Your comment makes me think that we have criminalized and squashed entertaining but obviously political writing out of existence :-) .
Say that somebody writes to make certain ideas more visible. For example, somebody wants people to buy the idea that amusing oneself to death is what we do (the book you mentioned). Somebody else perhaps has found that we are chronically depressed and cynic, when instead we should be thinking that a dead death itself is a fine trophy to hang on the wall during the march of progress[^1].
You can a) decide that you are set on your ways, thus entertainment should be pure and removed enough from reality so it doesn't mess with your deeply held beliefs and not read any of those books. or b) run the risk and read the thing with an open mind.
A lot of people are in the a) camp. Those who are in the b) camp would still like to be entertained a little.
It won't break the world, but it's warranted that it will break the world of people doing labor and getting paid for it. And when you think of it, even being a mediocre (or even moronic) investor is practicing a form of labor, so not even capital ownership is safe in the long run. And yes, generational wealth is a thing but there are tides that slowly shift wealth from A to B (e.g. from USA to China). Have a machine smart enough with even a sliver of motivation (intrinsic or extrinsic) to get some wealth for itself, and just watch what happens...
Well, US has the base near Guantanamo; I haven't been to that side but I have been to Guantanamo proper... trust me, that place is hot and has mosquitoes and two decades ago the naval base was almost as infamous as North Korea. And then there's the newly opened "alligator Alcatraz"... I think Mr. President have gotten some ideas for Greenland :-)
I mean, they wouldn't be if I had any money invested in Nvidia (I foretold their rise twenty years ago, but then as today I was too poor to keep any investments, in Nvidia or otherwise).
But, in general, I think we are going to keep building ocean-boiling amounts of compute, which we are going to use to do many grisly things and some good ones. I hope I can avoid the bad stuff and benefit from the good, despite it being statistically unlikely. It's called hope :-) .
> In that sense life is obviously not a computation: it makes some sense to view DNA as symbolic but it is misleading to do the same for the proteins they encode.
Proteins can also be seen as sequence of symbols: one symbol for each aminoacid. But that's beyond the point. Computational theory uses Turing Machines as a conceptual model. The theories employ some human-imposed conceptual translation to encode what happens in a digital processor or a Lego computer, even if those are not made with a tape and a head. Anybody who actually understands these theories could try to make a rigorous argument of why biological systems are Turning Machines, and I give them very high chances of succeeding.
> These proteins are solving physical problems, not expressing symbolic solutions to symbolic problems
This sentence is self-contradictory. If a protein solves a physical problem and it can only do so because of its particular structure, then its particular structure is an encoding of the solution to the physical problem. How can that encoding be "symbolic" is more of a problem for the beholder (us, humans), but as stated before, using the aminoacid sequence gives one such symbolic encoding. Another symbolic encoding could be the local coordinates of each atom of the protein, up to the precision limits allowed by quantum physics.
The article correctly states that biological computation is full of randomness, but it also explains that computational theories are well furnished with revolving doors between randomness and determinism (Pseudo-random numbers and Hopfield networks are good examples of conduits in either direction).
> ... whatever.
Please don't use this word to finish an argument where there are actual scientists who care about the subject.
> I don't think it's necessary to completely discard the idea. However, I do think it's important, at the end of it all, to ask: Okay, so what's the utility of this framework? What am I getting out of setting up my point of view this way?
That's the important question indeed. In particular, classing life as a computation means that it's amenable to general theories of computation. Can we make a given computation--an individual--non-halting? Can we configure a desirable attractor, i.e. remaining "healthy" or "young"? Those are monumentally complex problems, and nobody is going to even try to tackle them while we still believe that life is a mixture of molecules dunked in unknowable divine aether.
Beyond that, the current crop of AI gets closer to anything we have had before to general intelligence, and when you look below the hood, it's literally a symbols-in symbols-out machine. To me, that's evidence that symbol-in symbol-out machines are a pretty general conceptual framework for computation, even if concrete computation is actually implemented in CPUs, GPUs, or membrane-delimited blobs of metabolites.
The first level "why" at least is straightforward: Christianism. Even when not directly imposed, it's still the basis of the Western system of values and morals.
But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)? Was it property and rules about property? Was it to maximize the number of children, so that the group/tribe/kingdom would be militarily stronger than the neighbor? Or maybe it was to prevent some sort of very specific and concrete problem, real or perceived, that arose from tolerating free love, and that we today have no clue about?
> But it's fascinating to think about the second level "why": what made people encode monogamy and heterosexuality into their cultural canons (including their mainstream religion)?
I dunno about heterosexuality being encoded[1] into cultural canons, but for monogamy it's actually quite simple: violence.
Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
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[1] As far as heterosexuality goes, it's not "encoded by wilful intention" so much as "this is the default". IOW, most people are happy going with the default, so if you make something opt-out, the majority won't opt-out. Same for opt-in. This is why countries that have opt-out organ donors have more organs donated, while countries that have opt-in organ donations have a fraction of he opt-out countries.
