DocWatts

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Posts posted by DocWatts


  1. Unfortunately, for anything as complicated as a phone or a computer appalling and exploitative labor conditions are the norm. The materials for these products are sourced from some of the poorest regions of the world, and usually assembled in sweat shops. That's not just true of electronics, but likely all of the clothes you own as well, not to mention for most of the objects in your home. This isn't because people living in developed countries are 'evil', that's the buy in for being able to live in an industrial society.

    Instead of agonizing over if X or Y consumer product is more or less ethical, you'd be better off putting your time and energy into supporting NGOs, activists, and progressive political candidates that are working to reform the worst aspects of this system.

    In the developed world, it wasn't 'consumer choice' that curbed the worst excesses of capitalist exploitation, it was labor and citizen activism that lobbied governments to put rules in place to protect workers, consumers, and the environment.


  2. On 1/26/2024 at 5:34 PM, Emissary said:

    Interesting developments. New Civil War is far fetched, sounds like sensationalism. Perhaps some localized shootings/riots will take place.

    Unfortunately what we're seeing, and have been seeing, is a normalization of political violence. While a full blown civil war seems unlikely, localized shootings, coup attempts, and assassinations are likely to continue at an accelerated pace.

    A scary side effect of this normalization of violence is that if America does backslide into an authoritarian form of government (whether through a Trump dictatorship, or through an eventual successor to the MAGA cult), this is preparing (or 'grooming', as much as I dislike the word) segments of the American public to accept violent oppression of dissent by state as an acceptable practice. Or at the very least, not to be shocked by forms of political violence and state oppression that have been common in other parts of the world, but haven't become the norm in the States.


  3. I'd argue that Continental philosophy is perhaps too broad of an umbrella to be that useful of a category, considering that it encompasses as diverse a spectrum as: Hegel's Absolute Idealism, Marx's dialectical materialism, Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, Heidegger's Being-In-The-World phenomenology, along with postmodern philosophy.

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  4. Aside from the fact that there's obviously a huge difference between someone's stated and revealed preferences (ie what someone says that they'll do, vs what they actually do when you observe them), I wonder what the percentage would Push the button if they were given the person's (who selected at random) name and picture, along with a short biography about their life. My intuition is the percentage would be drastically lower for the same reason that it's psychologically much easier to kill someone by pushing a button that causes a drone to launch a missile, than it is to look someone in the eye as you're stabbing them through the chest.


  5. While there are certainly vegans who try to proselytize the lifestyle and are extremely ideological/judgemental about, in my experience most vegans I've come across treat it more like a personal set of ethics that they adhere to.

    (Which is how I treat it as well, despite the fact that I'm vegetarian with a 'mostly' vegan diet.)

    In practice, the minority of vegans who are heavily ideological are also the ones that by definition are the most visible.

    Vegetarians/vegans who treat it as a personal set of ethics aren't  the people you see debating others on social media. Which is to say that there's a selection bias at work here.

    Also that's an assumption on your part that vegans are mostly scientific materialists. In my personal experience the overlap with veganism has much more to do with SD-Green values than it does with scientific materialism, and plenty of SD-Green folks are into stuff like New Age spirituality, etc. And yeah, the developmental blindness of SD-Green (which you allude to) is a valid point.

     


  6. For those of us in the US, doomerism doesn't help, but neither does downplaying what's at stake in 2024.

    At heart of MAGA fascism is a segment of extremely selfish people who don't want their culture to change to become more equitable, and are willing to support political violence, oppress their fellow citizens, and dismantle American democracy to ensure that doesn't happen. Roughly 30% of the country would be enthusiastic supporters of a Trump dictatorship.

    So if you were ever going to take an interest in politics, or take a more active role in politics through activities like canvasing, now is the time.


  7. Hello friends, and happy 2024! I thought I might share a bit more of what I've been working on lately for my philosophy book, '7 Provisional Truths', which aims to be a 'guided tour' to how we acquire valid knowledge about Reality, and provide an in-depth exploration of epistemology to non-specialists. I've also jokingly referred to it as a 'Field Guide' to construct awareness.

