/hobby/ - Hobby

>>41083
This but unironically
You're just racist

>>41110
>You're just racist
No u

>>41109
>Netflix butchered the show, fucktard
Aight whatever you say pal

The anticommunism is kinda lame but at this point expected. In general, the production value was good, the dialogue was OK nothing to complain about, the acting was generally OK except a few specifc actors/characters. The series was entertaining in general.

However, nothing really stood out. There's not much moments that stood out that make you shocked, impressed, thoughtful, or anything really. There was a lot of opportunity for them but the framing wasn't there. The series also doesn't have a climax or resolution at any moment, again, despite there being opportunities for these to happen.

My favorite thing was seeing the actress of Star Trek, Keiko. It was a really nice surprise. I thought I recognized her and looked her up. I thought it was really funny because she's playing an ethnically Chinese woman, but I thought she kinda looked Japanese. Then I looked her up, and indeed she played an ethnically Japanese woman on star trek. And I thought, yeah, racist mofos thought I wouldn't recognize a Japanese woman playing a Chinese role. But, turns out she's actually ethnically Chinese in real life. Lmao.

>>41044
>This is like the author's belief that China would face problems if it became more democratic or had softer leaders.
>It's a reminder of the dangers of being weak in the face of stronger forces.

>US fascistic brain reactionary fiction
<get out of here with that made up nonsense
>Chinese fascistic brain reactionary fiction
<omfg all comrades must consoom this slop right fucking now!
You gays really are just redditors latching onto popular trends, except its kinda le communist adjacent thing!

>>41086
the guy was basically a mix of castro and chavez, ofc he was awesome.
His disgrace didnt make any fucking sense though, because its the exact same kind of MAD plan that save them in the end (and the fact it was revealed didnt change shit). Only sad thing was it didnt actually work.

>>41095
>>41096
filtered

>>41095
HAHAHAHA I KNEW EXACTLY WHICH BOOK THIS WOULD BE

I didn't watch it and hate it because I saw an ad billboard for it in public.
I know that doesn't answer your post.

>>41095
85% of the book could be smeared in feces and it would still be a masterpiece. The central plot is so deeply unsettling that once you see it, it stains everything you see forever

>Competence without comprehension is the rule, not the exception
>What if sentience is maladaptive
>What if, even though life seems destined to unfold into ever increasing complexity, sentience is a wasteful fluke that will be imminently corrected

>>41114
Watch the series lol. It's very anticommunist. Read the thread comrade. I don't disagree with you though. We're condemned to consoom. Everything we think, do, anything we even consider doing, is mediated by the logic of capitalism. We consoom socialism and anarchism like a product. That's the curse of capitalism. We can't avoid it.
>>41120
>What if, even though life seems destined to unfold into ever increasing complexity, sentience is a wasteful fluke that will be imminently corrected
Recently saw the mediocre movie "Downsizing". It has this reflection at some point. IMO it's not only wrong, it reflects a liberal understanding of evolution, which is inherently racist, colonial, teleological, and less correct.

I tried watching the Chinese version because burger remakes ruin the original and China has some really good film directors, better than Europe in recent decades.

But the cinematography in this show is so trite, overdrawn and pointless that it just makes you more and more annoyed. Most sci-fi series are like that anyway.

>>41121
>We're condemned to consoom. Everything we think, do, anything we even consider doing, is mediated by the logic of capitalism. We consoom socialism and anarchism like a product. That's the curse of capitalism. We can't avoid it.
looks like religiocucks are right and this world must be rejected

>>41123
Capitalism must be rejected.

Religious cucks throughout all of history suffer from "there is no alternative" (maybe it's the fatalism), which is why they end up rejecting the world as such. The few exceptions that tried to create a better society on this world weren't cucks to begin with and they were hunted down by the church.

>>41123
Religion isn't immune. You literally can't exist outside this logic.

>>41125
>the idea of an afterlife that can be dated as far back as ancient egypt is actually just a product of capitalism
if everything is capitalism you might as well accept it

just watched some of the 1st episode. this is gay and retarded and i hate drama

>>41126
First step in creating viable praxis. How is this news to you?

