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Boing posted:I'm a psychologist and Bakker is spot on, at least in Neuropath, with his understanding of modern trends in psychology and neuroscience. The dude's done his research, which is why I find it so compelling. Fiction books written by psychologists (and philosophers) are always a treat. That's interesting - I was a psychologist at the time*, working in social neuro at NYU, and I thought he was hilariously off target. All his 'rape module' gibberish threw up the usual red flags signaling a humanities major foundering in the shoals of evo-psych fallacies. *I actually read Neuropath as a psych undergrad, so I'm not going to claim I was really a 'psychologist' then, but I went back to dissect it later and hoo boy is it a mess. e: 'The brain is a meat computer, the product of a blind evolutionary process without teleology or intent. We can't monitor or control most of what's happening in there. Our conscious experience is defined by self-deception, heuristic bias, and post-hoc rationalization. We basically have no idea what the gently caress we're doing or why.' 'Good summary of the last twenty years, Bakker. I bet you could make an interesting story from this 101-level foundation. What happens?'  We're talking about the dude who equated labiaplasty with female circumcision to prove that feminism has failed and civilization always returns to its bio-programmed routine of men enslaving women. Bakker's so good at writing deep history and uncanny, revolting alien presence, and he even has a good rhetorical grasp of basic psychology. The problem comes, hilariously enough, when he has to turn any of that rigor on his own ideas. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Nov 7, 2014 |
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Nov 7, 2014 16:48
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Bakker does have some weird views on the 'men are wired to rape' front, but that's never been central to his work and it hasn't stopped my enjoyment of his books.
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Nov 7, 2014 18:40
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Let's just all be thankful that the SJW sphere can't read anything longer than a tumblr post. 
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Nov 7, 2014 19:12
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Libluini posted:To be fair, no one demands a storyteller to have a degree in everything he/she writes, that would be insane. As long as he knows enough to spin some entertaining yarn, who cares? Besides, I would be careful with claims of "lying" in fiction, since technically everything fictional is a lie. Storytellers are liars, didn't you know? To be fair, he was replying to a post that explicitly stated that Bakker knew his neuroscience and that what he had to say was hard to deny.
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Nov 8, 2014 04:12
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wellwhoopdedooo posted:To be fair, he was replying to a post that explicitly stated that Bakker knew his neuroscience and that what he had to say was hard to deny. And I commented on this and stated it is not that important if Bakker "knows his stuff" as long as he knows enough to fool most people. Besides, the more science you include in your fictional work, the higher the chance it will be horribly out of date shortly after publication. The chance of a research failure practically doubles if you write outside your own area of expertise and triples if you work with a relatively new science like neuroscience. Since I know this, I'm often quite tolerant to someones science writing in fiction. This is why I only bother looking something up if it's in a non-fiction book. (Or I guess, if something really interests me, because I want to make sure it's actually true and not "true ten years ago, when the book first came out".)
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Nov 8, 2014 11:26
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A quick question from someone who only read the first trilogy: Is the last book of the second one actually out yet? I'm getting... conflicting information.
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Nov 8, 2014 11:48
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anilEhilated posted:A quick question from someone who only read the first trilogy: Is the last book of the second one actually out yet? I'm getting... conflicting information. The answer is a clear no. Who lies about something like this?
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Nov 8, 2014 11:53
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anilEhilated posted:A quick question from someone who only read the first trilogy: Is the last book of the second one actually out yet? I'm getting... conflicting information. The last I heard was: The manuscript has reached the publisher, that's it. No actual publication yet.
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Nov 8, 2014 11:55
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genericnick posted:The answer is a clear no. Who lies about something like this?
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Nov 8, 2014 12:08
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Haha that blogger who criticized Bakker turned out to be another scifi author using a fake name to intentionally assemble mobs to harass competing authors: http://www.metafilter.com/144305/Ripping-up-the-SFF-Scene-Requires-Hate Half hearted apology: http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2014/10/15/apologies-and-finality/
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Nov 13, 2014 17:28
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:Haha that blogger who criticized Bakker turned out to be another scifi author using a fake name to intentionally assemble mobs to harass competing authors: Reading that is just  , not even solely in regards to Bakker but in terms of the SF community and the state of discourse generally.It's exactly the sort of thing you think of when you imagine a false-flag op to discredit social justice movements, only it was run by an actual woman of color?
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Nov 13, 2014 18:20
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As I've gotten into writing and publishing it's quickly become apparent that the whole field is so tiny and incendiary you're better off having no public opinions about anything. There a ton of great people, but something about the discourse is just so fraught.
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Nov 13, 2014 19:01
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I haven't read Neuropath but I don't know if I'd find it creepy from what I'm hearing, since I already know I'm just a biological computer and don't see any reason why that should bother me.Boing posted:Neuropath also helped me appreciate the Dunyain a lot more and where Bakker might be going with them. At first I thought it was an oversight that people without emotion could have any motivation to do anything at all, and that Bakker hadn't thought it through to the end, but he obviously has and he obviously is saying something with it. The Dunyain search to become "self-moving souls" is doomed of course since it doesn't make any sense, unless the metaphysics of Earwa allow for a fundamentally different interpretation of free will than in our world. The Dunyain are not without emotion. They're generally less emotional than regular humans, and they take pains to stamp it out during their conditioning, but they still experience emotion. The fact that (Thousandfold Thought spoilers)Moenghus acknowledges this and Kellhus does not seems to me to just be more evidence for "The Trial has broken him" scenario.
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Nov 16, 2014 18:33
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Being a biological computer is trivially obvious, I don't think that's either the interesting or poorly handled part of Neuropath.
