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TaoHorror

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« Reply #210 on: January 14, 2020, 02:46:38 pm »
"Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as conscious beings will be recognized as a gigantic waste of time."
 -Thomas Nagel

Articulated much better than I ever could, but I've felt this way for some time. Though trying may not be a waste of time, we may learn a lot with robotics that could be a boon for humanity. But the idea we can make a computer ( or anything ) conscious beyond the good old fashion way will likely never happen.

I've had this idea for a somewhat scifi story/movie/something ( I'm a shit writer, so it'll forever rot in my head ) whereas we did fail to generate artificial intelligence from hard machines, but we made some ground with soft machinery and succeeded in creating a brain from scratch as a brain ( meaning wholly organic with exact bio materials as a human brain ) and a consciousness shows up ( emerges? ). From there we figure out how to disable the mechanism that allows us to forget and then build another brain and we ask the "person" who shows up where they came from. A lot of details have to be worked out, like is it an infantile consciousness that arrives and we have to wait for it to grow up, learn language, does disabling forgetfulness drive it insane, etc. But I think it could be suspenseful story building up to "summoning" a consciousness that will remember where it came from. So if my story is "true", what's showing up would be a soul.
It's me, Dave, open up, I've got the stuff

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« Reply #211 on: January 14, 2020, 03:26:37 pm »
A lot of details have to be worked out, like is it an infantile consciousness that arrives and we have to wait for it to grow up, learn language, does disabling forgetfulness drive it insane, etc. But I think it could be suspenseful story building up to "summoning" a consciousness that will remember where it came from. So if my story is "true", what's showing up would be a soul.

Very Hegelian, I like it.  I love Hegel's line from The Phenomenology, "Wir sehen hiermit wieder die Sprache als das Dasein des Geistes." (So, again, we see language as the Dasein [being-there] of Spirit.)

Quote
Yet one cannot maintain that the sensible is injected by me into things like some sort of perpetual and arbitrary hallucination. For there is indeed a constant link between real things and their sensations: if there were no thing capable of giving rise to the sensation of redness, there would be no perception of a red thing; if there were no real fire, there would be no
sensation of burning. But it makes no sense to say that the redness or the heat can exist as qualities just as well without me as with me: without the perception of redness, there is no red thing; without the sensation of heat, there is no heat. Whether it be affective or perceptual, the sensible only exists as a relation: a relation between the world and the living creature I am. In actuality, the sensible is neither simply ‘in me’ in the manner of a dream, nor simply ‘in the thing’ in the manner of an intrinsic property: it is the very relation between the thing and I. These sensible qualities, which are not in the things themselves but in my subjective relation to the latter – these qualities correspond to what were traditionally called secondary qualities.

-Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude

For Sci (just being a QM quote) and Wilshire (a quote about things in themselves).  Mostly though, a quote for me, that someone actually intelligent spells out my vague notion about a relationality.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

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« Reply #212 on: January 15, 2020, 12:51:01 pm »
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Thus, one could say that up until Kant, one of the principal problems of philosophy was to think substance, while ever since Kant, it has consisted in trying to think the correlation. Prior to the advent of transcendentalism, one of the questions that divided rival philosophers most decisively was ‘Who grasps the true nature of substance? He who thinks the Idea, the individual, the atom, God? Which God?’ But ever since Kant, to discover what divides rival philosophers is no longer to ask who has grasped the true nature of substantiality, but rather to ask who has grasped the more originary correlation: is it the thinker of the subject-object correlation, the noetico-noematic correlation, or the language-referent correlation? The question is no longer ‘which is the proper substrate?’ but ‘which is the proper correlate?’
-Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

sciborg2

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« Reply #213 on: January 17, 2020, 09:00:08 pm »
"You're saying that evil is a means to an end, never an end in itself. But what if evil was more than just a label for antisocial behavior? What if evil was a real force working in the world, capable of drawing people to its service?"
-Matt Ruff, Bad Monkeys

