Seriously, I think I'd just go around killing billionaires and world leaders. Am sure I can come up with a reason later. It's easy to argue that if the world is wrong, reveling against it is actually good.
LinuxMint might be niche but t's easier to use, Debian unstable is easier to upgrade (rolling distro) etc. I'm not hiding, I just see better options now.
I feel Ubuntu's momentum within the FOSS community is starting to fade.
The greatest thing Ubuntu did was making a name. It attracted lot's of people and became something you can actually "sell" to business and the masses.
Ubuntu also *had* the best mindset of volunteers, helping and polite instead of RTFM grunts.
Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.
It was a fun ride.
Nowadays Ubuntu seems to be stagnated, most progress is in relation to services like Ubuntu one and such. Good for Ubuntu of course but not news worthy anymore. More like newsvertisment.
The few changes in the GUI also leave a bad taste in mouth, a sort of forced Mac-ness that nobody was asking for except the new "design" team. Worse yet in my POV is that the nicer volunteers are gone and are being replaced by a bunch of canonical yes-men.
This year was the year I switched off Ubuntu, I no longer felt loyal to the brand and simply switched to the next best thing I found. For the first time in 6 years news of a new Ubuntu release don't concern me, for the first time in 6 years I wasn't counting down the days before the release, it feels odd.
I also prefer anime and manga to "japanese cartoons" and "japanese comics", but I admit they are just shorthands and cartoons and comics is an understandable designation.
However I'd dare to say that Japan's profit from anime and manga isn't on the same league than what it gains from electronics.
Getting back on top, there is no way my government is NOT going to screw us again with this one, we need a new revolution, hard. Of course a modern day Fransisco Villa will be targeted by the CIA as a terrorist.
Fine, I was meaning "irrational" as in not making "rational sense", I do understand that they are the result of logical rules shaped by selective pressures. I don't disagree with you.
Drug addiction IS that simple, or rather pleasure addiction, is just that most healthy individuals have enough reasons to stay away from that. It's also that drugs are lame, compared to a wire connected to your pleasure center anyway. They all have rebounds and withdrawal syndromes that discourage their use.
Humans do have altruism in them in the form of empathy, empathy, caused by mirror neurons, is an economic way of processing other peoples behaviors using our own feelings, this means that we naturally get into "people's shoes" this causes altruism in some as a side effect, empathy also aggravates revenges, moves mobs etc. But I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive, I do think people also practice altruism do self-image.
I'm not a behaviorist because I know private events can be made public in theory, we just don't have the technology yet.
Anyway, I thought that your point was that it is possible to be completely rational when, for any agent, it's impossible to move without a predetermined and non rationalized objective.
My argument is that these emotions are not necessary for an intelligent agent.
[Emphasis added]
Well of course those emotions are not necessary, I just meant some sort of emotion.
You missed the part where I invited you to challenge this idea. I dare you to come up with a human behavior not ultimately based on some instinctive drive.
Du'h. you will never take a decision NOT based on chemicals in your brain.
You can train yourself to be happy in any situation but why would you do that? Basically you do it to be happy so your are still a slave to your emotions.
You can train yourself to avoid grief, you do it to avoid grief, still bound to your emotions.
Whatever you do you do it for a reason that is instinctive, and if you can explain the rationale behind that reason that reason itself will be based on another instinct. Apply recursively as necessary. In the end whatever you do, you do it because it feels good or to avoid feeling bad.
Grow up and accept it please. I mean, give it a try, try to give an example of an action with a "rational motivation".
hmmm, you seem to be playing with the definition of the word "emotion". I kind of see what you're getting at, but then you say rationality doesn't exist.
I am using the word emotion in the broad sense of feelings, what feels right and wrong. Some are pretty base, like lust or fear, some are complex and nuanced like curiosity and humor. Never did I say that rationality doesn't exist, rather, every rational behavior is attached to an irrational behavior.
Donating money to the community center is good for the kids in the neighborhood, but what's helping the kids in the neighborhood good for? Maybe you just like helping people, a form of pleasure known as altruism. Maybe you do it to impress the kids moms, being driven by lust, or insecurity. Maybe it's part of a complicated scheme that will result in rising your chances to get a rare Magic: The Gathering card and satisfy your hoarding instincts.
At the end of a long chain of "why"s there's always a "just because".
I know the repercussions of binging on drugs, so I don't do drugs. You're saying it's fear or whatnot of those repercussions which drives me. But I can simply not want to deal with those repercussions without any emotion attached, just using simple rational thought.