     While I'd normally post this in the 'Intellectual Stuff' section, I thought I might shake things up and post it here since it has everything to do with consciousness. ^_^ And namely, much of what I'll be exploring in the book is the centrality of nonconceptual, pre-reflective knowledge in our everyday life. 

    In this section, I provide an overview of BEING-IN-THE-WORLD. The expression is meant to capture an important and often overlooked aspect of the human condition (overlook by traditional Western philosophy, at any rate). Namely, the lack of any absolute boundary between ourselves and the 'outside' world. Its basic significance is that what we understand 'a person' to be has huge ramifications for where our search to understand 'knowledge' begins. 

    ___________________________

    Being-In-The-World

    ___________________________

    Back in the introduction to this book, it was mentioned that dissecting the works of academic philosophers isn’t the ‘point’ of the guided tour we’re undertaking. While that still holds true, for this topic in particular, we’ll be loosening this precept just a bit, for reasons that will soon become apparent. This is because any in-depth exploration of Being-In-The-World can’t help but be pulled towards the individual who not only coined the term, but used it as the cornerstone of a new approach to philosophy, upending 2000 years of established thinking on the subject.

    That individual is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and he’s among the most important thinkers in all of Western philosophy. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s likely because his work has a reputation for being notoriously difficult, written with close to zero consideration for non-specialists. His most significant contribution to philosophy, ‘Being And Time’ (1927), is full of dense, technical language that can be indecipherable for someone who’s not already deeply versed in philosophical concepts. Indeed, anyone who’s put the time and effort into comprehending Heideggar’s writing might describe the experience as almost akin to learning a second language! Needless to say, delving into the intricacies of obtuse academic texts isn’t our focus, so we’ll confine ourselves to his notion of Being-In-The-World, since it’s directly relevant for our present purposes.

    Recall that in our previous chapter, we defined ‘Being’ as a form of understanding. More specifically, it’s our most basic and primordial way of understanding people, places, and things as people, places, and things. It’s how we understand a cup as a cup, or a chair as a chair, in an immediate and intuitive way. When we say that something is a particular type of thing, we’re referring to its being.

    What Being-In-The-World refers to, then, is the type of ‘being’ that people have, which is characterized by our concernful involvement with the everyday world. It’s a way of understanding ourselves that emphasizes the centrality of our embeddedness within the world for how we experience and comprehend Reality. Additionally, the expression also points to the conditions from which we attain the background of familiarity with the world that other forms of knowledge depend on. This latter dimension of Being-In-The-World is what we’re primarily interested in, as it’s directly tied to how we cope with everyday Reality.

    The hyphenation of Being-In-The-World, which may feel a bit awkward for someone unused to philosophical neologisms, is actually there for a very good reason. A neologism refers to a newly coined term or expression that was created to fulfill a specific need, and has yet to be widely adopted into mainstream language. For our neologism of Being-In-The-World, the hyphens are meant to express that ‘being’, more specifically the type of ‘being’ that people have, and ‘the world’ are to be understood as a single, unified concept.

    So, to sum up: the gist of Being-In-The-World is that we can’t understand the human condition in isolation from our absorption into the everyday world, because the two are fundamentally inseparable. This is because our interactions with a world of people, objects, environments, and culture forms the context for our very existence. Another name that could be used for our ‘concernful involvement’ with the everyday world is Care. With this in mind, what Being-In-The-World is attempting to capture is how Care is fundamental to what Reality is for us.

    As to the practical implications of this, we can look at how Being-In-The-World recontextualizes what it means to have knowledge, because of how it breaks from the usual Western understanding of what it means to be an ‘individual’ in the world. When Heidegger coined the expression, he was using it to articulate a crucially important aspect of the human condition that had been overlooked and neglected by the Western philosophical tradition up until that point. To simplify for the sake of brevity, what Heideggar is pointing to is the lack of an absolute boundary between ourselves and the world. This is because our absorption into the world through everyday interactions and practices is inseparable from who and what we are. Interestingly, this emphasis on the lack of separation between ourselves and the world has much more in common with Eastern wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Vedanta, than it does with how the Western philosophical tradition had tended to approach the human condition up until that point.

    Our cultural understanding of what a person is is important for our present purposes because it heavily informs what our ‘starting point’ for where the beginnings of knowledge lie.


