A good paper, I agree with the main points, in as far as I understood.

My only disagreement would be the position that the only means of verifying a model is generative.

The important thing in science is having a model that has predictive / inferential power. And given this, there are already plenty of things we understand about consciousness. I can display a particular kind of image to you, and predict you will see an optical illusion in your "mind's eye", thus verifying that particular understanding of how the brain constructs that aspect of consciousness.

I would not see it as impossible that a model of the neurological basis of consciousness could nonetheless be verified purely with tests of this kind.

Bear in mind also that there are some pretty fundamental aspects of consciousness that are still wide open for explanation: sleeping, dreaming, anaesthesia etc. Let me be clear that I don't consider these part of the "hard problem" of consciousness, and I actually get a bit annoyed when people take the problem of consciousness to just be whether someone is awake, alert etc.
However, I think our understanding of these phenomena remains quite weak so it is plausible to me that a model that explains subjective experience could also revolutionize our understanding of these too. And these aspects may have very trivial ways to test in vivo.

Evidence of what woke is? Are you serious? — Fire Ologist

Any evidence of the injustices and suppression of free speech and free assembly that you're saying is a significant problem on the left, right now.
Preferably comparable to what is happening in the real world, with ICE protestors being brutally put down, an executive order basically saying left wing ideology is terrorism and a speech to the military making it clear that ideological loyalty is a requirement. And this is just in the last few days.

My proof Trump is not a fascist is the fact that he stepped down from office in 2020 all while he seems to have believed the election was stolen from him. — Fire Ologist

Haha, that's hilarious.
You know, you and I have had our differences, but with wit like that, you're all right @Fire Ologist, you're all right.

This reminds me a bit of the canard "There's no such thing as the supernatural; if it exists, it's natural"
Which misses the point that supernatural typically means inexplicable using the natural laws as we know them. Very obviously believers in such things (FTR: not me) accept that supernatural phenomena would belong to the set of things which exist / are real.

Of course, this isn't what the OP is doing but it is another definition error IMO. "Magic" means something pretty close to "supernatural". It doesn't mean you can't even put the phenomenon in a sentence like "when the magician reaches into the hat, a rabbit appears"; that would be absurd.
By that definition a genie emerging from a lamp and granting my wishes doesn't count as magic, because we have a predictive model: "When I say a wish, that thing manifests".
Instead it means we don't have a predictive model based on known natural laws.

I think the title was cryptic enough to put off clicks :)

It's an interesting topic, I would actually come at it from the other side though.

I think people mostly do speak to AI like chat gpt as if it is a person. I certainly do; I basically speak to it as a friend, congratulate it when it came up with a particularly good solution etc.

And I think there's danger in *that* because people might soon rely on basically pretend relationships with friends that aren't real, while gradually losing the ability to form real friendships.

Also, you might be alluding to the common concern in sci fi of AI being treated as an appliance when it is actually conscious, and so creating a new kind of slavery without even realizing (the Orville did this well with the Kaylon origin story).
It's possible, but I think we're hyper alert to the possibility of consciousness and with AI likely surpassing us at things we consider as evidence of intelligence, I think we're much more likely to treat a general intelligence as star trek treated Commander data. (Or indeed, Isaac on Orville)

On inequality: sorry, it seems I was wrong. The world got much wealthier in the industrial revolution, and so the typical subsistence farmer moving to the city was better off. But the owners of capital were tremendously better off. So inequality actually increased.

On AI progress; as I say @javi2541997, I use AI daily to help me with work and personal tasks, as do my friends. Why don't you think it counts as progress?

Mijin was saying woke is just a word used to scare people. That woke is not a real thing. I disagree with that.

I’m saying if woke wasn’t a real thing, it wouldn’t function to raise fear like it does. But it is real. Obviously. — Fire Ologist

I know I said I'd bow out, but if someone @s me then I am summoned again.

I have asked you multiple times, at least half a dozen times now, for evidence. And the fact that you fall back to basically "lots of people believe this" is telling. It's the same argument used about the "stolen" 2020 election. Or the MMR vaccine causing autism.

Lots of people can believe false things, especially when it's a message being pushed in the circle in which they get their "news".

I've got here late but still want to reply to the OP...

I’ve always been sort of a skeptic when it comes to new tech most my because given human history we aren’t exactly good at using it to our betterment (looking at social media and the Industrial Revolution). — Darkneos

The vast majority of tech is a net benefit; it's just humans figuring out ways to do things.

