bonobo

Yeah, I think you described well how the the super-rich would act in this scenario. That's exactly how I think they'd deal with it.

I don't know, the US already looks like an oligarchy to me, with billionaires pulling some strings. I'm slightly surprised Mamdani won in NY, but not shocked since urban centers usually lean more left. A president though? I don't see it.

People can vote if they want, but the far right (which is heavily influenced by the super-rich) is already working to erode the legitimacy of the voting system. And people will have a hard time revolting against the state because the state is far more capable now than it was in the past.

Trump implies every now and then that he intends to stay in power. Even if he doesn't follow up on these threats I don't think we can expect democracy to keep order, it seems unlikely to me. When capitalism fails, democracy is the first casualty.

I hear this argument being repeated a lot but I think it shows a lack of imagination to stay stuck on the idea that modern capitalism has to continue (at least for the super-rich). Capitalism is just a means to an end, that is to generate wealth. The wealthy's goal is abundance for themselves, and screw the rest.

The only reason they tolerate the proletariat is the need for labor to handle tasks that still require human beings. That’s what the modern capitalist machine does: it harvests labor. If they manage to eliminate the need for intellectual labor via AI and automate enough physical work using tech like Boston Dynamics and John Deeres, whoever's still around become trash. The reliance on this system of money flowing back and forth ends, because the only reason to maintain it is having people generate wealth for them. Once they can eliminate that "cost," they’ll do it without blinking.

We’re already seeing jobs being wiped out by the tens of thousands with the arrival of AI, and billionaires hoarding capital far beyond what they could ever consume, driven simply by the pleasure of having more than the next guy. We’ve also seen how some are depraved enough to treat human beings as mere resources for their own gratification. Why would them keep people around they don't need anymore? People are failable, expensive to keep and unreliable. If all can be automated, it will be. Expecting wealth distribution from them is also a fantasy. If they cared they would do it now, but the talk is always "when we reach certain goal the riches will tricke down, just wait."

The argument that "there won't be anyone left to buy products and keep capitalism running" might hold true during a transition phase, but that would just be like ripping off a Band-Aid. None of them super-rich will care about the money flow once this structure becomes obsolete and can be replaced by another system that’s more efficient and easier to control.

We have also to consider what if their voices not only don't matter but are actively being suppressed. It's hard to start a revolution if who's in control can control communications and can preemptively identify people who are more likely to start dissent. Maybe this time we won't even have the slightest chance to revolt.

I see, thanks for your reply. I'm still with physicalism so far, but I see your point. It gave me more room for thought.

> You are a feature of the world that is impressed upon me.

I was disappointed here for a while thinking about my NPC nature and place in this world, then I realized *YOU* must be a (very persuasive I'll admit) feature of the world that is impressed upon *ME*. Now I'm fine again. Thanks to myself for giving rise to such an interesting p-zombie like you.

I find your position quite interesting but I feel like it still suffers the same issues I've seen in other "mind-first" arguments (I'm sorry for any ill-defined terms as I'm not a philosopher myself), such as p-zombies (how do you know other people are conscious as well?) and the origin of it.

I think both positions (physicalism vs mind-first) suffer from the same issue that is to reach the bottom of it all, except physicalism seems to have reached further. In the past we wondered what the world was made of and we observed it, coming to the idea of elements such as Aether, then later developed chemistry then physics, reaching layer below layer of rules that interact to the emergence of the layer above. Lots of rules that we can (apparently) reproduce and verify, cells emerging from molecules interacting emerging from atoms interacting emerging from quantum particles emeging from quantum fields... Maybe emerging from strings or a simulation? We don't know. It seems to me we also don't know how to tell we've finally reached the bottom of it, but what we have sounds pretty solid.

In a mind-first view it seems that this stack is upside-down, with a consciousness giving rise to a brain in a world with its objects which are made of molecules coming to existence upon observation (that is, chemistry would be a top layer after conscience further inspecting it), which are ruled by physics etc. Except this cause-and-consequence relation is not clear to me. Like you said:

> To me, it appears obvious to me that I am having a conscious experience from which the physical world and all its laws and processes, emerge.

How would this work if, from your perspective, I'm also conscious and not a p-zombie? Do I give rise to the world, or do you? Do we all collectively create a single world from our consciousness in a "Sandman's Dream of a Thousand Cats" way? And if we're all p-zombies except you, why bother arguing with us? (not throwing shade btw, I'm just interested in your point of view).