Literally one of the main points of the book: the church’s mandate and enforcement of monogamy in Europe lowered violence so much that a different kind of society emerged.
> Do you really want half your testosterone-fueled 18-28 year old males unable to attract a mate? There'll be continuous fighting to kill of the excess males.
This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Monogamy is possessiveness, and possessiveness is what drives violence.
>If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
* In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
* It makes marriage intrinsically more complicated simply because of the more complex interactions. For example, if Alice is married to Bob, who is married to both Alice and Carol, who is married to both Bob and David, what are Alice and David to each other? Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
* Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
> In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.
You can use a condom. TIL, rubber condoms are a mid-19th century invention; a significant upgrade over sheep gut.
The alternative is called polyfidelity.
> [...] what are Alice and David to each other?
They're called Metamours.
> Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?
It's called a polycule.
> Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?
You write a will.
By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are. Try figuring out how to reject inheritance (e.g. of debt) in your jurisdiction.
> There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.
Yes, the reason is to reinforce division and oppression. One "side" is underprivileged, the other has to fight each other for supremacy. The stronger few win, everyone else loses. History is littered with examples.
Don't get me wrong, these are all very good questions. But we've figured all of these things out quite a while ago. People do live like that, and form lasting, loving communities. I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
Sure. Now. But monogamy and polygyny are a little older than condoms.
>Metamours [...] polycule
You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics. Knowing what a "metamour" is, says nothing about what the formal and informal responsibilities of the parties involved are or should be with respect to each other. My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>You write a will.
How did that work before most people knew how to write?
>By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are.
That's not an argument in favor of legally legitimizing polycules.
>the reason is to reinforce division and oppression
I mean, I gave several reasons why historically either monogamy or asymmetric polygamy would have been preferred over symmetric polygamy, that have nothing to do with oppression.
>I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.
Sure, maybe. Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated. If monogamous and polygynous societies are more common than polyandrous and polycular societies, it's probably for a reason.
> You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics.
Yes, that's what I've tried to imply. You name things, so you can discuss them in more abstract terms, so you can form a social & legal framework around those concepts.
> My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.
>> [...] not having to define [...] is a reason to forbid [...].
Suppress the concept. "We don't talk about that."
> How did that work before most people knew how to write?
How did people enter agreements?
> Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated.
Agree. It's also how dictatorships rise. Another form of oppression that concentrates power and fires back at the group who have initially supported it. Another lose-lose.
> This is nonsense. Non-monogamy is relinquishing exclusivity. If a man can have multiple women, but a woman can't have multiple men, it's just a different form of oppression.
Only if your argument is that this behaviour is nurture, not nature. IOW, if your argument is "this behaviour is completely disconnected from instinct and has nothing to do with evolutionary pressure", then sure, your argument makes sense.
Many of the great apes, and indeed, other animals, don't think in terms of political soundbites, though, so we can readily observe that the behaviour "violence over mating rights" is a thing that developed in those creatures that eventually evolved into other creatures which evolved into pre-hominids which evolved into hominids which evolved into us.
Some things are instinct. It's a very large stretch to claim that violence over mating isn't instinct, but political.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that...
Violence about having an exclusive mate could be a purely cultural construct, reinforced from childhood. I can say that I always, personally, considered the idea of controlling a person abhorrent, as much as I found uninteresting the idea of orbiting my intimate life around a single person with special and very high privileges over whatever I do and think, including outside of bed. However, all my relatives were very insistent that I should date girls and marry. 100% culture, 0% nature. Of course, this is just a single data point.
The heterosexuality part being the "default" is a bit naive, because it ignores the lengths to which some people go to force their kids to be heterosexual. Again, anecdotally, my father sired two gay sons, who had to go to great lengths to have a less traumatic life. Sometimes I suspect my father wasn't that hetero himself, and was only ensuring the next generation inherited his cultural legacy/trauma.
I could consider an argument that a majority (heterosexual) imposes a cultural canon on a non heterosexual minority. But the problem with that is that we don't really know if that majority/minority split would exist without the very strong cultural conditioning. And, as I said before, I don't really believe that homophobia is something the Canaanites invented out of spite. Most likely, it was a cultural trait that conferred advantages to groups, particularly after the agricultural revolution locked human population in a cycle of growth and war for land--but that's just a pet theory of mine.
There are even theories (read the controversial book "Sex at Dawn" if you want the details) that our current cultural canons about sexuality run against what was our nature for hundreds of thousands of years.