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Nov 16, 2014 19:36
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The Sharmat posted:I haven't read Neuropath but I don't know if I'd find it creepy from what I'm hearing, since I already know I'm just a biological computer and don't see any reason why that should bother me. This is exactly how I feel, and Boing and I have gone round and round in circles about this. If you accept the brain as an entirely physical object then it follows pretty naturally that you could (with sufficiently fictional technology) stick you finger and in make people feel or do all sorts of things. Bakker just heaps on his nihilism to make it seem worse than it is. Take the classic experiment about the moment at which you make decisions (reference please Boing, tia) - participants were given some task, responding to flashing lights or some such, and told to press a button in a certain situation. Using the brain scans they were able to show that the participants decision-making bit of the brain lit up way before they were consciously aware of having made the decision. I've butchered the specifics, but the core of it is all I need for my example - brain scans show you decide stuff before you are aware of having made the decision. Does this seem especially shocking to you? All it says to me is that we instinctively work on a flawed understanding of our own consciousness - we work on the assumption that our "will" is a little homunculus sat in our skull pulling levers, that our decisions materials ex nihilo. If our brain is causing decisions then of COURSE it's going to show on a brain scan before we realise it, that's what the brain is FOR. There are all sorts of philosophical ways around this. I like to think that our perception of consciousness, our inner-life, is just one big con-trick that our brain plays on itself - our brain makes the decisions and then projects it onto this thing we call "self" which doesn't actually do anything. But this is because I am Not A Psychologist, and because I fundamentally misunderstood the concept of epiphenomenalism. But Bakker latches onto an almost comically extreme version of this - your brain makes your decision, not you, therefore nothing is real and nothing has any purpose and we should all just lay down in the gutter. In the afterword he even admits he's trolling - nobody would believe The Argument, but we don't have entirely satisfactory arguments for why it's wrong. It's like Hume's problem of induction - we just kind of ignore it and move on with our lives. Which raises another question - why would you write a novel in which the clear author-insert (a totally cool philoso-chologist, who's totally cool and awesome and awesome at sex) spouts ideas that you don't agree with? The climactic scene where everything gets all trippy and weird is fantastic, I'll give Bakker that. More of that please.
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Nov 16, 2014 19:50
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Strom Cuzewon posted:This is exactly how I feel, and Boing and I have gone round and round in circles about this. If you accept the brain as an entirely physical object then it follows pretty naturally that you could (with sufficiently fictional technology) stick you finger and in make people feel or do all sorts of things. Bakker just heaps on his nihilism to make it seem worse than it is. I've read the same thing about our brains making decisions before our consciousness becomes aware of it, but it's kind of obvious this is just a neat little detail about how our minds work, not "HURGH BRAINS MAKE DECISIONS NOT US NOTHING IS REAL". Too bad Bakker went over bord like that. Another reason not to read his non-fantasy works. My pet-theory about consciousness was: What we call consciousness is the reflective layer of our minds, the lower layers all deal with the hard stuff, like calculating the ballistic curve of a ball you want to throw, or calculating probabilities and decision-making based on our experiences and memories. The upper layer, what we think is ouselves, gets the results of those calculations so we can reflect on it and either continue to support the decisions our brain made, or reject it and try again. It also gives us the capability to learn of our errors, since we can analyse the dumb poo poo we pull afterwards and adjust our thinking accordingly. I always see our minds as this blindingly complicated mesh of different layers, working together. And the entirety of all those layers of consciousness, created by groups of synapses working together, is "us". Corresponding to that, remember how therapy can slowly deal with multiple personality disorder? In effect, a therapist convinces the victim of this disorder to dissolve all the different personalities and accept them back into the main mind. This works, because when multiple personality disorder occurs, your complicated mesh of layers gets broken and forms new personalities, presumably either at random or based on whatever shock or trauma has caused the break. Those splinters of course can only be reformed into old you if you get convinced those other voices in your head aren't real, just aspects of yourself. Mental illness is the point where you can't accept the choir of voices inside you as a part of you and start thinking they are real.
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Nov 16, 2014 23:20
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I remember reading Neuropath and wondering why Bakker was so impressed by the realization that you could control what people said, did and felt through physically manipulating their brains, when it's just an ickier version of grabbing someone's fist and punching it repeatedly into their face while saying "Why are you hitting yourself?" I also remember feeling the vague need for a shower afterwards. Man's got some kinks that he was definitely writing.
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Nov 17, 2014 01:11
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JerryLee posted:Reading that is just Benjanun Sriduangkaew sure is a stupid loving name.
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Nov 17, 2014 01:30
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Dystram posted:Benjanun Sriduangkaew sure is a stupid loving name. Not her fault she's Asian.
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Nov 17, 2014 03:59
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GreyjoyBastard posted:Not her fault she's Asian. It's most likely a pseudonym. I thought it was a bad choice at first just cuz it's such an awkward name to spell or pronounce, but then again, it is a distinctive one that would be hard to forget or get confused with other authors.
