Bring knowledge of CFCs to a time when we’re able to make them but not able to detect the ozone problems they cause.

Curtis Yarvin “joked” that we should turn poor people into biofuel, so…

A very reassuring technology to have!

But my worry was more about them changing their business model once they get big enough.

I’ve been using Kagi for about a month now, and I think I’m gonna stick with it. Paying with dollars instead of data/attention feels more healthy for everyone involved.

(Fully realizing, of course, that there’s nothing stopping them from doing both, and that’s why we need better laws. Voting with your wallet will never be a complete solution… but it is something I can do right now.)

That feel when my phone only rendered “geneva_convenience@le…” but I still knew it was .ml before checking

Bags of dirt: The fourth little pig

“They don’t need to collect dollars in order to spend them” does not mean “They ought to spend dollars and not collect them”.

I’m only describing that collecting X amount from tariffs does not imply that spending must necessarily increase by X somewhere due to some kind of conservation of dollars that the OP seemed to assume.

Found the Randall Wray enjoyer. :)

You’re not wrong. Burning is what they used to literally do in earlier times, and the conceptual model today is exactly the same even if there’s no literal burning.

People don’t like hearing it though. Idk why.

No one.

Remember, the government is the issuer of the currency. They don’t need to collect dollars in order to spend them.

Imagine a referee removing a point from a participant.

The point doesn’t go anywhere, waiting to be reused, it just gets deleted. The next point to get added isn’t the “same point” in any sense, even though the point total is the same and maybe even some physical point token got reused.

Conceptually, sovereign currency is always on a one-way trip from being spent into existence to being taxed into annihilation.

Pick two communities.

Probably a “more accurate but less popular” community and a “less accurate but more popular” community.

Post in the “more accurate but less popular” one. Cross-post that to the “less accurate but more popular” one.

PS: Given your name, I’d expect you to have an opinion already.

Gotcha. Yeah, I can endorse that viewpoint.

To me, “engineer” implies confidence in the specific result of what you’re making.

So like, you can produce an ambiguous image like The Dress by accident, but that’s not engineering it.

The researchers who made the Socks and Crocs images did engineer them.

Privacy doesn’t mean that nobody can tell what you’re thinking. It means that you will always be more justified in believing yourself to be conscious than in believing others are conscious. There will always be an asymmetry there.

Replaying neural activity is impressive, but it doesn’t prove the original recorded subject was conscious quite as robustly as my daily subjective experience proves my own consciousness to myself. For example, you could conceivably fabricate an entirely original neural recording of a person who never existed at all.

I added some episodes of Walden Pod to my comment, so check those out if you wanna go deeper, but I’ll still give a tl;dl here.

Privacy of consciousness is simply that there’s a permanent asymmetry of how well you can know your own mind vs. the minds of others, no matter how sophisticated you get with physical tools. You will always have a different level of doubt about the sentience of others, compared to your own sentience.

Phenomenal transparency is the idea that your internal experiences (like what pain feels like) are “transparent”, where transparency means you can fully understand something’s nature through cognition alone and not needing to measure anything in the physical world to complete your understanding. For example, the concept of a triangle or that 2+2=4 are transparent. Water is opaque, because you have to inspect it with material tools to understand the nature of what you’re referring to.

You probably immediately have some questions or objections, and that’s where I’ll encourage you to check out those episodes. There’s a good reason they’re longer than 5 sentences.

If you wanna continue down the rabbit hole, I added some good stuff to my original comment. But if you’re leaning towards epiphenomenalism, might I recommend this one: https://audioboom.com/posts/8389860-71-against-epiphenomenalism

Edit: I thought of another couple of things for this comment.

You mentioned consciousness not being well-defined. It actually is, and the go-to definition is from 1974. Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”

It’s a pretty easy read, as are all of the essays in his book Mortal Questions, so if you have a mild interest in this stuff you might enjoy that book.

Very Bad Wizards has at least one episode on it, too. (Link tbd)

Speaking of Very Bad Wizards, they have an episode about sex robots (link tbd) where (IIRC) they talk about the moral problems with having a convincing human replica that can’t actually consent, and that doesn’t even require bringing consciousness into the argument.

Could just say:

If you accept either privacy of consciousness or phenomenal transparency then philosophical zombies must be conceivable and therefore physicalism is wrong and you can’t engineer consciousness by mimicking brain states.

Edit:

I guess I should’ve expected this, but I’m glad to see multiple people wanted to dive deep into this!

I don’t have the expertise or time to truly do it justice myself, so if you want to go deep on this topic I’m going to recommend my favorite communicator on non-materialist (but also non-religious) takes on consciousness, Emerson Green:

• The Hidden Mind: For Privacy and Against Illusionism
• Zombies
• Phenomenal Transparency
• Interview with Philip Goff, talking about all of the above

But I’m trying to give a tl;dl to the first few replies at least.

I wonder: Has this happened with anything else?

Where an older generation struggled to understand at all, a middle generation adapted to it early enough to witness all of the quirks, and then a later generation was born into an already-smoothed out system — and they all lived simultaneously?

Seems like a uniquely modern thing, but then again agriculture and clothing and currency have all had periods of rapid change in the past.

Like were there Generation F dudes out there like “omg we’re the only ones who understand knitting frames smh”?