u/Choice_Term_8440

Ok wow. So.

We ask Sam about UBI. He spends a long time letting us know that it’s physically possible. Fine. That might’ve been fun a while back. It’s not fun now.

“Doctor, can we cure my cancer?”

“Well you know given physics and the essentially infinite nature of baryonic matter, not infinite, but surely infinite from our vantage point, that means that knocking around the tumors in such a way as to get them to conceivably do something physics allows in theory is, in that David Deutsche sense, an engineering problem.”

Sam. 😐

Thank you. Thanks for letting us know it’s feasible in the perfect case.

Cute. That’s such a fun “Bill Nye” answer.

Oh and furthermore, AI could figure it out. Ostensibly it could make the logistics and the inventions such that nobody should be poor. Abundance to the limit of what’s physically possible. An aligned explosion with our interests. Like wow. That sounds nice. Sounds like kind of a big deal almost. As if there’s a real option there. And if so, then a lot is at stake.

So where do we sign? Let’s do it. What do we have to do to increase the odds of having that happen? 🙂

Oh wait. What’s that?

Oh, yeah, sry, that’s right. The alignment thing. It could totally not go well. If AI is not aligned it could be Hell. We haven’t solved the alignment problem yet. So we don’t know.

BUT. You’re still saying there’s a chance 🙂

Wait, what’s that?

Even if AI works out we still might not get there? 🧐

Whatever do you mean, good sir?

And…?

But…?

Sam?

“The transition to perfect abundance will still have political problems. We won’t be able to solve them.”

Wait okay, so hold on. Political problems. TOTALLY. Agreed. That’s always a thing. And yeah, we won’t be able to solve them if, if, if what?

“We won’t be able to solve them.”

If?

“We won’t be able to solve them. Period.”

Rich people won’t want to do it.

And we won’t figure out how to make them. Even with our democracy and Constitution, supermajority power, we STILL won’t be able to get the Atlas Shrugged set to cooperate. And that matters.

Whatever do you mean, Sam? 🤔

“They’ll have ways to duck that task. And the rest of us will be left to fend for ourselves. Robocop.”

What? Robocop? I hope you don’t mean the “I’ll buy THAT for a dollar” version where punk rock hell’s angels assholes shoot people with machine guns and flamethrowers in broad daylight on a regular Tuesday.

Is that the version you mean Sam?

The fucking Peter Weller?”

“…”

Sam?

Sam.

“Yeah?”

I need to hear you say it.

“The fucking Peter Weller.”

Jesus. Why? Explain it again.

“We don’t have the LOGIC by which we’d spread it around.”

Logic? But you said AI could use logic and stuff to help us do what’s physically possible. David Deustche. You said. You said! AI could do it IF the alignment thing…

“Morals. We won’t have the morals.”

Okay; so there it is. We CAN do it. We won’t. Because we’re dicks. “We,” meaning, well, look at Musk, for example.

He has all the money and he doesn’t care about empathy. He’s said it. Charlie said it. Ben said it. Vance probably fucking said it. Thiel maybe said it? It’s in the bone structure.

“Empathy COULD be gamed.”

We need cognitive and affective empathy, okay. Yeah. Go on? How do we…GET it? That seems like your area. Aren’t you a what’s it again? A…a…

“Neuroscientist?”

Bingo! Yeah. A neuroscientist.

Hey! Thank God. Right? Cause you get this shit. Morally AND biologically. And politically. Philosophically. Meditationally. Fuck you got this covered actually.

“But the rich are autistic. Or saying they are because it’s cool.”

Huh? That’s an odd thing to just say. Did that, do you know someone who’s doing that?

“The rich ones don’t understand luck. They lack compassion. Or self awareness. That’s not going to age well.”

Oh.

😕

What’s not going to age well?

“That.”

Oh.

😕

ALRIGHT NEXT TOPIC!
Can an atheist win the next election? ✨

There’s just utterly no direct proof of deliberate child targeting.

The Commission never identifies a verified case where the IDF knowingly identified a civilian child and intentionally targeted that child.

Wtf?

Hamas is largely erased from the battlefield which is absurd. The commission report underweights Hamas’s embedded military presence, tunnels, civilian clothing, and use of civilian infrastructure, creating a distorted picture of combat, of course.

It’s all speculation and zero evidence so it’s not useful in changing minds, just reinforces the perversely low standards woke communist brown types will go in the effort to stick it to white-ish capitalist Jews for some reason.

