Philosophosphorous [comrade/them, null/void]

hell yea heavy metal guitar noises

I don’t agree with that. I don’t see what’s impossible about understanding consciousness as an emergent property of matter in the same way that many individual ants collectively bring feats that you can’t explain looking at a single ant.

the problem is that every ant in the ant colony is ostensibly a purely physical phenomena (at least, we usually do not concern ourselves with the ant’s subjective experience as much as their information processing capabilities - we watch their movement, monitor pheromones and chemical signals, note the structure and changes to their nest, etc., all very physical and mutually compatible ideas), whereas something like the concept of subjectivity is entirely incompatible with our ideas about physics. you can do ‘information processing’ without subjectivity very efficiently, as with any calculator or computer, so subjectivity seems entirely superfluous in the sense of a purely physical explanation.

The fact that we haven’t gotten there just yet doesn’t mean it can’t be done, or that biology is completely independent from physics and/or psychology completely independent from biology.

you have to prove something is true before you believe it, assuming ‘we will figure it out later with no significant modifications to our theory’ is intellectual laziness/unsound epistemology. no one is saying that biology is completely independent from physics or that psychology is completely independent from biology, i am only saying that our understanding of such topics are far from a unified ‘theory of everything’ and are therefore incomplete in a non-trivial way at best, and fundamentally flawed or incorrect at worst. obviously the subjective component of human consciousness is somehow related to brain function, we can prove and accept this empirically without any kind of metaphysical claims or assumptions tacked on. obviously physics isn’t completely BS, it helps us solve a lot of problems. but at the same time, we cannot fully explain (i.e. reduce, hence why i am arguing against ‘reductivist physicalist realism’ and not non-reductivist versions of physicalist realism such as the one you seem to espouse) psychology in terms of atoms and their locations and velocities and mass without losing information. the fact that you believe in ‘emergent processes’ itself means you are likely not a ‘reductivist’ physicalist realist like i am arguing against.

I just don’t see how from “we don’t understand consciousness” it follows “therefore it can’t possibly be explained with physics in the way we understand physics”.

usually when a theory fails to account for a phenomena, it is assumed to be flawed or incomplete somehow, and the significant explanatory gap for subjectivity in physics and information processing (what information processing algorithm produces a first-person experience? is there a fundamental particle or wave of subjectivity, a ‘subjectron’?) would seem to imply a non-trivial incompleteness or flaw.

i don’t think i’m confusing anything, for further clarification i am specifically arguing that reductivist physicalist realism - the belief that all of reality including consciousness can be ‘reduced to’ or entirely explained in terms of our current understanding of physics or a trivially modified version of it - a relatively common belief among ‘reddit atheists’ (see ‘love is just chemicals’ trope, ‘meat computer’ ideas, etc.) - entirely precludes the possibility of any kind of subjectivity whatsoever as an inherent logical consequence of its base assumptions. A mostly unmodified version of our current understanding of physics or information processing has no explanation for things like ‘subjectivity’ or ‘consciousness’ at a fundamental level, and therefore any worldview that would explain such phenomena in terms of physics will necessarily fail to account for, or erroneously posit the lack of existence of, such characteristics (‘consciousness is an illusion’). kind of like the difficulty of finding a coherent way to unify quantum physics and ‘macro’ physics into a single ‘theory of everything’, the ideas in use are more or less incompatible - you can’t really ‘reduce’ a thrown baseball and explain it purely in terms of quantum physics without losing important information, even though quantum physics is smaller scale/more ‘fundamental’ to macro phenomena.

i am a militant agnostic. i don’t know if there is a god, and neither do you. its crazy to me to fully believe in any specific spiritual lore without like direct personal experience, like maybe there is ‘a god’ but maybe its completely inhuman and incomprehensible, maybe its a giant fish, maybe its mind is composed of the EM activity of stars, idfk why people assume our language or our thought could capture something like that, if it even exists. believing that there is Definitely No God or Anything Else Humans Don’t/Can’t Understand seems epistemologically invalid. like yeah, i’m not going to decide how to live my life based on some bronze age account of some Sky Warlord who wants me to sacrifice my children and cut off parts of my penis and beat my slaves and never do anything thats Too Fun, idfk why people would assume bronze age patriarchical slave-owning mysoginists would have the FInal Say on stuff like that, but i’m also not going to just assume that reality is completely pointless and that we are all meaningless meat computers waiting for our homeostatic processes to fizzle out. I agree with ‘materialism’ in the sense that i think there are parts of reality that are outside my personal mind, but strict physicalist realism is metaphysically and existentially and semiotically barren as an ideology, why should i care if i or anyone else has healthcare/rights/life if our existence is pointless nonsense, lifeless particles knocking into each other deterministically, human consciousness an evolutionary spandrel, an information-processing fluke that only makes us suffer from our knowledge of the universe’s meaninglessness. I have to believe that there might possibly be some reason for me to keep collecting new experiences or i would simply stop. i have to believe that , under better conditions such as communism, humans could spend more time on the questions and ideas that matter on a more fundamental level, instead of constantly struggling just to physically survive, and that there might be semiotically interesting paradigms to discover. i have to believe that conscious experience matters, or should matter, to me, that there really is something that differentiates living thinking beings from lifeless particles and the unconscious information processing of a calculator. otherwise there is nothing to distinguish humanity from a cancerous growth or mold, if ‘nothing’ is the beginning and the end i’d rather just cut out the middleman and get back to it and save myself and everyone else a whole heck of a lot of trouble and misery.