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Nov 17, 2014 04:08
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Libluini posted:I've read the same thing about our brains making decisions before our consciousness becomes aware of it, but it's kind of obvious this is just a neat little detail about how our minds work, not "HURGH BRAINS MAKE DECISIONS NOT US NOTHING IS REAL". Too bad Bakker went over bord like that. Another reason not to read his non-fantasy works. Beefeater1980 posted:I remember reading Neuropath and wondering why Bakker was so impressed by the realization that you could control what people said, did and felt through physically manipulating their brains, when it's just an ickier version of grabbing someone's fist and punching it repeatedly into their face while saying "Why are you hitting yourself?" It's kinda like this, but it's also more than this. Prince of Nothing touched on it as well with the Cants of Compulsion (though it was less central to the story). Yes, by manipulating someone's neuroelectrochemistry you can make them love or hate or fear, or do things they otherwise wouldn't do. But it's not mind control, like holding someone's limbs and making them move around. The point is that there is no fundamental difference between doing something, and being made to do something. If a machine makes you love, then that love is exactly the same as whatever other love you might feel. It is not fake, it is not artificial, it is indistinguishable - the machine is as valid a cause of any affect or cognition or behaviour as anything 'organic'. There is nothing transcendental about natural human experience that makes it more 'real' than anything else that could affect your brain. If you were hooked up to a machine and you could press a button to become instantly happy, would you sit in one place and keep pushing the button forever? Most people say no, because the happiness wouldn't be real, and there's more to the world, and they would get bored of it, or whatever. But Bakker's postulate (and the postulate of most of psychology and neuroscience) is that of course you would, you would sit there and you would push the button and you would die of ecstasy because it is the most pure joy in the world and nothing can compare. It's not fake. It's as real as anything else. And that's what Bakker finds so scary, and why Neuropath exists. You might not find it as scary, since it's more of a philosophical thought experiment for now, but as far as scary and disturbing sci-fi goes Neuropath hits closer to home than anything else I've read. Libluini posted:My pet-theory about consciousness was: What we call consciousness is the reflective layer of our minds, the lower layers all deal with the hard stuff, like calculating the ballistic curve of a ball you want to throw, or calculating probabilities and decision-making based on our experiences and memories. The upper layer, what we think is ouselves, gets the results of those calculations so we can reflect on it and either continue to support the decisions our brain made, or reject it and try again. It also gives us the capability to learn of our errors, since we can analyse the dumb poo poo we pull afterwards and adjust our thinking accordingly. Multiple personality disorder isn't a real thing, the closest diagnosis (dissociative identity disorder) is extremely controversial and more often fraudulent than not, and it's impossible to talk about "the way therapy can deal with it" and "this works" because it's weird and rare enough that there's no established therapeutic intervention and no sign as to whether it works or not. So I'm not sure where you got this. But your pet theory about consciousness is plausible enough from what we know about the brain. Have you heard about Sperry's split-brain experiments? It's something I'm surprised Bakker didn't touch on in Neuropath since it's a perfect example of how our idea of an integrated consciousness can't possibly be the way we think it is. You can cut someone's brain in half and observe that the two brain halves have entirely different percepts and behavioural triggers and yet the person's conscious layer doesn't realise anything is wrong. It's weird as gently caress. Strom Cuzewon posted:But Bakker latches onto an almost comically extreme version of this - your brain makes your decision, not you, therefore nothing is real and nothing has any purpose and we should all just lay down in the gutter. In the afterword he even admits he's trolling - nobody would believe The Argument, but we don't have entirely satisfactory arguments for why it's wrong. It's like Hume's problem of induction - we just kind of ignore it and move on with our lives. This is it. Bakker clearly believes the Argument, he can't reason as to how or why it's wrong, and he puts forward such a convincing case for it that it's hard to doubt him. But whereas Neil is representative of the dark, disturbing, thriller side of the semantic apocalypse, Thomas shows that even though it's impossibly to deny you can still forge your own meaning in life and be happy with it. Since Thomas is the author insert, I think Bakker holds his view - that all of his consciousness is ultimately mechanistic, but that has no behavioural implication, it doesn't mean anything now, and people get on with their lives as if nothing is different because that's all they can do. He's not a nihilist. But in the future (possibly even the near future) when our buttons and our triggers are laid bare to science, society and human experience will change in really strange and probably scary ways. We already do it now, in subtle ways: advertising and loyalty points and celebrity endorsements are all mechanistically rewiring our wants and desires to make us better consumers. It will become more and more normal to judge your suitability for a job or a studentship based on the results of your brain scan - which is not really different at all from basing it on the results of a personality test or an aptitude assessment, and that's the whole point. My favourite Neuropath quote is "We're only allowed to push the buttons that nobody can see". It really hits close. We have a cultural aversion to people who manipulate and pull strings and play with peoples' emotions, but that's what all of us are doing all the time whenever we talk to anyone or ask for favours or post status updates on Facebook. This is the reason pick-up artists are creepy but the hot Spanish artist you work with isn't. We can't see the buttons yet, but wait for it.
