What I find most interesting about modern society is that every subculture has these hardcore adherents.
It's so predictable now. I was at a friend's house a month or so back. He was showing off his fancy outdoor pizza oven, in which he would be making pizza in that evening.
First thing I asked him is, "How deep in to this are you?" I immediately knew there had to be pizza oven nerds online arguing over which pizza spatula (called a peel I learned) is best, and the ongoing battle between wood purists vs metal fanatics.
He was wondering how I knew so much. If you look in to any interest or hobby, the rabbit hole is deep, and the politics and patterns are typically the same. So I'm not surprised it applies to firearms as well.
Simply remove the product managers or at least rip out their vision. Take that as violently threatening as you find appropriate from your personal experience with nested menus on touch screens replacing simple buttons you could operate without looking down.
Heh, people said the same thing in the 80s when all of our "greatest minds" were working in Finance.
The last time our great minds were put to a task that most people agree bettered humanity was in the 60s, when working as a government scientist in the space program was considered the best job you could get.
Making tools for the powerful to use while they manipulate the weak is not merely a waste. It's actively harmful. We're summoning monsters today that we'll have to fight tomorrow.
On addition to thinking about "how much better could tech be" I insist we begin thinking abt "how much simpler and more peacefully could we live?"
Why extract so many resources to run gambling and adtech servers? Why doom infants abroad to mining? Why invade international boundaries to get their resources?
The really sad part is that they could even use that same technology for good AND profit. If it's true that (for example) the facebook algorithm knows if someone is depressed, people would pay real money for the algorithm to shape their behavior and mood for the better.
VLC has a few nits, e.g. common settings and useful functionality buried somewhere. Like mouse gestures for instance, you have to go out of your way to enable them and cannot customize the mapping.
mpv on the other hand, I have multiple config profiles different viewing purposes. It introduced me to ffmpeg, which as someone who became a dev later in life, made me more comfortable with using cli tools and diving in to documentation. Being able to tinker made me feel like hackerman.gif and is one of the things that things that helped my career transition.
But yeah, not for my mom or wife, VLC is best for them.
> Just to confirm: this paper focuses on the 'awakeness' aspect of consciousness, not self-awareness
That's how I read it. I'm interested in consciousness, but neither in terms of "self-awareness" or of "awakeness". Awakeness just means you aren't asleep. The term "self-awareness" implies awareness, which might be what's meant by consciousness, and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
Objectively self-awareness is just inner-awareness vs outer-awareness - what you might consider as another sense, but where the sensory inputs are parts of the brain rather than external (eye, ear, etc). So, the watcher and the watched are both the same - the brain.
The "self" is just a psychological construct - the actor behind our actions, which in fact is just the brain. This is just the way our brain has evolved to understand/predict an evolutionary landscape full of autonomous agents, who we need to model to predict their behavior. There's no fundamental difference between "self" (my-self) and "you" (your-self) - our brain observes some (inner or outer) entity as a causal entity, and models it.
>and it assumes there's a Self, which is a metaphysical concept, not susceptible to scientific invetigation.
I don't think this is correct.
Not only because metaphysical concepts can still be suscpeptible to scientific investigation (as can e.g. time, reality, and so on. For example for reality "do we live in a simulation" could be something some scientists do try to determine), and because some metaphysical concepts just turned into practical concepts this way.
But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
Time is not exclusively a metaphysical concept, the perception of time is.
Reality, again is a very vague word in physics. One definition is, real is that which always is, not that which is not. Material nature is subject to constant change, there is nothing in the material universe that is immovable, unchanging and eternally static and stable.
Eastern philosophy describes the reality as the 'Self', the self is eternally existing without a causation but this Self, the observer, requires an observation and hence the concept of material nature comes into place to justify the existence of the observer but the Self is mutually exclusive to the material nature. The Self is not an manifestation of the material nature, otherwise it would be ever changing, like material nature.
For science to explain consciousness, it has to drop the idea of a controlled experiment. You cannot empirically verify certain thing to be true, this is what metaphysics is for.
Made the point better than I could. Also I would just contribute that a long line of anti-science apologism has taken the form of declaring that certain concepts are beyond the reach of scientific investigation. Evolution, human nature as understood in evolutionary terms, orbital mechanics past a certain point of Newtonian modeling, anaesthesia, etc.
> But also because self-awareness and the concept of self can be defined in quite practical terms too (e.g. a higher level loop on top of regular thinking referencing the lower level, or similar ideas like in Hofstadter).
I treasure my dog-eared copy of GEB. Having said that, Hofstadter sets out to argue for a "emergent phenomenon" explanation of consciousness, and I don't think his "loops within loops" argument works. It's not really an argument; it's finger-painting. He's trying to point in the direction of an argument (which is fine, even admirable; GEB is almost entirely concerned with allusion and suggestion. It's supposed to make you ask questions).
It's quite easy to argue that the idea of a self (or the sense of being a self) is emergent, or an illusion; it's much harder to explain "idea" and "sense" in those terms, unless you resort to non-conscious[0] senses and non-conscious ideas.
Basically, I agree that you can explain everything in terms of emergent phenonemena, except the subjectivity of consciousness/awareness. We experience it directly, we know it's real (it's the only thing we know!), and nobody has come up with a way of showing that it's real, or even saying what it is, or how we could show it's real. Dougie's loops are just a distraction.
[0] I say "non-conscious" rather than "unconscious" because I don't want Freudian woo to intrude.
Yes, of course. I think I was suggesting that "awareness" and "consciousness" could be considered to be synonyms. If that's correct, then you can't use self-awareness as evidence of consciousness, because it begs the question (i.e. circular reasoning).