Firstly bear in mind that everything we construct is tech....we tend to use tech as shorthand for things in the digital space from the last few decades, but speaking more fundamentally about tech, as you are, then the clothes you are wearing are technology, as is the building you're probably sitting in. Not merely the device that you're reading this on.

Secondly I'd dispute even your examples. The industrial revolution brought a lot of benefits, and although there was huge inequality, and a lot of pollution, in most cases the inequality was less than the agrarian society it displaced, and we have ameliorated a lot of the pollution. And it utterly transformed our quality of life.

Not to say there aren't still big problems, like climate change, but hands down it's been a net benefit to humans.

It seems that, like social media, AI is catering to our worst and basest impulses for immediate rewards and nothing thinking about the long term. — Darkneos

I would disagree with that. e.g. LLMs and the like are being used in most cases to create things and get advice. I don't see this as base impulses.

What’s gonna happen when you replace most jobs with AI, how will people live? — Darkneos

It's not a given that unemployment will increase. Technology tends to displace jobs and replace them with something else, hence why US unemployment has bounced around the same average for decades even as we've been in the information age.

In any case, jobs exist to fulfill human needs. If there are no jobs, that implies a post-scarcity environment. If we're saying only the rich can afford robots or whatever, then there are still jobs for human maids. You can't have tech that both no-one can afford and yet be maximally disruptive.

(Well, I don't actually think it's that simple, I am expecting a lot of social unrest and probably the unemployment rate will increase. Countries with a weak welfare safety net are going to suffer a lot. I am just trying to push back against the assumption of the OP)

So far AI just seems to benefit the wealthiest among us and not the Everyman — Darkneos

I use AI every day and I doubt I'd be the wealthiest guy in a soup kitchen.

What would be the point of planning if you only ever live for a heartbeat? I don't think you believe NC yourself, so why would you respond in this thread when you won't even get to see the reaction yourself? — SolarWind

Firstly your point obviously has nothing to do with whether it is true or not.
Lots of things in the universe are either unpleasant or unintuitve, it doesn't make them false.

But secondly, I haven't claimed to know the NC position is correct, I have only said that it is the position that stands up best to the counter-arguments right now. It is not rational based only on that tentative judgement, to give up on life immediately.
But in fact, even if I knew that NC is correct it, doesn't give me any basis to not do anything either, so I may as well continue to play along, for this millisecond that I'm alive.

Thanks brother :fist_bump:

You know what though @Fire Ologist you are right that I think I've said my piece for this thread.

I think the premise the OP is based on is false. And I think "woke" is a meaningless scare word.

I've already explained why in multiple posts, so I may as well bid everyone goodday and bow out.

I know Trump and Christians, and old white men are authoritarian and they hate free speech — Fire Ologist

You make it sound like just a couple of random guys. Trump is president, Project 2025 includes making America an explicitly Christian nation, and much of project 2025 has already been rolled out, right up to soldiers in the streets and executive orders describing people being "anti-christian" as terrorists.

That discussion requires some sort of working definition of “woke” - that is how one could demonstrate how, for instance, the Vietnam thing sounds stupid — Fire Ologist

Nope. Again, that would be like saying I can't say the emperor has no clothes unless I define exactly the fine silks which I believe he lacks.
It's trivial to point out that conservatives have used "woke" to mean anything and everything and thus it's a nonsense term. Why would the hopeless task of trying to forge a new word with a concrete meaning and get everyone to use it be on me?

I think you want to disagree with me no matter what. — Fire Ologist

The topic hasn't shifted in several pages, and I don't think you have presented me with any argument to even attempt to change my mind, so yes of course the disagreement stands.

I bet it is because woke ideology is so authoritarian and so destructive of freedom and free speech. So I agree with much he says here.

But you don’t seem to see any fascism coming from left/progressive/woke - you seem to be more interested in showing how “woke” is a strawman (which undercuts the entire OP) and more interested in showing how the right spreads fascism. — Fire Ologist

Correct -- my position is that what the left is doing in terms of free speech is not even 1% of the threat of the right wing currently. Serious estimate. This does not always have to be true for all time. A different government, a different culture, things can change. But that's the reality right now, and I've asked you many times for examples that would convince an objective observer otherwise.

