Thread for mundane ironists

Social Forums Non-Philosophical Chat
722

Artificial Intelligence

“Maybe the only significant difference between a really smart simulation and a human being was the noise they made when you punched them.” Terry Pratchett

Next up: they punch you.

“Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.” Nick Land

I knew it!

“What use was time to those who’d soon achieve Digital Immortality?” Clyde Dsouza

You know, if that’s even possible.

“To be human is to be ‘a’ human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.” Brian Christian

Fractured and fragmented, as it were.

“By far the greatest danger of Artificial Intelligence is that people conclude too early that they understand it.” Eliezer Yudkowsky

Hell, I’m still stymied by the space time continuum.

“Look at you, hacker: a pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?” Ken Levine

By pulling the plug: https://youtu.be/7CkTYPnJS0E?si=Vb7zxN0DU-1wVV7d&t=39

723

Heaven

[b]“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a Heaven or a Hell, as we ourselves make it.” John Lubbock[/b]

No doubt about what I make of it, eh?

“I don’t like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places." Mark Twain

How about now, Sam?

“Heaven might shine bright, but so do flames.” Neal Shusterman

Just a coincidence, I’m sure. Well, fairly sure.

“Heaven would be Hell in no time if every cruel, selfish, vicious soul went to Heaven.” Anne Rice

Instead, most of them seem to come here. 8)

“Remain faithful to the earth, my brothers, with the power of your virtue. Let your gift-giving love and your knowledge serve the meaning of the earth. Thus I beg and beseech you. Do not let them fly away from earthly things and beat with their wings against eternal walls. Alas, there has always been so much virtue that has flown away. Lead back to the earth the virtue that flew away, as I do—back to the body, back to life, that it may give the earth a meaning, a human meaning.” Friedrich Nietzsche

So, how’s that working out for you?

“Sometimes I think heaven must be one continuous unexhausted reading.” Virginia Woolf

One in a million?

724

Stupidity

“The enemy wasn’t men, or women, or the old, or even the dead. it was just bleedin’ stupid people, who came in all varieties. And no one had the right to be stupid.” Terry Pratchett

What, not even virtually?

“Choose your company with care,” he said. “In life, careful casting is essential. Be sure to find someone who knows the full measure of your stupidity. They will keep you anchored amid a torrent of praise. They will remember you when everyone else turns away — just as this person said they would. It is then when you lift yourself out of whatever gutter you’re floating in and try to prove them wrong. You would do well to remember that illusions are cheap. Honesty is rare.” Marcel M. du Plessis

Sounds familiar to say the least.

“I have come to believe that very intelligent people often suffer from a special kind of stupidity," said Roger. "Sometimes it serves as a kind of armor for them. As long as they can doubt something, they don’t think they need to believe it. And if they don’t believe it, why should they keep the obligations that come with it?” Louis de Wohl

Heads they win, tails we lose.

“We as humans always run the risk of ruining everything for everyone by being stupid.” Joseph John Lee

If only until the end of time.

“Ignorance is assuming that a fence is just one long gate.” Craig D. Lounsbrough

Flagrant stupidity, he means.

“Not what you’d call stupid. His brain got there in the end. It just went the long way round.” Terry Pratchett

What some might call stupid though.

725

Artificial Intelligence

“AI winters were not due to imagination traps, but due to lack of imaginations. Imaginations bring order out of chaos. Deep learning with deep imagination is the road map to AI springs and AI autumns.” Amit Ray

Let’s imagine what that actually means for, say, all practical purposes.

“Humans are limited in the attention, kindness and compassion that they can expend to others, but AI based compassionate robots can channel virtually unlimited resources into building compassionate relationships in the society.” Amit Ray

On the other hand, only if you are “one of us”.

“But on the question of whether the robots will eventually take over, he {Rodney A. Brooks} says that this will probably not happen, for a variety of reasons. First, no one is going to accidentally build a robot that wants to rule the world. He says that creating a robot that can suddenly take over is like someone accidentally building a 747 jetliner. Plus, there will be plenty of time to stop this from happening. Before someone builds a “super-bad robot,” someone has to build a “mildly bad robot,” and before that a "not-so-bad robot.” Michio Kaku

Looks like we will luck out again. Too bad for all the others.

“The attribution of intelligence to machines, crowds of fragments, or other nerd deities obscures more than it illuminates. When people are told that a computer is intelligent, they become prone to changing themselves in order to make the computer appear to work better, instead of demanding that the computer be changed to become more useful.” Jaron Lanier

That certainly explains something.

“If an AI possessed any one of these skills—social abilities, technological development, economic ability—at a superhuman level, it is quite likely that it would quickly come to dominate our world in one way or another. And as we’ve seen, if it ever developed these abilities to the human level, then it would likely soon develop them to a superhuman level. So we can assume that if even one of these skills gets programmed into a computer, then our world will come to be dominated by AIs or AI-empowered humans.” Stuart Armstrong

Place your bets!

“The Polito form is dead, insect. Are you afraid? What is it you fear? The end of your trivial existence? When the history of my glory is written, your species shall only be a footnote to my magnificence.” Ken Levine

Pick one:
1] Hint, hint
2] Wink, wink

726

Free Will

“We’re a government that believes in everybody having the illusion of free will.” Anthony Burgess

I’ll bet that gets tricky.

“I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no ‘commandment of love.’ I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.” Max Stirner

I’ll bet that gets tricky.

