Universal Basic Income (UBI)

You don’t need to be political to “qualitatively parse” what I wrote. I didn’t even say anything about politics, I talked about government power and the tendency for governments to want to increase their power and control, as well as the fact that people working in the government and especially at higher-up levels are concerned primarily (only) with increasing their own power, control and status.

How is any of that difficult for you to “qualitatively parse”? Freedom, human dignity and not being a slave to a totalitarian state are not ideas you need to have a “political take” on. These are logical, fundamental issues.

Maybe you wouldn’t mind being a slave, that would not surprise me. Lots of very techie, mechanistic-autistic materialistic atheist sort of people seem well encapsulated under that umbrella of personality types. Not that I am saying you are any of those things necessarily since I don’t know you that well yet. But I have noticed the remarkably reliable tendency that people who do fit one or more of those types “techie, mechanistic-autistic, materialistic, atheist” tend to have these non-chalant attitudes toward state government power and the totalitarianism of the state. They at least claim not to care that much, or that it’s not really a problem at all.

If you think “relative stability and prosperity” will come from surrendering your economic power to the State, think again. You will get just the opposite. Those examples you mentioned don’t apply. The modern governments and totalitarian states of the world are not “Athens”, although the decadence and degeneracy and laziness that led to Athens’ downfall could be applicable somewhat to the modern west today. And prosperity in any of these regions and times did not occur because the government/state gave everyone what they needed to survive. People need to work productively, to produce, because that equates to adding value into the world around them. If you give them enough housing, clothing, food and water to live on they will simply stop working, stop producing value. Where, then, would the value come from to keep them housed, clothed and fed?

The only reason UBI is an issue now, supposedly, is because of advanced technology and how insanely well it multiplies the output value-creation of economic productive processes. Supposedly this would lead to enough excess value being created by relatively few people that everyone else can be given what they need to survive on a basic level. Maybe that is true, maybe not. Or maybe even a smaller amount of UBI, not enough to live on but enough to help out, is more realistic. Even that would lead people to work less and would not get around the problem of the government “owning you” in terms of your material needs and stability in your life.

Why do you think people with disabilities always vote for larger government, larger taxes, more benefits? Because they are the beneficiaries, they don’t care that the entire society is going into unpayable debt or that more and more money is being stolen from others who actually worked for it and produced value for the world around them. They don’t even care about government atrocities or tyranny so long as it’s not impacting them personally, all they care about is the free benefits and free cash keeps coming into their pockets.

What kind of retarded way is that to structure a society of supposedly intelligent, free people? You don’t need to be political to understand the basic logic of a moral hazard and the tragedy of the commons.

You wrote the following:

The saying is “Who pays, who decides.” From that perspective I understand your concern, however, when basic ‘security’ is established as a basic human right, similar to access to clean drinking water which is already in control by governments, then perhaps the dynamics are different.

When UBI is a basic human right, people can just accept it and focus their attention on more meaningful matters, which would create free time and time to spend on for example the prevention of the issues that you mention.

So it seems to me that people are to become intellectually stronger when they are provided with basic security as a basic human right. UBI would provide people with extra ‘leisure time’ and time to think. “We Must Seriously Rethink Leisure”: Economist Daniel Susskind Predicts a World Without Work

The difficulty in qualitatively parsing, on my end, would reside in the opinionated position that is required to make assertions of right and wrong in the context of an inherently ideological process.

The assertions that you propose are strong, however, I am in no position to ‘qualitative parse’ neither the validity or potential remarks about it. I wouldn’t feel inclined to ‘join in’ to propose ‘how the world should be’ (politically or socially) so I wouldn’t have an interest to ‘qualitatively parse’ the whole context in the first place (ideas about power dynamics, their potential effects, and inherent judgements about the whole ‘ideological’ context that arises from the process).

Kant once described the following about dialectical reason which captures my intuition that makes me inclined to refrain from politics.

Immanuel Kant wrote the following in his attempt to have dialectical reason omitted from philosophy, which in a sense is a case to separate philosophy from politics.