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Nov 17, 2014 14:09
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Boing posted:It's kinda like this, but it's also more than this. Prince of Nothing touched on it as well with the Cants of Compulsion (though it was less central to the story). Interesting point, but your example doesn't work that way because we know human brains become accustomed to pretty much anything. The joy from that button would have to get stronger and stronger over time to overcome the effect of our brain tissue adapting to the endorphins coursing through it. A similar thing like what happens with drug addiction: An addict has to give himself stronger and stronger doses to get the same effect, until he dies. Someone who would ignore the effects the endless joy had would sit there until he dies, too. And some would notice their body breaking down and get out. After all, some people do fight of addiction by themselves. So it's not a done deal. Also I would argue inducing love or other emotions from the outside is as artificial as it gets. A machine (AI) having emotions thanks to some kind of super-chip inside of it would be more natural then someone manipulating the brain from the outside. Regardless of what the victim thinks, the emotions are all fake. There's nothing special about human experience, but that doesn't magically make all forms of experience equal, artificial experiences are still artificial, natural ones still natural. quote:Multiple personality disorder isn't a real thing, the closest diagnosis (dissociative identity disorder) is extremely controversial and more often fraudulent than not, and it's impossible to talk about "the way therapy can deal with it" and "this works" because it's weird and rare enough that there's no established therapeutic intervention and no sign as to whether it works or not. So I'm not sure where you got this. Most likely someone who disagrees with you over this. Mental diagnosis is often a shitshow of wishful thinking, so I go with what is closely related to neurology. Since the brain at least is actually there. quote:But your pet theory about consciousness is plausible enough from what we know about the brain. Have you heard about Sperry's split-brain experiments? It's something I'm surprised Bakker didn't touch on in Neuropath since it's a perfect example of how our idea of an integrated consciousness can't possibly be the way we think it is. You can cut someone's brain in half and observe that the two brain halves have entirely different percepts and behavioural triggers and yet the person's conscious layer doesn't realise anything is wrong. It's weird as gently caress. I remember similar experiments with people who had extensive brain damage. In one case half the brain was missing and the person was completely unable to sense anything connected to the missing half: You could enter the room from the side were his eye was connected to the missing half for example and he wouldn't notice you. His working half would simply reject all input from that eye and from that ear, too. It was spooky. In all other things that person was completely normal. It was as if the brain had simply reorganized itself to compensate for the missing half, but apparently something either went wrong or the lower layers of consciousness decided having a working mind was better then having full sensory capabilities but being a vegetable. In other cases I've heard about, people lost their capability to talk normal: They themselves thought they would try to talk, but something in the deeper layers had gone wrong thanks to the damage and instead of human speach in an understandable language, gibberish came out. Sometimes this would stay like that, sometimes the brain some day went "wait a minute, something is not working" and reorganized itself and suddenly they could speak normal again. quote:This is it. Bakker clearly believes the Argument, he can't reason as to how or why it's wrong, and he puts forward such a convincing case for it that it's hard to doubt him. But whereas Neil is representative of the dark, disturbing, thriller side of the semantic apocalypse, Thomas shows that even though it's impossibly to deny you can still forge your own meaning in life and be happy with it. Since Thomas is the author insert, I think Bakker holds his view - that all of his consciousness is ultimately mechanistic, but that has no behavioural implication, it doesn't mean anything now, and people get on with their lives as if nothing is different because that's all they can do. I think at the point we fully understand our brains up to the point where we can have brain scans mean something for judging job suitability, we could probably change the brain on demand to something suitable for the job. I'm not holding my breath for either thing happening any time soon. On advertising, it's a double edged sword. It influences us, but over time we start to automatically filter it out. Look a Japanese street in a shopping district, for example: The first time to see all this colorful advertising everywhere, you would think the typical Japanese gets headaches every day just from tryint to process all this. But they don't. They learn to ignore it and get on with their live. That's the counterpoint to all of this manipulation-crap: An easily manipulatable brain means being easy prey for every animal that happens to find the right triggers. So like everything, even our brain architecture is in constant flux to protect us. Because if our brain couldn't do this, we would have gone extinct by now. Hell, every higher animal with a brain similar to ours has to resist manipulation to at least some degree to be able to survive, or most of the world would have been taken over by weird, pheromone-spewing carnivorous plants by now.
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Nov 17, 2014 14:40
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Libluini posted:Interesting point, but your example doesn't work that way because we know human brains become accustomed to pretty much anything. Here's the thing: Your brain becoming accustomed to things is itself a mechanism of the brain. If we accept that your brain can be controlled by external stimuli, then your brain's ability to adapt can also be controlled by external stimuli. So this: Libluini posted:On advertising, it's a double edged sword. It influences us, but over time we start to automatically filter it out. Look a Japanese street in a shopping district, for example: The first time to see all this colorful advertising everywhere, you would think the typical Japanese gets headaches every day just from tryint to process all this. But they don't. They learn to ignore it and get on with their live. doesn't mean poo poo, because the fact that people can ignore advertising means that advertising is failing to fully intrude into our lives. If advertisers could figure out how to make people pay more attention to their ads using tricks to dampen the human brain's ability to filter out irrelevant information, do you really think they wouldn't? They don't even have to be neurological Marionette-style tricks, there may well be some purely psychological approaches that haven't been discovered yet. The human brain is powerful, yes, and good at what it does, but if we're going with the conceit that "the inputs and outputs of the brain have been laid bare and scientists know how everything works", you are not safe. You cannot rely on your brain to protect you from external influence. If your brain can be influenced and driven, so can you. Drugs are the same. Stimulants lose their euphoric properties over time because the human brain can adjust well to baseline levels of arousal. But that is a thing it does, and if you have control of the brain at your fingertips, you can make it not do that. Isn't that terrifying? Libluini posted:Also I would argue inducing love or other emotions from the outside is as artificial as it gets. A machine (AI) having emotions thanks to some kind of super-chip inside of it would be more natural then someone manipulating the brain from the outside. Regardless of what the victim thinks, the emotions are all fake. You can argue this, and I guess we fundamentally disagree on this point. I'm in agreement with Bakker here - there is no difference. You can use 'natural' or 'artificial' as theoretical constructs that refer to the source of the neural perturbation by convention, but if the neural correlates and the subjective experiences are identical between cases, what differentiates the two? I'd like to hear what kind of empirical distinction you'd draw between 'natural' and 'artificial' experience. "Regardless of what the victim thinks"... it's subjective experience. What the victim thinks is the only thing that matters. Would you accept if someone loved you because of a machine stimulating the love part of their brain? What if they loved you because of some kind of head injury? Or a natural quirk of their brain chemistry? Or because you'd spent a lot of time with them and they like the way you smell? These can all be causes but the end process and output is the same. Libluini posted:I remember similar experiments with people who had extensive brain damage. In one case half the brain was missing and the person was completely unable to sense anything connected to the missing half: You could enter the room from the side were his eye was connected to the missing half for example and he wouldn't notice you. His working half would simply reject all input from that eye and from that ear, too. It was