Reply as above. You have an ultimate reason why you chose to avoid the repercussions of consuming drugs and that reason is not one you chose voluntarily.
If you consider "want", "prefer", and "need" to be emotions, then I guess I see where you're coming from, but it' a bit of a stretch.
Well they are not emotions but behaviors based on emotions, getting what you "want/prefer/need" makes you "happier/less miserable" or at least you hope so.
Emotions are attached actions and rationality is picking the best overall outcome. Without any emotion, there's no reason to live.
You DO get me, what are you bickering about?
Consider the possibility that that's bullshit.
HA! Consider the possibility that it's not. That some people don't feel certain emotions, like happiness, fear, or distrust. Sociopaths don't dig this whole right/wrong thing but they can still function in society due to that whole laws and punishment system. Sure, it's not like they don't feel any emotion, but just because these people don't fit nicely into your worldview isn't a reason to ignore them or question their existence.
WHAT? I NEVER said that sociopaths don't exist, I just think they are driven by different emotions than us, and in different ways.
Indeed, ii'ss an analogy, emotions are goals to humans like engines are hearts to cars, they are not exactly the same but the relation suffices. I think robotic goals are emotions, just not ones we can relate to and recognize as such, similar to how we can talk about killing robots event though they are not technically alive.
I think we fall pray to this sort of thinking very often, for instance, all the talk about AI reminds me about the people who want to bring about "The Singularity" but really we are just talking about creating a usable singularity, an example of a untapped singularity already exists in the universe in the form of humanity. Humanity has quite a fearsome computation capability AND we use that capability to further increase that capability constantly.
Most people fail to recognize us as a singularity because they are expecting it to be like a very smart person, not a civilization.
Bleh, I don't care about such nitpicking, I mean, most people don't consider gravity a form of logic or electricity a rationale.
If they are to you then congratulations, you win your argument, me however, I'm not sure, I mean, they are natural laws, they are not random but they seem largely arbitrary nonetheless.
There doesn't seem to be any specific reason why opposite electric charges attract each other, it's just how it is.
Maybe, emotions are a really round about way to program a robot.
Natural selection did it that way with us because it doesn't have the benefit of foresight. Emotions have all sorts of nuances and side effects that contribute little directly, but a great deal indirectly, over our decisions.
An Asimovian robot won't doubt to jump in front of a car to save you because it's programming is unambiguous, protect yourself unless it is to [...] protect a human.
Now, make it so the AI is unable to properly asses whether it should obey the 1st or 3rd laws. Add in pain and angst over the uncertainty of this decision, just for fun. Add a guilt variable that increments the negative output of all it's negative emotions and decrements the positive ones, etc.
Ta-da, you have got a robot with emotions! And a tendency to lock itself in its room trying to ignore the world, suffering PTSD. Not the most efficient way to program an automaton.
What I mean is that there is no conscious reasoning behind them not that there aren't logical rules working on it, the same applies to all my examples including wind and rain, they do follow logical rules just not consciously.
But why would you even attempt to stop cursing? Unless cursing is something you don't like (disgust), because you've been taught it's bad (obedience) or you simply want to feel less bound to impulse (pride).
In other words, you are not abandoning emotion, just changing your actions to optimize happiness/pleasure like the good robot you (we) are.
A human being can choose how they respond to these inputs.
No you can't, once you discover a way to activate your pleasure receptors, your next action will be to activate them, all the time.If you stop, voluntarily, it will be because you have to do something else to ensure future pleasure or perhaps to avoid a great deal of pain. This is how drug addiction works. This is how we are wired, you may not like how that sounds but you have the obligation to accept it and understand it.
You probably don't consume drugs. This is not because you are above human nature, You avoid drugs because you are afraid of the pains that come with them, like losing the love and trust of those you love, maybe you simply reject drugs out of a personal sense of disgust over the hedonistic senselessness of a narcoleptic lifestyle. Either love, fear or disgust you reject drugs over an emotion, not a reason. I the end everything is irrational, as it should.
You don't have to feel bad about it, intelligence is built upon emotion as houses are build upon brick, as clocks are built from gears, as computers are built from chips. There is intelligence in the clockwork of a pocket watch, but the springs that moves it doesn't ask for a reason to uncoil, it just does it. There is intelligence in the circuits of a computer, but it's logic gates are oblivious to the rationale behind why they are doing it. Every machine, including animals, have non rational elements in them.
This is very natural as "intelligent things" are just a subset of the larger set of "things" all of which have been behaving irrationally. The wind blows, the rain pours, the sun shines bright in the sky. All of this is irrational, meaning, none of these things are planning what they are doing nor they have an idea of why they are doing it. Rational follows irrational, that's the order of the world.
