Human beings are social animals. They need social interaction to survive. Being isolated is recognized as a form of torture. Interactions being draining is often a consequence of contingent societal factors rather than an essential property of interaction itself.
It could just have had a different name before cow domestication.
Even if AI someday does become profitable short term, total profits will still go down long-term, because all profit comes from human labor (or exploiting nature). All any technology ever does in capitalism is to replace human labor, thereby putting more pressure on the empirically proven tendency of profits to fall. Profit gains from technology can only ever be short term and relative to competition who hasn’t yet adapted the technology. Once everyone has, prices drop, adjusting to lower socially necessary labor time.
The only way for the billionaire class to keep profits flowing a bit longer at this point is to do what we already see them doing now: get rid of the free market by enforcing monopolies with captive markets, bonded labor and merging big capital with an increasingly violent and warring state apparatus: capitalism inevitably leads to fascism-imperialism every time.
AI lends itself to this because of the centralized nature of data centers, the already monopoly based business model of tech companies and the political power and influence those monopolies hold. On the other hand, there is some potential, if not revolutionary at least disruptive potential, in small scale, specialized, open source models that can be trained with fewer resources.
The only alternative road to fascism, of course, leads to communism.
Wish he had had that thought earlier and stayed this calm, when his slaves were freed instead of staging an insurrection with help from the CIA to get them back. On the other hand, he could have been less nonchalant and impulsive that other time were he decided to molest a child live in front of a camera.
Edit; it’s still a good quote, but many had the same idea and the person it’s attributed to here is problematic
I think you’re both right. They are right about religious institutions in class societies. You use the word “initially” and are right about religion in those very early, classless societies called “primitive communism”. When people started using agriculture, classes arose with material surplus, patriarchal structures formed to manage inheritance of that surplus and over some time, the violent suppression of oppressed classes by the ruling class was taken up by various institutions that coalesced into states. Religious institutions fit in here. They became tools of oppression or were oppressed and destroyed themselves. Those that survived fell in line. And their task in class societies is to produce hegemony. In a revolutionary moment, religion has sometimes been adapted to serve liberation and that could happen again.
It’s important to make these two distinctions when talking about religion. First, between individual believe and organized religious institutions. Even a deeply religious person can still condem all religious institutions. And second, based on the societal context: religious institutions at what time, in what society? Religious believes of members of which class? Do they help to liberate or oppress? Do they urge to accept circumstances or to fight for freedom? Both is possible.
There’s also a third distinction that comes up often: between orthodoxy (for example what’s written in holy scripture) and lived historical reality.
Personally, I’m an atheist, but I have religious friends who I respect deeply.
And western “leftists”
The benefit is for Google to make more profits if people are locked into their “ecosystem” without competition driving the prices down.
It’s possible to avoid anti-semitism and at the same time acknowledge the structural problem with Zionism prevalent in Jewish institutions. The many international statistics in the link prove, that many or most Jews are zionists and support genocide. One should also acknowledge the material privilege of being able to move to stolen land, profit from cheap apartheid labor, move into a stolen house, receive support from colonialist nations, commit violent crimes with impunity and so on, that comes with being (white, western and) Jewish in the world today, as well as the responsibility and the immense task that comes with this privilege for Jewish people to build better, non-zionists Jewish institutions who brake with the status quo of organized religion largely materially and ideologically supporting massive crimes against humanity.
Somewhere out there is a community that talks about goblins so much it poisoned all the training data and you just have to wonder, what do they know, that we don’t? Maybe Gabi can lead the way to an answer.
What do you actually think is philosophy and what do you propose instead? How do you know your “tools” are better? Better by which criteria? Why those and not others? Even just attempting to answer any of these questions is doing philosophy. You can’t escape it. Framing philosophical questions in the language of say, set theory, like Russel did, dosn’t answer them. It’s just using another language. The Vienna Circle thought (inspired by Wittgenstein) that using a formal language would make the answers perfectly clear. And the one who refuted them, proofed them wrong, was no other then the one they admired the most, Wittgenstein himself. No one will take your ideas seriously, if you don’t engage with this history first. I’m not saying it’s pointless or stupid, it might well be worthwhile. You just have to do it first or end up embarrassingly chasing around the first idea that pops into your head. Like “I feel sure about my answers in a math test and unsure about my essay in philosophy class, that’s why math is the best and philosophy is stupid” this is the infantile and emotional level your understanding of both philosophy and math is at currently. Or maybe it isn’t, but it sure seems this way, since you haven’t clearly articulated your positions, nor made any attempt to formulate an argument for them. Not using normal language and not using mathy language.
