar and spice and everything nice, sir.

Yes, but Burroughs was writing fiction that was closer to reality than he probably realized--because, you know, he was a smart person. Alex Jones derives reality from the most inventive of fantasies--because he's a dumb person.

Also, language totally is a virus from outer space, if by "virus" we mean a reproductive tendency programmed into our brains, and by "outer space" we mean that we're organisms on a planet in space...

 

[CiG]

 

[Einherjar86]

Awww, don't be like that.

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

fwiw Burroughs wrote that "Language is a virus from outer space."

u read Snow Crash?

 

[Einherjar86]

Fuck yeah man, great book.

 

[Dazed and Brutal]

Fuck yeah man, great book.

Oh it's straight head cheese, his fugue passages on linguistics were fucking nuts.

 

[Einherjar86]

My teaching advisor for the semester told me a few days ago that Stephenson actually went to BU. I had no idea. Apparently his first book is called The Big U, and is based on his time on campus.

Anyway, in other news:

https://aeon.co/ideas/you-thought-quantum-mechanics-was-weird-check-out-entangled-time

The problem is that entanglement violates how the world ought to work. Information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, for one. But in a 1935 paper, Einstein and his co-authors showed how entanglement leads to what’s now called quantum nonlocality, the eerie link that appears to exist between entangled particles. If two quantum systems meet and then separate, even across a distance of thousands of lightyears, it becomes impossible to measure the features of one system (such as its position, momentum and polarity) without instantly steering the other into a corresponding state.

Up to today, most experiments have tested entanglement over spatial gaps. The assumption is that the ‘nonlocal’ part of quantum nonlocality refers to the entanglement of properties across space. But what if entanglement also occurs across time? Is there such a thing as temporal nonlocality?

The answer, as it turns out, is yes. Just when you thought quantum mechanics couldn’t get any weirder, a team of physicists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem reported in 2013 that they had successfully entangled photons that never coexisted. Previous experiments involving a technique called ‘entanglement swapping’ had already showed quantum correlations across time, by delaying the measurement of one of the coexisting entangled particles; but Eli Megidish and his collaborators were the first to show entanglement between photons whose lifespans did not overlap at all.

Seriously, what the fucking fuck.

And it gets weirder:

What on Earth can this mean? Prima facie, it seems as troubling as saying that the polarity of starlight in the far-distant past – say, greater than twice Earth’s lifetime – nevertheless influenced the polarity of starlight falling through your amateur telescope this winter. Even more bizarrely: maybe it implies that the measurements carried out by your eye upon starlight falling through your telescope this winter somehow dictated the polarity of photons more than 9 billion years old.

Lest this scenario strike you as too outlandish, Megidish and his colleagues can’t resist speculating on possible and rather spooky interpretations of their results. Perhaps the measurement of photon 1’s polarisation at step II somehow steers the future polarisation of 4, or the measurement of photon 4’s polarisation at step V somehow rewrites the past polarisation state of photon 1. In both forward and backward directions, quantum correlations span the causal void between the death of one photon and the birth of the other.

 

[Dak]

Would you like to parse practical application or meaning?

Edit: I've recently been arguing with my youngest brother he's been trying to reduce the hard problem of consciousness to irrelevance by saying "physics!", but I don't want to just say "quantum physics!" as a rebuttal.

 

[Einherjar86]

Haha, I'm not sure I can!

 

[Einherjar86]

I've recently been arguing with my youngest brother he's been trying to reduce the hard problem of consciousness to irrelevance by saying "physics!", but I don't want to just say "quantum physics!" as a rebuttal.

By appealing to physics, would he be trying to explain away the phenomenon of consciousness? That's my impression, but I don't want to presume.

I also still don't fully comprehend the quantum physics position on consciousness (I'm sure there's more than one). It's not as simple as reducing it to conscious observation, since "observation" in quantum physics means more than conscious perception.

 

[Dak]

By appealing to physics, would he be trying to explain away the phenomenon of consciousness? That's my impression, but I don't want to presume.

I also still don't fully comprehend the quantum physics position on consciousness (I'm sure there's more than one). It's not as simple as reducing it to conscious observation, since "observation" in quantum physics means more than conscious perception.

Yeah, he's being a material reductionist determinist and acting like no smart people have ever worked on this complicated problem. He's just about to turn 18 so ya know.....

 

[Dak]

http://reallifemag.com/model-citizens/

@Einherjar86 I imagine you will enjoy reading this. It was something to think about for me, because citysims are one of the game types I have enjoyed, although I always enjoy the earlier stages than the latter. At some point a city sprawls enough to stop being enjoyably manageable. This is probably one of the reasons why I liked "Banished" over larger sims like SimCity or Cities: Skylines (although I do really like Skylines).

 

[rms]

Would you like to parse practical application or meaning?

Edit: I've recently been arguing with my youngest brother he's been trying to reduce the hard problem of consciousness to irrelevance by saying "physics!", but I don't want to just say "quantum physics!" as a rebuttal.

are you sam harris and your younger brother lawrence krauss?