Most common words were “could not verify,” “appears,” “reasonable grounds” which is what is used when there’s no direct evidence of what soldiers saw or intended. Worthless basically.

Forensics almost entirely made up of Gazan family testimony, absurd “doctors opinions” about battlefield events (?) and unsupported attribution of bullets or drones without ANY independent forensic verification or chain of custody. IOW more bullshit.

This shoddy Commission improperly treats inflammatory comments by pols as evidence of IDF policy yet there is literally zero connection to operational directives or command orders to target children, because it’s absurd and disgusting, there are no such orders to target children.

This is a made up drama yet again.

Hey if you’re so hungry for evidence of armies wanting to kill kids, you need look no farther than Hamas, but when it’s Jewish kids I guess that doesn’t count. (Pathetic!)

The tragedy of child deaths in Gaza or any war is horrific. Hamas is 100% at fault. The deliberate targeting of children is hideously serious allegation and the entire commission report is conjecture. Thats fucking sick but no surprises.

The methodology is shite, erases Hamas and PIJ from the battlefield and totally disregards military context.

Tries to establish intent with outcome like a dumb redditor. They know their audience apparently.

Meanwhile if they were honest the whole thing would cover bad choices made by Hamas.

Let’s see, Hamas started the war maiming and killing and raping kids and families. We know this for a fact. (Oddly you don’t care.)

Wouldn’t release the hostages. Also war crime. (Hostages are diff from prisoners. Knuckleheads in Israeli prisons are not hostages. They’re violent mods and Molotov throwers or worse.

Hamas fights in civilians infra and uses human shields and nowhere in the whole commission could they verify a single case of Israel illegally targeting a kid. So fuck them. And you agree with them, fuck you. You’re either stupid, or lying.

Full report available in this article:

https://unwatch.org/un-watch-legal-rebuttal-disproving-the-pillay-commissions-charge-that-israel-deliberately-targets-palestinian-children/

Warning to anyone who found this subreddit through its name or description: I strongly suspect this community has been commandeered.

This is branded as a lighthearted Carolina humor/conversation sub, but in practice it appears to be operating as an unmoderated propaganda hub for Islamist-extremism apologia and anti-Israel narrative laundering.

The pattern is not normal debate.

It looks like a staged “both sides” environment where the supposed range of views still collapses into the same conclusion: Israel is uniquely evil, Hamas is contextualized or excused, and anyone resisting that frame is treated as ignorant, immoral, or out of touch.

Because there appear to be no active moderators, the sub has effectively become an abandoned storefront.

Whoever posts most aggressively gets to define the room.

Right now, I strongly suspect that room is being used to manufacture the appearance of consensus.

Readers should not mistake volume, repetition, or fake balance for truth.

This is not organic Carolina conversation. It is ideological capture wearing a meme-sub costume.

As a hard incompatibilist I hold almost identical views as the compatibilist.

I just don’t call it “being held morally responsible.”

I call it “receiving the practical necessary deterrent as part of a values tradeoff.”

I would say to someone who broke a law for example:

“Sadly, you now must face a consequence you won’t like, because of the deterrence-value of the consequence in larger society, and because of the benefit in that it might make you less likely to do that thing in the future.

“That said, it is wasn’t your fault, in the deeper and larger zoomed-out factual sense, if by ‘wasn’t your fault’ we mean ‘wasn’t authored by you,’ because every part of you is caught in a causal chain of facts and events in physical space that you didn’t author.”

“We’d also have to define ‘you.’ The thing that did the thing is your brain and body, we can point to it, and know that the body did this thing.

We can’t, however, point to your perception, because we don’t yet know quite what perception is, we don’t understand ‘qualia’ or how neatly it overlaps with reasons and deliberation.”

It’s kind of a weird thing to say at court hearing but fair is fair. Let me attempt to explain.

We know, for example, that at least one of the things that contributes to giving reasons and deliberation their heft in the compatibilist argument requires memory, to an extent.

To show this, here’s a fanciful thought experiment, not intended to have any bearing to any known medical possibility:

Say you lose part of your memory for 30 seconds.

With zero recollection of laws, commitments you hold, what the social contract is, consequences to actions, etc.

You remember language, your name, what foods you like, even pieces of your past, but any memory related to morality, social norms, social contracts, commitments to rules, or even rules themselves, have been temporarily removed.

You know what “killing” is, the ending of a life, of a bug, a fly, a chicken, a person, a whatever, but you don’t remember it’s bad, or that you yourself abhor killing or violence, especially killing a person.