spooky. In all other things that person was completely normal. It was as if the brain had simply reorganized itself to compensate for the missing half, but apparently something either went wrong or the lower layers of consciousness decided having a working mind was better then having full sensory capabilities but being a vegetable. That's nothing. Check this out: http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/ posted:For example, if the name of an object is projected so that a subject with a severed corpus callosum sees it with the right hemisphere only, he will say that he doesn’t see anything, because the severed connection has in fact prevented his left hemisphere, which is dominant for language, from doing so. But if the experimenter then asks the subject to use his left hand to choose a card with a drawing of the object whose name he saw, or to identify this object by feeling it with his left hand, he will have no problem in performing the task. Thus the right hemisphere cannot express itself in complex sentences, but it clearly can recognize words. http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/ posted:Certain experiments that Gazzaniga conducted with split-brain patients also led him to develop the concept of the “left-hemisphere interpreter”. In one of these classic experiments, the split-brain patient had to point with his two hands at pictures of two objects corresponding to two images that he had seen on the divided screen (one with each of his two separated hemispheres). In the test shown here, the patient’s left hand is pointing at the card with a picture of a snow shovel, because the right hemisphere, which controls this hand, has seen the projected image of a winter scene. Meanwhile, his right hand is pointing at the card with a picture of a chicken, because his left hemisphere has seen the image of a chicken’s foot. In case you needed any evidence that Neuropath's "rationalisation module" is a real thing. Even in the general case, most of our judgements aren't based on reasons, but are made before being fully thought through, and then have reasons custom-fitted to them. Libluini posted:I think at the point we fully understand our brains up to the point where we can have brain scans mean something for judging job suitability, we could probably change the brain on demand to something suitable for the job. I'm not holding my breath for either thing happening any time soon. What do you think about your suitability for a job being determined by an aptitude assessment? That seems fair, right? If you can't answer the questions they want you to, you're probably not suited for the job. What about a personality test? Clearly their scientists have figured out that they want people who are outgoing and conscientious, who have a low risk of mental instability and are able to keep their head down. That still sounds fair, but you might feel a little helpless since those are things about yourself that are harder to change. Still, you can always learn the test and bluff it and come across as more extroverted or diligent or emotionally stable than you actually are. We can already see personality correlates in fMRI imaging data. (see http://www.yale.edu/scan/Gray_2005_CABN.pdf, a study that is already 9 years old). Do you really think the capacity to discover job-relevant traits from functional brain scanning isn't going to happen? MRIs are still low-resolution and difficult to interpret, but they work and they're getting better and better as our technology improves. Bakker's low field MRIs are still science fiction and might be for some time, but we don't even need to go that far to start getting into some really disturbing territory. I might be trying too hard, and I'm not necessarily trying to convince anyone to like Neuropath if it's not for them, but I love to talk about the science and the philosophy behind it which I think is really solid and relevant and not just a nihilist fantasy author hack who read a little too much Nietzsche or whatever people think it is.
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Nov 17, 2014 15:20
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Boing posted:Here's the thing: Your brain becoming accustomed to things is itself a mechanism of the brain. If we accept that your brain can be controlled by external stimuli, then your brain's ability to adapt can also be controlled by external stimuli. So this: I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere here, because if you have perfect control like that, you can still not do that because the effect would be: The victim dies, because his tissue gives out. The end. So sure, in a theoretical sense there is manipulation possible up to that degree. It isn't practical though, thanks to the physiological limitations of our organic tissue. Feelings of euphoria for example are happening because of endorphines, a type of drug produced by our own bodies, is flooding our brain. If our brain adapts to that, it does so by essentially going numb. If you could somehow control the brain down to the cellular level and force the synapses to accept more drugs, the cells would die. You have to remember, those adaption processes haven't developed in animals to protect against imaginary mind control monsters, they are supposed to prevent our bodies from dying due to getting poisoned by our own drugs. So if you force someone to feel by circumventing that, you end up with a corpse. quote:"Regardless of what the victim thinks"... it's subjective experience. What the victim thinks is the only thing that matters. Would you accept if someone loved you because of a machine stimulating the love part of their brain? What if they loved you because of some kind of head injury? Or a natural quirk of their brain chemistry? Or because you'd spent a lot of time with them and they like the way you smell? These can all be causes but the end process and output is the same. Here we have to agree to disagree, I fear. What the victim thinks is complete bollocks if it's fake. The subjective experience doesn't count for poo poo then. To your questions: -No, because it's fake. -A head injury producing that kind of effect would be pretty much impossible, head injuries don't create memories and experiences which aren't there in the first place. A head injury producing a personality change to make it possible to re-interpret available information to make someone fall in love, that I can see. Weird, but still acceptable. Random chance isn't an artificial effect, after all. -Natural quirks are what makes us fall in love in the first place, so yes. -The last thing is also a natural process, so yes. I think this should answer all your questions. quote:What do you think about your suitability for a job being determined by an aptitude assessment? That seems fair, right? If you can't answer the questions they want you to, you're probably not suited for the job. The problem on this slope downward is: Intelligence and personality tests are hilariously unreliable. Asking someone questions to find out if they actually know what they're supposed to be doing later is fine, but if we enter the realms of personality and intelligence, it gets more diffuse and unreal. Brain scanning right now can be astonishingly accurate in showing what parts of our brains fire up if we think about something, the problem a reliable test has to answer is: Different humans have different synapses assigned to different groups, with different parts of the brain firing up if they think of the same thing. So right now we can make some vague assumptions and the better we get at looking at the brain, the better we can predict how something works a certain way. Sadly this doesn't translate into finding out what exactly a human will do, beyond stuff like "if he smells coffee, he remembers the smell of coffee and this part of the brain we know is associated with memories is flaring up". Still, I think there will be brain scans like this, since we humans still use intelligence and personality tests (and lie detectors) even though we know they aren't working that great. But subjectively, people who use them want to feel secure in their decision making, not actually make good decisions. And they still get used and brain scans will probably get used, even though knowing your potential employee has a 44% chance of drinking coffee if coffee is available is not really that useful. Hell, on the other hand discrimination based on skin and heritage will go down dramatically if brain scans turn up to be the new best thing for management. I could live with that. Of course knowing management, if they have the choice between a man with 65%, a woman with 67% and a black man with 78% aptitude for a job, they will still take the worst possible choice because it's a man and "good enough". quote:I might be trying too hard, and I'm not necessarily trying to convince anyone to like Neuropath if it's not for them, but I love to talk about the science and the philosophy behind it which I think is really solid and relevant and not just a nihilist fantasy author hack who read a little too much Nietzsche or whatever people think it is. Don't worry, I don't mind. I just won't read Neuropath, even if it is the best book in the world, because I hate thrillers! Luckily there's also a lot of philosophy in his fantasy books. Also ancient history, which surprised me a bit. But it's also a bit funny to see the guys earlier in the thread wondering about the overly stereotypical names in his fantasy books, knowing that most of them are inspired by Mesopotamian names, not Tolkien.
