How does the World view America these days?

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEuyiBZA0dA

  On 11/28/2015 at 6:54 PM, coax said:

 

  On 11/28/2015 at 2:22 AM, LimpyLoo said:

I

Right-wing people (of which I deem JE an honorary member for his highly-immoral attitudes about blasphemy revenge killings) are turning my views more and more radical each day

 

All of my relatives are republicans, not to mention most of Maine

 

Bah

What sort of radical views do you hold? Who / what are you watching?

Well, what I want to see in this world is everyone living as safely, freely, comfortably, and for as long as possible (and as long as you don't harm the people around you, you have the right to do whatever the fuck you please)

This, i think, is the most important principle regarding society

The hard part, of course, is figuring out how to deal with people who aren't on board with such a principle

This is something I think about semi-obsessively, every day, everytime I read the news: for instance, a couple days ago there was a guy in Detroit or Chicago (I forget which) who robbed an 80yo man, and then doused him in gasoline and set him on fire to cover his tracks...and then the BLM shooting and the Planned Parenthood shooting...

So recently I've come to the opinion that murderers (and rapists, and other such monsters) shouldn't be allowed to procreate, as I feel that civilization has a right to defend itself against being poisoned by their shitty, destructive, anti-social genes

Parenting is another thing I've been thinking about lately...there was recently a gang dispute (again, I think in Chicago) where a 9yo boy was (purposely) killed in retaliation

Whatever it is that creates such fucking monsters--e.g. genes, parenting, poverty (although clearly povery alone doesn't create monsters)--needs to be addressed in an extreme way if we ever hope to make this world a truly decent place

I know alot of shitty parents, and not suprisingly they raise shitty kids, and these shitty kids seem to be the ones executing 9yo's and trying to rape/murder my girlfriend and shooting up health clinics and immolating elderly people for a few bucks

I don't know what the specific solution to shitty parenting is, but due to the immense harm it does to society, I don't think people have the *right* to be shitty parents (in economics, this would be called an 'externality,' a harm created by bad parents and inflicted upon society; thus society has a right to 'offset' such externalities, however that might be done)

The earth is a shared space (for better or worse) and that being the case, I think civilization has a right to defend itself against shitty people, beyond what it currently does

---

As far as who/what has influenced my recent 'radicalization'...mostly just reading moral philosophy, psychology, econonics, population ethics, metaethics, game theory, AI research...these fields are fertile ground for new ideas, as discussion tends not to be impeded by taboo or political considerations...

Philosophers especially generate novel ideas...i'm a huge fan of Derek Parfit, Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Peter Singer

So anyway...

Whenever I travel to a new country for work, usually the first thing people ask me when they find out I'm American is about guns, then why are Republicans so insane, and don't Americans realize they are destroying our country. It makes me sad, this is how a lot of people view US, the media sensationalizes the violence so much, which then fuels Americans' own views, makes them feel justified in being aggressive and mistrustful of others that don't look like them. The US media has become really poisonous IMO, it fuels anti-Muslim bigotry, distrust of minorities, and with the tards on Fox News, which I'm assuming has a less educated viewership, and probly more viewers in the South than the North, you see how they get roasted on SNL for their lack of fact checking, idiots take their word for it, bc they don't know any better.

Nice. I don't really have anything to add to that, but deciding who get to pro-create is a slippery slope... Also checking out Derek Parfit, not familiar with him!

1) Not every slope is slippery

2) Derek Parfit is a genius of the highest order...his thought experiment "Parfit's Hitchhiker" is often used to test decision theories in game theory (spoiler: they all fail, save for one)

Also, he talks alot about identity (check out his thoughts on teleporters for some mind-bending stuff), our moral obligations to future (as-yet-unborn) people, the paradoxical math of population ethics, etc

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Parfit's_hitchhiker

  On 11/29/2015 at 9:35 PM, LimpyLoo said:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Parfit's_hitchhiker

Haha, the most interesting part of the first one for me was the Future Self idea. Very nice. A lot of old people cursing their younger self for being so stupid. Smoking tobacco might be an easy example, but what about all the other risky activities. Sometimes risk might be worth it (war, extreme sports, doing drugs, whatever) no clear lines there as to who has the superior rights, Now Self or future self.

I think for the remaining argument about identity, the transported self is a new self. You can't do anything but copy, and many copies could exist at the same time. But it doesn't really matter, I presume he talks about this for moral reasons not technical analysis

I saw a video with him earlier tonight. I don't agree with everything he says but a lot of it. Like he compared saving a drowning child in your proximity and saving him, to a poor kid in Africa, and that it's the same responsibility. Personally I would get into all kinds of notions about jobs, technology, infrastructure and so forth since saving a kid in Africa is more than just pouring money, in that sense it's more like saving a drowning child every day all the time, not just one.

There's not even any real continuity between the active conscious self between the time we fall asleep and wake up again, is that any different to the idea of the teleported self? The nature of identity and teleportation is a pretty common trope in science fiction btw, it predates Parfit's formulation.