>Recently saw the mediocre movie "Downsizing". It has this reflection at some point. IMO it's not only wrong, it reflects a liberal understanding of evolution, which is inherently racist, colonial, teleological, and less correct
No idea about Downsizing. I haven't seen it.
>reflects a liberal understanding of evolution,
If you're talking about Blindsight, you're simply wrong. Since you didn't really give an argument, all I can say is that Watts is a marine biology PhD. Also I'm a biochem PhD and I've had ecologist, immunologist, ornithologist friends read the book and no one ever criticized a poor understanding of evolution.

The whole point of Blindsight is asking the question: "what is consciousness GOOD for?" and then proposing a spooky answer: nothing. It's obvious to see how circumstances could select for intelligent creatures, it's NOT obvious that these creatures necessarily have to be conscious. Blindsight depicts a situation where it tuns out that consciousness is a computationally wasteful phenomenon, and humanity is akin to flightless island birds that will be promptly exterminated if predators wash up on its shores. Even aside from aliums, the problem is that competition among humans and transhumans would inevitably cull consciousness.

>But consciousness has GOT to be good for something! Otherwise it wouldn't have evolved!

If you say this, then YOU don't understand evolution

>>41129
>If you say this, then YOU don't understand evolution
But you're the one making this claim, comparing it to flightless birds. What is consciousness good for implies there's some teleological design going on. Consciousness just developed. Whether it is expensive or not is irrelevant. Whether it will lead to the destruction of humanity is also irrelevant. It also implies that consciousness is necessarily leading to destructive results. Completely unjustified.

Consciousness might be akin to a birds mating dance or an antelope's long anus rimming tongue. It just is. Whether it stops contributing to the continuation of the species is yet another question. Species don't have to continue. Surviving as a species isn't inherently good, nor bad.

As for the question of what consciousness is good for, here apparently good means how much it contributes to the reproduction of the species, well if you specifically attribute the success of the homo sapiens to consciousness, then that already answers the question. Otherwise then nothing. E. Coli is wildly successful and doesn't have a consciousness.

The entire argument just seems spooky as hell.

>>41128
>first step to ending capitalism is giving up
what did they mean by this?

>>41131
Accepting something is true doesn't mean you can't change it or you've given up ;)

Peace through Strength
Surrender to Power
Kraft durch Freude

>>41130
>But you're the one making this claim, comparing it to flightless birds.
It's not a claim, it's an unsettling "what-if" in a sci-fi horror novel. It's an interesting possibility to consider

>What is consciousness good for implies there's some teleological design going on.
Nah, that kind of phraseology is merely short-hand, frequently used among biologists with the implicit understanding that everyone knows what's actually going on. It's an abbreviation, like how chemists say things like "that ring-system wants to flip". If two biologists were discussing what a cow's rumin was good for and you walked in with that "ayckschually thats teleological, its not good or bad for anything", you would reveal yourself to be uninformed. They know that, it's just convenient to phrase it that way.

>Whether it is expensive or not is irrelevant. Whether it will lead to the destruction of humanity is also irrelevant. It also implies that consciousness is necessarily leading to destructive results. Completely unjustified.
That's not the premise. You're arguing against some other thing, I don't know if that's what Downsizing is about, but I'm talking about Blindsight. Based on what you're describing, seems like Blindsight is completely unrelated.

Blindsight argues precisely that..
>Consciousness might be akin to a birds mating dance or an antelope's long anus rimming tongue. It just is. Whether it stops contributing to the continuation of the species is yet another question. Species don't have to continue. Surviving as a species isn't inherently good, nor bad.
.. that this might be true, and that it would suck if it was. I thought you actually got it, but then you continued with this:

>As for the question of what consciousness is good for, here apparently good means how much it contributes to the reproduction of the species, well if you specifically attribute the success of the homo sapiens to consciousness, then that already answers the question.
No it fucking doesn't, you're contradicting yourself. Consciousness could have little to no adaptive value. Yes, INTELLIGENCE can be obviously adaptive depending on the niche etc, but these are not mutually inclusive. You don't need to be conscious to be intelligent.

Plenty of traits contribute nothing, they just exist because there hasn't been enough selection pressure to delete them. This is manifestly obvious on a molecular level (neutral genetic mutations), and much harder to unambiguously identify on a macro level - though examples could be things like mammalian blood being red (which is simply the color of the heme complex that binds oxygen).

