You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it • Hacker News Board

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#461

Post by purple-leafy » Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 8:14 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #138

purple-leafy wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just get rid of social media? That’s what I did. Well, I have a hackernews account but that’s it

There is a lot to be gained from social media, once filtered. It's not all bad.

I think there is lots to gain from Wikipedia, but increasingly social media is being gamed and politicised and manipulated. For me the cons outweigh the pros heavily. I don’t even read the news.

I feel incredibly free and happy with basically no online presence. Best I’ve ever felt.

All I need is Wikipedia, hacker news, and a couple of books. Coding and coding books gives me all I need.

Next step is to buy some GPUs to get away from hosted LLMs and start running them locally. Then I am truly free and information dense and self sufficient

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#462

Post by Kbelicius » Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 12:11 PM UTC

piloto_ciego wrote: post #451

Kbelicius wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Free will is absolutely largely about making choices. Free will largely isn't about making choices or having choices. It is largely about how/why we make choices. Bacteria can move, thus bacteria have a choice of direction in which to move. Bacteria move, so it is making a choice. If GP has free will just because they made a choice to write a reply to you, as you claim, then it must follow that bacteria also have f…

Responding to stimuli with a reflex is not a choice.

That just sounds like an arbitrary difference. What is the difference between a reflex action and choice action? Do animals have free will?

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#463

Post by alberto_ol » Mon, Apr 29, 2024, 12:37 PM UTC

With regard to the Ralph Waldo Emerson's quote, it is likely that he never said or wrote those words.

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/06/20/books/

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#464

Post by namero999 » Wed, May 01, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

strogonoff wrote: post #457

namero999 wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just echo this, in that monistic idealism (especially, as a personal preference, in the declination of analytical idealism) is a worldview able to supersede the incongruous, untenable and for the most part, epistemically moot physicalism/materialism, which is sadly still considered the default mainstream worldview. As parent said, many open questions and interpretations become relatively trivial under idealism,…

Could you name-drop any analytic idealists? What would be in your opinion a good starting point?

Bernardo Kastrup.

I think the best resource are his books. He also has several online interviews. The guy used to work at CERN and ASML, turned to philosophy.

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/analytic-idealism-course/

A compressed version of the same material

https://www.essentiafoundation.org/ef-keytoe-analytic-ideali...

The PhD dissertation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iyoiJmWvSs

Enjoy the rabbit hole :)

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#465

Post by huygens6363 » Thu, May 02, 2024, 4:42 AM UTC

piloto_ciego wrote: post #453

huygens6363 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what process do you propose decided to think “I chose my thoughts and what to concentrate on”? Surely you must see this is problems all the way down.

Simply think about what you want to concentrate on, then concentrate on that until you get tired or physically can’t concentrate on it any more? I would be shocked if I was the only one on HN who ever thought, “I don’t want to think about this right now, I want to think about ” and then stopped thinking about the first thing. In aviation there’s even actually training on division of attention and learning to prioriti…

You are glossing over very fundamental issues here. If you want to be pragmatic about it, sure. Don’t worry about it. At the macroscopic scale this discussion does not matter and of course I can choose what to focus on, I hope we all can.

But then again, the addict also says he willingly chooses to drink another beer.. I’m sorry, I can’t let go. But I get your point and TBH I don’t really care either way. I just like to introspect and get at the bottom of things and then let go.

Re: You are what you read, even if you don't always remember it

#466

Post by piloto_ciego » Mon, May 13, 2024, 5:13 AM UTC

Kbelicius wrote: post #462

piloto_ciego wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Responding to stimuli with a reflex is not a choice.

That just sounds like an arbitrary difference. What is the difference between a reflex action and choice action? Do animals have free will?

Some animals certainly do. They’re not necessarily bound by our morality by any stretch of the imagination, but absolute some animals likely have free will.

As for reflex versus choice, if someone hits my knee just right my legs going to kick out. If someone pushes in the same spot and says “kick your leg out” and I don’t want to, I don’t have to.

There may be constraints on that, obviously at gun point I’m going to, but yah, if you’re able to think about then choose to do something or not do something that seems qualitatively different than a reflex.