First of all, the profits of oil companies(for example) are absolutely at the expense of everybody else(arguably, they are at the expense of everybody period). Not everything is about money.

Secondly, lots of exchanges happen where not both parties profit. Exchanges happen where neither party profits. Because the profit of an exchange is not always predictable, and there are also other factors that might influence decision making. I don’t profit from working in a sweatshop because the time and energy I spend doing it is worth much more than what I am paid. I still do it though, because the system is such that if I don’t do it, I die.

Profit for a business is simply the difference between cost of business and revenue.

Governments are competent when competency is necessary to serve their interests. Updating government websites isn’t usually their top priority or even a priority.

>Are you saying the most qualified/best people end up in the positions of power?

No. Profitability and being qualified aren’t the same thing, and it’s also more accurate to say organizations are put in power. Because if you have profit, you have money to throw around, and money is power. Additionally, as an individual, the only real way to get to the top in terms of how much money you have is by owning a large amount of a high-value company.

I didn’t say that a system existed that prevented all wars, genocides, and famines, I don’t know where you got that from.

No, capitalism has not existed since the first civilization. You’re making the common mistake of conflating capitalism with a market. Capitalism is the system of private ownership that separates the working class, those who make money by selling labor, from the owning class, those who make money by owning the means of production. Prior to around the 16 or 17-hundreds, it did not exist, and before then most of the countries where it originated were some variation of a feudal society.

But you’re kinda right with the Soviet Union thing. The Soviet Union was not capitalist in the same way a place like the United States is, but it was very similar. The key difference being that the owning class was united with the state, which allowed capitalist and state oppression to unite a lot more dramatically.

What would have been impossible?

Lots of empires were outwardly expansive. None of them took over the world like capitalism did, because their expansionist goals were motivated simply by power fantasies of their leaders.

Capitalist motivations are different because they apply to everybody in society, and whoever carries them out the best is automatically put into a position of power, so the society is quickly controlled by capitalist forces and becomes hyperfocused on capitalist interests and that doesn’t stop even when the people doing it die; they are just replaced with new capitalists.

That’s why so many elites in modern society are utter sociopaths; empathy gets in the way of profit a lot of the time and so if you have empathy there are people who will outcompete you and you won’t get to the top

Yeah but every other system would also not have colonized the entire planet through countless continuous genocides and centuries of exploitation.

AGI is probably the last trick capitalism will pull before it dies. Either that or climate change. I’m hoping it’s AGI, because that has the potential to actually be positive.

There are a lot of similarities. The profit motive of capitalism, and more recently(aka past 200 years) the requirement that companies grow to appease shareholders, is what has caused capitalism to spread itself and become the dominant global system. Now it can’t grow geographically anymore, so it’s been growing in other ways and it’s going to continue doing so until there are no resources left and the system, along with everything else on earth, collapses. AI gives me some hope because it offers an alternative way for capitalism to collapse that doesn’t ruin everything for everyone forever.

It’s the patriot act on steroids

No. Some bacteria can eat plastic but most can’t. On top of that, your body has lots and lots of bacteria in it already and eating yogurt doesn’t meaningfully increase that amount.

You can’t successfully address polarization without successfully addressing the root cause. It’s like trying to stop a flood from happening by pushing the water back. Polarization is happening because people are getting more and more unhappy and have wildly different ideas of how to address that. Which is why we’re really in a pickle: The thing people are being polarized around is the thing that must be addressed to end polarization.

That research makes all sorts of philosophical assumptions about consciousness. For example, even the idea that other humans are conscious at all is an assumption.

That doesn’t make it invalid, they’re necessary for the field of medicine if you want to come to any type of conclusion about how to minimize human suffering, which is the whole point of medicine.

But we’re not talking about medicine, we’re talking about philosophy, and those assumptions don’t hold any water in this context.

Our consciousness changes when our brain enters different physical states, even states that it hasn’t evolved to be in(such as those created through the use of psychoactive drugs). You can even remove chunks of the brain and, so long as it doesn’t kill the person, they can remain conscious, though their consciousness is altered. Even someone who is sleeping is conscious, though differently from being awake.

This is why I think consciousness is a property of all physical phenomena and not just of the brain - we know altered brains are still conscious.

Most physical phenomena don’t have the ability to collect sensory data or form memories or learn, which is what the brain has evolved to do, but, while there’s no evidence and no way to collect evidence of this, given the information we have about consciousness, it seems more intuitive that physical phenomena would generate some form of experiences than the alternative simply by way of being physical phenomena.

Maybe when you open a dresser the dresser ‘experiences’ itself being opened, in some sense. Maybe by changing the channel on the tv the TV senses the signal of the remote and has an instinctive response of changing its internal data, which it experiences.

Yes? How’re you gonna gather evidence for something as impossible to measure as consciousness

Well if that’s the case it’s kind of obvious. Faces selected to be presented as real by a human are more likely to be perceived by a human as real

It’s just part of my general knowledge of how GANs work I don’t have a source, I could be wrong

Yeah but when a GAN face diverges it is seen as a failure and the system learns from that. When a real face diverges it isn’t a failure it’s just a face

That kind of makes sense. Artificial faces are designed to look as much like real faces as possible. Real faces can diverge from what is typically seen as a ‘real’ face

I don’t know. As AI generated text becomes more and more coherent it could raise questions about how thought is produced. Of course, these AIs are not motivated to come up with new philosophy but rather to mimic the speedy patterns of other people. But it still takes more than just regurgitating data, it takes actual thought for a human to do that. If that can be machine-generated then what’s going on in our brains?