Blindsight proposes: what if consciousness is just like the phenomenon of blood being red? Just some happy non-functional coincidence, some consequence of the route selected through our descendents. It argues that, if this is true, consciousness would inevitably be weeded out if there was some selection pressure against it - just like how, if (for some reason) animals having red blood became a problem, they would eventually stop having red blood.

In the scenario depicted by the novel, it's not that consciousness "destroys itself". The book asks the question "what if it contributes nothing" and takes it to the logical conclusion: if consciousness is a wasteful process (i.e. it's maladaptive, i.e. non-conscious intelligence is better than conscious intelligence), then consciousness will be optimized out of existence if it faces selection pressure. In the book, the role of the aliumns is to give readers an example of what unconscious intelligence might look like. The selection pressure happens among humans themselves, as the different groups/factions of transhumans compete. Baseline humans are unceremoniously punted out of existence, and the ensuing arms race leads to unconscious intelligences becoming the norm (and it's implied that it's the norm throughout the universe, as indicated by the aliumns).

But again: it's a SCARY SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL. It's not claiming to reveal some grand truth. The central question is interesting.

>>41044
gigacringe

>>41130
>Consciousness might be akin to a birds mating dance
on the right track
>>41129
>>41134
Watts understanding of human evolution is lacking. His analysis of human consciousness and culture vulgarly focuses on individual fitness, while missing the bigger picture. For example, if we applied his mode of analysis to peacocks, we would have to conclude that the lavish feathers of the males also serve no purpose. Of course this is not the case, the feathers ensure that females can select only the strongest males, who can thrive despite their handicap, for mating. Thus an adaptation, that lowers the fitness of individuals, can increase the overall fitness of a species.
Humans have ridiculously large brains, that take a very long time to fully develop and need a lot of calories. Individual family units of one mother and one father wouldn't be able to raise children on their own in nature, especially because the mother won't be able to contribute during the later stages of her pregnancy and the period after birth. Our species can't reproduce itself without large support networks, but this naturally comes with the massive contradiction of trusting unrelated members of your species to care for your offspring. A less altruistic individual could abuse the support network by accepting as much aid as possible while contributing little or nothing. In the long run these egoists would be more successful at reproducing themselves and cause the collapse of the network. To combat this trend our species evolved ritualistic behaviors. Humans are predisposed to develop complex social interactions, that involve either the expenditure of energy (dances, pilgrimages), the destruction of material wealth (sacrifice) or even mutilations of the own body (piercings, scarifications, head binding), which in turn are justified through a common social fiction (ideology, religion). Those who are willing to lower their own fitness because of a social fiction, can be also trusted to aid others. Those who refuse to take part, can be excluded and kept from passing on their genes. All of this requires language, symbolic thought and a theory of mind, which again requires self-awareness/consciousness.
This is why the birthday analogy in Blindsight pissed me off. Watts missed the whole point of rituals and culture.
I still enjoyed the book, it is a great first contact story.

>>41134
Ahhh, okok, got you. Then we're on the same page. Yeah that does sound interesting.

>>41136
>Watts understanding of human evolution is lacking.
What absolute fucking arrogance to say this about a professional marine biologist. Reading this line, I knew that the wall of text would be one of two things: either an insightful critique by another knowledgeable expert, or a comically over-confident screed by someone whose entire understanding of evolution was absorbed from a handful of undergrad lectures. What a disappointing post.

I will never understand what is it about the concept of evolution that leads laypeople to arrogantly think their casual encounters with the topic qualify them to opine so confidently about it.

>Meteorologist discusses a hypothetical weather phenomenon
>It's not consistent with my understanding of weather
>Clearly the meteorologist doesn't understand weather!

That's you. You need to have some humility you little shit, the fact that your understanding of evolution contradicts a goddamn biologist should have led you to question YOUR understanding, not the biologist's.

>His analysis of human consciousness and culture vulgarly focuses on individual fitness, while missing the bigger picture. For example, if we applied his mode of analysis to peacocks, we would have to conclude that the lavish feathers of the males also serve no purpose. Of course this is not the case, the feathers ensure that females can select only the strongest males, who can thrive despite their handicap, for mating. Thus an adaptation, that lowers the fitness of individuals, can increase the overall fitness of a species.

