"What is the price of friendship?" and other evil questions from a rational monster

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

― Oscar Wilde

We follow the theory of Philip E. Tetlock, who has studied several related topics: forecasting future events (as detailed in a book Superforecasting (2015)), counterfactual history ("What if...?"), and some "taboo thoughts" that despite being rational, often provokes "moral outrage" (precise definition given later).

These topics are related, as we will see later. But first: What's the price of an average human life?

Answer: In America, between 1 million to 10 million.

Now, this is perfectly reasonable, as a Fermi estimate quickly shows: An average American works 50 years, with yearly salary 30000 dollars. So in full that gives 1.5 million dollars. That's a lower bound, considering that it's just cash salary and doesn't include all the other non-salary productive work, like friendship, volunteering, and writing free blog posts (like this one lol). But the order of magnitude is very much right.

Okay, if that's right, then isn't it wrong to say "A life is priceless?"

Yes. But don't say it out loud, else you get the dreaded moral outrage.

Survey of moral realism and irrealism

Note: philosophers use "ethics" and "morality" as the same word.

The moral realism vs irrealism contrast is the most important contrast in metaethics, the study about what ethics is, such as whether morality is objective, subjective, emotion-based, rationality-based, changeable over time, etc.

Realism says morality is real in some sense, while irrealism says it isn't.

Infinity

For an example of such a contrast, we can consider the positions on infinity in mathematics. Realism would simply say that infinity exists, is an actual mathematical object, and there's a symbol of it, ω. Irrealism would claim that ω is just a convenient fiction, and merely stands for the endlessness of natural numbers.

There are very fine-grained notions of realism vs irrealism in the study of infinity, too, used by expert set theorists. Most set theorists consider the first few infinities unproblematic, but as they climb up the ladder of infinities, they encounter more and more abstract infinities. They often draw a line somewhere and proclaim infinities beneath some line real and above unreal.

The Poetry of Suffering in Buddhist Stories of Hells

Buddhist cosmology is fascinating. Its description of hell, for example, is extremely precise in its time-duration. Today we will measure the length, size, and the pain of hell.

Naraka is the hell in Buddhist cosmology. It differs from the hell of Christianity in two respects: firstly, beings are not sent to Naraka as the result of a divine judgment or punishment, but merely as a result of the evils (bad karmas) accumulated from previous lives; and secondly, the length of a being's stay in a Naraka is not eternal. After a creature's karma is used up, they will be reborn in one of the higher worlds.

Physically, Narakas are thought of as a series of cavernous layers which extend below Jambudvīpa (the ordinary human world) into the earth.

There are 8 hot narakas and 8 cold narakas.

Death Poems from Samurais

I played the game Seppuku Jisei. Slashing enemies was meditative. I aimed for the zen of one slash, one death, to lose myself in the flow of the kill. I stood in the middle of a mound of blood and limbs.

After the game, I saw some death poems here, and decided to investigate them. Thanks to my passable Japanese skills, I found their originals, and their contexts.

Death kept her distance.

But I reached for her hoof 

Just one touch...

I shivered from her love.

Let's Play: Ludum Dare 41

Ludum Dare 41: Combine 2 Incompatible Genres

Splendid Adventures on a Sunday Afternoon

Best story for a Sunday with nothing to do. Perfect for ponies between 6 and 60. Amazing illustrations.

Suddenly, tortoise and the hare.

Let's Play: Ludum Dare, 43, 42

Ludum Dare 43: Sacrifices must be made

Sacrifices Must Be Made

Great moody game with a story and a fun card game mechanic. Very worth playing for about 20 minutes. Not hard, but can be gory. Contains one big feast at the end!

I wonder why the opponent keeps saying the stoats are "noble"? Maybe the game maker just really likes stoats.

Eternal Home Floristry

Good art and great writing. Topics too grown-up for me. Contains a few prostitutions, gays, abuses, jealousies, murders, company mergers, hugs, and other grown-up nonsenses.

I guess maybe if you add ikebana with yakuza, you'd get this.

Let's Hilariously Read: Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009)

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (2009) is a collection of 40 short stories about how afterlife could work.

Imma just comment on each of them with 1 sentence, then with more if it seems needed.

Like THIS.

Consciousness is an illusion, a byproduct of evolution: The Attention Schema Theory (AST) of Michael Graziano

Consciousness is not mysterious, it’s just the brain describing itself—to itself.

Michael Graziano is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. His style of explaining consciousness is fully materialistic:

• The hard problem of consciousness doesn't exist, because consciousness is an illusion.
• The real problem is just this: Why do humans proclaim "I'm conscious."? What do they mean by that, and what made them proclaim that?
• The answer is that the illusion of consciousness is a byproduct of human evolution.

Basically, consciousness is an illusion, a spandrel of evolution.

Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong (2016), Michael Graziano. In this essay, he shoots down multiple theories of consciousness, because they don't answer the real problem. For example, concerning the Integrated Information Theory:

What exactly is the mechanism that leads from integrated information in the brain to a person who ups and claims, “Hey, I have a conscious experience of all that integrated information!” There isn't one.

In order to figure out why humans have this illusion, it's necessary to study humans as fully physical (no funny qualia business plz) robots that think about themselves but in a grossly inaccurate way:

The theories that show the most promise are metacognitive theories... the brain doesn’t just model concrete objects in the external world. It also models its own internal processes. It constructs simulations of its own cognition. And those simulations are never accurate. They contain incomplete, sometimes surreal information. The brain constructs a distorted, cartoon sketch of itself and its world. And this is why we’re so certain that we have a kind of magic feeling inside us.

The origin of consciousness: we think about own thoughts in grossly simplified models.

Steven Laureys: is anyone home inside a coma patient?

