Principia Amalgamatio

Pictures, musing, and some serious content occasionally.

[duncanscottwilson]

There's a cognitive skill that, in retrospect, has been important to my life, but which I don't think I've ever named: It is (relative to myself) the skill of acting unlike Eliezer Yudkowsky, or averting self-consistency pressures. E.g.: On one trip to New York, when I said I'd never drunk a glass of wine, someone challenged me to drink a glass of wine at least once, in order to - I don't remember if they said this, or I thought this - make sure that I wasn't just not drinking wine because I hadn't previously drunk wine. And it seemed to me that this was a legitimate bias that was worth disposing of via this one-time cost, so I drank a glass of wine. Just to make sure that on future occasions when I decided whether or not to drink wine, I would not be deciding on the basis of there being this huge threshold to cross over of a first glass. (I haven't had another glass of wine since, but don't regret this decision.) I think the form the cognitive skill takes for me is having in mind a picture of yourself - a concept of your role, not just the way other people see you, but also the way you've always behaved in the past - and whenever there's an optimal thing to do that involves behaving unlike yourself, you feel a little extra jolt of virtuousness, a bit of pleasure and positive reinforcement. It seems conceptually related to the skills of "Being a Genre Savvy, Level 1 Intelligent Character inside your own mental landscape" and another unnamed skill of "Trying not to be That Guy you keep meeting who is stuck inside their own corner of conceptspace and can't change the mind or their subject even if the world is at stake, so you treat them as an NPC and hope maybe you'll find a use for them someday - don't let yourself become That Guy." ‪#‎cogskills‬

Eliezer Yudkowsky

[duncanscottwilson]

The belief that plants can suffer reflects a pre-scientific animism. A precondition of being a unitary subject of experience is a central nervous system. No selection pressure to evolve an energetically expensive central nervous system could exist on sessile organisms such as plants, which lack the capacity for rapid self-propelled motion. Recall we know how to switch off pain altogether in animals: nonsense mutations of the SCN9A gene cause congenital analgesia. Plants lack a SCN9A gene - or any functional analogue. Even if one believes that individual cells can support rudimentary experience, the encasement of individual plant cells within thick cellulose cell walls prevents any plausible form of phenomenal binding. By contrast, a pig, for example, is at least as sentient (and sapient) as a human prelinguistic toddler - and deserves to be treated accordingly. In practice, the only people who affect concern for plant suffering are meat-eaters who want to rationalise animal abuse. We're not dealing with pre-scientific animists arguing in good faith that plants have souls. Strictly speaking one can't literally disprove the belief that plants (or rocks or mountains etc) suffer pain. Such a conjecture is inconsistent with the scientific world-picture and reductive physicalism. But then we don't understand how creatures with central nervous systems can solve the phenomenal binding problem (cf. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu.... Critically, however, without a unitary subject it makes no sense to say there is a subject of experience who suffers - and can be worthy of moral consideration."

DP 100 

[duncanscottwilson]

Fb dump pt. 2

As a stopgap for the horrors of the current state for animal agriculture, could advocating the usage of euphoriants or opiates to increase the general hedonic tone of enslaved animals be of any positive utility? I foresee even if the back of the envelope calculations were net-positive as a short term solution, a few drawbacks of this is might be: 1) Creating moral permissibility for animal-product consumption, causing: a) inefficiencies in allocation of resources and higher impact on the earth b) a possible slowing to the abolition of factory farming 2) A possibility toward the stigma of being thought of as someone who want to "drug up" our food leading to a general discrediting of the project as a whole.* Thoughts? Reasons for or against? *I feel a similar stigma exists when I bring up the elimination of predation and recently have started to see this as a possible negative utility to bring this up in conversation. As it might lead to a rejection of the easier to swallow proposition of elimination of factory-farmed-based suffering. Has anyone else found this? Any possible solutions to head on collision with status quo bias?

[duncanscottwilson]

Fb dump:

A thought I've had recently is that there may be a point in the continuum of ideas between empty and open individualism where our perceived diachronic identity is entirely illusory but the synchronic identity that is self-intimating at every discrete time step may be in some sense a recruitment of an ontologically unitary self. Or another similar but definitely more open-individualistic idea would be that there is a unitary self (analogous to an n-dimensional prism) which at each time step reflects a slightly different aspect of itself. Thus there is phenomena similar to continuous identity due to the experimentally testable fact your personality traits and other aspects of your self at t = n is highly related to your identity at t = n-1 but in the way that each petal of a flower is individually "distinct" they all make up the flower as a whole. Maybe none of this is anything philosophically novel, thoughts?

[foodfuck]

[duncanscottwilson]

On the face of it, cheating Hume's guillotine and deriving an "ought” from an "is" is logically impossible. However, for reasons we simply don't understand, a normative aspect is built into the very nature of some first-person states, e.g. I ought-not-to-be-in-this-deadful-agony. If you are the victim of unbearable agony or despair, the badness of such states is not an "open question". Combine the normative aspect of such first-person states with the scientific world-picture, i.e. no here-and-nows are special or ontologically privileged. Insofar as suffering is bad for me, it's bad for sentient beings anywhere. Here we have the germ of a theory of universal (dis)value. In short, moral realism can't simply be dismissed out of hand.

David Peace

[sidawson]

using infrared laser pulses to achieve superconductivity at room temperatures.

[destroyed-and-abandoned]

A Mossy Canteen In An Abandoned Factory

via poowbag

[duncanscottwilson]

Sometimes the most rational choice is to take eL. eS. Dee. & eM. Dee. eM. Aye and cuddle and talk all night. It seems if you don’t love anyone then consequently you love everyone.

The most inconceivable part personally is the fact that these are just hints of the rich and intricate quaila state-spaces of our post-human progeny.

Much love errone.

[lifehackable]

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[duncanscottwilson]

If any field of inquiry needs revision in its scientific methodology then it's the "subjectivity of consciousness" If when we take psychedelics we really are just exploring "different ways it feels to be physics" then the state of consciousness that a specific observer moment would be in would dramatically effect what empirical data they would gather. IF and it's a big if, consciousness discloses the intrinsic nature of the physical then there may be a sort of "state-specific-science" where different laws and truths may be found just as veridically, as science done when in consensus reality. But rather this science would be conducted in state spaces that could only be seen as radically alien to any person today.

[bysusannemota]

[mentalhappyland]

[duncanscottwilson]

The self is the praised neural filter (posterior cingulate cortex? ?) in which the universe gets to act as if it isn't itself.

[dataandphilosophy]

Sometimes, people say something along the lines of “not all desires are good. You might desire something about your desires, and that is what we should actually follow, so that we don’t just give addicts more heroin and off...

[spaceexp]

View and ensuing panic at the press site as Antares explodes on launch, Oct 28, 2014

[tacticalneuralimplant]