whittingtonaaon

I already posted a comment on this, but forgot to answer the actual question. I don’t think it follows that it’s wrong to commoditize basic necessities. Take, for example, food: the reason just about everyone in the western world can afford food is BECAUSE it is commoditized.

I would like the barriers to home ownership to be lowered. On the other hand, I don’t think the rental market is evil. A lot of people can’t afford to buy homes, and without homes for rent would be out on the street.

I think there is a big problem with housing affordability in many countries. It’s also a promising investment because, as Mark Twain says, “Buy land, they’re not making it any more.” This makes land unlike other commodities (you can just make more iPhones or whatever.) The situation leads to some movements which see land as inherently a public good, such as Georgism, on which there is a good Wikipedia article.

I think it would also be nice if there were some kind of scheme whereby property tax is low for a first home, but increases when you own more than one.

I use the 13 mini and am satisfied. The battery life is good, which is important… but I actually prefer touchID to faceID. The reason, I guess, is more consistent success and no accidental unlocking. It’s also nice to be able to unlock a phone on your desk without picking it up.

It’s like, people with scientistic views, praising objectivity, claiming that consciousness doesn’t exist, come out with conclusions like “a system understands Chinese.” I’m afraid I find this so ludicrous that I can’t continue the discussion on a civil level.

I guess it is hard to define because it’s such a basic, essential thing. So does it matter that it’s hard to define? Even babies and puppy dogs experience pain and pleasure. They are feeling creatures. We don’t have any evidence that non-biological beings have pain, pleasure, fear, excitement… and so on.

I don’t know where you get the idea that these guys are dualists. Maybe Chalmers, but I don’t think so. My favorites are Nagel and Searle, and neither is a dualist or a neo-Cartesian. Their main contribution, I believe, is simply to show how silly the computational theory of mind is. Dennet may be easier to read because he professes something which inspires the imagination, and is easy to digest, since it doesn’t conform to the truth.

When we say a camera can see—or a computer can sense—we are using an anthropocentric metaphor.

This is just full of ontological and epistemological assumptions which have been mainstream for a few decades but are very controversial among philosophers. Philosophers don’t sit in bubbles—and use all the evidence they can find—and make great contributions to knowledge, even though what they do is not science. There’s a reason there are other subjects besides chemistry and physics.

I agree with you. The way I stated it was a little blunt. But no matter what the hard sciences show, they don’t really make claims about subjective experience. This is simply because the hard sciences by definition make no such claims. They can find things like correlations between states of matter and claimed subjective experience, but this doesn’t really get to the point. I think if it ever does, it will be such a huge revolution that what we’re left with should be called something other than physics or chemistry.

You’re right. I’m being repetitive. But it’s not really an argument. All I’m doing is saying the definition of science, at least as it’s historically been defined. The only bit of argument I have there is that I think by forgetting this definition we’ve wandered astray.

Because the victim is, of course.

But science has never said anything about it at all. The subject matter of science is the externally observable and consciousness is an internal category.

How can science, whose subject matter is the external world, explain the internal world of sentience? Not only has it contributed nothing to this question, it was also never supposed to.

It is if you take “sentience” to mean “the ability to feel,” which is what my dictionary just told me. I think this category really is the most basic differentiating one. Higher level stuff like self awareness all depend on it. The most basic difference between a computer and a human (or even a dog…) is, in my opinion, the ability to feel.

I’m not talking about self harm. I’m talking about the experience of pain—which most everyone has had! These are different things.