How is that more relevant than what I am trying to talk about on a thread call “The End of Woke”? — Fire Ologist

Because the OP is about what's happening in terms of authoritarian policies and freedom of expression. I doubt what he wanted was dozens of pages of definition debate.
And in any case, I've put to you that the people most against "woke", have used it to mean just about anything from why we lost Vietnam to vaccine mandates. You're not interested in discussing that, so if you won't engage in that issue with defining woke, why should I continue to engage in your hijack?

Right, you want to talk about something else. Not what woke has done. — Fire Ologist

I am asking you, what evidence you have of your so-called "woke" that compares to what's happening in the real world, like an executive order that now labels ideological dissent as terrorism at the same time as the military is being sent to Democratic cities.
As I say, it's farcical. We're living in the early stages of Project 2025 and you think the real problem is someone who got his feelings hurt by a woman in 1994 or whatever. If you've got better than that anecdote, let's hear it.

They both agree on the same underlying fact: there is no continuity beyond the perception of it. NC adds the additional idea: therefore, we are always dying. — hypericin

Call it "adding on", or call it different. Maybe it's just semantics?

But personally I would maintain it's actually a different position. PC says I am the same person as the Mijin of 10 years ago (numerically the same of course, not qualitatively). NC says I am not, in either sense.

When it comes to the imperfect transporter, PC has the difficult problem of establishing where the line is of numerical identity. It's like "heap" problems where there is the problem of which hair you remove that transitions a person from "full head of hair" to "balding". Except that the classical heap problem is fairly trivial IMHO, being largely a matter of a third person making an arbitrary choice. But the imperfect transporter actually matters, to the first person, because it's whether you are alive or dead.

NC doesn't care about the imperfect transporter; it has no applicability or relevance.

If there is no continuous consciousness, then what is it that is doing the dying? — hypericin

Conscious experience. In a sense NC is saying that consciousness does have a lifespan; it's as long as a unified conscious experience, so probably something around 1/10th of a second. Not more than a few seconds anyway. After that, you can call it dying, or ending, it doesn't matter. The point is, it isn't the "three score and ten" of a human body's lifespan.

As I've said in past threads; I think there is a linguistic issue with the word "nothing", in English, that is often right at the core of the issue.
People will say things like "nothing is still something" and "how can 'nothing' have a property of existing", which I think are meaningless statements.

In English, the words "no" and "thing" have been concatenated into a noun: "nothing". But it's a special noun. If I say "There's nothing to be afraid of", I am not saying we should be afraid of one thing, that we're labeling "nothing". I am saying there are zero things to be afraid of: we should not be afraid.

And likewise with the universe. If we say there was nothing before this universe, that is not positing a state where a thing we're labeling "nothing" has the property of existence. Not usually anyway.

If we were going to go down the road of trying to make a "real" noun of "nothing", then sure we can demonstrate "nothing" easily. It occupies zero space, so right now there's an infinity of "nothings" in any volume of space.

Sure we do. Q3 is easy. The ball-catching robot was one. A fly evading a swat is another. If one is searching for a model, you start simple and work your way up to something as complex as how our experience works. — noAxioms

But I reject the breakdown into those three questions, if you're going to insist that neuroscience cannot ask Q2.

The hard problem is Q2 and it is legitimate for science to want to know how a neural net can have experiences.

It seems a bit pointless to me to keep deflecting from the hard problem to declare that there is no hard problem.

Let’s start over. — Fire Ologist

We've had at least a dozen pages of whining about the definition, can you please address some of the more relevant points, like all the infringements on free speech and other human rights that are orders of magnitude worse than any of the claims of what "woke" has done?

Many times. For example, in the podcast by JD Vance and Stephen Miller, Miller said:

"It is a vast domestic terror movement [...] We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organised campaign that led to this assassination"

The executive order is similarly in weakly veiled language: the groups and entities that perpetuate this [left-wing] extremism have created a movement that embraces and elevates violence to achieve policy outcomes, including justifying additional assassinations

A new topic. Avoids the issue. — Fire Ologist

Yes and you brought it up

It’s ok to call someone fascist. If they are fascist. But get us back on track. — Fire Ologist

Sure, and Trump fits the definition to a tee. I seem to remember someone, not sure if it was you, that tried to claim Democrats were more fascist but when asked what part of the definition is met by whom, no response was forthcoming. But ok, let's return to "woke".

You really need to deal with this: — Fire Ologist

I don't "need to" deal with anything. You've used woke to mean a dozen different things in this thread, and as I've repeatedly pointed out, so has MAGA media.

