I wouldn't go so far as to call this gibberish like other commenters, but I don't get the point. I follow the logic but it feels incomplete. Why does the thesis matter?
What You (Want to)* Want
101–110 of 189 posts
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#102"You can do what you want, but you can't want to want what you want." I've read many of PG's essays, but this one feels like GPT-3 wrote it. It's borderline gibberish. Like he trained an AI on all his other essays, fed it the essay title, and this was the result. I half-expect a year from now that he'll tell us all his recent essays were written by this AI and it's now the core IP in some recent YC investment.
Not only that, but he got it totally wrong. It's not that people change what they want, it is that they think they want something, but then they discover that they were wrong.
Also, what you want changes over time, but not because you decide to want something new, or to stop wanting something. It just happens. The best example of this is going through puberty, where you develop desires that you didn't have before. This is not a decision that you make.
Figuring out what you want is a process of discovery, not of decision-making.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do people still read philosophical writings by the likes of Plato and Socrates? This piece like quite a few others is a kind of musings which many find interesting and PG doesn't claim it to be scientific. There are areas of human interests that lie well outside our scientific capabilities. People should be allowed to speculate on them. Reasonable conjectures often precede solid evidence/proofs in math and science. T…
I was gonna say. This is very much discourse. It's someone's musings. What's so cringy about this? It never claims to be scientific; it never attempts to persuade or even really argue. 100% your twitter reference.
My beef with it is that it is a series of opinions stated in the form of facts. If the topic was something like programming, CPU's, etc this approach would not go over so well, but for certain topics it seems like concern for the truth is ~unacceptable.
And why does this matter, at least plausibly? In my opinion, because of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
I believe that if humans get the idea in their head that they have no free will, it could be detrimental to rising to serious challenges like climate change, inequality, etc.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#104I actually think PG is exploring something that is at the heart of what it means to be a human being. Interestingly, the traditional teaching of Original Sin is that we are broken at the level of what we 'want'. The phrase commonly used is 'disordered desire'. The key idea here is that if you want the wrong things, you are not actually free, even if you perceive yourself as choosing freely. As a corollary, the more y…
The concept of original sin is garbage.
Wow, thanks for sharing this deep insight. -- A fellow "original mind"
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#105I don't really get what he means here. >you can't (want to)* want what you want It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. you can't (want to want what you want). you can't want to want to want what you want). And it is recursive: you can't (want to want to want it)
I want to watch porn. And I want to not want to watch porn.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
After a while the speed at which a fan turns in a circle in order to move heated air off a CPU stops being interesting and larger questions that aren't as falsifiable start to seem interesting since they have so many implications to the practical questions that do matter. For example, "does God exist?" has huge influence on how we think of why wars are caused. The trouble is that much of philosophy is castles built o…
At least for me -- and I'm certain I'm not alone on this -- what makes a question interesting is not the question itself but rather how one approaches it. To what extent humans and other life forms have agency is a question one can approach with things like neuroscience or with things like vacuous word salad. > The trouble is that much of philosophy is castles built on sand. Most serious philosophers would agree with…
> Most serious philosophers would agree with the idea that scientific evidence is a good way to rule out beliefs inconsistent with reality.
Only for the subset of beliefs that are related to physical reality - metaphysical matters are beyond the physical sciences, although psychology is generally considered a science and contributes some value to the discussion.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#107I probably don't have much to contribute, but I wanted to share some thoughts on the concept of free will Paul seems to brush against. I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. But one thing the "free will doesn't exist" people tend to forget, is that the brain rewires and changes itself. You are destined to do what your brain is wired to do, but doing…
> I found the concept of free will at odds with my opinion that the brain and physics are very deterministic. Physics don't have to be deterministic in order to be at odds with free will. Whether neurons fire due to a predefined pattern, or they fire with some probabilities do not change the equation for "how can a biological machine have free will?" Choice is at odds with both predefined rules and drawing from a ran…
> I completely fail to see how you ended up at that conclusion from that argument. A recursive function, that mutates itself is still bound by it's rules for mutation and recursiveness. Choice doesn't grow out of an exponentially growing number of possible states.
Not if you add a few random variables. Radioactive elements disintegration seems random. May other things could be as well.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It seems to me that "want to want what you want" is a tautology, if you want something you already want to want it. Tell that to an addict.
Tell what? I am not sure I am following you... can you be more specific?
That wanting something implies that you want to want it.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#109Seems like he's saying that you can't change who you are at the core, which I disagree with.
With each want, however, the meaning becomes more and more frivolous. Who cares what you want to want to want to want to want? That's not recognizable even on a subconscious level.
Re: What You (Want to)* Want
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Combining this with an infinite universe theory, it could also just be random noise intentionally introduced to a specific "instance" of a universe.
To the best of our ability we haven't been able to detect any signs of any strings which might point to a puppet master or any mechanism by which anything as potentially informationally massive as randomness could be transferred to 'our' universe.
Not quite: there are millions of people who claim the existence of a God(s), or claim to have had "experiences" with the same. However, to those raised in secular environments, these claims "have" "no" validity, but this is actually just the model of reality built by the mind (what "is", in "reality"), which is heavily influenced by the metaphysical framework one was raised/trained on, or exists within.
Philosophy (logic, epistemology, etc) has more appropriate tools and techniques for dealing with such questions, but if one (one's mind) has been trained that only the scientific method can provide knowledge, they are kind of stuck at a local maxima (inside a "simulated reality dome") that they are unable to see out of, or typically even want to see out of.