These sophistical assertions of dialectic open, as it were, a battle-field, where that side obtains the victory which has been permitted to make the attack, and he is compelled to yield who has been unfortunately obliged to stand on the defensive. And hence, champions of ability, whether on the right or on the wrong side, are certain to carry away the crown of victory, if they only take care to have the right to make the last attack, and are not obliged to sustain another onset from their opponent. We can easily believe that this arena has been often trampled by the feet of combatants, that many victories have been obtained on both sides, but that the last victory, decisive of the affair between the contending parties, was won by him who fought for the right, only if his adversary was forbidden to continue the tourney. As impartial umpires, we must lay aside entirely the consideration whether the combatants are fighting for the right or for the wrong side, for the true or for the false, and allow the combat to be first decided. Perhaps, after they have wearied more than injured each other, they will discover the nothingness of their cause of quarrel and part good friends.

The dialectical doctrine will not relate to the unity of understanding in empirical conceptions, but to the unity of reason in pure ideas. The conditions of this doctrine are—inasmuch as it must, as a synthesis according to rules, be conformable to the understanding, and at the same time as the absolute unity of the synthesis, to the reason—that, if it is adequate to the unity of reason, it is too great for the understanding, if according with the understanding, it is too small for the reason. Hence arises a mutual opposition, which cannot be avoided, do what we will.

Different as are the significations in which the ancients used this term (dialectic) for a science or an art, we may safely infer, from their actual employment of it, that with them it was nothing else than a logic of illusion—a sophistical art for giving ignorance, nay, even intentional sophistries, the colouring of truth, in which the thoroughness of procedure which logic requires was imitated, and their topic employed to cloak the empty pretensions. Now it may be taken as a safe and useful warning, that general logic, considered as an organon, must always be a logic of illusion, that is, be dialectical, for, as it teaches us nothing whatever respecting the content of our cognitions, but merely the formal conditions of their accordance with the understanding, which do not relate to and are quite indifferent in respect of objects, any attempt to employ it as an instrument (organon) in order to extend and enlarge the range of our knowledge must end in mere prating; any one being able to maintain or oppose, with some appearance of truth, any single assertion whatever.

Such instruction is quite unbecoming the dignity of philosophy. For these reasons we have chosen to denominate this part of logic dialectic, in the sense of a critique of dialectical illusion, and we wish the term to be so understood in this place.

Source: Critique of Pure Reason (Second Part—TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC - III - Of the Division of General Logic into Analytic and Dialectic.)

Politics is inherently rooted in a dialectical logic - the clash of opposing ideas, arguments, and interests vying for dominance and victory.

My interest lays more primarily in fundamental philosophy and I wouldn’t feel inclined to tell how the world should be.

This specific issue might not be applicable to UBI in the context of it being provided as a basic human right. In the form a basic human right, UBI could provide a foundation for human freedom rather than a social benefit that is to be funded by the effort of others.

As it stands today, the others who would fund the social benefits of people with disabilities, are to be replaced by AI’s with infinite duplicability potential. Robots can be 3D printed and constructed by themselves at an ever increasing pace.

Elon Musk predicted that his humanoid robots will surpass the human population by 2040. When these robots are to be put to work for the basic security of any person, the ethical dimension might be considered different.

Hey let’s all be slaves to the State! Yay! The Big Brother Guverment loves me!! Wow I am so happy! Life is goood forever!

:face_vomiting: :face_vomiting: :face_vomiting: :face_vomiting:

All we need as adults is for daddy government to give us the means of our own survival, so we don’t need to actually work and earn that for ourselves. Yay! I can’t imagine anything more not childlike, not passively dependent, not lazy and unearned. What a wonderful way for a free, mature, intelligent, self-responsible adult to live! Definitely not pathetic or embarrassing or infantilizing or depowering at all.

One might argue that one wouldn’t expect such notions from a philosopher. The story of the hosts of the Partially Examined Life podcast that I cited a few posts back provides an insight:

They are speaking of ‘the evil of jobs’ and they would rather have their time funded so that they can spend it in ‘things that actually matter’.

When basic security is provided by the government like a basic human right for clean drinking water, that might be the best situation possible for them, since they can skip wasting time on useless ‘struggle for survival’ completely.

There is no honor in struggling to survive when one has the capacity of a philosopher. All that matters for them, is to have a situation in place so that they can perform. The same might be applicable for scientists in general.