Libluini fucked around with this message at 15:55 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 15:53
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Libluini posted:I think there is a misunderstanding somewhere here, because if you have perfect control like that, you can still not do that because the effect would be: The victim dies, because his tissue gives out. The end. Yes, agreed. This is compatible with my point. I'll leave the rest alone since I could go on for ages about it, but this is the thing that I want to engage with the most: Libluini posted:Here we have to agree to disagree, I fear. What the victim thinks is complete bollocks if it's fake. The subjective experience doesn't count for poo poo then. To your questions: I don't think this perspective stands up to any scrutiny. It might be down to some implicit assumptions I'm bringing to the table but I can't see where you draw the distinction between 'natural' and 'fake' emotions on any objective basis. A head injury doesn't have to alter your memories and experiences to make you feel love, an injury could theoretically cause the feeling of love itself because that's all that love is, a feeling that carries up to conscious experience based on some combination of brain inputs. But that would be random chance, and apparently random chance is "natural", but the exact same inputs created by a person somehow are not. Unless that person did them without physically touching your brain with some kind of equipment, in which case they are still natural. "What the victim thinks is complete bollocks if it's fake". Does the victim feel the fakeness? If so, how? If not, why does it matter? What if they were your emotions? We don't know the origins of our thoughts and feelings, the best we can do is make educated guesses which are as often right as wrong (c.f. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Storms & Nisbett, 1970; Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001, etc.), so to you there would be no difference between your feelings of love regardless of where they came from. Would you be cool with someone not accepting that your love is 'real' because they think it's fake, even though it feels completely right to you and you're not able to access the source of it? vv man I'm trying really hard to talk about how I felt the book really succeeded in doing that, you can't just leave it at that sentence Boing fucked around with this message at 17:15 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 16:33
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Bakker's entire argument is that you can manipulate any part of the human experience by altering the brain, which is a trivial consequence of monism that's maybe surprising or nihilistic if you come from a religious or spiritual background. The book might have been worthwhile if he'd made an interesting exploration of what that'd mean for the human experience as an individual and society.
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Nov 17, 2014 17:07
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Boing posted:I don't think this perspective stands up to any scrutiny. It might be down to some implicit assumptions I'm bringing to the table but I can't see where you draw the distinction between 'natural' and 'fake' emotions on any objective basis. For me, 'natural' is something which is either implicit in a thing (organism, machine) itself or originating in something not caused by a sentient being making a conscious choice to cause it. Random chance for example can't be 'artificial' in the sense of the word since there's no causal relation between a random thing happening and a sentient being planning to make it happen. There are of course weird edge cases like someone planning to do something, but loving it up and causing something else to happen. That something else would then be artificial again in nature. quote:A head injury doesn't have to alter your memories and experiences to make you feel love, an injury could theoretically cause the feeling of love itself because that's all that love is, a feeling that carries up to conscious experience based on some combination of brain inputs. But that would be random chance, and apparently random chance is "natural", but the exact same inputs created by a person somehow are not. Unless that person did them without physically touching your brain with some kind of equipment, in which case they are still natural. In that case, the feeling of love would apply to everyone that person meets equally, that would be quite acceptable, even if the love itself is artificially made. (Like by someone driving the car hitting you and causing the head injury.) Here we are at the mentioned edge case: If a person just suddenly slips on a wet rock, hits his head and suddenly loves everyone, that would be a natural cause, even if it is a bit weird. If a person gets hit by a car and gets a love-inducing head injury: Different cause, this time a sentient being was involved, the output is artificial, or to be less strict, artificially altered. It's like I said above, as soon as the eventually output is altered by a sentient being planning to alter it somewhere along the line, it gets less natural, more artificial. I do agree that I may be too strict with this, most likely you'd get a sliding scale, with robots punching your brain directly on one end, a creepy sociopath manipulating you just with words in the middle and a flower randomly touching you in a wild forest on the other end. This way, I can accept that a cackling madman trying to stick electrodes into my brain and a nice woman chatting me up are both manipulating me, but the nice woman is a more natural input, leading to a more natural output. quote:"What the victim thinks is complete bollocks if it's fake". Does the victim feel the fakeness? If so, how? If not, why does it matter? Feeling the fakeness would be akin to torture, making the entire thing extra worse. If the victim doesn't notice fake emotions as fake, this probably won't matter to the victim itself since he doesn't notice it. It's still fake, of course. And when other people notice this, ethical problems start to creep up: Is the change benevolent for the victim, is it detrimental? Can and should we work to restore the old personality by changing the emotions again? It's a case-by-case thing with no real answers. quote:What if they were your emotions? We don't know the origins of our thoughts and feelings, the best we can do is make educated guesses which are as often right as wrong (c.f. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977; Storms & Nisbett, 1970; Woodzicka & LaFrance, 2001, etc.), so to you there would be no difference between your feelings of love regardless of where they came from. Would you be cool with someone not accepting that your love is 'real' because they think it's fake, even though it feels completely right to you and you're not able to access the source of it? I guess if it were my emotions and I'll never notice it, I would be hosed.  Also I should point out when I can't notice my emotions are fake I would be obviously pretty uncool with someone not accepting me. But I would be a victim and needing help, not someone going "Hey cool, my personal real doll!" Personally, I would feel revolted and repulsed if someone told me they "accepted" someones love if it is obvious for everyone except the victim how false the emotions are. If it happened to me, I would wish someone would work to take the fake feelings away and restore my old personality, not indulging my new, fake-me. I consider something like this as temporarily dying, with me either staying dead, or the old me being revived after the change is reversed. Our brain is capable of taking in input from the outside world, processing it and even reflecting on old experiences and memories to change its perception. Someone actively interfering with this process to his own ends is the most vile thing I could imagine, worse even then murder. Libluini fucked around with this message at 17:18 on Nov 17, 2014 |
