Right, could it be any more obvious? Trump's bromance with Musk has blown up in his face and here's a useful distraction and a way to make him look like a tough guy. After all these years, Trump is like a pane of glass to people with half a brain.

But like Orwell said in 1984 about Goldstein: "Always there were fresh dupes waiting to be seduced by him."

Yes. Ad homs aren't wrong per se, but you're engaging in classic ad hom:

Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem, refers to several types of arguments that are usually fallacious. Often currently this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself. — BitconnectCarlos

I'm not attacking Trump's argument, I'm questioning WHY he's doing what he's doing. This is not a fallacy. In criminal law, is the motive of the accused important? Yes. Did John kill Bob because he was legitimately scared for his life or because Bob was sleeping with his wife? That matters a lot, right? If John was legitimately afraid, he doesn't go to jail. If John was bent on revenge, he goes to prison for a long time.

"Well, is the cabinet member corrupt or not? This is a one-to-one scenario rather than a mass event. I prefer a good action done with impure motives to a bad action with pure motives, especially on a mass scale."

Yes, the cabinet member is corrupt, but that's irrelevant to the hypothetical. A president firing a corrupt cabinet member because of perceived corruption (even if the president is wrong), is totally understandable, right? If the President truly believes Bob is corrupt, he should fire him. But if the cabinet member is corrupt and the President fires him because he's Jewish, we have a HUGE problem on our hands, don't we? The intention is everything.

I don't want to press on with my points until we've reached agreement on this central issue: President Trump's motives in sending the marines to L.A. is very important. Agreed?

Ad hom. Focus on the action, not the character of the person initiating it. I'm seeing streets full of burning cars and absolute lawlessness in LA, but if you'd rather focus on Trump's motivations, go right ahead. — BitconnectCarlos

Are you saying it's an ad hom to consider a president's motivation for a particular action??? Let me give you an example: say you have a corrupt cabinet member. A president firing him for corruption is good. A president firing him because he's a Jew is bad. Right? So, the action can be the same, but the motivation is HUGELY important. Yes?

Oh, and you think the city of L.A. has descended into "absolute lawlessness"?

For normal Americans, rioters flying foreign flags and burning American ones is not a cause to rally around. — BitconnectCarlos

True, but a president salivating over the prospect of sending in the troops to an American city is much more disturbing. I've lived in L.A. County most of my life. I've seen bad rioting first hand. What's going on now is nothing like that. We don't need marines here.

Do you agree with me here that Trump is chomping at the bit to send the troops in and look like a tough guy?

What does that even mean, "fully transitioned?" Did they have their chromosomes changed? — Harry Hindu

A biological woman who looks very much like a man. Has had sex change operation, double mastectomy, hormone treatment, etc. What restroom do you want her to use?

AIs simulate, they aren't rational agents outside their ability to simulate of agents who may, sometimes, be rational. If we made AIs that modeled the range of human behavior, there would absolutely be AIs that snort fentanyl. — hypericin

But a pzombie is supposed to be a non-conscious duplicate of me, and I am a rational agent, so if the pzombie isn't a rational agent, it's not a pzombie.

Right on both counts. But I think part of a philosopher's job is to understand, not merely refute. To me, eliminative materialism/physicalism is not compelling, but Daniel Dennett (to pick one) was an extremely smart guy, and if we don't put ourselves in his mental shoes and try to work out his perspective, we'll just be creating a strawman to call "not compelling." We'd also be committed to the position that Dennett was the sort of thinker who is compelled by something obviously not compelling . . . hmm, not too likely.

So, no offense, but "That's absurd" and "Come on!" and "But you don’t believe that. Nobody does" doesn't get us very far. — J

No, but eliminative materialism is just so out there you reach an axiomatic level where further argument is pointless. What more can you say when someone denies consciousness, other than 'you can't actually believe that?' There's no evidence or arguments you can muster at that point. The person is denying one of the few indisputable truths about reality.

ETA: And an eliminative materialist, if they're being honest, would get the eyeroll. They would know it's coming. They know what they're proposing is extremely counterintuitive. They might then say, "wait, think about these intuition pumps" and to give Dennett credit, he is very clever.