Next, you are subject to pain stimuli and have a choice on how to alleviate it. The first choice works slowly but doesn’t harm anyone.

The second choice works quickly but kills someone else, and you fully know that it kills them.

But again, your memory of killing being illegal, taboo, immoral, having severe consequences, being objectionable or wrong, all completely gone.

Your deliberating and reasoning lead you to choose the quicker option. After all, it alleviates your pain sooner, and since there’s utterly no consequence one way or the other, as far as you know, you reason that it makes more sense to take the quicker option.

A Compatibilist likely wouldn’t intuit that your deliberation and reasons in that moment belonged to the operant definition of “you” such that they could say “you” are morally responsible, and thus must undergo prison and all the usual suffering that accompanies prison.

After all, the “you” that would be asked to bear all that suffering is simply not the “you” that remembers killing is wrong and not allowed. The you that remembers that stuff was not present at the time of the killing. The you that feels qualia was present.

But we don’t hold THAT you responsible. Or should we say that PART of you. The likism part, the qualia part, was still you but just didn’t remember killing was bad.

And yet, you did reason, you did deliberate. Everything else remained “you.” The qualia of being alive was still you, in the Nagel sense, your consciousness was yours, it was “like” something to be you, the pain was “your” pain in the same sense it always was.

Even when you ate the cookie provided, it tasted great, always was your favorite. So you’re still “you” in the qualia experiencing sense. You just lack some key memories.

Next, your memory returns in full after the 30 seconds. You remember all the previous sensations of the last 30 seconds, because after all, they were yours.

The memories that you’re not supposed to do that rush back. You’re aghast that you killed a person just to remove a pain signal quicker.

In this restored state, a Compatibilist likely would not intuit that the choice to kill the person was “yours” in the sense that they could attribute moral responsibility.

And yet you are utterly convinced that you were still you. You just didn’t remember the rules.

It was your qualia, your unbroken locus of perception, your feelings and emotions and capacities to think and reason, you just lacked all information needed to make your reasons and deliberation whole, such that you’d know not to kill a person to alleviate your pain.

Okay.

So now, with your memory back, you’re subject to the exact same test again.

This time you opt for the slow route. Because you recall that killing has consequences, that “thou shalt not kill,” that other people don’t want to be killed, that you despise killing or violence of any kind. All of THOSE memories are now fully restored.

It’s a good thing that you choose the slow route.

Because this time, the Compatibilist judge, knowing your memory is restored, is prepared to weigh your deliberation and reasons as “yours” to the degree that they could hold “you” morally responsible for your actions.

This time, the moment of deliberation and reasons belongs to “you” in an important sense.

We can conceive of being sufficiently “you” and having qualia, pleasure and pain, and Nagelian likism, even without that necessary piece that makes us morally responsible, in this case, a band of memory around rules, consequences, and a few preferences held around human killing.

From this, my takeaway is that the part remaining after you remove those memories is the larger part of “you.” Minus that memory, you’re still you in the experiential sense, the intuitive sense of being yourself. The qualia first person sense.

We can say that “you” killed the person, in that your body in its entirety, as it stood, did the killing. If “you” means your whole body and mind, then yes, it was “you.” But if “you” means your body + the entirety of your memories, then it wasn’t “you,” who did the killing, and so “you” can’t be held morally responsible absent that memory. And yet, absent that memory, you were still very much “you.”

We intuitively only want to hold the “you that kills while fully knowing it’s bad” responsible. We don’t want to hold the rest of you responsible. Just that part.

It seems that this part, though, isn’t tethered to the “you” that we assign qualia, pain and pleasure to. And yet in punishing that part that killed knowing it’s bad, we have no problem punishing the “whole” you. This feels oddly like group punishment, since we’ve proven that the “you” that experiences qualia can exist independently of the “you” that knows killing is bad.

What’s peculiar in all this is that both deliberation and pain are tied to brain parts. We can remove a memory needed for deliberation, such as in amnesia, and we can also remove “pain” such as in a lobotomy, where the Nagelian self, the seat of “lights on” so to speak, doesn’t ascribe valence to the pain. It doesn’t care either way.

Here’s what’s weird. Processing a memory and deliberating what to do doesn’t require qualia, but pain does. So in that sense, the deliberative self is not as essential to the larger self as the pain-aversive self.

I wonder if this suggests that the pain-aversive self is more part of the “you” than the deliberative self.

If so, then perhaps that’s why I have the intuition that I can’t hold “you” morally responsible. I can only hold your body as attributable to the action.

Anyway