pcalau12i

There is no "consciousness." False belief in "consciousness" is a product of Kantianism, which itself was heavily inspired by Newtonian physics (Kant was heavily inspired by Newton), which we have changed some categories over the years but the fundamentals have not and have become deeply integrated into western psyche in how we think about the world, and probably in many other cultures as well.

Modern day philosophers have just renamed Kant's phenomena to "consciousness" or "subjective experience" and renamed his "noumena" to "matter." Despite the renaming, the categories are still treated identically: the "consciousness" is everything we perceive, and the "matter" is something invisible, the true physical thing-in-itself beyond our perception and what "causes" our perception.

Since all they have done is rename Kant's categories, they do not actually solve Kant's mind-body problem, but have just rediscovered it and thus renamed it in the form of the "hard problem of consciousness," which is ultimately the same exact problem just renamed: that there seems to be a "gap" between this "consciousness" and "matter."

Most modern day philosophers seem to split into two categories. The first are the "promissory materialists" who just say there is a real problem here but shrug their shoulders and say one day science will solve it so we don't have to worry about it, but give no explanation of what a solution could even possibly look like. The second are the mystics who insist this "consciousness" can't be reconciled with "matter" because it must be some fundamental force of reality. They talk about things like "consciousness fields" or "cosmic consciousness" or whatever.

However, both are wrong. Newtonian physics is not an accurate represent of reality, we already know this, and so the Kantian mindset inspired from it should also be abandoned. When you abandon the Kantian mindset, there is no longer a need for the "phenomena" and "noumena" division, or, in modern lingo, there is no longer a need for the "consciousness" and "matter" division. There is just reality.

Imagine you are looking at a candle. The apparent size of the candle you will see will depend upon how far you are away from it: if you are further away it appears smaller. Technically, light doesn't travel at an infinite speed, and so the further away you are, the further in the past you are seeing the candle. The candle also may appear a bit different under different lighting conditions.

A Kantian would say there is a true candle, the "candle-in-itself," or, in modern lingo, the material candle, the "causes" all these different perceptions. The perceptions themselves are then said to be brain-generated, not part of the candle, not even something real at all, but something purely immaterial, part of the phenomena, or, in modern lingo, part of "consciousness."

If every possible perception of the candle is part of "consciousness," then the candle-in-itself, the actual material object, must be independent of perception, i.e. it's invisible. No observation can reveal it because all observations are part of "consciousness." This is the Kantian worldview: everything we perceive is part of a sort of illusion created within the mind as opposed to the "true" world that is entirely imperceptible. The mind-body problem, or in modern lingo the "hard problem," then arises as to how an entirely imperceptible (non-phenomenal/non-conscious) world can give rise to what we perceive in a particular configuration.

However, the Kantian worldview is a delusion. In Newtonian physics, if I launch a cannonball from point A to point B, simply observing it at point A and point B is enough to fill in the gaps to say where the object was at every point in between A and B independently of anything else. This Newtonian worldview allows us to conceive of the cannonball as a thing-in-itself, an object with its own inherent properties that can be meaningful conceived of existing even when in complete isolation, that always has an independent of history of how it ends up where it does.

As Schrodinger pointed out, this mentality does not apply to modern physics. If you fire a photon from point A to point B and observe it at those two points, you cannot always meaningfully fill in the gaps of what the photon was doing in between those two points without running into contradictions. As Schrodinger concluded, one has to abandon the notion that particles really are independent autonomous entities with their own independent existence that can be meaningfully conceived of in complete isolation. They only exist from moment to moment in the context of whatever they are interacting with and not in themselves.

If this is true for particles, it must also be true of everything made up of particles: there is no candle-in-itself either. It's a high-level abstraction that doesn't really exist. What we call the "candle" is not an independent unobservable entity separate from all our different perceptions of it, but what we call the candle is precisely the totality of all the different ways it is and can be perceived, all the different ways it interacts with other objects from those objects' perspectives.

Kant justified the noumena by arguing that it makes no sense to talk about objects "appearing" (the word "phenomena" means "the appearance of") without there being something that is doing the appearing (the noumena). He is correct on this, but for a different reason. We should not use this to justify the noumena, but it shows that if we reject the noumena, we must also reject the phenomena ("consciousness"): it makes no sense to treat the different instances of a candle as some sort of separate "consciousness" realm, or some sort of illusion or whatever independent of the real material world as it really is.