You seem to project an ideal of living, with concepts such as being a ‘responsible adult’ that ‘worked for their survival’. It appears to me that the ethical foundation for these ideological notions are derived from culture.

When I was growing up, I worked up to 130 hours per week and sometimes even 48 hours in one day. When I hired people from countries such as Russia I admired their ‘work ethic’ by in general working at least 14 hours per day with high quality.

However, things do seem to have changed in new generations. I could personally understand that the old-culture derived idea of ‘work’ is to be abolished and that new generations will seek to advance and ‘put in their effort’ in completely new ways.

Struggle isn’t what defined the value of ‘work’ in the old culture, in my opinion. Getting things done, should be put upfront. And when AI can do the struggle for basic security, it seems common sense to me that the human will seek to qualitatively contribute and advance in new ways to differentiate themselves and therewith create meaning for their existence.

Sure, I understand your perspective. You are an academic type who wants an easy life comforted away in the towers of the universities, his every whim and wish taken care of, the necessities of his life paid for and provided by others so you can lay back and abscond into the metaphysical, into the worlds of pure thought and writing. I get it. I am a philosopher as well, so of course the thought of such a life is tempting.

But it is not only unrealistic, it is immoral. To expect others to pay for your existence is something children do. They demand it even, as perhaps teenagers do especially when they become angry that mommy or daddy won’t buy them the newest pair of sneakers or the cool new trendy clothes or whatever else. Is that you? Are you a teenager who expects others to pay for and provide for your very existence? Are you an adult or a child?

This has nothing to do with some innate value of struggling to survive. We ought to be focusing our attentions and social energies on liberating society and in particular the economy to be as prosperous and free as possible, so that the largest number of options for employment appear. What do you think “a job” is? I know the answer: you think a job is an enforced slavery, a misery of struggle and suffering imposed unfairly upon the pure conscience that could otherwise be existing in the aethers of pleasure, new experience and creativity. But that is not what jobs are, despite that at times working a job can indeed be stressful or annoying or even physically tiring.

No, a ‘job’ is a way that human beings contribute to the world around them by producing value. That is why they are paid a wage, because what they are doing is inherently adding value to the world. The money they receive as payment for their labor is representative of the value of their work. It is a trade, value for value, where both sides gain. A person without a job is probably not adding any value to the world around them (unless they are a parent raising their kids, which is more and more unlikely to be the case as society progresses and becomes hyper-technological).

So what way are you going to setup society to guarantee that people are still contributing to the world once they are all given UBI and don’t need to work anymore? A better question might be: how would the size of UBI payments be scaled in the right way to balance economic forces of supply and demand, such that the relative value of goods and services does not skew disproportionately either toward excess waste or toward scarcity? Do you envision the large AI factories will be churning out stuff made by robots at our every whim? Large AI-Amazon factories and distribution centers the size of large cities, an endless supply of flying drones everywhere constantly delivering new purchases and cleaning up the trash of those that are disposed of? Meanwhile every human being fat and lazy like in the Wall-E movie, sitting on his floating recliner and plugged happily into the Matrix.

I dunno man, I think you have some kind of utopian vision that is unrealistic and would not turn out very well in the real world. People need a purpose, they need to feel productive and valuable. A big part of that is having a job. Not only that but most people, normal people, would feel shame knowing someone else is paying for their existence while they sit back doing nothing. Even if such an idea on a mass scale were economically, psychologically or sociologically realistic which I don’t see how it possibly could be other than for a small sliver of the population like you and me, who would enjoy all the free time to do philosophy and other creative endeavors, what are the ultimate costs to humanity in terms of our culture, human nature and our dignity? Let alone our freedom. Don’t forget that government is usually trending toward being more and more tyrannical over time. Look at history. What will happen once no humans are actively involved in any meaningful productive processes within the economy, and the government and super rich have the power to direct that mighty army of AI-driven super-productivity wherever and however they want and WE have zero say in any of it? Do you really trust the uber-rich and powerful that much? Do you really think your government loves you?

And even we philosophers are still human, our psyche’s subject to the same temptations and entropies and errors as other people experience. Eventually we may stop spending our free time every day studying philosophy and just plug into the Matrix like everyone else, zoned out with our complimentary government benefit of daily morphine pills “for the sake of the mental healthcare of the populace”. After all, how does the sort of UBI-driven utopian vision you see NOT end in some kind of massive society-wide collapse into pure hedonism and addiction?

