I think if your concept of nihilism holds that Socrates believing that justice is inherently good is nihilistic, it's not a very useful take on nihilism.
I think it's actually a great take. In my opinion there always has been something downright creepy about justice. The way some people talk about justice and the good society is eerily similar to Norman Bates in American Psycho or corporate modernity which the movie mocks.
There is a thin line where justice crosses over into complacency, maintaining order or just being a hollow PR slogan that instead of rallying people actually pacifies them.
I think the author is right that there is something liberating about pessimism and cynicism because they refuse to play, actually challening and mocking whoever claims to know what is just or correct.
You just took Socrates out of the conversation, though. I think the point is that you can only call Socrates a nihilist by refusing to treat him seriously. From the article:
> Thrasymachus’s cynicism is so compelling that Socrates spends the rest of the “Republic” trying to prove that justice is better than injustice by trying to refute the apparent success of unjust people by making metaphysical claims about the effects of injustice on the soul. Socrates is thus only able to counter cynicism in the visible world through faith in the existence of an invisible world, an invisible world that he argues is more real than the visible world. In other words, it is Thrasymachus’s cynicism that forces Socrates to reveal his nihilism.
The logic seems to be that such an invisible world is obviously false - so obviously false that not even Socrates himself could believe it. But the absurdity of calling Socrates a nihilist is easy to see as soon as you give that invisible world a little credibility, even if only to say that Socrates could have found the idea plausible.
Yeah I was a bit taken aback when reading that part and became increasingly concerned that the author didn't know what he was talking about.
Imagine your friend asks you to count the windows on a building, so you count the rows and columns and multiply them. When he asks you how you did it so fast, you tell him, and he responds with something like: "Oh, I didn't realize you were a Nihilist." He then explains that mathematics is immaterial, and therefore non-existent. You believing in such a thing apparently makes YOU the Nihilist?
No. Nihilism is not about holding supposedly "empty" beliefs. If anything, it's the opposite; Nihilism would hold that these beliefs in the immaterial are themselves empty. Your friend might be a Nihilist, but you certainly aren't.
The content of this whole wing of thinking is "you have to have a brain-like system to have a brain-like thing". Which, fair. But what's crazy-making about it is that people have decided this sort of insight says something about mathematics and metaphysics, which it does not.
For example, this:
This observation which they refer to as the “hard problem of content” or the “covariance-is-not-content principle” is that systems acting on covariance information, while acting on information, do not constitute content-bearing systems, because to bear content is to embody claims about how things stand, when in fact they merely embody capacities to affect the world.
is just complete nonsense, and to extract the charitable reading I put in quotes above, you have to read closely for paragraph after paragrah to see that what's going on is the word "content" is reserved to mean "things brain-like things do in a brain-like way to other brain-like things in a context built for brain-like things."
Again, okay! But: it's wildly misleading to frame this as being about mathematical logic or the metaphysics of symbols, syntax and semantics.
Yes, this article is pretty much misleading end to end, and not taking into account the cost of heating is the keystone.
Everyone who thinks about this issue should stop cherry-picking some particular consumption good you think should be curtailed.
One, it's anti-humanistic, you'll end up getting slammed for telling (poorer) people from hotter areas to suck it up, and contra the article, you'll deserve it.
Two, analytically it seems to confuse even people who should know better. You have to take the whole system into account.
Directly pricing the externalities of carbon emissions solves both of these.
I got burned doing 80-90% of the four-person semester-long software engineering lab.
I think it boils down very simply: the intra-group dynamics can't be opaque to whatever mechanism regulates the group. Hence making the group dynamics unknown to the instructor but not providing group members some other mechanism does not work.
Letting students punish/fire each other would just open up lots of other ways of things being unfair that would need their own mitigations. (In the real world this takes the form, very imperfectly, of a boss' incentive alignment and employee exit.)
I think the only reasonable answer is to not make individual contribution opaque to the instructor. Git/etc (for code and documentation) may be your friend here.
Energy consumption has not stopped growing in rich societies... so long as the economy grows, energy consumption grows. The relationship isn't perfectly linear only because the available metrics are imperfect, but if you have any data that outright contradicts this rather reasonable assupmtion, please show us.
Huh, I sure put my foot in my mouth on that one... a rather big assumption I never checked. Recalibrating...
But in my defense it's worth mentioning that globally it still seems to hold true. The fact that energy consumption stopped in rich countries is apparently mostly due to the fact that manufacturing, which is one of the most energy-intensive parts of the economy, moved to poorer countries. But since the rich countries consume those manufactured products, the energy use should be counted against them too!
See my above reply to jbay808. If you include imports, CO2 emissions attributable to the US increase by 6%. Even with that 6% upward correction, primary energy consumption per capita in the US now is lower than it was in the 1970s.
Demanding "plane-ness" is the mistake here: you're throwing in a kind of glib idealism. If instead you demand "the possibility of forming lots and lots of electron bonds in a shape capable of performing flight" then the iron atoms did "have an amount" of the property necessary for being a plane.
I suppose if you define "conscious" in that way-- "this atom/electron/whatever has the possibility to be part of a system that thinks/reasons/feels/perceives"-- then yeah, panpsychism is vacuously true. But that's a wild abuse of the word "conscious" that is nothing like the its understood meaning: if nothing is not conscious, then the word is meaningless. When we try to define consciousness, we're obviously looking for the "thing" which we have but rocks and water molecules plainly don't. If you don't want "consciousnesses" to be the word for that thing, fine, but serious people are just going to ignore you, invent a new word for the thing, and carry on the original search.