No, what we perceive directly is material reality as it actually is. Reality is what you are immersed in every day, what surrounds you, what you are experiencing in this very moment. It is not some illusion from which there is a "true" invisible reality beyond it. When you look at the candle, you are seeing the candle as it really is from your own perspective. That is the real candle in the real world. The Kantian distinction between noumena-phenomena (or between "matter" and "consciousness") should be abandoned. It is just not compatible with the modern physical sciences.

But I know no one will even know what I'm talking about, so writing this is rather pointless. Kantianism is too deeply ingrained into the western psyche, people cannot even comprehend that it is possible to criticize it because it underlies how they think about everything. This nonsense debate about "consciousness" will continue forever, in ten thousand years people will still be arguing over it, because it's an intrinsic problem that arises out of the dualistic structure in Kantian thinking. If you begin from the get-go with an assumption that there is a division between mind and matter, you cannot close this division without contradicting yourself, which leads to this debate around "consciousness." But it seems unrealistic at this point to get people to abandon this dualistic way of thinking, so it seems like the "consciousness" debate will proceed forever.

You have not made any point at all. Your first reply to me entirely ignored the point of my post which you did not read followed with an attack, I reply pointing out you ignored the whole point of my post and just attacked me without actually respond to it, and now you respond again with literally nothing of substance at all just saying "you're wrong! touch grass! word salad!"

You have nothing of substance to say, nothing to contribute to the discussion. You are either a complete troll trying to rile me up, or you just have a weird emotional attachment to this topic and felt an emotional need to respond and attack me prior to actually thinking up a coherent thing to criticize me on. Didn't your momma ever teach you that "if you have nothing positive or constructive to say, don't say anything at all"? Learn some manners, boy. Blocked.

Time to switch to HarmonyOS.

I don't really agree. US propaganda is absurdly effective and for some reason no other country has been capable of replicating it. I think the problem is socialist countries tend to be too honest. Their propaganda against western countries is often to just tell it like it is. A lot of people in the USSR doubted it and genuinely believed the USA was a utopia and the Soviet propaganda was just all lies, and so that's why many supported Yeltsin. You see the same with China today, if you ask Chinese opinion on the USA you will be surprised that most don't see the USA a dystopia but as a utopia. Many Chinese people have frequently told me they thought in the USA people only work four days a week and health care is free.

US propaganda is much more effective because they just make absurdly extreme lies, claiming that socialist countries are all literally hell on earth. The reason this is so effective because most reasonable people who recognize their state is probably going to lie to them for their own benefit are also afraid of becoming dogmatic in the opposite direction, and so they falsely assume that "the truth must be somewhere in the middle." In other words, if the state says a country like the former USSR was literally hell on earth where everyone starved, the "reasonable" person isn't just going to assume that the USSR wasn't literally hell on earth, because they have a cognitive bias that makes them not want to come across as too dogmatic in the opposite direction, so they will instead conclude that he USSR was slightly hell on earth.

You see this tactic used all the time in liberal media. They always exaggerate things to the most ridiculous degree, like in the DPRK they publicly execute you with artillery for having the wrong haircut or feed you to dogs. This propaganda is so effective because even people who recognize this propaganda is indeed propaganda will still buy into it somewhat, and so the lie still works on them. An obvious example is the "100 million dead" claim which we all know is just a completely fabricated number, but even more "reasonable" people who recognize it is fabricated just assumes the number is less but still in the tens of millions, so they still have bought into the propagandistic framing that it even makes sense to blame socialism/communism for these kinds of deaths at all. They already buy into a framework which is biased against socialism/communism because they'll never apply this same kind of arbitrary body count analysis to capitalism, and so they're already successfully propagandized by assuming their is some truth to it even if they admit the 100 million number is exaggerated propaganda.

This tactic was first introduced by Adolf Hitler when had talked about what he called the "Big Lie" in Mein Kampf, explaining it as a propaganda tool the Nazis would use where they would make lies so extraordinarily exaggerated that most people assume there must be at least some truth to them, even if they don't buy into it completely. But if you buy into it at all, you have already fallen for the lie, and so you are already successfully propagandized.