=-=-=

"We stood facing each other like two libertines...I think it was then that I told him truly why I was not on his side -

Because the Good was more of an Adventure."
-Calasso, Ruins of Kasch

Francis Buck

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« Reply #214 on: January 18, 2020, 08:59:42 am »
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

sciborg2

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« Reply #215 on: January 20, 2020, 01:09:45 am »
"Being clever's a fine thing, but sometimes a boy just needs to get out of the house and talk to some girls...GAMBLE A STAMP, I CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE A REAL MAN!"
 -Grant Morrison, Flex Mentallo

sciborg2

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« Reply #216 on: January 22, 2020, 07:21:50 pm »
“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell

sciborg2

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« Reply #217 on: January 23, 2020, 10:28:04 pm »
“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell

"We can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world.'
 – RG Collingwood

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« Reply #218 on: January 30, 2020, 03:16:56 am »
Quote
  In one of the Agatha Christie stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as the beautiful woman he had previously met on a trans-Atlantic voyage, she has merely disguised herself to hide her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, remarks sadly that if a beauty can make herself appear ugly, then the same can also be done vice versa. What then remains in man's infatuation beyond deception? Does this insight into the unreliability of the beautiful woman not Signal the end oflove? "No, my friend;' replies Poirot, "it announces the beginning of wisdom:' In other words, such skepticism, such awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, misses the point, which is that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which appears: no matter how fr agile and deceptive it may be at the level of substantial reality, what transpires in/through the moment of Beauty is an Absolute-there is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it. Therein resides Plato's deep insight: Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances (Plato was well aware that this hidden reality is that of ever-changing corrupting and corrupted matter); Ideas are nothing but the very form of appearance, this form as such- - or, as Lacan succinctly rendered Plato's point, the supra-sensible is appearance as appearance. For this reason, neither Plato nor Christianity are forms of Wisdom-they are both anti-Wisdom embodied.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

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« Reply #219 on: January 30, 2020, 01:35:44 pm »
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We don’t see the instantaneous locations of objects and infer movement. We see movement. The movement is part of the immediate uninferred contents of our perceptions. To have an experience that represents an object as in motion, the content of the experience must have temporal breadth; it must span a temporal interval. To see the force of this remark, we distinguish a changing representation from a representation of change. The first requires two experiences with different contents. The second requires a single experience whose content spans that of a pair of instantaneous experiences and compares them with one another. A movie screen that displays a different image at different moments doesn’t represent change. The image on the screen at any given moment only displays an instantaneous state of the environment. Representing change requires having contents that span a finite interval and compare experiences at different moments. The fact that change is something that we see directly—that is, that change is represented in the immediate uninferred contents of sensory experience—means that synthesis is integrating over time, not just across modalities. Concepts of space and time are constructed together by the mind as part of a unitary framework in which we and the objects of sensory attention are simultaneously located and related to one another. The concepts of things as objects of perception and one’s self as subject of experience are stabilized out of regularities over an extended stream of experiences, and they embody presumptions about the way things hang together over time.
Jeanne Ismael - How Physics Makes Us Free

A pretty good description of the Kantian perspective on how/why space and time are something like a priori categories of mind, and so the (sort of) "beginning" of Transcendental Idealism.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