Last time, we saw how consciousness and top-down attention can be pulled apart. This time, we'll pull apart two parts of consciousness: awareness and wakefulness, following Steven Laureys, a neurologist who studies disorders of consciousness.

Awareness: content of the consciousness.

Wakefulness: level of consciousness.

Their study is arguably the most medically relevant part of the study of consciousness, since there are many people in coma-like states, who have a normal sleep-wake cycle, but seems to have no awareness. Figuring out if they are aware is important for figuring out how much personhood they still have.

Warning: contains one brain selfie.

Let's read Attention and consciousness (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya

Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes (2006), Christof Koch and Naotsugu Tsuchiya. This paper argues that attention and consciousness are different.

This paper in an expanded format is viewable on Scholarpedia.

Attention in this paper always means "selective attention". Think of it as "shining a spotlight" on something, like a face, a melody, a word. It does not mean general arousal and alertness.

We argue that events or objects can be attended to without being consciously perceived. Furthermore, an event or object can be consciously perceived in the near absence of top-down attentional processing.

Thoughts

If an embryo of two cells can be separated into two embryos, from which twins can develop, can this be continued more? So we get triplets, fourplets, fiveplets, etc.
And if that is so, would they have shorter lifespans due to cell division shortening the telomeres?

• Race against the machine
• Race with the machine
• Race into the machine
• Race of the machine

What would happen if sex organs are plug-and-play devices?

 - Well for starters it'd be pretty horrific if someone loses their vagina during pregnancy.
 - Maybe not so much. Hospitals would have emergency vaginas for that. Or just do cesarian.

1. All models are wrong, but some are useful. ---- George E. P. Box
2. Ethics are models of the world. ---- One possible stance of ethics 
3. All ethics are wrong, but maybe some are useful. ---- Conclusion

Susan Blackmore's Theory of the Self

Susan Blackmore is a scientist who is most famous for studying memes, with the book The Meme Machine (2000). It's a bit outdated at this point though. She's also a skeptic in debunking some pseudoscience.

I'll start with two videos:

Memes and Tremes

Susan Blackmore studies memes: ideas that replicate themselves from brain to brain like a virus. She makes a bold new argument: Humanity has spawned a new kind of meme, the teme, which spreads itself via technology -- and invents ways to keep itself alive

Living Without Free Will

When I say that consciousness is an illusion, I do not mean that consciousness does not exist. I mean that consciousness is not what it appears to be. If it seems to be a continuous stream of rich and detailed experiences, happening one after the other to a conscious person, this is the illusion.

Illusionism: consciousness experience is an illusion, and there is no qualia

Remember the "hard problem of consciousness"? What if there's no hard problem at all, as I guessed? Then the problem isn't the hard problem of consciousness, but the illusion problem of consciousness. Not "why is there qualia?" but "why do we keep talking about the so-called qualia that doesn't exist?"

Illusionism as a Theory of Consciousness (2017), edited by Keith Frankish:

Illusionism is the view that phenomenal consciousness [feeling, qualia] is an introspective illusion — that introspection misrepresents experiences as having phenomenal properties. This view has many theoretical attractions, but it is often dismissed out of hand for failing to take consciousness seriously.

Clenes and Genes: Evolution of clay and the genetic takeover

This post is heavily based on Tim Tyler's page. It has lots of dead pictures, so view them on the Internet Archive if you see them.

Genes are not the only thing that can copy themselves. Computer virus, RNA, protein virus (prion), and chain mails, they all can.

The idea of non-gene replicators is not new. Richard Dawkins proposed memes in The Selfish Gene (1976), and Graham Cairns‑Smith proposed clay-genes (clenes?) in The origin of life and the nature of the primitive gene (1966). Genes and memes are getting all the popularities, but clenes aren't, so I'll summarize clene theory. A detailed explanation is here.

Overview of clenes and genes

First we check the 1966 paper's abstract:

Life on earth evolved through natural selection from inorganic crystals.

During the formation of a crystal, certain kinds of lattice imperfections usually replicate as a necessary part of the crystallization process.

... the primitive genographs were patterns of substitutions in colloidal clay crystallites. (The theoretical information density in such a crystallite is comparable to that in DNA.)... A gradual “take-over” of the control machinery by organic macromolecules—a genetic metamorphosis—is then considered to have occurred.

Let's breakdown will like George Ainslie

Breakdown of Will (2001) is a book about breaking down will, that is, dissecting the idea of a "will" and show how will is made from little pieces. The book is too long for me to read because I'm a very busy pony, so I'll just read summarize fro Précis of Breakdown of Will (2005).

BTW, Ainslie's breakdown of will has no relation to Jaynes' breakdown of the bicamel mind, but the name really reminds me of the breakdown, which is how I came to notice Ainslie's breakdown of will theory. I'm such a nihilist, I just can't stop myself from finding another thing to breakdown.

The author, George Ainslie, is most famed for his discovery of hyperbolic discounting in Specious reward: A behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulsive control (1975).

People devalue a given future event at different rates, depending on how far away it is. This phenomenon means that our preferences are inherently unstable and entails our present selves being pitted against what we can expect our future selves to want.

"Discounting" means that humans prefer the same reward to come sooner. The \$100 that comes in a month seems to be less attractive than the \$80 that comes today. This is a very reasonable assumption, for two reasons:

1. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.
2. \$80 today can be invested and turned into \$100 by the end of the month. Though to be realistic, the average return on capital is just 5%/year.

Pointless Notes: Pretty Fractals in Your Brain!

Purkinje cells are pretty, neuron cells are pretty, the whole brain is pretty! The spinal cord, however, is ugly. Don't talk about that dumb slimy snake in your back.

All that glitters are Purkinje cells.

So let's measure the fractal dimensions!