So more important than your (constantly shifting) claims about the word, is your repeated assertions of overreach in the name of woke. Do you have any examples of that? Something better than the anecdote of one guy who said some women were mean about men many years ago?
Or better yet; something even vaguely comparable to the silencing of universities, journalists, public protests etc happening under this administration?

And indeed, since the last time that I said that we've of course had an executive order, ostensibly about the "left-wing terrorist networks" that the government has claimed (without evidence) orchestrated Kirk's murder. But the order will crack down on groups that engage in anything deemed "anti-American," "anti-capitalism," or against "traditional American views,"
No problem there with free speech, eh? And nowhere near as bad as "something something woke".

But is the question whether “woke” is clearly defined? That’s what you want to talk about. Without pointing to any definition at all! — Fire Ologist

No it's not "what I want to talk about".

My position has been, and remains, that the word "woke" is a meaningless scare word that a certain audience has been conditioned to be triggered by.

My cites are firstly all the examples of conservative media using the word to mean everything and nothing, like that it's the reason the US military has lost wars, or vaccines are woke, or that teaching accurate history is woke etc etc. You repeatedly played dumb and ignored these examples.

The second cite is your flailing in this thread; where woke has been used to mean just about everything, but we're not allowed to say woke is ill-defined because "not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke".

Don’t be a baby. Put your big boy pants on. You can always refute something I said that matters. — Fire Ologist

OK, let's see, can we refute this?
You said "Keep losing elections, and hoping people shoot more fascists."

Firstly, no I don't want anyone hurt by political violence. So that remains a scurrilous accusation.

Secondly, you seem to be alluding to the word "fascist" as encouraging violence. But no-one calls his enemies "fascist" more often than Trump.

Is it OK when Trump does it? Or is Trump woke?

Nicely done. No such thing as woke. No way to define it. It doesn’t mean anything. Got it. — Fire Ologist

You have said it's not clearly defined, you stupid shit.

And the reason I'm calling you what you are now, is because your accusation that I am "hoping people shoot more fascists" is absolutely despicable.

No I don't think PC and NC are the same, and I just explained with a concrete example e.g. a proponent of NC does not believe there are rational grounds for either teleporting or not teleporting; either way they are about to die. That's not the same as the PC position.

Prepare yourself for some blunt answers, and understand I am having to literally wipe my brow each time i need to respond to something abjectly dishonest in this post: — AmadeusD

Bring it on. Let's see if you find even one inaccuracy.

It is either active or inactive. There is no third option. There are not three genotypes for SRY. You're probably talking about translocation, which, if active, has happened in a male. Swyer is a female disorder and 46,xx are both male disorders of sex development. — AmadeusD

So you're choosing to say that only two genotypes "count" as genotypes and anything else is an aberration? So how is this any different to the special pleading you're doing with all other aspects of gender? (essentially: "it's binary except for the exceptions, which don't count")

This has absolutely nothing to do with the facts. "how would we know" doesn't come close to even touching the security of the sex binary. — AmadeusD

The facts are that your definition of gender is not scientifically accepted and therefore is worthless.
I was also pointing out that it's completely unworkable as a definition of gender in society but if you want to put that other issue to one side, then fine.

Yes — biologists generally agree that SRY is the primary genetic determinant of male sex in humans. It acts as the initial switch that launches male sexual differentiation, though other genes and factors are also required to complete the process." — AmadeusD

So several issues here.
Firstly primary determinator does not mean only, secondly, once again, there are more than two genotypes for this gene.
And finally, it's farcical; you're saying if the SRY gene is male, that overrides everything else; it doesn't matter if the person was assigned female at birth, has breasts, a vagina, has lived as a woman and is married to a heterosexual man...this is the level people have to go to to avoid conceding that gender is more complex than we learned in high school.

What’s wrong with that? The thread must have two dozen viable senses of “woke” at this point. — Fire Ologist

Everything is wrong with that. Off the top of my head:

1. You are the person that is throwing out these ever-shifting meanings.
2. While at the same time complaining about people that don't have a clear idea of what "woke" is (and, hilariously, saying that not knowing what woke is, is woke )
3. When the point has been put to you of how much of a mess the concept of "woke" is on the political right, going all the way to the president saying that the US lost in Korea, Vietnam etc because of "woke", your response was...well, I don't think you ever did respond to it.

And that's specificially the problems with this definition war you're having with your own brain.
I think there are many other problems with your perspective, chiefly that we're focusing on this boogieman while at the same time as human rights and freedom of speech is being trampled on a mass scale.

