Lost in Space
Well, the idea is that if you don't discard your idealistic notions of selfdom, you'll be a victim of the coming Mind Control apocalypse. Or possibly that we should all just give up because we'll be zombies to corporate Mind Control anyway.
edited 9th Oct '10 3:30:36 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The Ant King
Doublethink, man, doublethink.
Kill all math nerds
The Ant King
I do think everyone here is underrating the disturbance that scientific proof that all of our art, literature, relationships, and religious concepts are based on misconceptions could cause.
Kill all math nerds
Lost in Space
Not at all. People will simply ignore what they don't like. It's got longstanding precedent in human history. This one is particularly easy because it's science messing around with aesthetics, two great tastes that do not taste great together.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The Ant King
Another fear is the improved ability to destroy/torture people. We tend to view our minds as being able to separate themselves from whatever's happening to our bodies, but that might stop being true.
Kill all math nerds
Lost in Space
Again, baloney. The idea of being able to "distance oneself" from torture is a myth. The psychological effects of prolonged torture are well explained and no normal human can resist them effectively. "Psychological distancing" is part of the known pathology of torture victims and is easily predicted by the torturer.
edited 11th Oct '10 7:24:38 PM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The critique which I think is the sharpest is the suggestion that I have “drastically over-evaluated consciousness.” Given my own interpretative schema, I see this as a kind of ‘decentred, meh, ’ response, the idea being that the problem is only a problem if you buy into some kind of centripetal notion of consciousness in the first place – which I certainly haven’t for over twenty years now. Nevertheless, this is the response I get from most of my theory-head friends.
The ‘priority of the fragmentary’ is pretty much an article of faith amongst those of a continental philosophical persuasion, which is all well and fine, except that if you read closely, they seem to very selective in the how and what of their considerations. So for instance, selves can be fragmentary. Intentions and affects, certainly. Norms and concepts to a lesser extent, perhaps (because we need these to get our critiques off the ground in the first place). But how about things like contextuality?
When we can apprehend only bits that we tend to confuse for wholes, the most obvious question is one of whether we are apprehending anything at all. What if all the semantic furniture is fundamentally broken all the way down? I’m not sure the force of this question requires a “drastic over-evaluation of consciousness” for traction.
Lost in Space
Umm, pseudo-intellectual gibberish? Stream of consciousness musing on how our perception of "consciousness" is nothing more than the agglomeration of a bunch of random perceptions that just happen to give us the illusion of having free will and/or choice. And some Take Thats at his "narrow-minded, provincial colleagues".
edited 12th Oct '10 6:51:05 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
The Ant King
No, no, they think that the self is a fragmented, weak, irrational thing, but he thinks that an even more fragmented, weak, irrational thing!
Kill all math nerds
The Ant King
This post was thumped by the Codfish in a Derby Hat
edited 7th Aug '11 7:06:38 PM by NeuroBuddha
The Ant King
'kay
Kill all math nerds
edited 7th Aug '11 7:06:31 PM by NeuroBuddha
The Ant King
Maybe you think that, but I imagine deep-sea fish have different ideas.
And rocks too, probably. Try convincing icebergs, they seem like they might be open to the concept.
edited 7th Aug '11 5:23:41 PM by Myrmidon
Kill all math nerds
edited 7th Aug '11 7:06:23 PM by NeuroBuddha
The Ant King
Well it's good to know that little things and big things are both more real than medium-sized things.
Kill all math nerds
edited 7th Aug '11 7:06:07 PM by NeuroBuddha
The Ant King
Nice to know.
Kill all math nerds
But yeah, eliminative materialism is retarded. Let's purposefully ignore 'qualia' for the sake of being assholes! It's obvious the first-person perspective cannot be reduced to the 3rd-person, though they are correlated (aka the 'hard problem of consciousness').
edited 7th Aug '11 5:48:46 PM by NeuroBuddha
The Ant King
I agree.
Kill all math nerds
Fuzzy Orange Doomsayer
Just looked up eliminative materialism to find out what it was. My first thought was "what the fuck?" My second thought was "Isn't this just Gilbert Ryle's logical positivism under a new name?" (Mind you, I never did figure out what the hell Ryle was talking about.)
edited 8th Aug '11 3:00:57 AM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful
Also how does "neuroscientists are finding counter-intuitive stuff, and corporations are looking into using their finding" equal "we have to face the possibility that everyone is going to become a nihilist"?
Kill all math nerds