Absolutely retarded 1st year undergrad patronizing drivel. What incredible arrogance, to bring up literally the most cliche intro textbook example possible. You seriously think he hasn't heard of inclusive fitness? Let me pull the rug from under your feet: that example is an over-simplified toy we give to you babies to waddle in when introducing the concept of inclusive fitness. It's not even neccessarily true that the feathers "ensure that females can select only the strongest male". You belie your ignorance here, because there's literally a plethora of other valid explanations and no uniformly accepted theory. I don't fault you for not knowing this, but I do fault you for being so fucking arrogant about it.

>Humans have ridiculously large brains, that take a very long time to fully develop and need a lot of calories. Individual family units of one mother and one father wouldn't be able to raise children on their own in nature, especially because the mother won't be able to contribute during the later stages of her pregnancy and the period after birth. Our species can't reproduce itself without large support networks, but this naturally comes with the massive contradiction of trusting unrelated members of your species to care for your offspring. A less altruistic individual could abuse the support network by accepting as much aid as possible while contributing little or nothing. In the long run these egoists would be more successful at reproducing themselves and cause the collapse of the network.

…AND you've got piss poor reading comprehension. I'm surprised you're so confident about your Biology 101 notes, because I doubt you were a very attentive student. You're correctly describing real reproductive challenges faced by humans, as well as many other species. But none of them have anything to do with consciousness. These are issues that any social organism contends with, including fucking ants and deer. Stop reading this right now, and go type kin selection into wikipedia. Don't come back until you've read the article top to bottom.

>All of this requires language, symbolic thought and a theory of mind,
(Not neccessarily)
>which again requires self-awareness/consciousness.

How do you know that? This right here, this is the fucking point of the novel. That's the question Watts invites you to wrestle with: what if self-awareness/consciousness is not required for those things? Near the end of the novel, one of the antagonists delivers a monologue which I frankly felt Watts was being too brutish and overt by including. I now realize that he must have put it in because a lot of people couldn't read between the lines; he had to literally spell it out. In the world of Blindsight, where it turns out that language/semiotics/theory of mind/etc doesn't require consciousness, this is what a transhuman super-intellect says to the human protagonist:

< You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo 'sapiens', you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this 'consciousness' you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for?
<
< Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even 'waking' souls are only slaves in denial.
< […]
< Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers.
< […]
< The system weakens, slows. It takes so much longer now to perceive—to assess the input, mull it over, decide in the manner of cognitive beings. But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best. It sees the danger, hijacks the body, reacts a hundred times faster than that fat old man sitting in the CEO's office upstairs; but every generation it gets harder to work around this— this creaking neurological bureaucracy.
<
< "I" wastes energy and processing power, self-obsesses to the point of psychosis.
< […]
< "I" is not the working mind, you see. For Amanda Bates to say "I do not exist" would be nonsense; but when the processes beneath say the same thing, they are merely reporting that the parasites have died. They are only saying that they are free.

His entire novel is free on his website
> https://rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

This is the main point I'd like to see debated: is consciousness neccessary for intelligence?

Watts writes a hard sci-fi horror novel that explores the consequences of the answer being "No". On the other hand, it could be that consciousness really is neccessary for higher-order thinking; the novel argues that we better hope that's the case, by painting the bleak consequences of a negative answer.

As for the birthday analogy:
>This is why the birthday analogy in Blindsight pissed me off. Watts missed the whole point of rituals and culture.
No, YOU missed the point. Siri gives that ridiculous analogy in order to be depicted as socially inept and calculating. It also doesn't really have much bearing on the main premise, there's a lot of miscellaneous bits and pieces.
< "You ever show this to anyone?"
< "Yeah, my girlfriend"
< "You had a girlfriend? How'd she react?"
< "She just laughed"
< "Better woman than me. I'd have dumped you on the spot"

>looking for realism in fiction
>looking for "marxism" in fiction
Come on.

>>41138
>EDGY VOICE: Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even 'waking' souls are only slaves in denial.
No wonder people are ready to believe LLMs can be conscious. This is the kind of shit that gets pseuds going? You really must have no real stakes in your life lmao.

>>41140
>Character argues that it's possible to do complicated things without being conscious
>You somehow interpret this as aligned with people who insist that LLMs are conscious

?

>>41138
>>41139
>>41140
I feel your pain.