I'ts a bit more complicated than just awakeness, though. If you flash an image on a screen for a very short period of time, you won't ever be able to remember what it said or be able to tell someone what it said, but it can still have a slight effect on your behavior for about a second. There is information that are senses are providing to our brain that never makes it to conscious awareness.
Sometimes people have brain injuries that prevent the transfer of information from some parts of their brain to their consciousness. Someone with blindsight has an injury that prevents them from being consciously, in this sense, aware of their visual field. They can still pick up items in front of them when asked. But they can't describe what is in front of them, and if the close their eyes they can't remember where something is and still pick it up like a normal person can.
I'd highly recommend Consciousness and the Brain for an in-dpeth look at research in this area.
Right, and I think the key here is that we should be ready to see key elements we believe are necessary for conscious to be distributed across numerous systems, rather than uncovering a singular unitary thing. And so it's not a matter of "oh, this study only found XXX but it didn't find consciousness".
But it might be that the process of coming to full empirical understanding is that we take an idea that used to be black-boxed, and open it up to find numerous particular mechanisms, numerous layers. Kind of like how originally we thought there was one Vitamin B but then came to learn there were numerous subclasses that were different in important ways.
That's true, but its also true that some connections might be reasonably said to be key for sensory information to find its way into working memory so I wouldn't dismiss the title.
Why do you find self-awareness to be the more fascinating area of study? It makes complete sense that something could be self-aware if it could be aware of anything at all. What more do you need to research/understand about self-awareness?
It is far more interesting to me that there is “awakeness” to experience than that we can be aware of our selves (in the same way we can be aware of anything else).
A complete understanding of sentience including its causes would be a far more satisfying and ethically impactful body of knowledge than a complete understanding of self-awareness (assuming they are not inextricably linked somehow).
Awareness is just the basic state of most animal life, it has to be for it to function. It isn't particularly more interesting than a venus fly trap.
Self-awareness is something altogether different. The ability to look inward and analyze oneself, to effect the environment rather than just be a part of it...these are massive departures from the norm, responsible for everything that makes humanity great and terrible.
How could that not be the more fascinating area to study?
Because while self-awareness may be fertile ground for interesting emergent behavior, it is not mysterious. There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”. We basically know what’s going on at the ground level.
Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient. And since all that exists in our lives is our collection of sentient experiences of reality, this is a pretty big ethical question.
I think you have that mixed around. Basic awareness/consciousness/awareness is not especially notable or exciting, it's incredibly common and many aspects are well understood.
Self-awareness, an actual consciousness and inner voice, is exceedingly rare and poorly understood, and I think it would therefore be significantly more fascination since so much is yet to be discovered and understood.
> There is no “hard problem of self-awareness”.
Well, there is. The type of consciousness being referred to in "Hard problem of consciousness" is of a type that would require self-awareness as a prerequisite to exist. It's almost synonymous with it.
> Whereas with sentience (awareness), we have no explanation for why any physical state is sentient rather than nonsentient.
You're using these terms in a way that seems unorthodox, but unless I'm misunderstanding your point, we do understand, the answer is brain development and evolution.
This is of course not meant as proof or knowledge of any kind, but just that the way I’m using the words is what the “average” of how people in books and on the internet would use those words.
I don’t understand how “evolution and brain development” cause sensations to arise. What part of our biology is the part directly producing sentience experience? How would you explain why we experience anything instead of nothing? Can we replicate it in a non-biological system?
In the past we used the word "sentience" for this, but sci-fi confused "sentience" with "sapience," and now we have four terms that are meaningless, causing pointless arguments because different people interpret them in different ways.
- consciousness
- sentience
- self-awareness
- sapience
(It really doesn't help that 3/4 these are too poorly-understood to even have a good formal definition.)
I'm okay to live and let live and not litigate differences here as long as usage is meaningful and contributes to precision (although it would be perfectly fair to insist that's exactly what's being lost here).
I understand, for instance, that for some people there's an important difference between morality and ethics, but modern scholarship in meta-ethics that is perfectly up to speed on this vocabulary sees no benefit to policing that particular distinction.
>Personally, I find self-awareness the more fascinating area of study
I know what you mean by that, and fundamentally I agree with the basic idea. But (!!!) I don't think the idea of self awareness is nearly so critical as its made out to be, and I think it gets conflated with the other thing, described as the something-its-like-to-be (SILTB) quality.
I think outward, worldly awareness is enough, and whether or not a 'self' is among the things that fall into awareness (1) isn't strictly necessary, as that self might be backgrounded and unconscious, and (2) is sometimes just adopted as phrasing to indicate the presence of the SILTB quality even though I don't think it necessarily has anything to do with that.
Worked on a congressional campaign and got to peek in on the legislating side. Was surprised by the congeniality as a young ideologue who expected things to be more adversarial.
The real eye opener was how much overlap there was with donors giving to both sides in a campaign. Guess you need to hedge your bets.
The GoodFellows podcast by the Hoover Institute is high quality. [0]
The group is composed of former National Security Advisor, H.R. McMaster, an economist and a historian, so you get diverse intellectual conservative perspectives.
It's so predictable now. I was at a friend's house a month or so back. He was showing off his fancy outdoor pizza oven, in which he would be making pizza in that evening.
First thing I asked him is, "How deep in to this are you?" I immediately knew there had to be pizza oven nerds online arguing over which pizza spatula (called a peel I learned) is best, and the ongoing battle between wood purists vs metal fanatics.
He was wondering how I knew so much. If you look in to any interest or hobby, the rabbit hole is deep, and the politics and patterns are typically the same. So I'm not surprised it applies to firearms as well.