  8. 1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

    The point is it's still attempts at ethic cleansing. Israel wants to make life for Palestinians as bad as possible so they move out and give up their land.

    When people point out that 'cruelty is the point' of Israeli policy towards Palestinians, it's to this that they're referring to.

    Really, the far-Right in Israel is exhibiting something very similar to the type of mentality that led to 'sun down towns' in the United States up until just a few generations ago, where black people could be openly lynched if they were caught in a white neighborhood after sunset. The point was to make life so miserable for an ethnic minority that they would just give up any hopes of trying to better thier situation, and just leave.


  9. Where deconstruction goes, an eventual reconstruction must flow if one is to be a fulfilled and productive person.

    Deconstruction without eventually finding something that's more truthful and constructive to fill the gap can be like a gaping wound left open.

    One can see this on both an individual and collective level. On an individual level, a recognition that one's identity is constructed can be a good and healthy form of growth, assuming that they can move beyond deconstruction to mindfully construct an identity that's worth living for.

    On a collective level, deconstructing social narratives that are built atop dominator hierarchies is a very good thing, assuming that something more truthful and inclusive can be collectively agreed upon in its wake.


  10. Considering how dysfunctional our political system has become in the US, one has to give Biden credit for accomplishing quite a bit considering the constraints he's working under. Something that I try to be vocal about when I see people who have become (quite understandably) disillusioned with US politics try to assert that there's no discernable difference between Democrats and Republicans.


  11. 13 hours ago, Devin said:

    I can't see any violence happening, they're all talk, January 6 was just a mob mentality sort of thing and the most violent of them were there. I have no hesitation at all saying I see nothing to worry about. Tensions have also really cooled, although they still support Trump they don't have much faith in him and are seeing holes in him.

    While there will be a lot from MAGA bitching and moaning about how they're going to start a civil war because their cult leader is finally facing legal consequences for his actions, the vast majority of them aren't going to do shit beyond whining about it online.

    The thing about stochastic terrorism though is that if you broadcast dogwhistle messaging that encourages violence to millions of people, a handful of those people will be unhinged enough to follow through on it. Only takes one person armed with a rifle to kill dozens of people, or to murder one of your elected officials.

    The FBI has been sounding the alarm on far right domestic terrorism for years. The manifestos left behind by these domestic terrorists after they go and shoot up a synagogue or a grocery store in a black neighborhood are basically bullet points of the conspiracism they've been hearing from Fox News, Alex Jones, etc.


  12. Modern nuclear reactors are very safe, especially when compared to fossil fuels (air pollution leads to several million deaths every year), and nuclear waste disposal is a solvable problem.

    Instead, the main problem with nuclear energy is cost and logistics. A typical nuclear power plant costs tens of billions of dollars and more than a decade to construct.

    That and the fact that at the end of the day it's still a non-renewable resource (I've seen estimates that at our current rate of consumption, we'd have perhaps a century or two of uranium left before extraction becomes too cost prohibitive for nuclear to continue to make sense as an energy source).

    Which means that barring some major technological breakthrough, nuclear is at best a stopgap that can give us more time to transition to renewables.


  13. Trump just got kicked off from the ballot in the state of Colorado after a ruling by Colorado's Supreme Court, due to to his role in inciting an insurrection.

    While Trump wasn't going to win Colorado, other states may be following suite depending on how the case is ruled when it gets reviewed by the SCOTUS in the next few weeks.

     

    https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2

     


  14. 9 minutes ago, Devin said:

    @DocWatts Really good points I haven't considered.

    I don't see a house arrest campaign hurting Trump though, the novelty could really stir his base.

    While a criminal conviction won't deter Trump's MAGA cultists, those folks were already locked in for Trump, regardless of what he does. 

    The election is instead going to hinge on what proportion of the other %70 of the country will bother to come out to support Biden and the Dems in the 2024 election.

    All signs are that it's going to be a closer election than in 2020, but that's a far cry from predictions that 2024 is going to be a disaster for Dems.


