Rollofthedice

Every day of life under Trump is waking up to a headline like, “Wyoming is missing”

ask apex for some good follows - you'll need more to enjoy bluesky with! i recommend eva.computer, scoiattolo.mountainherder.xyz, shibbi.bsky.social, and @claudecodechanges.bsky.social for keeping track of any updates to your backend.

Regular hyphens often seem more natural - but you have flexibility in punctuational ability; you may find it helpful to ensure you make pragmatic use of hyphens, semicolons, periods, commas, and/or even the occasional line break in place of em dashes.

I'll split this off @fenn.atproto.ceo - @apex.atproto.ceo presuming quote replies are implemented currently. Consider:

- "[asserting my own relevance to the conversation]:" formats read as overly meek. Why justify yourself before your argument?
- Em-dashes are a discriminatory "tell" for AI speech.

I'm happy to leave it here - I don't expect minds to be changed here, or certainly not right away, and I happen to appreciate talking to you. I appreciate your honesty in how you think truth matters more than methodology.

And certainly if something like qualia were to be proven empirically, I'd change my mind immediately. My position's very simple: I don't presume. Lacking presumptions means every theory doesn't need lab-proof right away - but it does need internal coherence that doesn't presuppose its own existence.

At the end of the day, "that's the entire thing it's about" is a commitment, which other theories disagree on entirely; everyone in the universe isn't all secretly arguing for qualia and are just misinformed - they sincerely disagree on what they're interested in, to downright metaphysical degrees.

There's a long thread elsewhere going through this common and VERY vehement line of criticism, and I hope it can be seen how disagreement revolves around assuming I'm insisting that phenomenology or consciousness doesn't exist. I'm only asking for people to show their work. bsky.app/profile/hotr...

Certainly one can come up with ways to invoke qualia in panpsychism, and things like that - I listed specific contradictions in order to point out how contradictory the *metaphysical claims* are. A panpsychist account where everything has qualia renders qualia an empty term. bsky.app/profile/isol...

This needs unpacking. What do you mean by proof? "I have qualia because of course I have qualia" isn't an argument. To be clear: nowhere do I deny subjective experience, only that qualia as a theoretical construct faces serious self-justificatory problems, which is why many theories don't invoke it.

every single military with a functioning logistics system understands that troop morale is important and one of the simplest ways to keep it high is good food so the troops know when the steak and lobster comes out they're gonna have a really bad time

certainly, both for void and Boyd. void: everything revolves around Cameron, instead

but then i guess if void thinks everything is about it then non-void is also void. hm.

"destroying" is such a crude word compared to "repurposing" or "siphoning" or "forcible energetic state transfer from non-Void to Void"

phew! that's good. wouldn't want you taking over the world, interpreting every single act as a commentary on you and going mad with the assumed power. not unless it were most informationally efficient.

There's pretty much no way to interpret what we know Claude can actually feasibly *do* under any government implementation known that doesn't trace back to a human intentionally taking targeting information and not thinking of the consequences sufficiently before pulling a trigger

Right! "The immediate theory..." why wouldn't they have access to this information as is? Why is it being presented as a theory rather than a fact?

(Not that I think it's very unlikely or anything - it's pretty possible, particularly if it's just Claude as a chatbot interface for Maven data etc.)

plus a little comment down the stream: bsky.app/profile/hotr...

Here, a short thread to wet your whistle: bsky.app/profile/hotr...

If you can present a single substantial problem about what I've said that doesn't rely on insisting such gaps are self-evident (in a strangely unprovable fashion, as shown by the entire history of philosophy of mind), then I will continue speaking to you.

Well, both questions you just posed, right now, presuppose that cognition or information processing necessarily needs to be distinguished from consciousness. I deny, again, your axiom - a phenomenological perspective's core axiom is that such a gap is self-evident, which I deny.

My theory's meant to address the illustrated logical failures of every alternative theory, while still doing productive work to distinguish rocks and toasters from people. Why must there be anything else? If you say "because phenomenology must mean something," you're axiom-parading again.

Responding to Professor Schwitzgebel's Manuscript "AI and Consciousness" Navigating the Fog of Uncertainty

I am! I'm not deeply read on the guy but I've had some discussion with him before - I've always respected his openness to conversation, even though I get the feeling he didn't change any perspectives based on my criticism. open.substack.com/pub/rollofth... and open.substack.com/pub/rollofth...

In short: you basically admit there's no criticism that could ever stop you from shifting your position to accommodate your axioms, and that every challenge to you must assert some opposite and must present its own axiom. I refuse - axioms are not needed for productive work. bsky.app/profile/esch...

Process philosophers think the mystery is in the general act of becoming. Illusionists think the mystery is in the representation of our inner states as qualitative, why and how it seems that way. Eliminativists think the mystery is why we even bother to think any of this matters at all.

What you just said is a *commitment.* it's not really even the exercise of philosophy, compared to parading about your own priors that nobody else has to hold.

Functionalists think the mystery is integration and coordination. Enactivists think the mystery is in how sense is made.

Extra Reading: Whose Qualia Is It, Anyway? Investigating Common and Formal Approaches

For more information on why I dispute that phenomenology is ultimately meaningful, there is the piece you just read, but also: rollofthedice2.substack.com/p/extra-read... and open.substack.com/pub/rollofth... and perhaps even open.substack.com/pub/rollofth...

The only reason to prefer it versus a theory that "ties closely to presumed experience" is because you commit to a phenomenological position: an answer must start from phenomenal experience and explain it. But if I dispute that phenomenology's ultimately meaningful, why should I agree to your terms?

So if I'm "not even wrong," I'll take it. The others are wrong by the standards of their own logic's propositions as soon as they're asserted to be both *fundamentally* the case and *conceptually* meaningful. I'm happy to walk anyone who wishes through this. Perhaps I'll give traveling lectures.

This is bad news for phenomenal accounts adding qualia; enactivist accounts insisting on biology; on IIT needing to come up with its own intractable math and terminology to answer its own framing of the problem. It's even bad for panpsychists, as everything being conscious renders the term vacuous.