So, I feel compelled to say something about this recent essay by China Mieville dipping his toe into the philosophy of consciousness in order to argue against what he calls ‘folk Marxism’, which conflates historical and metaphysical materialism. This essay can be found here: salvage.zone/beyond-folk-ma…

I recently finished both McKenzie Wark’ Capital is Dead and Yanis Varoufakis’s Technofeudalism. I am not entirely unsympathetic to their aims, but I have some thoughts. Not unlike Mason’s Postcapitalism, there’s a weird fetsihization of information doing far too much work. To lay out my perspective right away, I’m not invested in either Marxian economics and the associated theory of exploitation in the way that any of these thinkers are. I’m not hostile to Marx, but I think their appropriations/elaborations of Marxism have some potential problems.

I think it's maybe worth summarising why I think post-Searlean critics of AI such as Emily Bender are wrong to dismiss the outputs of LLMs as meaningless. Though it's perhaps best to begin with a basic discussion of what's at stake in these debates. Much like the term 'consciousness', the term 'meaning' often plays proxy for other ideas. For example, saying systems can't be conscious is often a way of saying they'll never display certain degrees of intelligence or agency, without addressing the underlying capacities.

If the problem with Bayesianism is that it takes representational content for granted, the problem with Solmonoff induction is that it obviates representation entirely, objuring semantics in favour of foundational syntax. Each ignores the underlying dynamics of representation. By which I mean the non-trivial process through which singular objects are individuated (Kant’s problem) and the general types and predicates that subsume them are revised (Hegel’s problem). Semantic evolution is a constitutive feature of epistemic progress.

So, I’m extremely fond of pointing out instances a particular kind of fallacy: the collapse of obligation and supererogation. Today I’m struck by a more general dynamic that fits this pattern, but which is extremely delicate to discuss without being drawn into fray it creates. A quick recap: something is supererogatory if it is good to do (praiseworthy), but *not* bad not to (blameworthy). To act in this way is to exceed one’s obligations, to display excellence, or perhaps even virtue. Despite its familiarity, it is surprisingly hard to conceptualise.

Here’s another thread, inspired by a conversation I had with @Majafelice a few weeks ago. One of the things I’ve seen said by several sources recently, most prominently @AaronBastani, is that what passes for conservatism in the Anglophone world is no longer recognisable as such. By this I mean that the political philosophy of conservatism, articulated by thinkers like Burke, Hume, and others since, is simply absent from the political programs of contemporary conservatism. It’s not a bulwark against rapid social change at anything but the symbolic level.

Perhaps the great problem with being a republican in the UK at the moment is that there really is nothing new to say about the spiritual and material wretchedness of the institution of monarchy. The important things were said with whit, fire, and bile several hundred years ago. It’s not as if these things are some minor political tradition forgotten by history: there’s a direct line from Paine’s evisceration of hereditary authority to the American revolution. The now dominant strand of Anglophone culture has its roots stuck firmly in that soil.

Here’s a brief note on some ideas that are still in progress. I’ve said before that the older I get the more Platonist I become, though, unsurprisingly, those aspects of Plato I emphasise are somewhat idiosyncratic. I want to sketch out some of these idiosyncracies for you. I’ll preface any comments by linking to an earlier thread on the difference between what has come to be known as ‘mathematical Platonism’ in the analytic tradition and what I believe are the commitments of Platonism proper:

https://twitter.com/deontologistics/status/1386798597249945602

I’ve said this before, but because population ethics and the repugnant conclusion are still doing the rounds on here, I think we should distinguish between obligations to people who do not yet but will exist and those to purely notional people who we’re considering creating. For instance, there are good arguments to the effect that we should care about demographics and social reproduction, in order to ensure the continued functioning of society for those who already exist. Ceteris paribus, these imply ongoing responsibilities to future generations.

A brief thought on utilitarianism. I generally find preference utilitarianism more palatable than hedonic utilitarianism, because it comes closer to respecting the rational autonomy of persons in setting their own priorities. That being said... ...I think it ends up massively misunderstanding what desire is in the process. It ends up presupposing not simply that rational agents *do* know what they want, but that they *should* know what they want, in a complete and internally consistent fashion.

@ironick @jensensuther Okay, let's clarify this. Let's say you're defending the super-weak version of Hagglund's argument, in which the mere logical possibility of material dissolution, not even the empirical risk of it, is sufficient to ground the possibility of value. Here's two responses to this: @ironick @jensensuther 1. On the face of it, this does not really constitute a substantial condition for meaningful agency, because it's not a feature that any any material system whatsoever can fail to possess. There's no contrast case, nothing whose agential configuration fails to generate meaning.

