>The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Thanks for the suggestion.

I both understand and agree

Yes it is kind of refuted, as the basilisk would have no incentive to actually torture those who didn't help build it, it's just a waste of resources. But it's an interesting theory nevertheless.

> Adults are taught to focus on materiality. Children live in a much more fluid attitude.

My personal observations are of the exact opposite.

Nah. I'm not worried about dying, I just want to avoid it to the extent I'm capable of. Not being aware of death would just make me worse at avoiding it with no upside I can see.

I believe thinking about dying is worse than dying. If someone could give you the ability to be ignorant of death, would you take it?

You will still feel the dread as you are falling. If it isn't perfect you will still have a few final moments at impact.

This opinion from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiroemon_Kimura always stuck with me: "He credited eating small portions of food (hara hachi bun me) as the key to a long and healthy life."

do you have anything else that disproves reincarnation

but wouldn't that be invalid as (trying to be as vague as possible for reasons that should become clear) a. because torture can be psychological and the simulation theory isn't disproven we have no proof this isn't just a moot point and a sci-fi version of original sin instead of pascal's wager and b. smart AI would realize everyone doing the same job only means the project lasts as long as stored food supplies

> I think the perfect situation would be like the end of The Good Place, people can stay as long as they want and do whatever but they can leave when they're ready.

I always maintain that that solution was kind of a philosophical betrayal of the rest of the series's thematic setup (I'll be happy to explain if you want)

> But also would that possibly set the world off balance? Imagine being born into a world that the same people have been in charge of for centuries before you were born. Some Altered Carbon stuff. Death is the great equalizer.

then why not just have a world where the only deaths are unnatural as people are euphemism-for-euthanized when their beliefs/ideas are proven wrong so outdated views don't hang around any longer than necessary

yeah but lives don't have one arc you'd have to stretch over longer runtime like movies and I'm sure (if their basic needs were otherwise provided for yada yada yada) a lot of people would want to watch infinite seasons of their favorite shows or at least they're more likely than not to prefer the show get renewed unless not only is the ending satisfying but there's no more places the story could go that the ending leaves hanging

> When I'm talking about labeled vs unlabeled, what I really mean is that we have some intuition for how the labeled dataset might behave. E.g. "an increase in money supply causes an increase in inflation" is a better causal hypothesis than "an increase the president's body temperature causes an increase in inflation". We can make that judgement having never seen data, based on our understanding of the system.

What you have here is a circular argument. You are arguing that we can label variables with labels that are theory driven and so we can infer causality between those labels. You have already theorised causality without the data. So, the data is not the source of explanation it is merely a means to, rhetorically, assert that causality is the explanation. You have a causal explanation in mind and label the data informed by that causal explanation and then you carry out a mathematical operation on the numbers labelled and so, because you have labelled them you infer a causal explanation.

So you are correct: you can make a judgement without seeing the data. The data adds nothing to your understanding of the system because you have started from a theory, a model, and your activities with the causal relationship in mind. The data does not "contain causal knobs".

> Having made that hypothesis, we can look back to see if the data support it. The combination of a reasonable causal mechanism, plus correlated data, is typically seen as evidence of causation.

I would argue that what you are doing here is establishing rules for a rhetoric. Let us assume that we both accept mathematics is a kind of unbiased source of knowledge. This is a broad and possibly unwarranted assumption that would need refining, but accept it, broadly, for now.

You have a set of data which you recognise as x and y values. You have no theoretical labels to add them. But you list them and you are lazy. So you use a spreadsheet to tell you that the y column can be derived from the x column by

  f(x) = x^2   with R^2  = 1

So you are happy. The coefficient of determination ( R^2 ) tells you that the data "100% supports" the y=x^2 hypothesis. You are happy until someone comes along and says, have you considered

 f(x) = x * x
 f(x) = sqrt(g(x)), g(x) = x * x
 f(x) = (x * x * x) / x
 f(x) = (x * x * x * x) / (x * x)
 f(x) = (x^n) / (x^n-1) forall(n)>2

You object that this is all just messing about with variations on squaring things. I agree. But I point out that all I am doing is showing that there is more than one way to express a relationship of x to y but, generally, avoiding the use of y as a label.

So when you have f(x) = sqrt(g(x)), g(x) = x * x it is an awful circumlocution but it demonstrates that you can have a whole range of things "happening" to avoid using y. Which raises an interesting point about your notions of labelling data.

For a moment, pretend x can be relabelled "money supply" and y can be relabelled "inflation". We have the data set, as before {(1,1),(2,4),(3,9), ..., ( n,n^2 )} and we are supposing that the relationship is f(x) = sqrt(g(x)), g(x) = x * x or it is f(x) x * x. The first things first,

    f(x) is clearly to be relabelled as inflation.
    g(x) is also inflation (see your point^1 below)
    sqrt(g(x)) is money supply

Your point is that labelling clarifies causality. So, in mathematics it is permissible to rearrange a formula. But you are inferring causality so the only symbol in common in all of the formulations is the equals symbol. Which you might be holding in place of "causes". Which does correspond to your notion of Directed Acyclic Graphs but then places a huge constraint onto what you can actually say with labels.

