We need to stop calling these sites and services “free”. Anything that’s financed by ads, spying and profiling is not free, the user is paying with their attention, integrity and right to privacy. This is not nothing.
Presently, it’s a shady and dishonest practice since the terms of the transaction are rarely transparent to the consumer; in other words, it’s a scam.
Art can be a joke, a joke can be art
I have done plenty of research, thank you. Of course even more research never hurts.
Er, that’s what I am saying however is that you can observe and measure consciousness.
Going with any definition of consciousness relevant to this discussion, say phenomenality and/or awareness, no.
I am not sure why it’s hard to accept that some living things may not be conscious. Viruses propagate “mindlessly”, they’re neither living nor conscious.
That’s not really the point - I don’t claim to know what entities possess consciousness. The point is that you don’t either.
I also don’t understand why you think emergent properties are a hypothesis. Emergent properties of biological processes are fact
Obviously I’m talking about Emergentism as it relates to consciousness, and the idea that consciousness is an emergent property is not a fact, no. And there are perfectly valid reasons - for example, the “explanatory gap” - why someone might find it unsatisfactory.
So, I’m guessing everyone in this thread has a different conception of what “consciousness” actually is and what we’re talking about here, which makes it difficult to discuss casually like this. You seem to have a very exclusive definition of consciousness, which only serves to avoid the argument, really. “It’s possible that same organisms exhibit some parts of consciousness as we have noticed till now, but if those organisms do not exhibit all parts of consciousness then they’re not conscious”…you’re splitting hairs. If plants could be proven to be aware, have subjective experience, a sense of self, it would be reasonable to change our definition of consciousness to be more inclusive - simply because such a concept of consciousness would be a lot more useful then.
Emergentism is a popular hypothesis, not a fact. Christof Koch lost the bet, remember? The idea that “all organisms which are conscious have to exhibit the same properties” and “you cannot pick and choose” does not logically follow from anything you’ve said. These are criteria that you set up yourself. Take the idea of qualia as an example, how could we ever observe that an animal or a plant does or does not experience qualia? Nobody solved the problem of other minds.
Consciousness is nothing like a heart; the function of the heart can be observed and measured. How do you know that you possess awareness? You can only experience it. (Actually, that we are aware is the only thing we can know with complete certainty.)
which we don’t observe in those which lack consciousness.
See what you did there? You assume a priori which entities lack consciousness, and then motivate this by claiming they lack traits that can be observed in conscious entities. That is very neatly circular.
Food service and retail needs to exist, (commercial sales) call centers should be banned and their owners shunned from polite society.
I think the brain is only where the concentration of prions is highest and therefore the most dangerous part of an infected person to eat, but you can also get it from other body parts. But I’m no expert… haven’t eaten anyone in years actually.
What, you don’t enjoy a bunch of sleepy whiny junkies self-indulgently wailing through a three chord Bob Dylan cover for 15 minutes? Man, weren’t nineties arena rock great.
If you could increase the productivity of knowledge-workers 5%, that’s worth a trillion
A big if (and where does these numbers come from?), but more importantly, a “more productive” knowledge worker isn’t necessarily a good thing if the output is less reliable, interesting or innovative for example. 10 shitty articles instead of 1 quality article is useless if the knowledge is actually worth anything to the end user.
Ed Zitron, a tech beat reporter, criticizes a recent paper from Goldman Sachs, calling AI a “grift.”
Fittingly, this paragraph is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t already read the blog post; who is calling AI a grift, Zitron or GS? And is Zitron critical of the GS article (no, he’s not)?
Now, if it was your job to actually absorb the information in this blog post, there’s really no way around actually reading the thing - at least if you wanna do a good job. Any “productivity boost” would sacrifice quality of output.
Seriously? It’ll take you a minute to read, if you read slowly.
You haven’t been looking very hard I gather. There are numerous studies done on the benefits of reading, you could use your preferred search engine to read a few of them perhaps.
Those sure are some labyrinthine sentences you managed to conjure up there. Now, if only I didn’t find the task so boring, perhaps I might be able to untangle a coherent thought or two, who knows?
The idea that “Oh, if all the morons likely to believe facist ideology are just taught Hamlet, it will all be okay”
Well, of course nobody said that, it’s a gross oversimplification of my argument - a strawman - which I guess is very fitting in this context.
This is a naive position. In a class society, the upper classes see to it that their kids get educated. If you’re the daughter of an AC repairman, and you like books with weird words in them, your chances to have a career in the field where you would thrive are slim to none. The best way to counter this is to offer a lot of education, to everyone, not just to the people “with a good head for reading” that just happens to also all have rich parents. For this noble cause, taking the risk that a few kids might be bored for a few hours seems like a reasonable prize to pay. You never know what kid is going to respond to what subject, this is why a broad education is important.
No one is arguing that. Less-dumbed-down, thoughtful and well-formulated arguments and debates would benefit everyone, though. Especially if the audience is educated enough to be able to appreciate them.
So your argument is politics should be cartoonish, stylized and theatrical instead of nuanced and actually constructive? Congratulations, you got your wish. Just be sure to make the most of it before the masters of simplification and emotionally charged language - the fascists - take over, it’s just a matter of time I guess.
Not really. My point is, it’s very easy to dismiss something you have no knowledge or experience of. And I try to avoid doing that because it just contributes to the noise (I’m sure I don’t always succeed). But I don’t think it’s a good thing if reading comprehension and general language skills decrease in general, do you? Do you think people think more clearly, are able to argue their case better or identify disinformation more accurately if they don’t know as many words or how to use them?
Who even wants or needs this? A book or article, I could understand.