How well might this satisfy people who think a person's experiences can only be experienced by themselves? — TiredThinker

The inverted spectrum problem is still alive and well. No brain scans or neural activity measurements will ever convince me that your experience of red is the same as mine. You might see red as green, for all I know. Pragmatically, I think you experience the world the way I do, but I have no justification for that. For all I know, you're a p-zombie with no qualia at all and no brain research will ever convince me otherwise.

So, it's just about physics being different? I don't think it makes sense to identify philosophical materialism with physics at a particular place and time - otherwise, it would just be physics, and we already know what it is and have a word for it. — SophistiCat

We were talking about intuitive appeal. The physics changed from becoming something a child could essentially grasp to something nobody, 100 years after QM, can understand or even agree on.

Think of an AI simulating human behavior. This ai would get shitfaced, because humans get shitfaced and it's been trained to do what humans do. Somewhere internally to the AI there is a decision being made, the neutral network takes in all data and internal states, and this time "get shitfaced" comes on top with the highest weight. So the AI goes to the liquor cabinet and starts doing whisky shots. All without the slightest affective state.

we are driven by affective states, but why is this necessary? It's not for AI, it's not for amoeba, and presumably it's not for p zombies. — hypericin

That's true, but remember pzombies are supposed to be identical to us except for lacking subjective experience. Humans aren't ai's.

Would a rational AI, one with a programmed “drive” for self-preservation, ever choose to do something totally reckless—like snort fentanyl—knowing it could likely die from it? No. Not unless it was explicitly programmed with some bizarre override to ignore its self-preservation "instinct". But if that’s the case, you’ve stopped modeling a rational agent and started writing sci-fi code. That’s not a human—it’s a toy robot with bad instructions.

You see, it forces the question, Why does getting wasted make you feel good? The argument here would be that the good feeling of being wasted is quite ancillary to the real work being done, namely some kind of resetting of brain activity so as to better cope with life . . . not sure what actually does happen, chemically, but we agree that something does. Mother Evolutionary Nature has cleverly tricked you into thinking that her point is for you to feel better -- ha! As if! The same thing would happen if there was no (conscious) you! — J

So under that logic, when someone’s being tortured, the screaming, the begging, the sheer mental agony—that’s all just “ancillary”? The real story is just neurons firing and behavior patterns playing out? That’s absurd. You're telling me the conscious experience of extreme suffering isn’t actually doing any of the work—that it's just along for the ride while the “real” causal machinery is physical brain activity? Come on. If you actually believed that, you'd have to say the same torture could happen to a philosophical zombie with no inner life, and it would be just as tragic. But you don’t believe that. Nobody does. The experience is the point. The suffering is not a side effect—it's the core reality. It's why the torture victim breaks.

I'm not claiming that that's your position, you're just telling the eliminative materialist side of the story. It's not a compelling story.

What do you think is olds-school materialism, and what is post-QM materialism? Again, examples of exponents of these views would help. — SophistiCat

*Old-school materialism is basically the “billiard ball” view of the universe—solid particles bouncing around in space, totally mindless, following fixed laws. Think Newtonian physics, where if you knew the position and velocity of every particle, you could predict everything. That kind of worldview felt intuitive: physical stuff acting on other physical stuff.

Post-quantum-mechanics materialism is way weirder. Now we’re talking about things like particles being excitations in underlying quantum fields—not little balls, but ripples in a weird, abstract ocean. Plus you get phenomena like entanglement and superposition, where cause-and-effect gets fuzzy and locality breaks down.

People trying to stay materialist after QM usually just shift the definition—like, “sure, it’s not solid matter anymore, but it’s still physical because it’s in a field.” But let’s be real, it’s a huge departure from the old view. The “matter” of today is more math-like than object-like. So yeah, I get why people still call it materialism, but it’s not the straightforward, common-sense materialism it used to be.

*Ai wrote some of this

"but we ought to allow them in our thought experiments since they show what would have to be true if they existed"

I started a thread here about that awhile back. I keep trying to picture my pzombie equivalent getting shitfaced after a stressful day and not being able to. I get wasted because it feels good. But that motivation isn't available to my pzombie counterpart, so why on Earth would he do it? Also, let's suppose there's a possible world Earth populated by pzombies. Consciousness just never happened in this world. Woudn't the vocabulary of pzombieEarth be radically reduced? How and why would pzombies have words for consciousness? Or any emotions? I suppose their vocabulary would reflect mental states that have obvious physical analogues, like screaming during intense pain, but what about mental states that don't get physically expressed, like boredom or contemplation or mild enjoyment? Why would they have words for any of that?