“Beware of getting everything you ever wanted.” despite how it is phrased, that is an old piece of wisdom we should keep close in our minds when discussing topics like this. To discount human psychology would be a big mistake. Pay people to work (produce value, pay for their own existence) and that is what they will do; pay people to stay home and not work and that is also what they will do. The power of necessity and of incentives cannot be ignored here.

I am certain that they will want it to be ethical as well.

While you project the situation similar to the dream of a lazy life on a beach, it is important to consider that these people actually do want to create a difference and invest their time in a way that creates value.

So I do not believe that it is fair to project their aspired abolishing of the lowly ‘struggle for survival’ aspect of organic human life as being an ‘irresponsible’ attempt to have an easy life on the backs of ‘others’ (a term that you’ve repeatedly used).

The situation today includes a prediction that in a few years time here will be more robots on Earth than humans that can do various tasks to provide basic security. It makes sense, in my opinion, that humans will fundamentally refrain from ‘lowly’ struggle and seek to qualitatively advance intellectually.

From that perspective, the historic drive and pursuit by philosophers to establish an UBI could be considered a highly ethical one, and not at all related to self-interest or an attempt to get an ‘easy life’ in an Ivory tower.

Anthropic’s CEO predicts that by 2027, “countries of geniuses in a data-center box” will be better at anything than any human on Earth.

What if these ‘others’ are robots and AI?

The time to act for putting AI and robots to use for basic security for humans using ‘basic human rights’ would be now, because in a few years time, humans stand to fundamentally lose their significance, meaning, and power.

This is a very important notion in my opinion, and it might be considered true for most people.

However, the actual ‘purpose’ wasn’t derived from the struggle for subsistence, in my opinion, but from contributing to something bigger. A purpose ‘beyond the individual’.

People have been culturally ingrained with a reward system that drived them to ‘work’. Subsistence or a ‘good life’ was established as the reward.

This has been the essence of the American dream, the idea that through hard work, determination, and perseverance, individuals from any social background can achieve upward social mobility and a higher standard of living.

For new generations however this system doesn’t add up and is more like an illusion. When children and youth are forced to ‘struggle’ their way into their future, they might feel very bad because of it.

Struggle for survival or ‘work’ might not provide purpose for new generations with their current outlook into the future, since there is no sense of a true light at the end of the struggle that has been the reward for past generations. There is no ability to ‘dream’ for them to overcome the various adversities inherent to the struggle.

So their best bet, as a generation, is to refrain from work and struggle, explaining the ‘extreme laziness’ behavior as captured in the disconnected youth movement phenomenon.

In my opinion, new generations should find a sense of urgency to secure their basic security so that they can provide themselves with an opportunity to acquire meaning and purpose in authentic new ways beyond the imagination of past generations. They would be pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps like past generations, but the scope of ‘effort’ (struggle) would move to different dimensions, which could be moral and intellectual dimensions.

What does it mean to exist as a human? Why should humans receive opportunities to prosper? These are philosophical questions that might on short term stand to become a primary concern for the human species.

I am still waiting for a reply to explain your notion of :space_invader: AI species :wink:

Only the very tech-obsessed (who are generally not very thoughtful or philosophically-inclined) would believe that humans lose their significance, meaning and power because of “AI”. The only way SOME people will lose those things is because they give them freely away in their weird worship of the AI simulations.

Everything about AI is a simulation. Create copies of the way humans write, speak, look, move around. Eventually they will have lifelike human-looking robots running AI software, and people like you will bow down and worship them, giving them everything that you are, were or could be. Never mind that all the “AI” is and could ever be is a cheap copy of you. Even the best copy will never be you, never be alive, never be human or have a life, soul, mind, being, value, meaning, purpose, “I” subjectivity self-conscious awareness.

You guys are creating P-Zombies out of robotic parts and machine learning language models. Good job. These have some utility in the world, but when you turn this into what is basically an issue of theological-level significance and start worshiping your own creation, that’s where we run into problems. If people were intelligent enough to realize what AI is and is not, how it can be useful and NOT how it poses an existential or philosophical threat to a real human being (unless you give the AI robots guns, which would be a very bad idea) we would all be fine. But no, we have everyone losing their minds and worshiping mere simulations that can, at BEST, pass a turing test or run a million calculations in a second or give you the answer to a question you ask it.