I have no idea where you got any of that from.
What I am saying is that you are confusing the problem itself from the responses to the problem. We can super clarify it by putting it into three sections:

1. The original problem (Parfit's transporter)
A person steps into a transporter.
Their body is scanned and a perfect duplicate is made at some remote location, while, at the same time, the original body/person is killed.
What happens to the consciousness, the self, after this set of events?

2. Philosophical positions on personal identity
Bodily continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the physical substrate
Psychological continuity -- continuity of the self depends on continuity of the content of the mind -- the memories, the personality etc
No continuity -- there is never continuity of the self. It just feels as if there is because we inherit memories of previous entities

3. Therefore, what should a rational person do in the situation (1)?
BC says stay away; the transporter kills you -- the person at the destination is not you
PC says go ahead; you will arrive at the destination
NC says it doesn't matter what you do; you have 1 second to live either way

Now, there's a fourth section we can go into: counter-arguments; of which the "imperfect transporter" is just one. But I want to check you're on board with 1-3 first.

It's worse than that.
As I illustrated in my previous post, @Fire Ologist has used "woke" to mean at least a dozen different things in this thread, as well as wondering out loud about what it means.

So we're the problem for not having a clear idea of what "woke" means -- even though we're not the ones trying to rehabilitate the word / concept. But also, it's true that it's not clearly-defined. And also you can define it however you want for whatever rhetorical point you want to make in the moment.

Hope it's all clear now.

Q2 How does the experience of red (or any qualia) work? This seems to be a third person question, open to science. — noAxioms

Sure, but let's be very clear here. The question is how the brain can have experiences at all, and right now we don't have any model for that.

The danger that some slip into, and I think from later in your response you do somewhat fall into this, is of assuming a third person description means just finding things correlated with experience. But that's a comparatively trivial problem. If you put your hand on a hot stove, we already understand very well which nerves get activated, which pain centers of the brain light up etc.
What we don't understand is where the unpleasant feeling comes from. Or any feelings at all.

'The hard problem' as described by Chalmers seems to be Q3, but I don't find that one hard at all. Call it being flippant if you want, but nobody, including Chalmers, seems capable of demonstrating what the actual problem is. — noAxioms

Not only have you acknowledged many unsolved questions in your post, but you asked several of your own.

Now, in my view, subjective experience is a hard problem because it doesn't even appear as though an explanation is possible. What I mean by that, is not that I believe any supernatural element or whatever, merely that it is a kind of phenomenon that does not seem amenable to the normal way we reduce and explain phenomena.
Before we knew what the immune system was we could still describe disease. But since we can't even describe the experience of red it looks very difficult to know where to start.
Not impossible; we have no reason to suppose that. But a different class of problem to those that science has previously deconstructed.

But you don't need to agree with that view. Just the fact that you are acknowledging many open questions, that are pretty fundamental to what the phenomenon is, already puts it in a special bracket.
Frankly, I think you're acknowledging that it is a difficult problem, but are reluctant to use the word "hard" because you don't want to climb down.

I guess I had hoped somebody (the article perhaps) would actually identify those questions and in particular, how physicalism fails in a way that their alternative does not. — noAxioms

I don't know why you're still framing this as a discussion of whether physicalism is true or not. In the OP, you describe yourself as "somebody who has no problem with all mental activity supervening on material interactions".
I have also stated that I think we have no reason to suppose anything non-physical is going on (indeed, my position is actually I don't think it would necessarily help with the hard problem of consciousness anyway).

So let's put that side topic to one side: let's assume physicalism for the basis of this thread: The hard problem of consciousness remains.
I don't normally drop in my bona fides, but I work in neuroscience research. In neuropathologies specifically, rather than consciousness, but still, I'm the last person to try to invoke a "spirit" or whatever. I purely want to understand how the brain does what it does, and when it comes to experiencing "green", it's the most unfathomable of brain processes right now.

In terms of the questions, I've been going through some of them: how does a neural net feel pain (or have any other experience), how we can know if an agent experiences pain, some pains are worse than others...what's the mechanism for these different kinds of negative experience, if I make an AI, how can I know if it feels pain or not? And so on.