“To be a god can ultimately become boring and degrading. There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will! A god might wish to escape into sleep and be alive only in the unconscious projections of his dream-creatures.”― Frank Herbert

Or something like that.

“You may fetter my leg, but Zeus himself cannot get the better of my free will.” Epictetus

How about your God?

“Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir." he read, "You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next - and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized, " read Dwayne. "Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.” Kurt Vonnegut

Hear! Hear!

“No one has free will until they are an adult, and by then the choices that were made for them, have already set them on a course that gives limited freedom in the choices to be made.” J.D. Stroube

At least that’s cleared up.

727

This one really deserves a lot more thought. Especially in the light of AI and the fact that humans manipulated physics to produce it/them.

728

“There’d be reason enough for the invention of free will!”

He can’t do it. I’ve explained this 11 times, i think, in the last ten years.

If god KNOWS you are going to eat a cheeseburger in five minutes, you are not free to not eat a cheeseburger. If you were, it would mean that god was wrong when he said you’d eat a cheeseburger.

729

Hypocrisy

“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.” George Orwell

That never happen to you?

“The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.” George Orwell

You know, back in 1984.

“Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense.’" Gretchen Rubin

Let’s explain that.

“Your hypocrisy insults my intelligence.” Toba Beta

Again and again and again and again and again, for example.

“When I pretended to be precocious, people started the rumor that I was precocious. When I acted like an idler, rumor had it I was an idler. When I pretended I couldn’t write a novel, people said I couldn’t write. When I acted like a liar, they called me a liar. When I acted like a rich man, they started the rumor I was rich. When I feigned indifference, they classed me as the indifferent type. But when I inadvertently groaned because I was really in pain, they started the rumor that I was faking suffering. The world is out of joint.” Osamu Dazai

Stooges, he called them.

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

Or, sure, forks and knives.

730

Heaven

“One nice thing about heaven is that you can relive all your favorite moments and memories pretty much as many times as you want—sort of like a DVD of your whole life. Pause, rewind, fast-forward, slowwww motion, all day, every day.” Jess Rothenberg

Sign me up!

“Jesus’s resurrection is the beginning of God’s new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven. That, after all, is what the Lord’s Prayer is about.” N.T. Wright

You tell me.

“If you are a Christian, you are not a citizen of this world trying to get to Heaven; you are a citizen of Heaven making your way through this world. ” Vance Havner

Good to know?

“Now comes the mystery!” Henry Ward Beecher

Said to be his final words.

“The Wizard of Oz says look inside yourself and find self. God says look inside yourself and find the Holy Spirit. The first will get you to Kansas.
The latter will get you to heaven.
Take your pick.” Max Lucado

Too close to call?

“She sealed his lips with a wanton kiss; 'Though I forgive you for breaking your vows to heaven, I expect you to keep your vows to me.” Matthew Lewis

Sound about right?

731

He knows you will freely eat it only if you are free when you eat it. Not in a “foreknows” sense of “knows”, but an “already there” sense of “knows”. If you weren’t free, he would instead know you are going to be compelled to eat a compulsory cheeseburger (in 5 minutes, from your perspective). If you changed your mind just to prove him wrong, he only told you so that you wouldn’t eat it.

732

“He knows you will freely eat it only if you are free when you eat it.”

This means nothing. It’s a truism. Like “a ball is a ball if it is a ball.” This means you are either stupid or you mean to say something else, but due to the already confused nature of your case, you can’t be sure exactly what you’re trying to say.

“Not in a “foreknows” sense of “knows”, but an “already there” sense of “knows””

Putting god in the front or the back of the bus makes absolutely no difference pertaining to my point and is completely irrelevant… as is the rest of that stuff (whatever you’re trying to explain with it).

733

I’m sure you’re right & everything will be fine.

734

“If you changed your mind just to prove him wrong, he only told you so that you wouldn’t eat it.”

This is the seven year old mentality stuff you do when you believe god and humans play silly little games in conversations with each other. “Nuh-uh because he just told you that because etc., etc.!”

God didn’t tell me anything. I’ll try again.

If i have free will, i would be able to do something that god could not know of in advance. This means he’s neither aware of how physics works (while being the creator of it) or he simply isn’t god.

735

That would not be God.

736

You don’t want free will. So you make silly arguments like this. Silly even after I steel-manned it for you.

737

One second before the end of time, Joe will be faced with two choices. He can sell his lawnmower to Janice or not sell his lawnmower to Janice.

If In god’s head the prediction “joe will not sell the lawnmower one second before the end of time” exists, and joe decides to sell the lawnmower one second before the end of time, god is not omniscient.

If in god’s head, the statement “joe will or will not sell that lawnmower one second before the end of time” exists instead, god has made no prediction, is merely stating the case (an x or y will happen) and is not able to know what will happen after the beginning of that second passes and joe terminates at one or the other when the second concludes.

Therefore, one can not have freewill AND an omniscient god exists at the same time.

p.s. you guys may use this argument if you like, and I’d prefer you call it Prom’s Lawnmower Argument.

738

“You don’t want free will”

This is a trifle bit interesting. It betrays the fact that you think what we ‘want’ is or should be relevant when examining what is true or not. This is why people like you so easily end up on Christianity. It’s a vision of the world like you want it to be.

739

Best thing to do now is say nuthin’ and move on. Hope that those who you will later try to convince have freewill and that god exists don’t ever see the Lawnmower Argument for then they will be impervious to your lies.

740

He doesn’t have to PREdict. He’s already there.

That isn’t a thing.

741

Again, front of the bus, back of the bus. Irrelevant.