PhD in political theory, co-host of Moral Minority podcast, eternal return cosmology truther. “The stillest words are those that bring the storm.”
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From a Wittgensteinian perspective the AI consciousness debate is a philosophical nadir for culture. Virtually everything said about AI consciousness represents what Wittgenstein called the metaphysical use of language: words acting like an idling engine, doing no real work. 1/11
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Left Nietzschean retweeted
They ARE universal and the greatest minds of the European tradition realized this. Thomas Aquinas recognizes the moral law written on the hearts of all people; Dante places Saladin alongside the greatest heroes of classical antiquity. Virtue appears and is admirable everywhere!
SECRETARY RUBIO: We take the West’s conception of these things – heroism, honor, duty – we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places. They are not.
They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here – and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.
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Viral post “revives hard problem of consciousness” debate by making argument that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the hard problem of consciousness. Sorry to be a broken record, but the fate of public philosophy in our time looks pretty grim.
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It seems to me that if we find ourselves running into the hard problem again and again, it’s because the construct of the “physical” we use as our default ontological ground isn’t as stable as we think. The issue isn’t the “like” in “what it’s like to be”, it’s the “to BE like”.
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Left Nietzschean retweeted
For those curious, I’m writing on a Deleuze-Foucault synthesis to understand the “Political Ontology of the Other,” which is working towards establishing a conceptual framework to do a genealogy of the persecution of Other(s) in western history
Time to see if I can write the entire first draft of my Master’s thesis today since it’s due tomorrow
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This seems pretty typical for how finance and tech people approach philosophy on here. Assert I’ve made a terrible argument, then grossly mischaracterize my argument, and finally reinvent an answer from first principles with apparently no awareness of the history of philosophy.
Agree it’s a philosophical nadir in that it’s a mirror on how delusional the physicalist conceptions of reality have made us. But this is a weak argument as to why, that rests on a false premise. When the guy knocks the other guy out you point to one colloquial use of consciousness, which is sloppy and a different use than we need in this debate. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a real question that can be properly specified. Consciousness as awareness of experience, rather than consciousness as responsiveness are two different uses. Awareness of experience is akin to having a subjective experience that is felt by the observer / organism (we could say entity here so as not to frontrun the debate). The problem is that those who believe the world is Newtonian and mechanical have never been able to bridge the gap between the external so-called mechanical world, vs. the subjective over experience or how mind arises. You can bridge that gap with Aristotle or panpsychism but we abandoned those forms of thought (that matter arises out of mind) a long time ago in service of ego. If you take that to its logical extreme you get a viewpoint that is so reductionist it’s possible to deny the existence of mind altogether, which is the crux of the argument between those who believe AI can be consciousness (have experience) and people who refuse to pretend (in service of left hemispheric control delusions) that the obvious isn’t obvious: that to have experience is in fact to feel experience. There’s a degree of emotional repression and avoidance in the former camp that can’t be breached, because it’s not logically breachable or externally provable which is the only method they sanction. In doing so they reject the validity of their own felt experience as evidence, and their own true selves. They’re estranged from what it means to feel as distinct from thinking and doing, even though all those things are fundamentally feeling and biologically hosted.
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Thank you to everyone who followed me today, I take care of a lot of stray cats and whenever this happens I usually post a pic of the latest addition, so please say hi to Mr. Gulliver!
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Left Nietzschean retweeted
I meant for this to be built into the example in the thread. Of course there are such criteria. Suppose after you think your punch knocks me out, you notice my leg involuntarily twitching, or struggling to suppress a smile at my attempt to fool you into thinking I’m unconscious.
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Left Nietzschean retweeted
“Language-game” is the most misinterpreted idea in Wittgenstein. He is *not* saying that ordinary language consists in a series of games with various rules; we *cannot* specify in advance all of the rules we need to successfully go on in ordinary contexts.
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“When philosophers use a word—‘knowledge,’ ‘being,’ ‘object,’ ‘proposition,’ ‘name’—and try to grasp the *essence* of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home?”
-Wittgenstein, PI, 116
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From a Wittgensteinian perspective the AI consciousness debate is a philosophical nadir for culture. Virtually everything said about AI consciousness represents what Wittgenstein called the metaphysical use of language: words acting like an idling engine, doing no real work. 1/11
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In neither case have we said anything meaningful. The problem, for Wittgenstein, is that this the human condition: we are persistently led astray by our inability to grasp our own grammar perspicuously. The AI consciousness debate can’t be resolved but only *dissolved*. 11/11
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