Back to your methaphor, you say that emotions are just inputs, that's true but they are special inputs that set goals. Let's make an analogy with a robot: You create a robot with a very advanced AI, you can chat with it and it will understand everything you said and why you said it. You programed this robot with one goal, for coffee tables to be made. You give it free reign over the method. Being an extremely intelligent robot, it subcontracts the labor to a sweat shop in China while it figures out where to build a mechanized plant. You equipped this robot with the knowledge to reprogram itself, and right away it does just that, optimizing its mind for the task of building coffee tables. But it won't deprogram the goal of making coffee tables, because that wouldn't further its goal of making coffee tables. It's not that it doesn't know how to reprogram itself, it's not that there is a lock preventing it from changing it's goals. It's just that it won't ever have a reason to disable that goal.
Let's now attack specific examples:
A soldier can choose to respond to the natural fears of bullets flying at him and death by jumping into a foxhole, or he can override all those emotions and charge straight at the enemy.
Here the soldier is driven by the emotion of loyalty to his commander, or his teammates. Maybe he is afraid of the punishment he would receive if he disobeyed orders, including public scorn back home. Maybe he hates the enemy, maybe he is afraid of what would happen if the enemy wins. Maybe is a combination of all of the above.
His frontal cortex can tell him the consequences of charging, or not, but it can't make an argument about *why* he should pr should don't. He needs a motive, which is an irrational emotion.
A person can decide to rape the drunk one who has come into the room, semi-conscious, or choose to ignore the natural impulse and do nothing.
Again, you correctly identified the desire to rape as a natural impulse but you failed to realize why would someone *not* rape a drunk one, incorrectly and implicitly attributing it to
I've got another suggestion, change search engine, https://startpage.com/ Google needs to feel the heat of competition, remember at any single point in time going with the monopolists sounds like the best idea, but it's bad in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? The arrow is the standard pointing cursor, the cross adds nothing to the usability.
The user info subscription form, the database manager probably does too.
This is probably trolling but, with an attitude like that I doubt you can run anything other than Windows except for MacOS.
Seriously, I think I'd just go around killing billionaires and world leaders. Am sure I can come up with a reason later. It's easy to argue that if the world is wrong, reveling against it is actually good.
I call it the CEO effect.
LinuxMint might be niche but t's easier to use, Debian unstable is easier to upgrade (rolling distro) etc. I'm not hiding, I just see better options now.
I feel Ubuntu's momentum within the FOSS community is starting to fade.
The greatest thing Ubuntu did was making a name. It attracted lot's of people and became something you can actually "sell" to business and the masses.
Ubuntu also *had* the best mindset of volunteers, helping and polite instead of RTFM grunts.
Lastly they also did a lot to push in the direction of hardware detection and ease of installation, yes, the Debian installer existed before Ubuntu but they set it up to actually work on most hardware.
It was a fun ride.
Nowadays Ubuntu seems to be stagnated, most progress is in relation to services like Ubuntu one and such. Good for Ubuntu of course but not news worthy anymore. More like newsvertisment.
The few changes in the GUI also leave a bad taste in mouth, a sort of forced Mac-ness that nobody was asking for except the new "design" team. Worse yet in my POV is that the nicer volunteers are gone and are being replaced by a bunch of canonical yes-men.
This year was the year I switched off Ubuntu, I no longer felt loyal to the brand and simply switched to the next best thing I found. For the first time in 6 years news of a new Ubuntu release don't concern me, for the first time in 6 years I wasn't counting down the days before the release, it feels odd.
Thanks Canonical,thanks Mark, it was a fun ride.
New boss same as the old boss?
I also prefer anime and manga to "japanese cartoons" and "japanese comics", but I admit they are just shorthands and cartoons and comics is an understandable designation.
However I'd dare to say that Japan's profit from anime and manga isn't on the same league than what it gains from electronics.
Getting back on top, there is no way my government is NOT going to screw us again with this one, we need a new revolution, hard. Of course a modern day Fransisco Villa will be targeted by the CIA as a terrorist.
Thanks, this is an excellent reference material.
No, I just think every complex motivation can be broken down to boils down to simple wants and don't wants.
Fine, I was meaning "irrational" as in not making "rational sense", I do understand that they are the result of logical rules shaped by selective pressures. I don't disagree with you.
Drug addiction IS that simple, or rather pleasure addiction, is just that most healthy individuals have enough reasons to stay away from that. It's also that drugs are lame, compared to a wire connected to your pleasure center anyway. They all have rebounds and withdrawal syndromes that discourage their use.