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Nov 17, 2014 17:14
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I's like to make a brief point that I think people are making a pretty big assumption in conflating our feelings and our emotions. Feelings are just that, the experience or qualia or whatever that colours how we view the world, emotions are generally tied to the stories we tell ourselves about that world. I'd say that having feelings present without any of the memories, shared experience, etc. (the whole slipping on a rock and feeling intense feelings of love for the first person you see) would be very different from the feelings of love engendered by someone you've got a long and committed relationship with. Being able to ping someone's neural correlates for hatred when they see a particular person is at best going to produce irrational anger, which the victim may even acknowledge doesn't make a lot of sense. I don't think we could say he really hates the person that was picked out to trigger him. There's no reasoning or story we can put to it, strong feelings don't really capture what we mean when we talk about emotions. Emotions are part of how we engage with and understand the world, when they become simply something triggered in us by another agency then I'd say they're more a tool of control. The introduction of outside agency also does alter the situation drastically, at least in terms of how human beings perceive it. Something analagous would be someone getting struck by lightning vs. someone getting jabbed by someone else with a live wire. You could arge that the situations are identical and both equally natural but good luck getting a non-psychopath or what have you to agree on that. You can quite easily argue that our subjective experience is open to be messed with and manipulated but that isn't the same as saying that because the subjective experience is the same that the whole situation is the same. Unless you want to reject the whole concept of agency, in which case, yeah, we're into full on nihilism and you've managed to remove the notion of humanity from understanding the human experience and are probably on your way to declaring everything is just a few fundamental forces and I guess hello modern day Bishop Berkeley.
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Nov 18, 2014 05:49
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You can deny the possibility of acausal agency without going anywhere near nihilism. Even if your actions are all deterministic responses to outside stimuli, your past experiences and mental constructs will still alter the processing of those stimuli, and the stimuli will in turn alter your experiences and mental constructs. In the end your entirely deterministic decisions will still be determined by the complex interplay of your biological presets, upbringing, and life experiences — which is pretty meaningful. e: if someone showed me a comprehensive proof that I was a meat robot and I could only make one response to one particular situation at a given time, that I'd make the same exact choice every time if someone were to rewind time and run it again, I'd be totally cool with it. Hell, I'd be comforted. I like knowing that my decisions are constrained by my personality, beliefs, and experience! General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Nov 18, 2014 |
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Nov 18, 2014 06:01
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Is anyone in here actually a neuroscientist?
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Nov 18, 2014 18:20
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Yeah, kinda. I was in the NYU social neuro PhD program for a while but left to write. (So, I guess, not really at all!)
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Nov 18, 2014 18:54
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Philosophy PhD candidate that dropped out to do other things, so I try to stick to arguing about the terminology and whether you can really make the logical identification of neural corellates with subjective experience. I disagree with a lot of Bakker's espoused positions but one of the things I really like in the 2nd Apocalypse series is he does a good job of generally showing and not telling with it. Having Kelhus spend three paragraphs outlining why people are just meat computers and the terribleness of objective morality, etc. would be somewhat dull and, if you're used to reading actual academics, quite simplistic. Taking the ideas and crafting a world to show them off in is way more interesting even if I don't like the ideas.
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Nov 19, 2014 12:26
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Libluini posted:I always see our minds as this blindingly complicated mesh of different layers, working together. And the entirety of all those layers of consciousness, created by groups of synapses working together, is "us". Bakker is extremely specific about this, and any vague approximation just loses the point. For example, there are no "layers of consciousness". The problem is exactly that consciousness is only a tiny reflection of the actual process. It's a misrepresentation. You say that there are different aspects of consciousness, but the truth is that the little consciousness you perceive can be explained away. It's just not there AT ALL. Not even that one little bit. So it's not that you have a model that approximates what Bakker says, and that what Bakker says is extreme. What Bakker actually says is the opposite. Nor Bakker says "just lay down in the gutter". Because this would mean you give your consciousness credit for making that choice. You cannot make any choice because there's no choice at all to make. That's nihilism. Things go like that whether you want or not, whether you like it or not, whether you are aware or not. There's not a refusal to act, because there cannot be any refusal at all. Or even acceptance. quote:If we accept that your brain can be controlled by external stimuli This is another of the subtle points that is easily lost. It's not that the brain is "controlled by external stimuli". There's literally nothing internal to begin with. You are like a rock or a tree or a table. The brain is a physical thing. The way it reacts depends on what is around it and how it was built. It's all environment. The same way a wind will bend the blade of grass, then the environment affects the way the brain works. It sweeps through, and the brain does nothing to change this wind. There is a continuity between the external stuff and the internal stuff, because the point is: there's nothing internal. It's always external. What human beings did was draw a line, and arbitrarily decided that what was within the line was "internal". Science is simply proving that what we think is "sacred" and internal is instead and always has been external. There was never a dividing line to begin with, if not one that was arbitrary and illusory. A pretense of being different and special. Abalieno fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Nov 19, 2014 |
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Nov 19, 2014 21:33
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Abalieno posted:Bakker is extremely specific about this, and any vague approximation just loses the point. Yeah well Bakker is wrong, then.