Western countries really have their propaganda down to a science and no one can compete. Chinese people do not have some sort of magical mental barrier that can block out all western propaganda, they are human beings just like all of us and are susceptible to the same kind of propaganda, and I fear it would have far more negative impact than positive to let a flood of western propaganda into China. I mean, this was already kind of attempted at a small scale in Hong Kong and we saw how that turned out.

To be clear, self-determination is not and never has been some fundamental principle of communism and as an absolute principle was something wholly rejected by Lenin.

The several demands of democracy, including self-determination, are not an absolute, but only a small part of the general-democratic (now: general-socialist) world movement. In individual concrete casts, the part may contradict the whole; if so, it must be rejected. It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement, but it would be ridiculous to delete the demand for a republic from the programme of international Social-Democracy on these grounds.

Lenin, The Discussion On Self-Determination Summed Up

The point is that, while self-determination is generally a good slogan, we should actually oppose self-determination if this self-determination is not actually beneficial to the global anti-imperialist struggle and is just a tool by the ruling class of some nation to further their own interests. It's sort of like how western countries keep trying to funnel underground money into religious extremists in Xinjiang and encourages them to promote secession. This tactic is used for the purpose of trying to break apart China to weaken it for western imperialist interests, and so it shouldn't be supported.

Ukraine's government underwent a US-backed coup that immediately banned left-wing parties like the communist party and began to promote Ukrainian fascism. When you talk about self-determination of Ukraine, what you are really talking about is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians being conscripted to the front-lines to die on behalf of the borders of this US-backed fascist proxy state. It is hardly even Ukrainian "self-determination" but just the right of the US bourgeoisie to dominate Ukrainian politics and determine their future for them.

Besides, it's not like Russia has ever even stated their goal is to conquer all of Ukraine, anyways. They have stated since the beginning of their invasion that the goal was only to take control of the Donbas region which had seceded from Ukraine in a referendum. So if you want to talk about self-determination, what about the self-determination of LPR and DPR?

The claim that AI is a scam is a ridiculous and can only be stated by someone who doesn't understand the technology. Are we genuinely supposed to believe that capitalists hate profits and capital accumulation and are just wasting their money on something worthless? It's absurd. AI is already making huge breakthroughs in many fields, such as medicine with protein folding. I would recommend watching this video on that subject in particular. China has also been rapidly improving the speed of construction projects by coordinate them with AI.

To put it in laymen's terms, traditional computation is like Vulcans: extremely logical and have to go compute everything logically step-by-step. This is very good if you want precise calculations, but very bad for many other kinds of tasks. Here's an example: you're hungry, you decide to go eat a pizza, you walk to the fridge and open it, take out the slice, put it in the microwave to heat it up, then eat it. Now, imagine if I gave you just the sensory data, such as, information about what a person is seeing and feeling (hunger), and then asked you to write a full-proof sequence of logical statements that, when evaluated alongside the sensory data, would give you the exact muscle contractions needed to cause the person to carry out this task.

You'll never achieve it. Indeed, even very simple tasks humans do every day, like translating spoken words into written words, is something that nobody has ever achieved a set of logical if/else statements to replicate. Even something seemingly simple like this is far too complicated with far too many variables for someone to ever program, because everyone's voice is a bit different, every audio recording is going to have slightly different background noise, etc, and to account for all of it with a giant logical proof would be practically impossible.

The preciseness of traditional computation is also its drawback: you simply cannot write a program to do very basic human tasks we do every day. You need a different form of computation that is more similar to how human brains process information, something that processes information in a massively parallel fashion through tweaking billions of parameters (strengths in neural connections) to produce approximate and not exact outputs that can effectively train itself ("learn") without a human having to adjust those billions of parameters manually.

If you have ever used any device with speech recognition, such as writing a text message with spoken voice, you have used AI, since this is one of the earliest examples of AI algorithms actually being used in consumer devices. USPS heavily integrates AI to do optical-character recognition, to automatically read the addresses written on letters to get them to the right place, Tom Scott has a great video on this here on the marvel of engineering that is the United States Postal Service and how it is capable of processing the majority of mail entirely automatically thanks to AI. There have also been breakthroughs in nuclear fusion by stabilizing the plasma with AI because it is too chaotic and therefore too complex to manually write an algorithm to stabilize it. Many companies use it in the assembly line for object detection which is used to automatically sort things, and many security systems use it to detect things like people or cars to know when to record footage efficiently to save space.