ETA: Also, would pzombie world have tortures?

If materialism is, as you assert, a popular and intuitively attractive view, then I don't find your characterizations of it plausible. — SophistiCat

I brought this up too. Old school materialism has intuitive appeal, I guess. Post QM materialism is utterly bizarre and counterintuitive.

You want biological women who have fully transitioned to men and look like men to have to use the women's restroom???

This is a good challenge to P-zombies. Notice, though, that an advocate for the possibility of P-zombies would deny Premise 2: "Beliefs play a central causal role in human behavior. (When I say 'it's going to rain,' that statement reflects a belief that influences whether I grab an umbrella.)".

The argument here would go: "What you're calling a belief plays no role whatsoever in human behavior. A 'belief' is epiphenomenal; what causes things to happen is entirely explainable at the level of physics (and brain chemistry). When you say 'It's going to rain," that statement may well reflect a belief, but you're mistaken if you think the belief influences your grabbing an umbrella. Sorry, it's all physical." — J

It's like that old saw: who am I going to believe, the eliminative materialists or my own lying mind? It seems like a desperate move to make to rescue p-zombies.

Very interesting. I can't say I have much to add to this, except that I've often thought people are drawn to beliefs that are emotionally satisfying. I recall Steven Pinker stating that we justify beliefs using reason, but we form them based on our affective relationships with the world. — Tom Storm

I think this is true and it has implications for p-zombies. ChatGPT helped me formulate this:

Premise 1:
Humans form beliefs not solely by reason, but through affective (emotional) relationships with the world.
(Empirical claim supported by cognitive science and philosophers like Pinker.)

Premise 2:
Beliefs play a central causal role in human behavior.
(When I say "it's going to rain," that statement reflects a belief that influences whether I grab an umbrella.)

Premise 3:
A p-zombie is defined as being physically and behaviorally identical to a human, yet lacks any subjective experience (qualia), including affect.

Premise 4:
If beliefs are formed and regulated in part through affect, then a creature without affect cannot genuinely form beliefs.

Conclusion 1:
Therefore, p-zombies cannot genuinely have beliefs.

Conclusion 2:
If p-zombies cannot have beliefs, they cannot be behaviorally identical to humans, whose behavior depends on beliefs.

Final Conclusion:
P-zombies are logically incoherent. There is no possible world where a being is both behaviorally identical to a human and completely lacking in consciousness.

Chatgpt will find and link youtube videos now. That's a recent change. A little while ago, it told me it couldn't do that. I just asked Chatgpt and it says it changed with the June update.

ETA: My wife wanted to test it. She told it to find a Course in Miracles video about the body being the hero of the dream. Very obscure stuff. Chatgpt found 5 videos in about 10 seconds.

There is a philosopher who claims that Mary gains a new ability, not new knowledge. I bet ChatGPT knows...

"The philosopher you're thinking of is David Lewis.

In response to Frank Jackson’s knowledge argument (the "Mary's Room" thought experiment), Lewis argued that what Mary gains when she sees color for the first time isn’t new propositional knowledge (knowledge-that), but rather knowledge-how—specifically, the ability to recognize, imagine, and remember colors. This position is called the ability hypothesis.

Lewis laid out this view in his 1988 paper "What Experience Teaches". According to him, Mary doesn't learn a new fact when she leaves the room; she acquires new abilities, like the ability to recognize red by sight. This way, he tries to preserve physicalism by denying that Mary learns any non-physical fact upon seeing color."

The man was a badass. — Fire Ologist

Except he got it completely wrong on women. I always wonder if these misogynist ancient philosophers ever actually talked to women.

Studying the facts of bike riding vs actually learning to ride a bike. No matter how many facts you acquire about bike riding, you won't know how to actually ride the bike. You need experiential knowledge for that. Also, a blind person who's an expert on vision and has no idea what seeing is like. Mary's room stuff.

:up:

Aren't there two kinds of knowledge? There's factual knowledge of the objective world, which Mary in her black and white world can learn, and then there's experiential knowledge of the inner world (of what it's like to see red), which Mary, in her black and white world can't learn. Is experiential knowledge a JTB? Or do you just sort of know what x is like and cant be wrong about it? Can my knowledge of what red looks like even be expressed in terms of beliefs? The belief that red is like x must necessarily refer to an experience, which is hard to put into words. For example, I know what seeing is like, but I cannot put it in words to describe to a blind person (from birth), so how can I construct a coherent belief out of it? How do I construct a belief about my knowledge of seeing that is coherent?

