Well, first, the comparison you're drawing between something created by nature and a machine designed by us as a tool is incorrect. We were not designed. Its not that "nature" did not aim to create consciousness, its that nature does not have any aim at all.

Second, our very being is fundamentally different from what a computer is. Experience is a core part of being alive. Intellectual function is built on top of it. You're proposing the same could work backwards; that you could build experience on top of cold mechanical calculations. I say it can't.

Part of the reason is the hardware computers are working on, they are entirely digital. They can't do "maybes."

Another part of the reason is that computers do not "get together" and have their unconsciousness meet. They are calculators, mechanically providing the answer to a sum. They don't wander, they don't try, they do not do anything that was not a part of the explicit instruction embedded in their design.

I doubt it. Cheers.

I suppose that makes two of us then.

Exactly my point. You revealed nothing new to me that I didn’t already know.

Lmao good point.

prostitution as client or as worker ?

Yeah I don’t know how much introspection I need to agree that putting kids in gas chambers is a bad thing. Sure I can see how things got there, but I actively choose to believe there’s a line in humanity. Your opinion remains just absolutely bonkers to me and will remain that way.

Your evolutionary design can't see whether there are others that are can see you. It has to operate on the safest assumption. It's better to laugh when no one is there than not laugh where someone is, from the perspective of the above theory.

Wholeheartedly agree actually. Doing good “to get into heaven” is another ridiculous example.

The quote to me.. personally just comes off as “if you’re helping someone it’s for personal gain only” which is what I take issue with, since that’s a pretty wild assumption on how people operate.

Again it’s more of a dig on that specific quote, it’s not really worth defending. Everything you personally said in these comments was much more respectable than that nonsense quote.

>That's what logic does to intuition. If you can't prove your intuition false, that's generally when you feel like you "know" a thing, or have "proven" a thing to be true.

yes and no.

the very concept of "proving something false" implies a number of assumptions.
the existence of a subject, a critical thought, an external reality that follows decipherable rules and patterns, a language bearing meaning, the existence of the very intuition I am about to disprove.
I would say that these 'core intuitions' cannot be refuted by any rational proof, since rational proof itself presupposes them.

because they are not imaginary scenarios. They are scenarios based on known facts, however distorted and misinterpreted.

Exactly like in a criminal trial, whare you have to put together pieces, fragments of facts: no matter how hard you try to do it in the most rational and methodical way possible, there will always be the suspect for whom 90% of the evidence seems to lean towards his innocence, who is actually guilty, and vice versa.

>The AI can see crime at points X, Y and Z in neighborhood B but crime in Q in neighborhood A.

The AI doesn't see that. The algorithm is meant to predict crime, but you aren't feeding actual crime data into the system, you're feeding police interactions (and all the biases that individual officers have) into the system. More data doesn't always fix the issue because the issue is in measuring the data.

It should tell you something. But the exact same reason why you feel the way you do is the exact same reason why you wouldn’t learn anything from this. I hope you can introspect, but I have every reason to suspect that you won’t.

Being good to help your fellow man as if he were you is a noble thing, because it’s focused on the person across from you. Being good for the sake of doing good or to feel nice or for the sake of appearing noble isn’t noble, because it’s focused on yourself. It’s the difference between a mother volunteering at a soup kitchen and saying hi to a regular visitor, and Jeff Bezos donating $100,000 on national TV. If you still disagree, fair enough.

I think everything you defended was amazingly put until that Watts quote:

“When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person.”

That is just a very daft and dumb take in my opinion.. and screw that guy if you asked me.

Your personal defense of Tao before busting that quote out was respectable though.

The Ethics of Policing Algorithms does not Exist.

There, I fixed the title.

That 'line' doesn't exist in Tao. They're the same thing, or two sides of the same coin, or something totally made up by people to make sense of the world. All opposites are just the same thing in Tao, and the synthesis of those opposites is what makes life.

Tao says you shouldn't be either extreme of apathy or burning yourself out, but it also doesn't give you a definition of what balance is on a case by case basis. That's something you need to learn yourself by going out and experiencing life, to discover it first hand (some might call this the difference between wisdom and knowledge, with morals and ethics being solidly in the domain of the former according to Tao). It's not something you can define, read in a book, and then implement with 100% perfect efficacy. If it was, surely someone would have created the perfect cohesive argument that nobody can disagree with in the thousands of years humans have been thinking about these issues.

In terms of your comment 'because of the world we live in', Tao actually came about during a very awful period of Chinese history. Ironically, it was actually made with the idea of being a very practical philosophy that doesn't concern itself with rules and regulations of what to do, what is good or bad, and what is or isn't acceptable. Another comment goes into the historical context better than I can so I suggest reading those so I won't repeat.

Regarding the superiority complex that comes with religion, Tao very clearly disapproves of this. That's why depictions of practicioners in old art are usually of old, fat men with terrible teeth laugh, joking, acting clumsy, dancing, etc. It's because Tao is about living life, not taking itself seriously, and flexing on people about how much more ‘moral' you are is actually a form of egotism. Tao is very much against the individual ego. See this very famous koan with a message to this effect https://www.zinzin.com/observations/2014/zen-in-action-no-tree-no-mirror-no-dust/

I guess I'll just leave you with this Alan Watt's quote, which I think is kinda central to your intellectual conflict of trying to figure out in your mind what is the 'good' or 'right' thing to do.

"Nothing is really more inhuman than human relations based on morals. When a man gives bread in order to be charitable, eats with a Negro in order to be unprejudiced, and refuses to kill in order to be peaceful, he is as cold as a clam. He does not actually see the other person. Only a little less chilly is the benevolence springing from pity, which acts to remove suffering because it finds the sight of it disgusting."

Seems like an ethical definition of humor. Not that it doesn't make sense.

Though I would also argue that humor may be repugnant as a form of persuasive speech: calling into attention acceptance of injustices.

Humor that offends can be meant to offend as a way to force you to reassess your view.

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That's my favorite kind of humor. The kind that makes you really think about why we're still living this hellish facade. I also find big loud farts pretty good

Objective Reality

We tend to believe that physics describe the objective reality, in which our mechanisms of perception emerge, giving rise to perceptions and language.

But in fact, supposing that an objective reality exists, it has to go through the filters of our perception to be perceived, and language to be expressed in concepts and theories.

What's more: our perception is largely determined by the concepts we learn. And language is merely a consensus.

So the physical world, perception and language emerge and evolve together. None of them is real.

Remember when we believed that our planet was the center of the universe? It's now clearly false and a case of anthropocentrism, a cognitive bias.

Can you see a current instance of anthropocentrism?

• The belief that the laws of physics describe the objective reality, and that the physical world is the objective reality.

Now good luck with that :)

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That’s fine but If I say something ridiculous then by all means be a jerk to me lol.. how else can we grow?

Hahaha.....I'm a bit of an odd duck, I wouldn't take me too seriously!

FWIW, I'm gonna RES tag you so to avoid being a jerk if we should ever cross paths again.

I still suppose my question is, where’s the line?

If I feel terrible about homeless people for example. Should I be ok with “well that’s life”? Maybe I’m not apathetic… but am I really far from it?

I respect the viewpoint and again not trying to be an ass, but I personally have a lot of issues with these concepts given the actual world we are living in.

Always respected Tao of the organized religions but like anything a human touches, it comes with a superiority complex at the end of the day. The comments here with maybe the exception of yours kind of helped confirm that for me.