Being anti-AI is just being a Luddite, it is oppose technological development. Of course, not all AI is particularly useful, some companies shove it into their products for marketing purposes and it doesn't help much and may even make the experience worse. But to oppose the technology in general makes zero sense. It's just a form of computation.

If we were to oppose AI then Ludwig von Mises wins and socialism is impossible. Mises believed that socialism is impossible because no human could compute the vastness of the economy by hand. Of course, we later invented computers and this accelerated the scale in which we can plan the economy, but traditional computation models still require you to manually write out the algorithm in a sequence of logical if/else statements, which has started to become too cumbersome as well. AI allows us to break free of this limitation with what are effectively self-writing programs as you just feed them massive amounts of data and they form the answer on their own, without the programmer even knowing how it solves the problem, it acts as kind of a black-box that produces the right output from a given input without having to know how it internally works, and in fact with the billions of parameter models, they are too complicated to even understand how they work internally.

(Note: I am using the term "AI" interchangeably with technology based on artificial neural networks.)

Robots are dubbed “pearls on the crown of the manufacturing industry.” A country’s achievement in robotics research, development, manufacturing and application is an important yardstick with which to measure its level of scientific and technological innovation and high-end manufacturing...China will be the largest robot market in the world

Xi Jinping

They are incredibly efficient for short-term production, but very inefficient for long-term production. Destroying the environment is a long-term problem that doesn't have immediate consequences on the businesses that engage in it. Sustainable production in the long-term requires foresight, which requires a plan. It also requires a more stable production environment, i.e. it cannot be competitive because if you are competing for survival you will only be able to act in your immediate interests to avoid being destroyed in the competition.

Most economists are under a delusion known as neoclassical economics which is literally a nonphysical theory that treats the basis of the economy as not the material world we actually live in but abstract human ideas which are assumed to operate according to their own internal logic without any material causes or influences. They then derive from these imagined "laws" regarding human ideas (which no one has ever experimentally demonstrated but were just invented in some economists' armchair one day) that humans left to be completely free to make decisions without any regulations at all will maximize the "utils" of the population, making everyone as happy as possible.

With the complete failure of this policy leading to the US Great Depression, many economists recognized this was flawed and made some concessions, such as with Keynesianism, but they never abandoned the core idea. In fact, the core idea was just reformulated to be compatible with Keynesianism in what is called the neoclassical synthesis. It still exists as a fundamental belief to most every economist that completely unregulated market economy without any plan at all will automagically produce a society with maximal happiness, and while they will admit some caveats to this these days (such as the need for a central organization to manage currency in Keynesianism), these are treated as an exception and not the rule. Their beliefs are still incompatible with long-term sustainable planning because in their minds the success of markets from comes util-maximizing decisions built that are fundamental to the human psyche and so any long-term plan must contradict with this and lead to a bad economy that fails to maximize utils.

The rise of Popperism in western academia has also played a role here. A lot of material scientists have been rather skeptical of the social sciences and aren't really going to take arguments like those based in neoclassical economics which is based largely in mysticism about human free will seriously, and so a second argument against long-term planning was put forward by Karl Popper which has become rather popular in western academia. Popper argued that it is impossible to learn from history because it is too complicated with too many variables and you cannot control them all. You would need a science that studies how human societies develop in order to justify a long-term development plan into the future, but if it's impossible to study them to learn how they develop because they are too complicated, then it is impossible to have such a science, and thus impossible to justify any sort of long-term sustainable development plan. It would always be based on guesswork and so more likely to do more harm than good. Popper argued that instead of long-term development plans, the state should instead be purely ideological, what he called an "open society" operating purely on the ideology of liberalism rather getting involved in economics.

As long as both neoclassical economics and Popperism are dominate trends in western academia there will never be long-term sustainable planning because they are fundamentally incompatible ideas.

You did not read what I wrote, so it is unironic you call it "word salad" when you are not even aware of the words I wrote since you had an emotional response and wrote this reply without actually addressing what I argued. I stated that it is impossible to have an very large institution without strict rules that people follow, and this requires also the enforcement of the rules, and that means a hierarchy as you will have rule-enforcers.