Your answers have been either
1) Just make a judgement e.g. AI pain is different to human pain. I mean, probably, sure, but there's no model or deeper breakdown that that supposition is coming from. And, if we're saying it's a different kind of pain, what, exactly, is a "kind" of pain?
2) Just say that it couldn't be any other way e.g. About whether we can know what another person experiences. That's not a solution though. That's pretty much just repeating the problem but adding an unearned shrug.

I think this response gets to the nub of the disagreement. I can respond to the other points you've made, if you like, but I think they're noise compared to the central issue.

Let me try to simplify too, because when there are these increasingly long posts, no-one's reading or engaging.

My position is simply that when it comes to subjective experience there remains a large explanatory gap; questions we cannot answer and would like to, with actual practical implications.

I think noAxioms, because you've started this thread from a position of "I don't know why there's all the fuss about...", you're responding to the problems and questions somewhat flippantly. Either with your best guess -- which is meaningless here, if the conclusion is not coming from a specific model or description it's not a solution, and we have no reason to think it's right.

Or pointing out that there's no reason to suppose something non-physical is going on -- which is fine, but is also not an answer.
It's like saying "What's all the fuss about why some people have long covid, while some are even asymptomatic...there's no reason to suppose it's not physical" -- it's an irrelevant excuse to handwave the problem.

We have a reaction to a negative input. It is a choice of language to describe that process as involving pain or not. Perhaps it is a choice of language to describe it as negative or not. — noAxioms

This is backwards. The input is not inherently negative; it's just data. It's as subject to interpretation as all other sensory data.
The experience is negative, and that's the difficult thing for us to explain here.
If someone were to peel off your skin, it's not a choice of language that you call that a negative experience -- the brain somehow generates an extremely unpleasant experience using a mechanism that as yet we don't understand.

It's not like there's a 4th set of nerves coming from the eye, lacking any 4th-color cones to sense, so they remain ever unstimulated. If those unused nerves were there, then I suppose they could be artificially triggers to give the subject this experience he otherwise could never have. — noAxioms

Your claim was that science says there's no way we could conceive of what the world looks like to tetrachromats. Even if the cones of the eye stimulated color perception in a consistent mapping (and it isn't...it's contextual), it wouldn't rule out that we can imagine another primary color independent of stimulus.

Are there non-philosophical papers that conclude that something non-physical is going on, and that matter somewhere is doing something deliberate without any physical cause? That would be news indeed, a falsification of 'known physics is sufficient'. — noAxioms

No idea where that came from.
I've been speaking entirely from the perspective of neuroscience. If anyone has been claiming a soul, or anything beyond known physics, it isn't me.

Behaving as a human does when experienceing human pain? Seems unfair. It feels pain if it chooses to use that word to describe what it feels. — noAxioms

I can trivially program an agent then that feels pain. Pretty easy to make an AI that chooses to use expressions like "Owie! That's the worst pain ever" in response to the user issuing the command "feel pain". So am I now guilty of inflicting great suffering?

It would be pretty pointless to evolve the data of pain and nothing to consider it to be something to avoid. — noAxioms

Avoiding stimuli does not entail having a negative experience. Indeed there are plenty of processes in your body that reflexively counter some stimulus without you experiencing pain. So these two things are not intrinsically coupled.

Now, one of the most popular hypotheses for why we have the negative experience of pain is that it allows us to make complex judgements. If cutting my arm reflexively made me pull away then I would not be able to hunt as effectively as someone able to consider the hunt more important than the "bad feeling" of having a slashed arm. I think this is likely correct.
However, understanding some of the reason that we evolved subjective experience is still not a model of what it actually is and how the brain creates experiences.

Exactly. Science acknowledges this impossibility [of describing a tetrochromats vision with words], and yet it doesn't recognize said 'hard problem'. — noAxioms

Several things here:
1. Science absolutely does not claim the impossibility of describing experiences with words. For all we know right now, it may be possible to induce someone to imagine a fourth primary color with some kind of description. The fact that this seems implausible is not a proof of anything.
2. Science absolutely does acknowledge the hard problem. It doesn't always call it that, because that's a philosophical framing, but even strictly googling "hard problem of consciousness" finds many papers in neuroscience journals.
3. I think you have a misconception about the distinction between science and philosophy. Many things that were once philosophy have become sciences as they made testable claims. Indeed all of science was once considered "natural philosophy".
Even if it were the case that the hard problem of consciousness were entirely confined to philosophical debate, that doesn't mean that the scientific community is rejecting it as a concept. Only that it wouldn't yet be something amenable to the scientific methodology.