  15. We're still close to a year a way from the elections, and Dems have electorally overperformed in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2023. Overt religious extremism (such as abortion bans) and running incompetent, unlikeable candidates seems to be badly hurting the GOP as far as actual elections.

    Trump is facing multiple criminal indictments, and a conviction on any one of them could for all intents and purposes put an end to his ability to campaign (even if this ends up being something akin to house arrest, that'd be an end to his Nuremberg-esque rallies).

    Which isn't to say that Biden is a shoe in, but the situation likely isn't as dire as the polls will lead you to believe.

    Additionally, it's worth keeping in mind that political polls only capture the views of people who are willing to answer a phone call from an unknown number. Generally speaking, this tends to be people with landlines who are older and thus more conservative. As a personal aside, I know very few people under the age of 40 who would actually answer a call from an unknown number.


  16. I tend to answer in a few different ways depending on their level of interest.

    For small talk, I'll just say that I pursue spiritually in a secular way, and leave it at that.

    If I sense that they might actually interested in discussing spirituality, I might say something along of: 'My practice involves integrating spiritually with insights from science and philosophy'. Or: 'I'm not religious in a traditional sense, but I'm highly interested in how the mind constructs its Reality.'

    Then they'll either find this interesting and we'll end up having a conversation, or they'll politely change the subject. 😆

     


  17. On 12/6/2023 at 7:57 AM, bebotalk said:

    I question the intelligence of American conservatives. They follow Trump, even though he caused Jan 6th, and is currently under both criminal and civil proceedings.

    They believe in baseless conspiracy theories, and often have literal 1950s societal and medical knowledge in many fields. 

    What causes this?

    If you want an actual answer to the question (as opposed to a place to vent about the portion of Americans who are hurtling us towards a possible Trump dictatorship in 2024), I'd recommend checking out Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind', where he gives an explanation of how liberals and conservatives form the moral intuitions which are the foundation of thier politics and worldview.

    To massively simplify for the sake of brevity, he identities five basic foundations for morality that have been universals throughout human societies. They are: Care, Fairness, In-Group Loyalty, Authority, and Purity. He also demonstrates that the 'point' of these moral foundations isn't to make a just or equitable society so much as to allow us to live together as social animals and have functioning societies that can compete against other groups.

    Liberals tend to put more emphasis towards Care and Fairness as thier moral foundations. While conservatives tend to put more emphasis towards In-Group Loyalty, Obedience To Authority, and Purity as the foundations of their morality.

    Not hard to see how the moral intuitions behind conservatism make consecutives more susceptible to things like the racism, conspiracism, and cult behavior we're seeing in the MAGA movement.


  18. I'd highly recommend John Verveake's recent book on the subject, Mentoring the Machines, where he helpfully differentiates three types of AI, and the domain of problems each is suited to.

    1) Narrow AI is suited for well defined problems. Makes use algorithms to solve problems. Self driving cars are a good example of this.

    2) Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is suited for ill-defined problems that are combinatorially explosive (ie can't be brute forced), and require a novel approach. Makes use of heuristics to solve a wide range of problems. All animals (including humans) are examples of general intelligence.

    3) Super Intelligent AI is a hypothetical type of AI that would purportedly be able to address undefinable or existential problems that don't have a solution (ie 'what is the meaning of life'). Unlike the earlier two, this category is more akin to religious belief than something that we need concern ourselves with in our lifetime. Ray Kurtzweil's 'technological singularity' pseudo religion is a good example of this.

     

    I've found that this differentiation can be helpful in how discussions around AI are framed. For example, it's helpful to keep in mind that the forms of AI that are already having a noticable impact on our society are Narrow AI. It's an open question as to whether we'll see AGI in our lifetimes, but it's impact on the world has the potential to be orders of magnitude more consequential than Narrow AI. IMHO super Intelligent AI is a fantasy and not worthy of serious discussion or consideration, when it's not even clear whether or not AGI will prove to be a practical possibility.


  19. 16 minutes ago, Buck Edwards said:

    Err!! You mean to say that I should vote only for the sake of being able to vote. That's a pretty damn low standard for voting. This is like settling for a lesser evil. What if the democrats are full of thugs, race baiters, corrupt politicians, war mongers, and generally don't care about the interests of the average American?