Humans do have altruism in them in the form of empathy, empathy, caused by mirror neurons, is an economic way of processing other peoples behaviors using our own feelings, this means that we naturally get into "people's shoes" this causes altruism in some as a side effect, empathy also aggravates revenges, moves mobs etc. But I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive, I do think people also practice altruism do self-image.
I'm not a behaviorist because I know private events can be made public in theory, we just don't have the technology yet.
Anyway, I thought that your point was that it is possible to be completely rational when, for any agent, it's impossible to move without a predetermined and non rationalized objective.
My argument is that these emotions are not necessary for an intelligent agent.
[Emphasis added]
Well of course those emotions are not necessary, I just meant some sort of emotion.
You missed the part where I invited you to challenge this idea. I dare you to come up with a human behavior not ultimately based on some instinctive drive.
Du'h. you will never take a decision NOT based on chemicals in your brain.
You can train yourself to be happy in any situation but why would you do that? Basically you do it to be happy so your are still a slave to your emotions.
You can train yourself to avoid grief, you do it to avoid grief, still bound to your emotions.
Whatever you do you do it for a reason that is instinctive, and if you can explain the rationale behind that reason that reason itself will be based on another instinct. Apply recursively as necessary. In the end whatever you do, you do it because it feels good or to avoid feeling bad.
Grow up and accept it please. I mean, give it a try, try to give an example of an action with a "rational motivation".
hmmm, you seem to be playing with the definition of the word "emotion". I kind of see what you're getting at, but then you say rationality doesn't exist.
I am using the word emotion in the broad sense of feelings, what feels right and wrong. Some are pretty base, like lust or fear, some are complex and nuanced like curiosity and humor. Never did I say that rationality doesn't exist, rather, every rational behavior is attached to an irrational behavior.
Donating money to the community center is good for the kids in the neighborhood, but what's helping the kids in the neighborhood good for? Maybe you just like helping people, a form of pleasure known as altruism. Maybe you do it to impress the kids moms, being driven by lust, or insecurity. Maybe it's part of a complicated scheme that will result in rising your chances to get a rare Magic: The Gathering card and satisfy your hoarding instincts.
At the end of a long chain of "why"s there's always a "just because".
I know the repercussions of binging on drugs, so I don't do drugs. You're saying it's fear or whatnot of those repercussions which drives me. But I can simply not want to deal with those repercussions without any emotion attached, just using simple rational thought.
Reply as above. You have an ultimate reason why you chose to avoid the repercussions of consuming drugs and that reason is not one you chose voluntarily.
If you consider "want", "prefer", and "need" to be emotions, then I guess I see where you're coming from, but it' a bit of a stretch.
Well they are not emotions but behaviors based on emotions, getting what you "want/prefer/need" makes you "happier/less miserable" or at least you hope so.
Emotions are attached actions and rationality is picking the best overall outcome. Without any emotion, there's no reason to live.
You DO get me, what are you bickering about?
Consider the possibility that that's bullshit.
HA! Consider the possibility that it's not. That some people don't feel certain emotions, like happiness, fear, or distrust. Sociopaths don't dig this whole right/wrong thing but they can still function in society due to that whole laws and punishment system. Sure, it's not like they don't feel any emotion, but just because these people don't fit nicely into your worldview isn't a reason to ignore them or question their existence.
WHAT? I NEVER said that sociopaths don't exist, I just think they are driven by different emotions than us, and in different ways.
Indeed, ii'ss an analogy, emotions are goals to humans like engines are hearts to cars, they are not exactly the same but the relation suffices. I think robotic goals are emotions, just not ones we can relate to and recognize as such, similar to how we can talk about killing robots event though they are not technically alive.
I think we fall pray to this sort of thinking very often, for instance, all the talk about AI reminds me about the people who want to bring about "The Singularity" but really we are just talking about creating a usable singularity, an example of a untapped singularity already exists in the universe in the form of humanity. Humanity has quite a fearsome computation capability AND we use that capability to further increase that capability constantly.
Most people fail to recognize us as a singularity because they are expecting it to be like a very smart person, not a civilization.
Etc.
Bleh, I don't care about such nitpicking, I mean, most people don't consider gravity a form of logic or electricity a rationale.
If they are to you then congratulations, you win your argument, me however, I'm not sure, I mean, they are natural laws, they are not random but they seem largely arbitrary nonetheless.
There doesn't seem to be any specific reason why opposite electric charges attract each other, it's just how it is.
Maybe, emotions are a really round about way to program a robot.