The AI isn't going to feel human pain if that's what you're wondering. — noAxioms

That wasn't the question though. The question was how we could tell the difference between an agent being in pain and merely behaving as though it is in pain.

In this case though your deflection just serves to reinforce the point. If you're claiming that an AI would feel a different kind of pain to a human, what kind of pain is that, and how do you know?

It's always best with these things to bring it back to the practical.

The measure of how well we understand a phenomenon or system is what kind of useful predictions and inferences we can make about it.

When it comes to something like pain, say, we do understand very well the sensory inputs to the pain centres of the brain. But how the brain converts data into an unpleasant sensation remains quite mysterious.
This has practical implications -- it would be very useful to have some kind of direct measure of pain or some non-arbitrary way of understanding different kinds of pain. If we make a sentient AI one day, and it tells us it's in pain, how could we know if that's true or just saying that is part of its language model?

And we call it the "hard problem" because, right now, it doesn't seem feasible that a set of words could ever provide this understanding. How will words ever tell me what the extra colours that tetrachromats can see look like, when I can't tell a color blind from birth person what red looks like?
And indeed, how can I know whether an AI feels pain, when I can't know that you feel pain?

This is what makes it a "special" problem. The OP seems to basically acknowledge the main problem but seems to be shrugging it off in a "how could it be any other way" kind of perspective. But "how could it be any other way" doesn't give us any predictive or inferential power.

Because, the only thing we can know for sure about PC, from the transporter problem as it is usually phrased, is that an identical copy is a continuation of the self.
— Mijin

I don't think this is the case. The problem as it's usually phrase is designed to test your intuitions about what constitutes identity. — AmadeusD

I think this is the critical misunderstanding on your part, and is my response to all of your points in that post.
I was laying out what the personal continuity position is. The "you are transported" position.

No, it is not asking you to question whether an identical copy is you: that's the point of Parfit's transporter problem in the first place. PC is explicitly a response about such problems; it's making an explicit claim about what would happen.

Which, as I have quite clearly and distinctly laid out for you - does not have anythign to do with sex determination. Aberration doesn't change your sex — AmadeusD

Right and we're talking about how we determine sex. And your idea of using the SRY gene fails for at least these 3 reasons:

1. There are more than 2 genotypes for this gene -- it's not binary
2. How would we know what gene someone has, since their genitalia and secondary characteristics may not align. Call that an "aberration" or whatever other word you like. It remains impractical, since you balked at the idea of mandatory DNA testing, so how would it work in schools, prisons, hospitals etc?
3. Biologists do not define sex this way as it's completely arbitrary. I know you're happy to handwave everything that people who actually study this topic say, but it's a critical point for those of us who are not guided by conservative talking points over science.

This is pure nonsense. You brought it up. You deal with it. I didn't suggest we do that and no where did I intimate it was reasonable to suggest so. — AmadeusD

WTF? We were talking about gender being non-binary, and you brought up the SRY gene. Don't blame me if it's an indefensible position.

You can't avoid holding philosophical positions. And I find that often the people most dismissive of philosophy are the people trying to push their own (e.g. Creationist sites are often even more derisive of philosophy departments than they are of evolutionary biologists, say).

That said philosophy as a formal area of study does require certain cognitive skills and a lot of patience. Not everyone can do it.

I often regret not studying philosophy at Uni, but on the other hand, I do glaze over sometimes in very abstract discussions on definitions. And there are several topics in philosophy that I feel are pretty silly but have reached the threshold where you can't just question the whole premise any more.
I probably don't have the chops for it.

Many items on the list [of fascist traits] didn’t apply to Trump at all. — Fire Ologist

Like what? That was exactly the question I asked, so let's hear the one on the list that doesn't apply?
AFAICT the only one really debatable is the last on the list (launching a war of conquest) which is given as something common to fascism, not necessary. And there's still time...

And also you say that other leaders like Biden meet the items in the list. Let's hear that elaboration.