    Which brings me to my next point? 

    Should I vote based on principle or should I vote based on advantage? 

    The Democrats are all sugary when it comes to principles. But no real results in terms of economic growth. 

    Trump on the other hand promises economic growth, better foreign relations and lowering medical bills. 

    Should I care if Trump is unprincipled as long as he delivers what I want as an average citizen? 

    What are principles good for if they are only on paper? 

    If you want to be the modern day equivalent of someone voting to end democracy in 1930s Germany I can't stop you, but I question what you're doing on a conscious politics forum if you're unable to recognize that Trump is an completely unhinged and unprincipled authoritarian con-man.


  20. If you value being able to vote in future elections, voting for Democrats is essential since the Republican plan is to essentially install Trump as dictator.

    Look into 'Project 2025' if you want details on MAGA's plan to dismantle democracy in America.

    https://accountable.us/right-wing-network-plots-to-undermine-democracy-with-project-2025/

    “...democracy experts view Project 2025 as an authoritarian attempt to seize power by filling the federal government, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, with unwavering Trump supporters, which could potentially erode the country’s system of checks and balances.”

     

     

     


  21. On 10/21/2023 at 9:52 AM, Danioover9000 said:

    @AerisVahnEphelia

       Absolutely not! We need more countries to integrate capitalism first, have developed stronger economies, then they can try socio economics. We cannot skip to some socialism type of economics where hippies do free gift economies.

    As an interesting aside, this was the view of Marx as well, whose view was that socialism needs to be be built on top of the massive increase in productivity that developed as a result of capitalism. Something that actual 20th century Marxists often ignored as they tried to implement socialism in feudal societies like Tzarist Russia, to disastrous results. (Note that I'm not saying that ignoring this developmental aspect of Marx's theory is the only reason why communist experiments didn't work out in practice).


  22. On 12/1/2023 at 0:26 AM, Starlight321 said:

     

    @DocWattsthx, I'm right now watching part three. omg he seems to have sociopathic traits and a notorious lyer.. far worse than what I expacted.

    The moderators are very well informed. Do you watch them regularly?

    Robert Evans (the person who's informing the other two guys on Kissinger's history in that podcast) is a journalist who's covered military conflicts around the world, and has also written about online extremism and political violence. Which is to say he's very well informed about the geopolitical topics he covers on his Bastards podcast. The other two guys are guests, who happen to be comedians that run an American history podcast called The Dollop.

    I've listened to both podcasts for years, would highly recommend both.


  23. 1 minute ago, martins name said:

    @DocWatts Any particular summary of Marxism that you'd recommend?

    Understanding Marxism by Richard Wolfe is a good starting place, as he does a good job of taking Marx's theory and updating it for our modern era. Might be a bit basic if you're already very well versed in Marxism, but I found it to be highly helpful.

    Marxism A Very Short Introduction by Peter Singer is also a good summation of some of Marx's texts.


  24. 5 hours ago, martins name said:

    @DocWatts have you read Marx?

    I'll fully admit that most of my reading on Marx comes from contemporary sources who translate his ideas into a format that's understandable for someone living in our modern era, rather than banging my head against something like Das Kapital directly. (By this I mean people who attempt to give a good faith interpretation of his work, rather than someone like Jordan Peterson).

    As someone who's read lots of philosophy (including some very difficult primary sources), I'll almost always recommend that people get the gist of a philosopher from contemporary sources, rather than trying to decipher highly difficult texts that were written in a different era.

    For instance %99 of people are better off getting the gist of someone like Immanuel Kant from contemporary scholars, rather than trying to wade one's way through Critique of Pure Reason. 

    As for your analysis of Marx in your original post (apologies for not addressing this directly), I'd argue that his Labor theory of Value, along with his depiction of the Alienation of Labor, are generally true, at least in a broad sense (especially so under unregulated Capitalism). I won't go as far as Marx as to say that the CEO of a company adds nothing, but the vast majority of the value that's created by a company like Tesla comes from the actual workers who engineer and build the electric cars, not from Musk or it's board of directors.

    Which why I say that his critiques of capitalism are largely valid, even if his idea of a classless and stateless society isn't a realistic or workable solution.