sciborg2

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« Reply #220 on: January 30, 2020, 11:00:31 pm »
Quote
  In one of the Agatha Christie stories, Hercule Poirot discovers that an ugly nurse is the same person as the beautiful woman he had previously met on a trans-Atlantic voyage, she has merely disguised herself to hide her natural beauty. Hastings, Poirot's Watson-like companion, remarks sadly that if a beauty can make herself appear ugly, then the same can also be done vice versa. What then remains in man's infatuation beyond deception? Does this insight into the unreliability of the beautiful woman not Signal the end oflove? "No, my friend;' replies Poirot, "it announces the beginning of wisdom:' In other words, such skepticism, such awareness of the deceptive nature of feminine beauty, misses the point, which is that feminine beauty is nonetheless absolute, an absolute which appears: no matter how fr agile and deceptive it may be at the level of substantial reality, what transpires in/through the moment of Beauty is an Absolute-there is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it. Therein resides Plato's deep insight: Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances (Plato was well aware that this hidden reality is that of ever-changing corrupting and corrupted matter); Ideas are nothing but the very form of appearance, this form as such- - or, as Lacan succinctly rendered Plato's point, the supra-sensible is appearance as appearance. For this reason, neither Plato nor Christianity are forms of Wisdom-they are both anti-Wisdom embodied.
Slavoj Žižek - Less Than Nothing

I was following until the last line, where did the critique of Christianity come from and how is its Anti-Wisdom nature equal to Plato?

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« Reply #221 on: January 30, 2020, 11:29:00 pm »
I was following until the last line, where did the critique of Christianity come from and how is its Anti-Wisdom nature equal to Plato?

Zizek is a classic rambler.  It's hard to disentangle just what he is getting at there, but I don't think he is equating the two, just likening.

If I had to take a stab at trying to unravel what he is likening though, it's that both apart from the wisdom that, in Zizek's words there, "is more truth in the appearance than in what may be hidden beneath it."

Also, there is a lot more to Zizek's take on Christianity than I can rightly, or even try, to summarize in a concise way unfortunately.  Maybe in time I can, once I read more and more of his stuff.
I am a warrior of ages, Anasurimbor. . . ages. I have dipped my nimil in a thousand hearts. I have ridden both against and for the No-God in the great wars that authored this wilderness. I have scaled the ramparts of great Golgotterath, watched the hearts of High Kings break for fury. -Cet'ingira

sciborg2

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« Reply #222 on: February 02, 2020, 12:45:15 am »
“There will remain a certain sphere which will be outside physics ... It is obvious that a man who can see knows things which a blind man cannot know; but a blind man can know the whole of physics.”
- Bertrand Russell

"We can recognize a materialist author by his habit of using the traditional forms of Christian piety in speaking about the material world.'
 – RG Collingwood


'Historically, we may regard materialism as a system of dogma set up to combat orthodox dogma. ... Accordingly we find that, as ancient orthodoxies disintegrate, materialism more and more gives way to scepticism.'

- Bertrand Russell

sciborg2

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« Reply #223 on: February 03, 2020, 06:45:17 am »
"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."

-Gilles Deleuze
« Last Edit: February 22, 2021, 04:52:28 am by sciborg2 »

sciborg2

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« Reply #224 on: February 03, 2020, 09:27:57 pm »
"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and even rarer, thing that might be worth saying."

-Gilles Deleuze



"It is a time of false leaders, false nations and false gods. Men will come to convince you there is no evil, nor is there good. They will make one the other and destroy both. They will use the word "peace" to mean war. They will use the word "freedom" to mean slavery. They will blind you to what you know to be true until you no longer trust yourself.

You must not listen.

Comfort is not safety. Comfort is a thing to fear. All that challenges you is not your enemy. The firm hand strikes, but it can also hold you at the cliff. The soft hand comforts, but you will slip through its grasp. Civilization will teach that comfort is the only goal. Comfort of body. Comfort of mind. This is the path of defeat. This is the banishment of your own power. Those who wrap you in comfort seek to destroy you. They will praise you when you fear the world. They will hunt you when you hunt your fear. Be naked in the coldest day of winter so that you can love the warmth of the sun. Lay your body on stone so you can love the embrace of hay. Let adversity teach you. The hands of the forger must be firm and relentless, for the most important moment of the sword is the moment of tempering. This is tamashii o ireru. This is when the soul is put into the blade. What you choose will forge you.

And no sword can be forged twice."
-Bryan Hill, Fallen Angels #3