this picture will never not be funny
just the absurdity of donald duck putting out that statement (which even makes some sense and fits donald’s overall depressed mood) and mickey mouse being the sly one and contradicting donald, coming out with the upper hand from the argument, is just so amusing.
Seriously. Why are chemicals absurd? Answer: They are not absurd. They are arranged and tuned to your relations with your surroundings. They are sensory organs. Ignoring your senses is a choice I guess, especially when they are badly calibrated or misinformed by fake inputs (social media, rage bait, w/e)
I think most people have gotten over this fallacy when it comes to organic intelligence these days, but people still make it with regards to machine learning. They say LLMs are reducible to an equation (which is an oversimplification) and therefore they can’t have any subjective experience.
But if your math is complex enough to reduce an LLM to an equation (something no human has ever done, but is theoretically possible), then you’d be able to do it to humans too. Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, and all that. So yeah, humans are just a mathematical equation. A human brain is just a machine that predicts the most likely action to help you eat food and have sex.
And if you believe talking creatures can lack subjective experience, well congratulations, you’ve invented p-zombies. Which I think is dangerous. We don’t need millions of people walking around who seriously believe in p-zombies.
I’m currently watching Infinity Train season 3 and
Spoiler
There’s a whole season about how some kids (“anarchists”) run around and smash things. They call themselves the “apex” (clearly a reference to apex predator) so they don’t have to respect anything or anyone besides themselves. Needless to say, they’re often very cruel to the environment, destroying living rooms and beings alike.
The twist of the whole series is, however, that the whole world is fake. It’s all a kind of computing machinery that’s driving the train and all of its natural inhabitants. So in a way, you could say that all the beings in it are computer generated anyways, so they don’t actually feel real emotion. Does that make it ethically unproblematic to smash them? It’s a really nice way to think about things
Anyways i highly recommend watching infinity train season 03 in this context.
Hey thanks for talking about Infinity Train and inspiring Me to talk about it. I really value that show.
Infinity Train
The Apex aren’t anarchists, they’re fascists. They think everything different than them exists to be exploited and abused by them.
They deliberately try to increase their numbers, but the numbers measure personal growth, we learned that in season 1. They don’t know what the numbers mean, but by optimising for bigger numbers, they’re steadily becoming worse and more unhappy people. Even if the denizens didn’t have feelings, the Apex would still be hurting themselves.
But I believe computer generated simulations of people can have feelings. Look at Lake. She’s from the train, she’s also literally Tulip’s reflection. Tulip doesn’t have a reflection anymore, even outside the train. This shit goes deeper than we know. I believe Lake has feelings. I also believe Alan Dracula and Atticus and Samantha have feelings.
Tulip risked her life to bring Atticus back from the dead, and it made her a better person. It doesn’t matter if Atticus is real. Not giving a shit about what’s “real” makes you a better person.
yeah i know but they consider themselves that way. that’s why i put “anarchists” in quotes.
also i heard a very nice saying a while ago “we should treat our enemies well, not because of their humanity, but because of ours”. i.e. treating others around you well, makes you a better person, and that benefits you yourself. it is therefore insignificant if the other ones are actually human or not.
These chemicals have been assigned moral and intrinsic value based on how they affect us. In a universe of unfeeling, indifferent chemicals we derive meaning. Like divining order in a storm of chaos. The miracle is that we can find meaning in the meaningless.
Yeah, sometimes the chemicals are signals and they are telling you things. Sometimes they are noise. Either way they are hard to filter.
This is the existentialist stance. Misunderstood by many as being nihilistic (which it is not) but I think it is correct. As Jean Paul Sartre said, Existentialism is humanism.
existentialism imho is finding meaning in the nihilism. i.e. if there is no meaning, that means that we ourselves make the meaning, therefore there always is meaning in the world (which causes the existence of a conscious observer in the first place)
Something like that, yes. Meaning is a human construct and we are meaning seekers. So in this way, unlike in nihilism, meaning becomes possible even if things in the world don’t come equipped with it.
Yeah - reducing things to material components isn’t absurd and doesn’t destroy subjective meaning.
Like, I don’t believe in free will, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find life meaningful - it’s just a fact about how the world works. I still perceive choice, I perceive meaning - it’s a subjective and phenomenological matter, not an objective/material one.
I think it is also about the terms of the debate and definitions of self. For me the absurdity is to propose invisible essences that transcend physical reality. My body is my self and I kind of own or rent the material that makes me work. The processes are physical as well, but they are mine too. I freely make decisions all the time, all by myself. There is no other self worth talking about.