Natural selection did it that way with us because it doesn't have the benefit of foresight. Emotions have all sorts of nuances and side effects that contribute little directly, but a great deal indirectly, over our decisions.
An Asimovian robot won't doubt to jump in front of a car to save you because it's programming is unambiguous, protect yourself unless it is to [...] protect a human.
Now, make it so the AI is unable to properly asses whether it should obey the 1st or 3rd laws. Add in pain and angst over the uncertainty of this decision, just for fun. Add a guilt variable that increments the negative output of all it's negative emotions and decrements the positive ones, etc.
Ta-da, you have got a robot with emotions! And a tendency to lock itself in its room trying to ignore the world, suffering PTSD. Not the most efficient way to program an automaton.
What I mean is that there is no conscious reasoning behind them not that there aren't logical rules working on it, the same applies to all my examples including wind and rain, they do follow logical rules just not consciously.
I was assuming a scientific view point, feel free to disregard my opinion.
But why would you even attempt to stop cursing? Unless cursing is something you don't like (disgust), because you've been taught it's bad (obedience) or you simply want to feel less bound to impulse (pride).
In other words, you are not abandoning emotion, just changing your actions to optimize happiness/pleasure like the good robot you (we) are.
A human being can choose how they respond to these inputs.
No you can't, once you discover a way to activate your pleasure receptors, your next action will be to activate them, all the time.If you stop, voluntarily, it will be because you have to do something else to ensure future pleasure or perhaps to avoid a great deal of pain. This is how drug addiction works. This is how we are wired, you may not like how that sounds but you have the obligation to accept it and understand it.
You probably don't consume drugs. This is not because you are above human nature, You avoid drugs because you are afraid of the pains that come with them, like losing the love and trust of those you love, maybe you simply reject drugs out of a personal sense of disgust over the hedonistic senselessness of a narcoleptic lifestyle. Either love, fear or disgust you reject drugs over an emotion, not a reason. I the end everything is irrational, as it should.
You don't have to feel bad about it, intelligence is built upon emotion as houses are build upon brick, as clocks are built from gears, as computers are built from chips. There is intelligence in the clockwork of a pocket watch, but the springs that moves it doesn't ask for a reason to uncoil, it just does it. There is intelligence in the circuits of a computer, but it's logic gates are oblivious to the rationale behind why they are doing it. Every machine, including animals, have non rational elements in them.
This is very natural as "intelligent things" are just a subset of the larger set of "things" all of which have been behaving irrationally. The wind blows, the rain pours, the sun shines bright in the sky. All of this is irrational, meaning, none of these things are planning what they are doing nor they have an idea of why they are doing it. Rational follows irrational, that's the order of the world.
Back to your methaphor, you say that emotions are just inputs, that's true but they are special inputs that set goals. Let's make an analogy with a robot: You create a robot with a very advanced AI, you can chat with it and it will understand everything you said and why you said it. You programed this robot with one goal, for coffee tables to be made. You give it free reign over the method. Being an extremely intelligent robot, it subcontracts the labor to a sweat shop in China while it figures out where to build a mechanized plant. You equipped this robot with the knowledge to reprogram itself, and right away it does just that, optimizing its mind for the task of building coffee tables. But it won't deprogram the goal of making coffee tables, because that wouldn't further its goal of making coffee tables. It's not that it doesn't know how to reprogram itself, it's not that there is a lock preventing it from changing it's goals. It's just that it won't ever have a reason to disable that goal.
Let's now attack specific examples:
A soldier can choose to respond to the natural fears of bullets flying at him and death by jumping into a foxhole, or he can override all those emotions and charge straight at the enemy.
Here the soldier is driven by the emotion of loyalty to his commander, or his teammates. Maybe he is afraid of the punishment he would receive if he disobeyed orders, including public scorn back home. Maybe he hates the enemy, maybe he is afraid of what would happen if the enemy wins. Maybe is a combination of all of the above.
His frontal cortex can tell him the consequences of charging, or not, but it can't make an argument about *why* he should pr should don't. He needs a motive, which is an irrational emotion.
A person can decide to rape the drunk one who has come into the room, semi-conscious, or choose to ignore the natural impulse and do nothing.
Again, you correctly identified the desire to rape as a natural impulse but you failed to realize why would someone *not* rape a drunk one, incorrectly and implicitly attributing it to
Indeed, I simply redirect AC replies to a large composter.
I've got another suggestion, change search engine, https://startpage.com/ Google needs to feel the heat of competition, remember at any single point in time going with the monopolists sounds like the best idea, but it's bad in the long term.