And when I talk to panpsychists, I get the distinct sense that they know this and they're learning on it, and by doing so they're motte-and-baileying everyone else. They start out by saying that "electrons have consciousness", with the unspoken implication that consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan and have subjective experience, even if they won't say so. And then when someone scientifically-minded comes along and points out that that's absurd, they retreat to a new definition of consciousness that is true but pointless. We're trying to really solve the hard problem here, not handwave it away and declare victory.
Maybe I'm not a serious person, but I don't think "consciousness means the popularly-understood ability to reason and plan" is part of the common understanding of this term, and a lot of what you wrote seems like a "no true Scottsman" to me. And actually, really defining well what is meant by "consciousness" seems to be a big part of the challenge.
> We're trying to really solve the hard problem here
This seems to me to be the crux of the misunderstanding. To me, panpsychism essentially presents a perspective that it may not be a well-defined problem in the first place. Like a dog chasing its own tail. Or if you prefer, it's like the question: "why is there something rather than nothing?" who knows if there is an answer to this? I don't want to go into this too much, but to me panpsychism is basically an intuition for why the "problem of consciousness" may belong to this set of fundamental questions that we may not be able to find an answer for, and if that could conceivably be the case, then it is valuable for providing that intuition because that may be the best we can do.
You could do the overlapping space part of this in the game Descent/Descent 2 since building the levels involved actually directly creating the space partition data structure. I always thought it was incredibly cool and underused.
Yes, it's my favorite game of all time. No, I'm not sure you can really "get" the experience today. One thing older games were able to do was use time and boredom(!) for effect in a way that mostly doesn't exist nowadays with so many more well-made games with "optimized" reward systems.
I think of Grim Fandango, where a lot of the effect of the narrative comes in the way scrounging for clues by trial and error makes it feel as if you really were stuck in that town for a year. Play through quickly with a strategy guide and you won't actually get the effect of the environment.
Or take the difference between the original Zelda and the later games: I'd say the fact that the original completely lacked the well-marked trail of where you were supposed to be going and what you were supposed to be interacting with made it seem as if you had "found" a smaller part of a wider world, and you were reacting to its logic.
Star Control II did both of these things as well as any game has. The reasons for your actions were always intrinsic (not to make "1/5" go to "3/5" and then "5/5", quest completed!) and your course through the game was meaningful because it took place in an economy of choice, effort, and time that was consistent and weighty.
Beyond navel gazing, I think the real upshot is when something like Breath of the Wild is so universally adored, part of what you're seeing is all the potential being left on the table by the current paradigm of gerbil wheels with scrolling backdrops.
When I look back at my favorite games of all time, they all evoke this feeling of "I can go anywhere and do anything. There's so much to do and see, and I'm a little nervous to venture out because I'm not sure I'll be able to find my way back."
Star Control II is that game. So is Ultima VII, and several Infocom games that filled my
imagination and seemed bigger than they were. Before the era of a complete walkthrough a click away that will lead you by the nose.
The turning point was voiced dialogue. Once that became the norm, content became exponentially more expensive to produce, and so the size of the worlds shrank.
Sure, but the context was whether StarControl was already an instance of a game where other content creation had to compete for resources with spoken dialogue. It wasn't.
Modern examples of this are GTA5 and Zelda: Breath of the wild. They are not endless but huge open worlds that evoke similar feelings and emotions to what you describe
I found Horizon Zero Dawn somewhat similar. There were obviously edges, but they appeared natural and weren't always where you thought they would be. e.g., you could actually scale fairly rugged and steep cliffs and end up in places other games would never let you get near.
Superbly put. I miss the days of wandering into unfamiliar lands in Ultima VII - you never knew who or what you'd run into (and they'd be colourful characters and enemies - not just variants on a theme). I've read good things about BotW, and I'm glad this sort of living, open world still appears now and then in gaming.
I replayed Star Control II a few months ago and felt it held up surprisingly well. If you get bored, the whole game has already been mapped out, so you can easily speed-run it.
It holds up every time I play it too, but it's certainly not going to create any zealots playing it for the first time today.
I wrote copious notes while I played that game, something that I tried to do recently with a game, but eventually gave up in a moment of weakness and just looked for FAQs online. This was something you could do in 1992, I certainly had internet then, but you had to stop playing your game, possibly reboot, and then dial your modem, and try finding the answer with something like gopher, or hope that a local BBS had people talking about it. Basically it was enough bother that you'd power through a lot more than you would today.
I also largely consider SC2 to be one of the first incrementals ever produced. I don't think there's any way you could beat the game the first time you played it, without knowing some key locations. There was just too much to explore. Like the first rainbow planet I found allowed me to make enough progress, that I think I beat the game the following playthrough. But like the article mentioned, this accidental incremental element just doesn't really fly today, especially for a game that can take hours of investment.
I bought Star Control 2 in a retail box, and it came with a big fold-out map of all of the stars, which I still have in a box somewhere. Granted, the map didn't tell you exactly what you would find at each star system, but it did subtly mark points of interest (which I failed to notice until after I had completed the game the first time).
Without the FAQs online, there is a whole lot of grinding to do for star systems with resources worth mining on them, and the "fuel" system makes random grinding much more tedious.
True, every time I pick up the game for a replay, it's an instant "sell all landers until the (un)signed integer handling breaks and rake in unlimited Resource Units". Then I otherwise play normally and have a blast without the tedium of fuel.
I've resisted this on nearly every playthrough. I actually find it fun, the exploration for resource rich systems felt sandbox-y. You only need to hit a few and you're mostly set.
Which only shows how ahead of its time it was. Modern games love to fill your time with tedious resource grinds that can only be made tolerable by having the wiki open while you play.