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Nov 19, 2014 21:35
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Hahah, that's the goofiest misinterpretation of causal-closure monism. It's correct to say that there's no physical dividing line between 'internal' and 'external', but the mechanisms of the brain perform operations on input to produce output, which is why brains have adaptive value. They exist because they're able to change 'the wind', just as digestive systems exist because they're able to extract adaptively useful nutrients from input. People talk about this like it's some kind of big deal that should radically change our self-concept. In fact it's just elementary physics, surprising only if you come from a spiritual or otherwise dualist background. You're a behavior machine that accepts input and produces output, but since your internal states modify the output in a consequential way, it's still meaningful to discuss cognition and subjectivity - you just have to remember that like any other system, your brain's causal. What's more useful and novel to tell people is that many of the important systems in your brain aren't available to introspection, and we use post-hoc rationalization to explain many of our own actions. We can't provide effective inventories of why we behave the way we do. This makes us bad at predicting the actions of ourselves and others, and bad at making 'good' choices in a wide range of problems that challenge our cognitive heuristics. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 03:12
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I don't know... Obviously it's a pretty accurate picture from a scientific/physics perspective but I'm not entirely sold that it's a 'good' way of explaining or representing human experience. While worthwhile being aware of I don't, for example, think telling someone not to worry about choices they've made because really they're just a meat computer or that reconsidering a bad choice is just a sign of their biological computing mechanisms realigning or something would be a valuable contribution to them (valuable in the sense of improving their choices and general quality of life). The Bakker type perspective is definitely alluring in terms of giving a very neat causal story for any actions (along with the unspoken promise that anything we can't make sense of does fit into this picture, we just need to wait for the relevant technological development). I'm not convinced it's going to ultimately produce a perfectly explanatory model or even a satisfying one (I'm assuming that a perfect explanatory model is one that would give us a fully realised picture for all actions, 'internal' or 'external'). We are definitely a part of the world but I think it's a mistake to say, for example, that that means we are all part of objective reality and subjective reality is ad-hoc. It means rejecting that dichotomy in a way that, at least in terms of nomenclature, many monists don't really do. It may just be a terminology difference but it seems like a lot of people that buy into the scientist neuro-science thing do so by just saying (ultimately) physics explains everything we do and human experience is a big lie we tell ourselves. Also there's no such thing as lies or ourselves, we should just be talking in terms of quantum level force interactions.
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Nov 20, 2014 05:57
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The point is that telling someone they're a meat computer, while 100% objectively correct, has no bearing on their moral decisions or how they should think about their choices. The idea that monism somehow dovetails with antisocial behavior or permits sociopathy is superstition. Even in a provably deterministic clockwork world, there'd still be a place for telling other people to act correctly — and a place for feeling bad about misconduct, trying to do better, caring for people, all the other stock behaviors of the humanist approach. Traffic between deterministic minds can still alter their behavior. Physics explains everything, absolutely everything, including all of human subjectivity. There's no case to be made against this and no evidence for any other hypothesis. But this doesn't mean we don't exist or don't have any subjective experience or meaning: just that this subjective experience is the product of neural structures governed by the same physics as everything else, much like the computer programs we're using to communicate on a substrate of simple elements and electrons. And it's impossible to reduce everything we do to simple force interactions, because we're able to assign meaning to symbols, like language. You can't decrypt English by breaking a book of writing down into molecules or quanta. You need the cipher, the assignment of words to concepts. This cipher has been carried out by meat brains operating according to physical rules, but if you wanted to get it, you'd need to simulate the actions of those brains, not just look at the dead language on the page. You may be right that it's not a useful thing to tell people, separate from its 'objective' truth, and you may be right that we never retrieve a complete physical description of exactly how our subjective experience emerges from our neural architecture. I feel like I didn't respond to your point cogently. I agree that it's silly to call human experience a lie. It's a physical phenomenon of incredible complexity, and it's a phenomenon that clearly involves interior experience and the manipulation of symbols. e: after six neurotic edits to clarify points I feel like I should add that I hope I don't sound like an rear end in a top hat. General Battuta fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Nov 20, 2014 |
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Nov 20, 2014 06:28
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You really don't and I've had similar discussions with people that definitely are. I guess ultimately my argument, super simply, would be that the meat computer explanation of humanity is correct but not a full explanation. There are other, equally correct and useful ways of understanding ourselves. I guess my argument with Bakker would be that he accepts that the basic physicalist explanation is correct and so that's it. Like you said it's not functionally compatible with actually living life (like radical epistemic scepticism) but I get the impression Bakker sees that as pertly a fault on or part rather than a potential issue with his theory as the beginning and end of explanations.
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Nov 20, 2014 07:58
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Libluini posted:Yeah well Bakker is wrong, then. This is the weakest, most pointless way to engage in philosophy.
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Nov 20, 2014 10:20
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Boing posted:This is the weakest, most pointless way to engage in philosophy. My alternative answer was "I disagree with him." Besides, I could have just copied + pasted my original post as an answer, because everything I had to say about this point was in there. And I'm not budging on that, so a discussion with him was pointless anyway.
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Nov 20, 2014 12:14
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