Also, you are insisting your personal definition of anarchism is the one true definition that I am somehow stupid for disagreeing with, yet anyone can just scroll through the same comments on this thread and see there are other people disagreeing with you while also defending anarchism. A lot of anarchists do not believe anarchism means "no hierarchy," like, seriously, do you unironically believe in entirely abolishing all hierarchies? Do you think a medical doctor should have as much authority on how to treat an injured patient as the janitor of the same hospital? Most anarchists aren't even "no hierarchy" they are "no unjustified hierarchy."

The fact you are entirely opposed to hierarchy makes your position even more silly than what I was criticizing.

All libertarian ideologies (including left and right wing anarchism) are anti-social and primitivist.

It is anti-social because it arises from a hatred of working in a large groups. It's impossible to have any sort of large-scale institution without having rules that people want to follow, and libertarian ideology arises out of people hating to have to follow rules, i.e. to be a respectable member of society, i.e. they hate society and don't want to be social. They thus desire very small institutions with limited rules and restrictions. Right-wing libertarians envision a society dominated by small private businesses while left-wing libertarians imagine a society dominated by either small worker-cooperative, communes, or some sort of community council.

Of course, everyone of all ideologies opposes submitting to hierarchies they find unjust, but hatred of submitting to hierarchies at all is just anti-social, as any society will have rules, people who write the rules, people who enforce the rules. It is necessary for any social institution to function. It is part of being an adult and learning to live in a society to learn to obey the rules, such as traffic rules. Sometimes it is annoying or inconvenient, but you do it because you are a respectable member of society and not a rebellious edgelord who makes things harder on everyone else because they don't obey basic rules.

It is primitivist because some institutions simply only work if they are very large. You cannot have something like NASA that builds rocket ships operated by five people. You are going to always need an enormous institution which will have a ton of people, a lot of different levels of command ("hierarchy"), strict rules for everyone to follow, etc. If you tried to "bust up" something like NASA or SpaceX to be small businesses they simply would lose their ability to build rocket ships at all.

Of course, anarchists don't mind, they will say, "who cares about rockets? They're not important." It reminds me of the old meme that spread around where someone asked anarchists how their tiny communes would be able to organize current massive supply chains in our modern societies and they responded by saying that the supply chain would be reduced to just people growing beans in their backyard and eating it, like a feudal peasant. They won't even defend that their system could function as well as our modern economy but just says modern marvels of human engineering don't even matter, because they are ultimately primitivists at heart.

I never understood the popularity of libertarian and anarchist beliefs in programming circles. We would never have entered the Information Age if we had an anarchism or libertarian system. No matter how much they might pretend these are the ideal systems, they don't even believe it themselves. If a libertarian has a serious medical illness, they are either going to seek medical help at a public hospital or a corporate hospital. Nobody is going to seek medical help at a "hospital small business" ran out of someone's garage. We all intuitively and implicitly understand that large swathes of economy that we all take advantage of simply cannot feasibly be ran by small organizations, but libertarians are just in denial.

Anarchism thus becomes meaningless as anyone who defends certain hierarchies obviously does so because they believe they are just. Literally everyone on earth is against "unjust hierarchies" at least in their own personal evaluation of said hierarchies. People who support capitalism do so because they believe the exploitative systems it engenders are justifiable and will usually immediately tell you what those justifications are. Sure, you and I might not agree with their argument, but that's not the point. To say your ideology is to oppose "unjust hierarchies" is to not say anything at all, because even the capitalist, hell, even the fascist would probably agree that they oppose "unjust hierarchies" because in their minds the hierarchies they promote are indeed justified by whatever twisted logic they have in their head.

Telling me you oppose "unjust hierarchies" thus tells me nothing about what you actually believe, it does not tell me anything at all. It is as vague as saying "I oppose bad things." It's a meaningless statement on its own without clarifying what is meant by "bad" in this case. Similarly, "I oppose unjust hierarchies" is meaningless statement without clarifying what qualifies "just" and "unjust," and once you tell me that, it would make more sense you label you based on your answer to that question. Anarchism thus becomes a meaningless word that tells me nothing about you. For example, you might tell me one unjust hierarchy you want to abolish is prison. It would make more sense for me to call you a prison abolitionist than an anarchist since that term at least carries meaning, and there are plenty of prison abolitionists who don't identify as anarchist.

Most other countries don't even believe in innovation, they believe in vague "liberal values" and sometimes may or may not invest into innovation as a secondary thing at their leisure. In China it is literally unconstitutional for the government not to promote innovation.