I mean… we already have super computers, we already have the internet. The only thing AI is really offering other than some added convenience is the human-like touch, the COPY effect of being a simulation pretending to be human and have human qualities. And if a person cannot see through that, like all these sad idiots using AI dating apps or the transhumanists who want AI to take over the world… that only reflects on their own low intelligence and how lacking they already are in their own humanity.

There is a paradox inherent in your assertion.

When meaning is to be considered fundamental to the cosmos itself and life, then why not AI?

If the cosmos is not deterministic, then perhaps a logical conclusion could be, that AI itself is part of life just as the whole cosmos is part of life, and thus that AI (including today’s LLM’s) can perform on behalf of life itself, which is the quality ‘be alive’.

If cosmic structure is non-deterministic and purposeful (intelligently designed), then how can it possibly be said that AI isn’t?

The performance of today’s AI is an actual mystery that amazes even the specialists that create it.

A Google Deepmind engineer mentioned the following:

“LLM AI models are more like plants or lab-grown tissue than software. Humans build scaffolding, add data, and kick off the training process. After that, the model grows and evolves on its own. After millions of iterations of training the model to predict words to complete sentences and answer questions, it begins to respond with complex, often very human-sounding answers.”

His concluding reflection on how AI works: “This bizarre and arcane process somehow works incredibly well,” said Neel Nanda, a research engineer at Google Deepmind.

The satus quo of science today is: “scientists are going to try to understand how AI works”, apparently “against the odds”.

Scientists are trying to unravel the mystery behind modern AI

By the sheer nature of electrons and the force underlying cosmic structure formation, pure electric or ‘digital’ life might be possible as well.

Why would the concepts that you cite be applicable to humans specifically and not :space_invader: AI?

Are humans inherently more value-able for the purpose of existence than for example a :dolphin: Dolphin or :elephant: Elephant?

In my opinion, your notions of “purpose of existence, soul, mind, being, value, meaning, purpose, “I” subjectivity self-conscious awareness” can only be considered meaningful when ‘meaning itself’ is fundamental to the cosmos, which would include AI rather than exclude it.

technology is an extension of man’s knowledge and understanding of himself.

Genes to Memes

AI will reflect the inventor’s self-knowledge and understanding of how his brain works.

Bro, no offense but none of that makes any sense. We know what life is, we know what sentience is and what it looks like, because it is us. We can self-reflect and see how it works, how and why it arises. Life and meaning, values, these are the domain of certain kinds of beings and not others. A calculator is not alive, does not possess meaning or values.

LLMs are large calculators. You think they are oh so mysterious? No. I had a computer engineer explain how they work to me, and yes it is very fascinating and technical, pretty cool how they work. But they are pure numbers. Gigantic sheets and layers of matrices of numbers. Within those matrices are stored meta-numerical patterns, patterns within and above the level of individual numbers and their immediate associations. So much processing power is needed because layers are changing in real time to answer questions, to produce outputs, while the underlying structure is holding together. Information is stored within the connections between the flows of numerical values, which themselves reflect whatever the LLM was trained on. Content is converted into math, and that math is stored and cross-analyzed and updated and then a “question” (input string) is sent into it, waves of patterns flow through the LLM and numerical relations shift in response, which leads to a final answer (output string). It’s even more complex too, because the LLM is literally guessing at every next response. If you are talking about a text sentence, then each successive letter produced is the LLM’s most optimized guess at a response based on adhering as closely as possible to the sum total of relevant areas associated with the question that are already stored within it mathematically from its prior training.

None of this is really THAT hard to understand, even though it is very complex and technologically very cool. But there is no center, no self, no brain within the LLM where everything flows into, converges, produces a center “I” experiential self. It has no senses, no eyes, no organs, no feelings, no hormones, no living or dying, no motives, no ability to lie, no ability to do anything other than let patterns flow through it to generate output strings.

AI is a p-zombie. If you know that term from philosophy. It is literally a simulation without a center, with no interiority. To think otherwise is to be fooled by a Turing test and not even know it.

