Why doesn't pain matter? It's almost the canonical example of a valenced state that practically any moral theory is tasked with making sense of on moral terms.
Plants most definitely do not have different but equivalent mechanisms. They don't have subjectivity. Moral theory is about, among other things, explaining the meaning of moral behavior and language as it manifests in real people, and well-being is just as real as health. At least it is on moral realism which is a perfectly mainstream view in moral philosophy.
You are not making any sense, and literally won't understand if you never got beat-up physically in life, perhaps as a kid, and preferably more than once. One has to experience pain first-hand to empathize with it. You must have lived an extremely sheltered life for this to not happen to you, and so you don't understand. Your nihilism doesn't relate with people.
Yes, plants react functionally to damage, but in no way has any shred of consciousness been demonstrated in plants. You are just out to seek any excuse necessary to kill animals and perhaps humans too, with no difference.
It's awesome, but usual caveats apply that what sense means in the context of plants is something more like automatic biological reflexes, whereas the same language in the context of creatures with subjectivity has connotations that imply consciousness.
We're learning everyday that the complexity of plants is spectacular and it only deepens our appreciation for them and rightly so. But it's easy to get lost in language and think appreciating plants necessitates attributing consciousness to them, or attributing an open-ended possibility, which even in it's more measured form still dramatically overshoots what can responsibly be said about their capabilities.
Biomimicry is amazing, canopy patterns are amazing, optimizations to take advantage of water are amazing, signal exchanging in the face of disease or fire are amazing, and should be celebrated, and surely there is more we will yet learn. But nothing we have yet learned points to anything like consciousness, either in our form or in some possible alternative form.
Considering that we don’t even understand how consciousness works, I think it’s an open question. I’m also not sure why it’s so important for some to draw these distinctions.
>(As long as a pattern isn't fully contained within the blind spot regions of course)
There are dedicated optical illusion/explainers that give you the experience of the brain patching over the space with neutral background, even if there's something there, like a symbol or a star.
So if it's something featureless or continuous, like a wall of your room that's a solid color, or a sheet of college ruled paper, the pattern can just be continued.
That said I would stress there's limits to how much of that you can do just by pattern extrapolation as opposed to deriving images from distinct and specific information in a given region of the visual field. You have to know enough about a stretch of visual space to know that it's appropriate to spread a pattern over it, and that's the thing the blind spot doesn't know.
What’s interesting about that is that brain doesn’t actually give you much access to the sensor information directly, but gives an interpretation instead. There is a thing called Saccadic Suppression that blocks visual data processing for 50ms when eyes are moving, and the brain just backfills that missing data from the “next frame”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking
Thanks, I had not heard of that one. As a recovering philosophy bro I love cataloging all of these peculiar artifacts of our visual experience. They turn out to matter quite a bit in some of the endless mind versus brain and mind versus matter debates. Off the top of my head:
- Blind spot where the optic nerve exits the eye
- Saccadic Suppression (new to me!)
- Panum's fusional area (how close the overlapping images of your eyes have to be to each other to get merged into a unified image)
- The wagon wheel effect
- trichromatic vision (obvious but important because it easily could have been different)
- The foveial field, the central part of vision that's extremely precise, while things increasingly further away from it are blurry
- specialization in peripheral vision, (eg better sensitivity to starlight, as well as better sensitivity to flickers and motion)
Add those all up and you get a bunch of specific but contingent properties of visual experience. Some people of a certain philosophical frame of mind like to imagine that we inhabit a kind of pure mental experience detached from the physical world, but even if you think you're making no assumptions about the empirical world, all of these contingent facts show up, which make a lot more sense as being the products of biological structure.
One party authoritarian dictatorship with no free speech or democratic elections and no civil rights movement seems pretty bad to me. No amount of whataboutism is ever going to compete with that.
It also seems like clashes with India, every southeast asian country with internationally recognized territory rights in the South China sea, the forcible takeover of Hong Kong, arming and economically supporting Russia, Pakistan and Iran are bad, and the increasing probability of a hot war to take over Taiwan should count as bad, perhaps the most urgently dangerous threat to global peace in the 21st century.
The United States track record post WW2 is a complicated combination of monstrously immoral Kissenger and Bush style overthrows of democracies and genuinely valuable maintenance of a post WW2 democratic order focused on things like free speech and human rights. I stay with full sincerity that in the decade plus that I've been here on hn seeing whataboutism as a strategy for defending China, I'm yet to encounter anything that feels like a sincere engagement with United States role in the world as a combination of positives and negatives, it's always flatly one-sided messaging that feels like it's aimed at a favorable audience that already agree rather than like it's sincerely attempting to persuade.