1) the "drowning child" argument wasn't Parfit...you must've been watching Steven Pinker

2) Parfit's point about teleportation is actually really subtle and (I think) pretty novel:

At first it appears that his point is rather mundane: that the person that steps into the teleporter is not the same person that steps out the other side (and that, if the teleporter malfunctioned and left the 'original' intact and fatally wounded, the 'original' would take no comfort in the thought that the 'new' him will survive)

That's old, 'ship of theseus' stuff

Rather, what he says is that (essentially) the difference between you today and you yesterday is the same difference between the 'original' and the person that steps out the other side

The simple fact that you could (conceivably) travel back in time to yesterday and argue over whether 'yesterday you' should take out the trash now or put it off until tomorrow (thus burdening the 'today you')...shows the idea of a unified-identity-across-time as problematic...

That was exactly my point with respect to falling asleep and waking up again. I don't think it's a more subtle point, just the logical conclusion of the teleportation idea. This was something that seemed obvious to me as a fourteen year old reading science fiction novels from the 60s and earlier, so I can't imagine it's a new idea.

Oh yeah sorry

hadn't read your second post

this might be the worst thread on the internet

call me crazy, but i think no matter how someone tries to word a clever sounding argument, there's a pretty damn big difference between going to sleep at night and waking up the next day 'a different person', and stepping into a device that disassembles you at a molecular level, or whatever it does which essentially kills you.

  On 11/30/2015 at 1:10 AM, MisterE said:

call me crazy, but i think no matter how someone tries to word a clever sounding argument, there's a pretty damn big difference between going to sleep at night and waking up the next day 'a different person', and stepping into a device that disassembles you at a molecular level, or whatever it does which essentially kills you.

If your only objection is that one is more extreme than the other, then that's not really an objection

are you just a suicidal nihilist or what limpy? lemme guess, death is irrelevant to you? because a guy in a magazine said your death is no different than the fact of going to sleep?

if what he says is true and you really agree with it, why not just shut the teleporter at point B off and not make the copy of you? lets just say you stepped into teleporter a, which we can now just describe as a machine that disintegrates you. and that's it. nothing else. more extreme than going to sleep, for sure, but so what?

why is the copy even necessary? how does it's creation somehow complete this thing in a way that makes it OK? why not lets all just step into machines that destroy us and be done with it.

oh this reminds me limpy, i have a really cool idea, you should love this-

giant pistons, in space. giant space pistons.

ok so you'd have this huge platform in space basically, it's solid like steel, smooth as possible, maybe a few hundred yards/meters across. it doesn't have to be in space but i like to think it's in space. so anyway you can go lay on it, because, and this is the fun part, every half hour or so, this huge piston smashes into it with incredible force. such force that you're liquified and just shot out the sides in all directions, all 360 degrees, just a sheet of liquid flying through space, or like a ring that's expanding outward in space. there's a big line of people who made a pilgrimage to this thing, waiting their turn.

again more extreme than going to sleep but apparently that's irrelevant. so it should be totally cool/ok. if i'm going to commit futuristic suicide in some crazy machine i'd want it to be a giant space piston, not some box that has a sign that says 'teleporter' on it, that disintegrates me when i step into it. so some copy of me can step out the other side and study rocks on mars. whos the more hardcore nihilist now limpy, ya fuckin pussy

  On 11/30/2015 at 12:40 AM, LimpyLoo said:

The simple fact that you could (conceivably) travel back in time to yesterday

Ah yes, the simple facts of time travel. I'm sold

PS I could conceivably bang your mom in Andromeda

1) The idea isn't that death is irrelevant, the idea is that we are the ship of theseus

2) the original question is 'if you step into a teleporter here on earth that destroys you and assembles atoms into an identical copy of you on the moon: is that you traveling to the moon? or are you simply being killed and copied?'

The problem is that there is no definition of personal identity that stands up to scrutiny

Memory? You'd be the same person wven if you got amnesia (wouldn't you?)

Identical assembly of atoms? A copy won't be you, at least not phenomenologically (see above where 'original' gets fatally injured and is not comforted by thought that his noon copy will survive)

thanks for describing the basics of the situation to me as if i'm completely unaware of the teleporter bullshit-a-dox even though i'm posting about it and you're basically repeating a post you made like 5 or so posts ago. i unnerstand now, how silly of me (seriously though why am i in this thread)

The Social Brain Creates Identity

  On 11/30/2015 at 1:53 AM, MisterE said:

thanks for describing the basics of the situation to me as if i'm completely unaware of the teleporter bullshit-a-dox even though i'm posting about it and you're basically repeating a post you made like 5 or so posts ago. i unnerstand now, how silly of me (seriously though why am i in this thread)

So what's your objection? That I'm overanalyzing things and that really it's all as simple as it appears?

the ship of theseus thing is stupid to apply to a human as if it says we're an entirely different person only one day later. there may be small changes, but they're small. its a gradual progression, of the same organism. dismantling that organism will always be... dismantling that organism. it doesn't matter whether you make a copy of it on the other side of the galaxy/universe or not. it doesn't matter whether the copy is made 500 years from now or within the next plank unit which would probably violate some kind of principal of the universe since you have to analyze the structure, convert it to data, transmit that data somewhere else and reconvert it to matter. you could never do all that within one step. but it doesn't even matter. a copy is a copy. if you have no problem with killing yourself because a copy of you is made from some digital data on the other side of the galaxy at some point afterwards, you shouldn't have a problem just killing yourself period. so why not get smashed in a piston?

This states the case better than I possibly could:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/