To me physicalism looks like a flame graph with physics at the bottom and minds at the tips of the flames, with less simpler things giving rise to multiple complex things, while mind-first looks like an icicle graph (assuming multiple consciousness) or an upside down triangle (assuming a single consciousness), with physics at the top (all "graphs" putting cause at the bottom and effect on top).

> So every restaurant you go to, you head to the back to run a purity test on the political beliefs and “happiness” of the people making your food to make sure they line up exactly with what you believe?

Does their argument gets invalidated if they don't verify *every* restaurant ever? Nobody has the time nor the resources to follow their moral standards with 100% precision, but if we're doing our best I'd argue we can still take that moral stance.

Recently a slave labour scheme was dismantled in my country in which some wineries were keeping slaves to produce grape juice. The companies were on the news, and although I do love some grape juice I will never ever buy from them again. Do I check *every* single source of the products I consume? Of course no. Can they eventually do some marketing tricks and fool me into buying from them again? Maybe. But I do my best and I feel like this is sufficient to claim this is a good moral stance nonetheless.

You mentioned experience, but it's not clear to me if you mean that it's a requirement for "actual understanding." Is this what you're saying? If so, does that mean a male gynecologist doesn't have an "actual understanding" of menstrual cycles and menopause?

I think about astronomers and the things they know about stars that are impossible to experience even from afar, like sizes and temperatures. No one has ever seen a black hole with their own eyes, but they read a lot about it, collected data, made calculations, and now they can have meaningful discussions with their peers and come to new conclusions from "processing and correlating" new data with all this information in their minds. That's "actual understanding" to me.

One could say they are experiencing this information exchange, but I'd argue we can say the same about the translator in the chinese room. He does not have the same understanding of chinese as us humans, associating words to memories and feelings and other human experiences, but he does know that a given symbol evokes the use of other specific symbols. Some sequences require the usage of lots of symbols, some are somewhat ambiguous, and some require him to fetch a symbol that he hasn't used in a long time, maybe doesn't even know where he stored it. To me this looks a lot like the processes that happen inside our minds, with the exception that his form of "understanding" and the experiences that this evokes to him are completely alien to us. Just like an AGI would possibly be.

I'm not confortable looking at the translator's point of view as if he's the analogous to a mind. To me he's the correlator, the process inside our minds that makes these associations. This is not us, it's not under our conscious control, from our perspectives it just happens, and we know today it's a result of our neural networks. We emerge somehow from this process. Similarly, it seems to me that the experience of knowing chinese belongs to the whole room, not the guy handling symbols. It's a weird conclusion, I still don't know what to think of it though...

I had the same experience with Java and its looong lines of AbstractFactoryFactoryBuilders. Tabs + spaces offered the best of both worlds, and enabling whitespace visibility.

In the end it doesn't matter what's my preferred way of indenting code, the hardest part is always making people agree on it. So whenever a new project starts and the team needs to define code styling, we go with the language/IDE defaults. Anything else requires IDE setup and attention to indentation, which is too much to ask for when people barely pay attention to code quality.

This is not about protecting the files you share, it's about spammers abusing the file sharing mechanism to send you notifications. THEY share a file with you in order to trigger a notification and there's no way to block this.

That's usually the case, but I was pleasantly surprised to read this book on my Kindle. The A5 format is quite readable, if you don't mind some of the tiny font size (I actually like it).

You're trying to convert the 3D world as we know it to 2D, but there's no such restriction. There are other constructs in 2D that can be used for the same purposes.

Take Game of life for example. It doesn't matter that you cannot make circuits without crossing wires in 2D, Game of Life is turing complete anyways. A computer based on GoL is totally unlike our 3D computers, but can have the same capabilities. There's no reason to think that it would be any different with biology.

Or you can try comparing our 3D world with a hypothetical higher dimension. Our intestines are hollow cilinders, stable in 3D but not suited for 4D — in 4D you can look inside a 3D cilinder just like we can look inside a 2D-sphere (a circle) from our 3D perspective. A 4D creature would probably have a very different, more efficient, structure for this use case (food containment and nutrient absorption), which they probably wouldn't be able to just translate to 3D.

Or you could just count the number of times their names are mentioned... Except neither approach really represents character importance accurately. Why just go the naive route when you can extract more information from your data by using a more complex approach?

The article actually counters your point exactly:

"For example, Arya Stark, Sansa’s younger sister, has the third most chapters with 34, but ranks behind Sansa in terms of network importance."