Your first sentence describes the US for the last 40 years. One corporate party that passes legislation to benefit the elites while there are no counter civil rights movements where US citizens are literally less free than they were 10 years ago.
The US was birthed as a white ethno-national colonial state. It required 20% of the population to be held in bondage while denying suffrage to 80% of the population. It took 100 years + a civil war before slavery was ended, and it took nearly another 100 years before every American could truly vote. Not because it was the "right time" either, go look at how the women's suffrage movement started. They were fire bombing factories and capitalists.
The propaganda surely runs deep, but something tells me you're too rich to really suffer so congrats I guess. I'm sure many wish they could trade places with your privilege. I bet those that will suffer from needless starvation or lack of medical care due to US imperialism would really like to trade places too.
Sorry but these boogey man acts fall flat when you look at how hostile and anti-human the US government has become over the recent decades. You can't blame this on one person, the system was always rotten and a course correction will happen. You just better pray it's the right people directing the ship.
Sorry that it makes you uncomfortable to realize that slavers built this nation and enforced their will on the majority of the country by creating a government where elites control the country through minority rule. I bet you think the 3/5's compromise was just good governance too right? That's pragmatic centrism we desperately need in modern times!
If it makes you feel better I'll also include this in the help text of my next neovim plugin.
Are there distinct third world opinions in one direction or the other? I've tended to assume they are non-unitary rather than broadly converging on one side or the other.
It's not nearly as true in the other direction, because American culture and media are everywhere. The fact that they know more about you than you do about them should give you hints that you're missing some substance.
Comments like this are why I go to the comments! I never would have thought to check.
And while I'm here I want to note that I feel there's a big misunderstanding of what is and isn't demonstrated by DeepSeek. So far as I can tell the major (and important!) innovation is reproducing near-frontier level capabilities at a fraction of the cost, but it may be the case that iterating forward at the frontier is the costly thing and is a cost borne by Western companies and that nuance seems to get lost with DeepSeek. Which is not to say that as a matter of principle that non Western companies aren't sometimes capable of jumping into the lead (Kimi has been super impressive) but if GPT/Claude/etc "only" lead at the frontier with more expensive models, that's still a moat.
If you can get something almost as capable for a fiftieth of the price, in most cases you'll do that. You might still send a few tokens to the more expensive option for the exceptional, difficult cases, but that's maybe 10% of the tokens at most. I don't see how it'll be possible to keep spending what anthropic, openai, google etc are spending if they're only going to see the trickiest 10% of tokens.
Maybe I need to spell out the step that connects them - how will those companies afford to keep "iterating forward at the frontier" when they probably have a huge crash in their income coming from competition with good enough, but 1/50th the price cheaper and open models.
Iterating forward at the frontier doesn't seem like a sustainable approach if everyone else can catch up with you in 6 months.
>The commenter didn't say "I don't like that the only two serious competitors are from the USA and China", they ONLY called out China
What? They explicitly called out China in comparative terms with the US while also criticizing the US. Also, they're the other obvious major global power so it's not a question of singling out.
Right, and if distance from the present matters, probably the biggest risk to global peace (such as it is) comes from China's increasingly serious preparations for a military attack on Taiwan.
And some of us have a sore lower back after playing tennis, while some of us have terminal stage four cancer. Who is to say which is worse?
I think right now there's a kind of global propaganda competition playing out and the thing that does the most damage is false equivalences that encourage loss of perspective.
You cant compare qualia of suffering. At least not with our current technology. Thats the point - they both involve suffering but that doesn’t mean one is inherently worse than the other. The details and experience matter which got glossed over in these stupid debates- hence loss of perspective.
Honestly I had to read the wiki page of false equivalence and you’re not asserting the fallacy correctly.
The US committed massive treaty violations and genocide, on top of huge imperialist destabilization of many sovereign nations. Tianmen square and the Uyghers are bad, but we're straight up evil.
The Chinese government regularly kidnaps its own citizens, who have no due process rights, and is currently engaged in a mass genocide of a racial group they consider “inferior.”
Additionally, they have supported Russia consistently during their occupation of Ukraine, and just install leaders for life.
I’m confused how you think the US is worse. I say this as an Afroindigenous person who is very clear about the harms white supremacy has inflicted upon the cultures I am a part of.
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