• UlyssesT [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    That reddit-logo post is giving me vivid flashbacks to earlier struggle sessions about this topic on Hexbear, the worst of which involved arguments that workers replaced by chatbots shouldn't complain because chatbots are at least as conscious and sapient as they are and that those maybe weren't real jobs anyway. pain

    • VILenin [he/him]
      hexagon
      M
      ·
      10 months ago

      Redditors worship what is essentially a glorified version of this:

      Show

      As if it were something meaningful.

      Just a group of slack-jawed morons endlessly circlejerking about superdeterminism™️ absolving them of anything and everything and thinking a literal chatbot is conscious.

      Do you think, in the midst of spewing their superdeterministic physicalist garbage, any one of them ever stops to wonder if consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries ever not because everyone else is stupid, but because it really is mysterious?

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        10 months ago

        Do you think, in the midst of spewing their superdeterministic physicalist garbage, any one of them ever stops to wonder if consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries ever not because everyone else is stupid, but because it really is mysterious?

        A common techbro/Reddit take is "if something has been pondered for thousands of years, I am the Main Character and the bestest brain and I have already resolved it while not entirely understanding the premise of the question. Bazinga!"

        They also get really mad if their logical positivism claims are subjected to the standards of logical positivism: can you weigh and measure logical positivism particles in a laboratory environment? If not, then logical positivism does not exist. troll

        • VILenin [he/him]
          hexagon
          M
          ·
          edit-2
          10 months ago

          Seems to be a recurring theme in philosophy: some narcissist comes along every few years with their unsubstantiated one-liner bullshit and starts lecturing everyone else on how they’re dumb and stinky for not conceding to their objectively correct opinion. They all think they’ve cracked the code to millennias-old questions by pulling some maxim out of nothing and whining about how nobody comprehends their intellectual might.

          My favorite example of this is Hanlon’s Razor: based on nothing but vibes and you’re just supposed to believe it’s correct because its proponents think they’re big brain intellectual powerhouses.

          • UlyssesT [he/him]
            ·
            10 months ago

            Billionaires now subsidize such Main Characters and pay them to conjure up fictitious versions of reality that omit the inconvenient bits. It's repeats of older "everything is fire" "everything is wheels" "everything is clockwork" lazy and reductive takes on the cosmic whole, but now it's computers. And like so many contemporary takes, it's different because now we have computers.