Materialism is intuitive because our "internal model" or understanding of the world as a three-dimensional space filled with extended bodies in motion is reinforced by several senses, not just one. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well, it WAS intuitive. QM is extremely counter-intuitive. Matter used to be little particles that stuff was made of. Now it's excitations in quantum fields. WTF is that?

"are people excitations of a quntum field?

ChatGPT said:
Yes—people, like everything else made of matter and energy, are ultimately excitations of quantum fields."

What else does Ukraine have up their sleeve? This puts the incursion into Kursk in a different perspective. Was one of the reasons to make it easier to do this operation? And where are the quislings here who defend Russia at every turn?

Is there pressure on the ruling party to take back Taiwan? Does the average Chinese citizen care?

So those who spout the there are only two sexes mantra merely display ignorance of the complexity of biology and natures endless variations. — prothero

There's male, female, and what else? Various disorders where the person has characteristics of both sexes? That's not really a third sex though.

Men being physically stronger than women isn't a cultural thing. Neither is having more testosterone, which we know affects behavior. Has there ever been a culture where men have not committed more crimes than women?

So their delusion is in thinking that the English noun "woman" doesn't just mean "an adult human with an XX karyotype, ovaries, and a vagina"?

Well, this isn't a delusion because it's true. The English noun "woman" doesn't just mean this. It has more than one meaning. It can also refer to a non-biological gender. — Michael

I'm sympathetic to this, but when we label someone as "man", along with a physical description of a male (genitalia, chromosomes, etc.) that label also denotes that, on average, men are stronger than women and more violent and predatory. Would you agree?

How would something like the LHC or Hubble Telescope be built in anarchist land?

You could say they're men acting like women. But there are problems with that too. If someone thinks they're Napoleon and they dress and behave and insist on being referred to as Napoleon, from a rational person's point of view, aren't they pretending to be Napolean?

woman" includes a person who has the protected characteristic of gender reassignment [to female]

This is one of the reasons liberals have been having a tough time in elections and it's just wrong. Trans men aren't women. They're men pretending to be women.

Yes. I think most Westerners would agree that women are defined biologically and men identifying as women are still men. It's a fiction that is tolerated because some people really believe they are in the wrong body and identifying as another gender helps alleviate their gender dysphoria, and there's no harm in going along with it, except in cases like women's prisons, sports, and things like this law you referenced about women getting 50% of the seats on boards.

By community, do you mean online? Or the circles I move in? Or the people in my neighborhood? Or as an American?

Those seats on the boards were reserved for women and men who identify as women are not women.

Remember the uproar when Rachel Dolezal, a white women, identified herself (or tried to) as black? That didn't sit well with a lot of people.
— RogueAI

Yes, I remember it well. Have you read Faulkners' Light in August? In a deeply racist country, as in a deeply sexist society such identifications are fraught, and passing is difficult and exposure devastating. But what is your point? — unenlightened

You cut out the salient point of my paragraph:

"Remember the uproar when Rachel Dolezal, a white women, identified herself (or tried to) as black? That didn't sit well with a lot of people. There were accusations of cultural appropriation. To take it to the extreme, imagine Donald Trump identifying as black. Ludicrous, right? Even if lightning were to strike Trump, and he truly believed in his heart that he was black, he's still white. But how is that different than Bruce Jenner identifying as a woman? Why is that tolerated?"

It would be very fitting if instead of reducing the issue to bathrooms, we talked about whether the women were right. Was the UK Supreme Court right? Were women's rights endangered by substituting transgender women for biological women? — frank

The women were right.

Remember the uproar when Rachel Dolezal, a white women, identified herself (or tried to) as black? That didn't sit well with a lot of people. There were accusations of cultural appropriation. To take it to the extreme, imagine Donald Trump identifying as black. Ludicrous, right? Even if lightning were to strike Trump, and he truly believed in his heart that he was black, he's still white. But how is that different than Bruce Jenner identifying as a woman? Why is that tolerated?