Sounds a lot like Tom Holland - Dominion (to help the robots - "...broad history of the influence of Christianity on the world, focusing on its impact on morality – from its beginnings to the modern day.").
i don't think it's a valid way to think about society/religion/culture what your formulazation reflects.
up until just 2-3 centuries ago, people did not think about these questions in a self-deterministic way, i mean they trusted the ancestors to sorted out most of the things over the centuries, and they were not suposed to take huge social/cultural reforms, only minor adjustments. did not even have so huge view on the spacial and temporal panorama of different cultures and societies over the whle word like us today. today even just binging up this statement makes people angry like "oh those silly old people. they _unconditionally_ obeyed to whatever their parents and superiors told them. this is the way to opression and tiranny, etc, etc. not like us! we are truely grown ups today. humanity is out of the dark child days. now! now disagree to _everything_. default is «i deny»". i mean … who do you think want to fool you? i think, on average, parents wants to leave the well-tested and proven-to-be-stable fundamental ideas about the world to their children. and those dont change very often; the more fundamental the less changing world-properties are.
but changes in society started to accelerate, so came social and economic revolutions which all want to redefine as much as possible. with really big improvements in the sociology, antropology and other culture-related disciplines, people started to believe that we are watching ourself from the outside, so able to manipulate the norms and the law to "make society better". only noone has the same definiton what is "better".
There still is a cottage industry of people saying one should write this way and that, and by large they have converged to a common consensus of what's Good English. It has been a successful enterprise, and now LLMs excel at generating text inside those parameters :-) .
Now, whenever I review a book, and if it applies, I make a point of saying "the grammar and sentence structure are squeaky clean". Often, that's about the only good thing I can say of the book.
I wonder if Good English is correlated with follow-the-norms attitude in an author+editors team. Because, once you make follow-the-norms your god, it is guaranteed that the writing will be formulaic and uninteresting. And then the only thing that can save your writing (financially) is good marketing.
I think the surveillance state is gonna stay; we have been slipping into it just so and every electronic system out there wants to spy on us, beginning with our Windows and Mac computers and even the Sonos speaker. Small mystery that police forces want their slice of pie so badly.
Freedom of expression has been of a limited nature already for some years (just cast Israel in a bad light in USA and see what happens). With the coming wave of AI-powered surveillance, which may be even powerful enough to read your sexual orientation from examining direction and duration of glances in survtech feeds, we just need a small misstep (say, another twin towers-type catastrophe) for even freedom of thought to become a privilege to be had in isolated and protected places.
Freedom of speech is doing not great, but still OK in the US. The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
What now happens more is that big private companies, having huge influence on individual life in everything from communication to banking, attack people for their views. The cure for it might be to ease and speed up the way for people to push back against that. From de-monopolization to government mediators and arbitrage binding for companies (but not for the individuals so they can still sue), etc.
> The government is not prosecuting for speech, which is what the free speech protections can and should guarantee.
This has absolutely started happening, albeit not yet on a large-scale, systematic basis. Mahmoud Khalil [0] resided in the US legally when he was detained with the intention to deport.
That would be a crime. Khalil was not charged with any crime. The only conceivable reason to not charge him at this point, is because there is no evidence of him committing a crime.
Between 'the government is no prosecuting for speech' and 'the government makes up unrelated charges when they do not like your speech', as seem to happen a lot these days is only a very, very thin line. Rümeysa Öztürk comes to mind [1].
Using another pretext to target someone for their views is definitely a thing. This is not new (e.g., the Assange case) but its frequency is increasing.
I am going to offend both sides with what comes next (and curious how many downvotes it will attract), but I put only a small fraction of the blame for the increase in the above on the government which always wants to do this unless they feel a strong, popular pushback.
The real blame goes to the population that is happy to tolerate the government abuse of the laws as long as they think the blows are landing on their opponents. Silencing covid restriction protesters and BLM riots critics? Well, we are not defending antivaxxers and racists. Throwing out any idea of a due process in ICE raids? Well, we need to do something about the crime. And so on... Whereas 50 years ago, at least in the US, any jury would have thrown an attempt to break laws for a good cause out of court so the government would not even try to prosecute any of it.
In order to roll back government overreach we need to fight government overreach, even in cases where we strongly dislike the current target of that overreach. My 2c.
Tell that to anti-genocide activists who get deported for saying things like "Killing children is wrong" or "Maybe we shouldnt export guns to a Pedo-State"
I've used it for a few years; can't complain really. Perhaps it's a bit slow, but I don't notice because I already use VSCode and IntelliJ and have enteprise tooling and Teams in my Mac, so if I were to run a piece of fast software it will probably feel jarring and seizure-inducing.
Say that somebody writes to make certain ideas more visible. For example, somebody wants people to buy the idea that amusing oneself to death is what we do (the book you mentioned). Somebody else perhaps has found that we are chronically depressed and cynic, when instead we should be thinking that a dead death itself is a fine trophy to hang on the wall during the march of progress[^1].
You can a) decide that you are set on your ways, thus entertainment should be pure and removed enough from reality so it doesn't mess with your deeply held beliefs and not read any of those books. or b) run the risk and read the thing with an open mind.
A lot of people are in the a) camp. Those who are in the b) camp would still like to be entertained a little.
[^1] Yours truly. I do that in fiction. https://www.ouzu.im/
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