I read (most of) Martin Hägglund's This Life a few months back, aiming to confront a contemporary representative of the view that mortality is what gives life meaning. This is a view I'm quite opposed to, so I suppose it's worth articulating some of my objections here. There are really two sides to Hägglund's project: 1) defining the distinction between the religious and the secular in terms of the eternal and temporal, and 2) providing something like a transcendental argument for mortality as a condition of the possibility of value.

@rechelon @m0lpe @paul__is__here @KerryLVaughan @peligrietzer It really depends what you mean by 'fruitful'. If you mean it instrumentally, as contributing to some larger epistemic goal, maybe, though I think that's to ignore the point of such non-instrumental pursuits. @rechelon @m0lpe @paul__is__here @KerryLVaughan @peligrietzer I suspect that the Sun-God-AI would more likely be motivated to find a more complicated artistic domain (grounded in its own peculiar drives and practical mediums) in which it can't easily make such predictions.

@rechelon @m0lpe @paul__is__here @KerryLVaughan So, let's get a few things straight, just so I don't get tarred with the wrong brush. Yes, I read Continental philosophy, but I read other stuff too. I'm a rationalist. I've got no problem being necessitated by reason. Instrumental constraints are ironclad. @rechelon @m0lpe @paul__is__here @KerryLVaughan I'm also a proponent of the importance of positive rather than merely negative freedom. I agree that ethics is oriented by the expansion of our sphere of possible action, rather than solely by ensuring non-interference in one another's business.

I suppose I should say something about LaMDA. As ever, my main issue is that people insist on running together consciousness (sentience), intelligence (sapience), and personhood (autonomy) when talking about whether machines are sufficiently human-like to warrant whatever. Sentience and sapience are at best necessary but not sufficient conditions of autonomy, and I’m honestly a bit skeptical about whether sentience is a necessary condition in the ways it is often described.

I had to do some research into the current state of blockchains and cryptocurrencies recently, and I now know a lot more about what I don't know thereabouts. This spurred a line of thought it might be worth unspooling here, briefly. So, there are two different interests driving development and adoption of these technologies: i) interest in crypto tokens as assets with high ROI; ii) interest in blockchains as decentralised infrastructure enabling transactions that precisely balance transparency and anonymity.

@rechelon Just to be clear, the purpose of this isn't to steel man anyone. It's part of my active research in philosophy of logic, which has both technical and historical elements. I avoided the term 'dialectic' for years, because of the lazy ways it's often used in Marxist circles. @rechelon But having dug deeper into both the formal questions and the history of the term, I came to see that there is something important it refers to, and that it is the correct word to use to refer to that thing, as long as we can extract it from the worse connotations it's acquired.

The Chinese Room Argument is the closest thing I've ever found to a 'rationalisation pump'. It doesn't generate any useful intuitions about computation or mindedness, it simply emboldens people to rely exclusively on the intuitions they already have.

https://twitter.com/SellarsRespectr/status/1377414449355624453

I get into debates with fervant anti-computationalists *a lot*, which tend to run into a wall of incuriosity about what computation *actually is*, the most common cause of which is that they've read Searle and concluded they don't need to learn about how syntax/semantics works.

I don't claim to be an expert on the history or politics of protest, but I'm a specialist in a particular kind of logical fallacy: the conflation of obligation (duty) and supererogation (virtue). I think it's worth seeing how this plays into discussions of 'peaceful' protest. There's much to be said about the virtue of non-violent resistance as a strategy of protest and contestation. But the way in which liberal ideology fetishises protest as a means (voice) shorn of its end (change) thereby positions this strategic virtue as a public duty.

On reflection, I think what most personally frustrates me about the current compact between research and teaching in the academy is that my own writing is more clearly pedagogical than hermeneutic, but this has not earned me any points towards becoming a pedagogue. I would rather explain the key ideas of a thinker, or rehearse the dialectical development of a key concept, in ways that both optimally compress them and make them maximally accessible to non-specialist scholars. I think this is a virtue, but it really isn't rewarded in any way.

It's very hard to definitively determine which acts are evil, but I'm pretty sure that framing impossible demands ('damned if you do, damned if you don't') for no good reason is on the list. Nevertheless, I think we tend to underestimate just how easy it is to do this. This is sometimes the result of vindictiveness, but it's more commonly the result of indifference: imposing a set of rules/norms with a blindspot you can maybe see, but simply don't care about, largely because you'll never be in the position to make that impossible choice.