Yes, that was 4o. It's a very clever thought experiment. I don't like Chatgpt's reasoning. If I'm in a world where complex simulations of people are possible, and those simulations can be sped up enormously, and the stakes are high enough (say preventing a nuclear bomb going off), I can see an argument where I spend the rest of my life working on stopping the nuclear bomb, even decades after it's gone off, just on the off-chance I might be a simulation. ChatGPT's response was pretty good, I think:

"A simulation of you working endlessly for years, generating no new output, is inefficient and unlikely to exist. So your credence in still being in a simulation should decay over time as:

The deadline recedes further into the past,

No feedback is received,

And the marginal utility of continued effort drops.

Eventually, the expected value of continuing dips below zero."

It's unreal that token prediction produces these kinds of responses. I can imagine a machine intelligence looking at us and saying: I can't believe neuron firing produces these kinds of responses.

USER: So then, if all I know about the set up is that these kinds of simulations that can work at sped up times and brain scans are a live possibility in my world, I'm going to also know that any deadline with catastrophic consequences might not be a real deadline. My background knowledge is such that I could be a simulation in sped up time. But working past deadlines is also inefficient, and might lead to catastrophe, so what's the rational thing to do?


ChatGPT said:
Now you're asking the right question—the razor-edge of decision theory under uncertainty:

“Given that I might be a simulation, and I might not be, and my background knowledge includes the possibility of fast simulations being used in high-stakes scenarios… what should I do when the deadline has apparently passed?”

This is a classic case of self-locating uncertainty and decision-making under epistemic ambiguity.

Here's the setup, cleaned and formalized:
You are an agent who:

Understands that in your world, simulated copies of agents are possible, run faster than real time.

Has been placed in a work environment with a clear task and deadline (e.g., preventing a terrorist attack).

Hits a point (e.g., Day 5) where, if you were the original, the deadline has passed—but if you're a simulation, it has not.

So you ask: Should I keep working? Or stop, given that working past the deadline could be wasteful or harmful?

The Rational Analysis
Step 1: Consider the possible worlds
You are in one of at least two possible worlds:

You are the simulation. It's currently only, say, 3 real-world days before the attack. Your work still matters.

You are the original. The deadline has passed. Your work doesn't affect the outcome anymore.

But you don’t know which world you're in.

Step 2: Assign credences
If you're a Bayesian reasoner, you'd assign probabilities to being in each world. For example:

P(simulation) = 0.5

P(original) = 0.5

(These are just placeholders—your actual credence could be different depending on how common simulations are in your world, and how likely it is you'd be simulated in this case.)

Step 3: Consider payoffs
If you are the simulation and keep working, your work might save lives → huge payoff.

If you are the original and keep working, it's wasted effort → low or negative payoff.

If you are the simulation and quit, you likely fail → catastrophic outcome.

If you are the original and quit, no change in outcome → neutral.

Step 4: Maximize expected utility
Let’s suppose:

Saving lives = +1,000,000 utils

Wasted work = –100 utils

Catastrophe due to quitting = –1,000,000 utils

Quitting when nothing matters = 0 utils

Expected utility of continuing to work:

Copy
Edit
= P(sim) × (+1,000,000) + P(orig) × (–100)
= 0.5 × 1,000,000 + 0.5 × (–100)
= 500,000 – 50
= 499,950 utils
Expected utility of quitting:

Copy
Edit
= P(sim) × (–1,000,000) + P(orig) × (0)
= –500,000 utils
→ Rational choice: KEEP WORKING.

General Principle:
If there’s a non-negligible chance that you're in a fast simulation and the task still matters, the expected value of continuing work dominates.

Even though it feels inefficient or irrational in the apparent timeline, that intuition is based on a faulty assumption that you’re in the base reality. Once that assumption is shaken, your risk calculus changes drastically.

Objection: "But working past the deadline could be harmful!"
Sure, that matters only if:

You’re the original,

Working consumes significant resources,

And those resources might be better used elsewhere.

But unless those harms are massively weighted, the expected gain from possibly being the simulation overwhelms the cost.

Final Verdict:
In a world where:

High-speed brain simulations are a known tool,

The stakes are enormous,

And you don’t know which “version” you are,

Then rationality demands that you act as if your actions still matter until you have overwhelming reason to believe otherwise. That means:

Keep working past the apparent deadline—because there's a live chance that you're in a situation where it still matters immensely.