So, because we have two formulations that you definitely agree on - the ones in the footnote - you can, rhetorically, say that we cannot tell if the causal case is

 y=x^2 .................... y is caused by x^2     
 x=sqrt(y) ................ x is caused by sqrt(y)

which is then translated into

 inflation is caused by squaring the money supply
 the money supply is caused by square rooting inflation

What this highlights is that you now actually need, back in the labels, some meaningful understanding of what "squaring the money supply" is and what "square rooting inflation" is. Because, to be causally coherent, these cannot just be vacuous utterances. This example is incredibly simple.

Just imagine what would happen if your chosen econometric methodology dictates the use of linear regression. You then have a philosopical need to explain x and y in terms of a lot of mathematical structuring around squares, roots, differences, and so on.

Which might boil down to me saying, "I do not think that the equals sign is a synonym for causality". But it might also be saying that "data adds nothing to causal explanation in economics".

Quite literally, you have show two possible formulae for a simple relationship. Which suggests that, at best, a 1 in 2 chance (50% probability p=0.5) that you randomly select the "correct" relationship - where, here, "correct" requires that the relationship expresses something causal. This becomes worse when you realise that it is possible to express x^2 in an infinite variety of ways (rendering p=0, effectively true). This means that you are never really talking about causation.

Which leaves you in the position that econometrics is a good source of rhetorical support for causation but only really provides evidence of correlation: that there is, indeed, a pattern in the data. That pattern in the data does not, in any way, vouchsafe your theoretical causal explanation with certainty. Even if you label it.

^1 E.g. in your x->x2 example, if all you had were a list of Xs and Ys, you couldn't tell if the operation was y=x2 or x=sqrt(y). Without any knowledge of what the Xs and Ys refer to, you're stuck.

>It's is of course arcbitecturally completely different than my brain.....

An old circular CRT TV is architecturally completely different than a modern smart TV. Yet there's a commonality of function (convert input to two-dimensional visual display) that makes comparison not only possible, but obvious.

When enemies go to hell (?)

I am more of the opposite understanding. However, feel free to agonize over your mortality by trying to solve it as a problem. If transhumanism is your thing and you think that imortality would solve your problem with death then by all means, although I personally would rather put my energy into something else. Death dosen't only have to tragic or sad just as life dosen't have to be tragic and sad.

Death is the eternal lover of life.

Without death.. life wouldn’t be beautiful. Life without death would be cancer.

It’s hard but it’s true.

heuristic is not working without logic and probability. heuristic is an undercategory of it and is mostly using probabilitys!

u have not all info, but you still use logic and probability to come to a solution. Like trail and error, statistics and so on. all of those methods cant work without logic and probability.

​

My sentence of Kant and his Imperatives is not very precise. So im not sure what exactly you ask to be true here. A fact is the rationalistic/hypothetic system that is like causal and determiend analytics, methods that work to create truth and function. They are evidence-based but also use probability. As heuristic is also evidence-based in the end, but its only a probability where you expect the evidence to be.

so like phyiscs and math, which can prolong certain systems/facts but we cant measure them yet. Just after some years we are able to measure them and make em evidencebased. in the end

And the categoric imperative is also a method that works for moral. So both are methods/goals (rational sytems) which are not about belief, but about creating working facts and working moral - a workable and quantifiabale system for action.

So further, u can understand that moral, like all other systems, is a system of goals and methods and you can analyze goals and methods with the hypothetical/rational system (including logic and probability). And thats also evidence-based but also heuristic!

​

If people disagree with other peoples logics and conclusions, then there must be a reason for it. One reason could be, they dont have all the facts. Another reason could be, they dont have the same goals/methods (this is very important). And a third reason could be, they dont manage to come to the right conclusion, even if they have the facts and the same goals. And a forth reason could be, all first three together.

So for example, you have to jews analyzing a moral problem but both come to different conclusions. So where is the problem? They done have the same moral, they dont have the same facts or they dont understand them in the same way. or everything together.

of course its a big problem if you have two different systems, but you think its the same. this is the reason for many wars and many misunderstandings and social separations. and not just in morals.

Since consciousness is simply brain signals, yes we can detect consciousness without being conscious. That is what medical brain scanners do.

The issue is that we don't yet know how to translate the language.

A thermometer "knows" something is warm without needing to have consciousness to perceive temperature.

A computer that could read the pain signals in your brain would "know" you were in pain without needing consciousness.

>And your calculator also takes input. It doesn't automatically have experience.

Are you sure? Why do you think it doesn't? Clearly it reacts to input. Your brain also reacts to input.

I agree with the premise. Consciousness, when you try to describe it without actually referencing one's experience of it, is hard to fully understand. It's Iike describing color to a blind person, or sound to a deaf person, there is an innate sensory experience that qualifies the description, without which, it is hard to truly understand.

What is cool is that consciousness is the product of unconsciousness - over time inanimate molecules combined differently, and given the right circumstances we somehow get cellular life, and finally conscious organisms, all built from stardust.

Who says you cant "know" of consciousness without being conscious? What does it even mean to know something anyway?

Is just being able to regurgitate a definition enough? In that case a dictionary website is intelligent enough.

I think that a lot of the problems with many metaphysical arguments is that they are rooted in definitions of consciousness which are based on junk science or no science at all. Its a hard pass for me when I see arguments about consciousness that don't come from any kind of understanding of how the brain works, because thats where it all begins.

> The central point being that without subjective experience, you can't from its description infer it even exists. That it can feel like something.

A philosopher writes lengthy text about consciousness. Why does he do that? Answer that question and you have an understanding of consciousness. There is no reason to assume that this question would be unanswerable, since it's observable.

Exactly!