i am willing to defect to the aliens, especially if they let me pilot an alien mecha against the imperialists

deleted by creator

i read a thing earlier about how the chinese military has done drills against a hypothetical technologically superior enemy (jokingly called ‘ROBOTECH’ drills), where the enemy has cut off any electronic comms, has a bunch of high quality units, and always knows locations and coordinates etc. the normal forces usually lost early on but eventually were able to stalemate and even achieve one or two victories. i would have made a whole post about it but i cannot find the source where i read this, and google is completely uselesss, giving me nothing but china fearmongering about robot dogs or something.

they probably don’t hate you (at least not in a way that one could tell from this limited info), people just kind of become more interested in their jobs and personal lives/relationships more than friend groups as they get older. i have a roommate that i would hang out with all the time but they recently got a new romantic partner and now all they do is talk on the phone with them. i don’t really have other friends or family nearby to compensate for the new void in my social life so im not taking it particularly well. and thats on top of the ever present background sexual frustration and romantic loneliness that comes with being incapable of socializing normally or forming relationships, which itself is on top of global climate catastrophe, imperialism and genocide that define global politics. i distract myself with weed and mecha models and video games to cope and its worked out so far, i manage to maintain an iron-fisted, white knuckle grip on my sanity to reduce any additional hardship on those around me that might be caused by my mental problems.

i tried to think of something clever to post but i’ve got nothing

what does ‘real’ even mean? if you are experiencing something consistently, that responds to your interactions, its as real as anything else imo. does something being temporary or conditional on certain phenomena make it ‘not real’? because in that case any living being is ‘not real’, a mere transitory hallucination that will fade and be forgotten in time like an unremembered dream. maybe the characters in your sleeping dreams do in fact have their own subjectivity independent of your own conscious identity, ‘subsystems’ running on your ‘hardware’, as mortal and fallible as any living person. does lucidity or clarity or vividness determine reality? if so, then what about people who experience vivid, clear, lucid ‘hallucinations’, or people (perhaps with conditions like alzheimers or dementia) who experience waking life as an incomprehensible whirlwind of phenomena? is a lucid dream ‘more real’ than the dreams you do not remember? ‘reality’ is kind of a meaningless concept, engage with what you are capable of engaging with and don’t worry so much is my advice.

claims to know what death is like

is currently alive

opinion discarded

sick of being so lonely in a physical/touch starved sense but at the same time i cannot conceive of how i could ever fit another person into my daily life even if i somehow met the nonexistent unicorn person that would be mutually attracted to me. i am like balls deep in some kind of overly existential psuedo-philosophical thought monologue at any given time, any time other people interact with me it feels like an intrusion/distraction. i absolutely cannot do small talk and i hate anything with a hint of mundane suburban domesticity. i want to talk about sci fi robots and play vehicle simulator games and listen to ‘repetitive’ ambient electronic music and eat the same easy to prepare microwave slop foods every day, i will never be into gardening/cooking/sports/celebrities/social media/eating out/live music/alcohol/going outside. i am the least relatable person on earth and i am looking for the type of girl that wants to talk about hatches and multi-function displays and periscope visors and 30mm autocannons and fully mechanized space communism and the meaning of existence. the closest thing i have to an ambition is a wistful yearning desire to make a cool mecha game or furry mecha webcomic, that i am reasonably sure i will never follow through on in a meaningful sense.

lmfao cry more landleech

i know ‘bowie knife’ is kind of a vague clasification but im pretty sure they are supposed to have a wide blade, a partially cuved leading edge and a ‘clip tip’ point. a heavy blade designed to make hacking/slashing attacks like a machete as well as stabs. this here seems like just a generic thin stabby dagger, its basically the same blade as my fairbairn-sykes except with a different handle shape.

its always amazing to compare stalin’s writing and speech to the way he is portrayed in western media. ‘please fire me and abolish my government position’ - definitely the words of a power-hungry mass killing warlord dictator lmfao. compare literally anything stalin wrote to literally anything hitler wrote, stalin comes across as a humble scholar and hitler comes across as a raving conspiratorial racist madman. stalin be like ‘our party literally does not need the position of general secretary, please fire me’ and hitler be like ‘every ethnostate, of which mine is the best, must have a single unelected absolute ruler and i should be in charge of all of germany for ever’ and liberals will be like ‘i literally can’t tell the difference’

consider the following: use rice to soak it up

didnt that one city in some euro country remove all of their traffic lights and signage and that somehow reduced their traffic fatalities to zero because people had to actually drive with situational awareness instead of offloading their thinking onto signs and blinky shiny lights?

i thought the post title said ‘The Smarmiest Liberal’ so now i’m obligated to mention the television show Crashbox

descriptivism is linguistic tailism, humans have the ability and responsibility to shape their shared language for the benefit of all instead of letting anything and everything happen with no consequence as if entropy and random chance and any kind of capitalist or fascist modifications of language are holy and beyond reproach. as a niche leftist community there is not much we can do for the moment but analyze, however a strong centrally organized revolutionary communist party of some kind should absolutely ‘prescribe’ how language is used to shape society for the better.

westoids when china censors racism: this is literally 1984 animal farm totalitarian authoritarian mass genocide

westoids when AlgoCensor by Google (powered by amazon web services) censors words that would make their advertising partners less money: this is true innovation, the market is solving all of society’s problems in the most efficient way possible, take all of my investment money