Mathematical proofs aren’t generally agreed.
Yes, they are. Have you seen the controversies around many recent proofs? Proofs are getting so long and topics so specialized, that simply just reading them takes for ever. Some important ones have only been checked by one or two people. Some have been out for years and are still controversial, because no one claims to have some the immense work to actually checked them. That’s one of the reasons why proof assistants are used in the first place. They help, but they come with their own problems and challenges.
This is why ethics has failed. It has been built on the unstable foundation of philosophy instead of on the solid foundation of mathematics.
This is such a very old idea and you’re not the first one to have it. Just try it yourself as an exercise. Is like to see how you get an ought from an is with pure math. Every one who tried to build ethics on math only failed. Please, just google it or read some of the links I shared. Philosophers are totally familiar with very advanced math and use it. Again read some articles on like set theory or quantum mechanics on plato.stanford.edu to verify yourself. It’s already being used and always has. Even the antique philosophers were mathematicians. They invented logic and geometry. Every philosophy student through antiquity and the middle ages up to the Renaissance was forced to learn them before getting to the more advanced topics.
No matter how smart you are, other smart people probably had very similar ideas before you, tried to formalize them, got challenged, responded, tried again and so on. The history of their work is the history of philosophy. Trying to do better without even reading any of it would fit the definition of being naive.
just like human language proofs require the reviewers brains to be bug free to a point. The repeated verification makes proofs as correct as anything can get.
Exactly, I’m glad you understand. There’s no epistemological certainty in math, just like in normal language. We have to make do with being pretty certain, as good as it gets. I like lean for it’s intended purpose: advancing math. No one involved in lean is seriously claiming it produces some kind of religious absolute certainty. Neither is anyone trying to replace philosophy.
Math can’t elevate anything above philosophy, because in a sense, it is part of philosophy, one of the parts using specialized language, specifically the part that is concerned with tautologies.
Have you clicked on the links to the philosophy wiki I provided? Maybe read about what a brilliant mathematician and philosopher has written on the philosophy of mathematics to convince yourself, that philosophy of mathematics is valuable and necessary (wether you agree with his specific point of view or not). You’re already engaging in philosophical debate yourself. Your claims about the nature of philosophical arguments and mathematical proofs are themselves philosophical in nature.
Also, though you haven’t clearly articulated your philosophical position, it seems to be close to the one of the famous Vienna Circle , which was inspired by Wittgenstein, but later rejected by him. It’s generally agreed today, that their project of logical empiricism has failed. You can find the critiques of the various points in the article above.
It’s not about those specific proofs. You’re claiming, that every possible proof stated in lean will always halt. Lean tries to evade the halting problem best as possible, by requiring functions to terminate before it runs a proof. But it’s not able to determine for every lean program it halts or not. That would solve the halting problem. Furthermore, the kernel still relies on CPU, memory and OS behavior to be bug free. Can you be sure enough in practice, yeah probably. But you’re claiming absolute metaphysical certainty that abolishes the need for philosophy and sorry, but no software will ever achieve that.
Lean runs on C++. C++ is a turning complete, compiled language. It and it’s compiler are subject to the halting problem.
They already knew that. You’re treading an old worn out logical positivist path, that was inspired by Wittgenstein who worked closely with Russell (both mathematicians and philosophers) and he later saw his error, rejected his positivist followers and explained how truth is not a correspondence to facts, rather meaning is derived from use in language. This applies to all languages, formal and informal, including math and logic.
I explicitly refer to your second paragraph.
Yes, you absolutely can argue computer verified proofs. They are very likely to be true (same as truth in biology or sociology: a social construct), but to be certain, you would need to solve the halting problem to proof the program and it’s compiler, which is impossible. Proofing incompleteness with computers isn’t relevant, because it wasn’t in question and it doesn’t do away with it’s epistemological implications.
They all debated the question what being mathematical means there whole lives.
It’s called a captive market and platform capitalism for a reason. Thanks to the network effect, buyers and sellers gravitate to Amazon. Amazons main product is selling access to it’s walled of market to third party sellers (and attention to advertisers). All of this is to avoid competition and extract monopoly rents. “Ethical consumption” (just telling people not to use Amazon) is fine, but not enough to break this monopoly on its own. It will never work as a single strategy. You also need massive organizing for worker and consumer strikes and/or internationally coordinated state power to forcibly break apart the monopoly.