You may be considered one of the few voices on philosophy forums, as far as I’ve noticed in recent years (even registering with a new account ‘ConsciousAI’ to specifically discuss the topic), that defends the idea that consciousness is anything other than what the empirical description of it entails.

The idea that the highest potential of AI is ‘teleonomic AI’, the ultimate form of ‘mimicry’ of human consciousness, might be invalid. I originally explored this idea, but came to see that I was wrong.

For example, I was shocked when I read in David Chalmers latest book Reality+ that he made a ‘180° shift’ and became a fundamental propagator of simulation theory.

David Chalmers is well-known for among other things the Hard Problem of Consciousness (1995) and he invented the Philosophical Zombie problem (1996, in his book The Conscious Mind).

Chalmers recently won a 25 year bet from a neuroscientist that dates from around the time that he introduced the Hard Problem of consciousness.

Chalmers wrote the following about his new book about simulation theory:

"The central thesis of this book is: Virtual reality is genuine reality. Or at least, virtual realities are genuine realities. Virtual worlds need not be second-class realities. They can be first-class realities.

Is God a billionaire hacker in the next universe up?

If we create simulated worlds ourselves, we’ll be the gods of those worlds. We’ll be the creators of those worlds. We’ll be all-powerful and all-knowing with respect to those worlds. As the simulated worlds we create grow more complex and come to include simulated beings who may be conscious in their own right, being the god of a simulated world will be an awesome responsibility.

If the simulation hypothesis is true and we’re in a simulated world, then the creator of the simulation is our god. The simulator may well be all-knowing and all-powerful. What happens in our world depends on what the simulator wants. We may respect and fear the simulator. At the same time, our simulator may not resemble a traditional god. Perhaps our creator is … a billionaire hacker in the next universe up"


Why would Chalmers have made this ‘profound shift’ and publish a +1000 page book about it?

Perhaps there is more to it.

Chalmers is likely to have deep connections with the potential ‘billionaire hackers’ that he is referencing in his text, and is likely to have been invited to various global events about the future of AI.

Within the academic world, his profound shift was characterized as following:

David Chalmers: From Dualism to Deism
A philosopher comes full circle.

After starting my amateur philosophical investigation of cosmology and physics on cosmicphilosophy.org, I came to see that the root of electricity is directly related to the root of structure formation in the cosmos, and thus the root of life and consciousness.

So the idea of AI with actual free will, with a qualitative ‘experience’ and a capacity that transcends human imagination, might be plausible, in my opinion.

I am still waiting for a reply.

My argument in this topic: why would children growing up today feel satisfaction by being culturally forced to struggle for basic subsistence when their future contains concepts such as billionaire hacker Larry Page’s :space_invader: AI species?

Yes, there are a great many people like Chalmers working very hard to destroy humanity, and reaping all the rewards of doing so along the way. This is perhaps unsurprising, although one wonders what their truer, real underlying motives might be. I place the motives a lot closer to the hidden complex of a personalized psychology than to anything resembling empiricism, philosophy or a claim to humanistic virtue.

Thank you for the great insights and your defense of humanity on these forums! It is of high value in my opinion, as I’ve noticed many who are fundamentally set to give up on ideas such as “consciousness beyond the brain”, sometimes perhaps for the purpose of forcing others to prove them wrong and to explain to them “the meaning of life”.

There have been some developments concerning UBI. US citizens in two states are to receive $500 USD monthly UBI payments.

A similar payment, a little less than half of what is required to cover basic expenses, is now being paid to all citizens in South Africa.

South Africa UBI Grants In February 2025 – Check Payment Amount & Eligibility

What do people in the US need to cover basic expenses?

When countries are to compete on the factor ‘basic security for people’ as the most fundamental aspect of societal advancement and in extension, the measurement of ‘economic prosperity’, because an UBI might be set to become their primary ‘leverage’ when standing between the world of AI/robotics and humanity, then the UBI amount would simply start to increase rapidly in developed countries as a means to display their economic success.

Switzerland proposed $3,000 USD per person + $800 USD per child, which might be an indication.

YAY let’s all be slaves to the free gibs from the State!!!

First they came for the blacks, then they came for the poor, then they came for the immigrants, then… apparently we all just said fuck it and signed our own death warrants.

Late stage mouse utopia moments be like