----------------------------------

In terms of the central thread topic of "wokeism" though, nobody knows what point you're trying to make, least of all you.
You write that "I see pretty clearly what woke is", and yet here's a selection of the changing, arbitrary ways you've defined it:

- Wokeism is a type of totalitarian fascism
- Woke teaches me that there is a difference between white people and everyone else, and that all white people must be reeducated about their implicit biases and privileges
- The word “woke” as a class of people is itself a bit anti-woke, elitist, oppressive
- the woke have to bring their own facts to the table, and they don’t seem to care about or need real proof
- The woke coined the term “woke”. Which is ironic now that they flee from the term. It’s CRT.
- Woke says people are doomed and chained to their biases, and have to be told by the enlightened what their real motivations are
- Wokeism makes everything political
- They want to include trans, so they exclude cis-gender. They want to include black women, so they exclude white men. It's been happening with great progressive success for 40 years. To the wokeist, I must be living in a different world
- From what I can tell, woke principles are in need of discussion (like, what does woke mean?) — Fire Ologist

And then the icing on the cake: "Not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke".
So are you woke? :scream:

What is funny is that the same people who can’t see what wokeness is, somehow see with absolute clarity that Kirk was racist. — Fire Ologist

Yep. You think "woke" means everything has to be relative or subjective or something?
No wonder you're so against it!
Have you taken a moment to consider the possibility that maybe the problem is with your understanding?

Or Trump is a fascist dictator. — Fire Ologist

Definitely fascist. Once again: which of the things in this list does not fit trump?

"Dictator" though is a status, not merely an ideology. He wants to be a dictator, that's for sure, but he's not there yet.

Not seeing what “woke” is, is very woke. — Fire Ologist

If you had meant this as a joke, I'd salute you as thread winner.
But, sadly, it seems more likely that you're being serious.

the US might be 'less woke' in some respects, but it is also woke ground zero in the only considerations that matter. I mean, the philosophical roots are international, Marx, Foucault, Marcuse, Friere, etc.

But CRT and the vast majority of modern 'wokeness' come from US universities — Jeremy Murray

That's not a relevant point though, CRT is a college level topic in the US, where's the evidence of US schools being "woke"? Indeed *more woke than German, Kiwi, Spanish schools etc* to make sense of this talking point of wokeness being the problem?

I am puzzled, tbh, by you guys. You genuinely don't think wokeness is a problem? Do you endorse elements of the practice? — Jeremy Murray

It largely doesn't even make sense as a coherent concept, and in general I am suspicious about content aimed at provoking outrage.
Let me explain where I am coming from.

Here in the UK we've had a long history of calling things "woke", except that actual term didn't exist so it was "political correctness gone MAD".
Headlines about how you couldn't say Christmas any more, or that blackouts were becoming brownouts. They always turned out to be exaggerations, misconceptions or just outright bollocks. But they reliably sold newspapers: people love that feeling of outrage.

Unfortunately it spilled over into the UK shooting itself in the foot and voting to leave the EU, as a huge proportion of Brits believed that "crazy rules from Brussels" were responsible for all the problems in society. Now that we've left the EU and the UK economy remains stagnant, no one can point to a single mad law that we've supposedly extricated ourselves from.

And there's a worse element to this, because now even reporting accurate information about US history is being labeled "woke", and censored. Or it's "woke" to point out that immigrants eating dogs or being part of a crime wave is lies. It's being used as an excuse to lie to people, and keep them ignorant.

So anyway, yes if there's an example of a DEI policy that went too far or whatever, of course I'll call it out. But in general when someone's ranting about "woke" my finger is hovering over the Google button because I know 9/10 it will be pure bull.

It's also in the context of Trump saying he'll come for the other late night shows next and government threats against universities, corporations and private individuals based on their speech or protests.

But nah let's handwave it all, and "whatabout" to the imaginary time when supposedly something anywhere comparable happened to conservative voices.

Does your wife still teach? It's a tough gig, primarily because of appalling behaviour, regular violence, tolerance of disruption, etc. I was told thirty years back, during my b. ed, that we didn't need to 'worry' about discipline, because good lessons, culturally relevant material, etc would solve all the problems.

Wokeness has been the defining philosophical approach of public education for decades. Even the insistence on whole language over phonics is 'woke'. — Jeremy Murray

But the US is far less "woke" than most of Europe and the anglosphere, so by this logic we should all be envying the remarkably peaceful and disciplined American schools.

The reality is that it's the ways that the US genuinely is an outlier that makes schools more chaotic. Poor public funding, genuine poverty, a violent culture and parents who are suspicious of experts and science.

A personal bugbear for me is also how high schools are depicted on US TV. Every single time, even if it's a Disney movie or whatever, bullying is a significant plot point.
Don't get me wrong; kids are people and some people are jerks. Bullying happens. But having it central to the high school experience seems to normalize it IMO. Other countries manage to tell stories about kids that don't have to center around that behavior.