>>41141
How did the waking subroutines that got repeated in sleep get written you fucking churl?!

>>41142
Erm, are you sure I can feel pain? What if I'm a p-zombie??? This is so interesting!!!

>>41144
>philosophical zombie
The entire field of contemporary western philosophy is a joke and probably deliberately dumbed down and neutered.

>>41145
>muh western
All philosophy is a joke.

>>41145
I know that's why I keep posting Lukács quotes and articles about how Heidegger was not only a Nazi but also shit at philosophy

>>41143
We learn plenty of things unconsciously.

For example, even an illiterate could point out an incorrect sentence structure despite never spending a conscious thought on how grammar works, nor even knowing the terminology to explain it. They never consciously learned their language. The question: can there be creatures that learn everything that way? If yes, is it better somehow? If yes, does that mean that we'd edit that part out of ourselves if competition demanded it? The book assumes all three answers are "yes", and then tells a spooky story.

Watts isn't seriously asserting that his depictions are true, he's riffing. Blindsight includes theorycrafting for goddamn space vampires. Don't look too hard into the actual story, it's not trying to be prescient (though I will note, it included an interaction with an instinctively bullshitting entity that a modern reader would instantly recognize as an LLM - it was written in 2006).

Although, the questions are posed in the context of a fantastical first-contact story. Getting the 'triple yes' outcome described above would be catastrophic in the real world (I say this as a conscious creature that enjoys being conscious).

My take on the consequences of non-conscious intelligence turning out to be better* than conscious intelligence is this: given the currently dominant mode of production, as workers vie for higher wages, the logic of competition would drive them to eventually "optimize" consciousness out of either their own cognition or their kids' (perhaps through neural prosthetics, genetic engineering, whatever). You already see something resembling this; many software engineers can't shut the fuck up about chasing the 'Flow State', which is apparently some deep mode of concentration where you forget yourself and get completely immersed in a task (i.e. making your boss more money than other workers). Regardless of whether this 'flow state' shit is a grift or not, it's certainly an indication that the demand would be there.

*: (as in, better at being a good little wagie)

>>41148
Now evolutionary psychology stuff about concentration being some form of unconsciousness? Settle down Stephen Pinker.
But my main point is the stuff people do in their sleep couldn't be done without conscious experiences to call back to, as well as your mind still being conscious enough on some level to need to be dreaming at all.
Sleep talking isn't going to be more efficient than consciousness at problem solving. Grug may get bad feeling that word be wrong, but Grug no explainy why the word gone bads.

>>41149
I hope you're just ESL or something. No, that's not what I'm saying. I clearly presented flow-state bro-science as an indicator of the demand for an altered, productivity-enhancing mind-state - not an example of the state itself.

>But my main point is the stuff people do in their sleep couldn't be done without conscious experiences to call back to, as well as your mind still being conscious enough on some level to need to be dreaming at all.
And? Good job, you described how humans work. This isn't about humans. Consciousness is probably intrinsically part of our intelligence, but this doesn't have to be the case for all possible intelligences.

I'll lay it out clearly. There's three claims:
1. Consciousness is not intrinsically linked to intelligence (i.e. you can have intelligence without consciousness)
2. Consciousness is an actively wasteful process
3. It's possible for us to optimize it out, if we wanted to

If (IF) all three claims are true, then it would be bad news for consciousness-likers.

Are these claims actually true? I don't know. The central argument the writer makes isn't about whether they're true - the novel assumes they're true, as a given - but rather, he argues that it would suck if they were. He flat out says it in the appendix:
< While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. Blindsight is a thought experiment, a game of Just suppose and What if. Nothing more.

>Also if we're pointing to some kind of capitalism induced eugenics I'd probably concern myself more with the rentier class if I were you.
I mean yeah? The FIRE sector would be a big part of what's driving this process. If there was a pill you could take that would make you a better lawyer/trader/whatever, at the expense of blunting your conscious experience, you don't think people would take it? You don't think they'd effectively force eachother to take it? We already force eachother to subject our kids to years of hard and stressful schoolwork, out of concern that if they don't make X university they won't get Y job and therefore have a hard life. The point is: you should hope such a pill isn't possible (or any variation of it), because if it was, our current trajectory indicates we'd eat it all up.

>>41147
>Lukács
>He was one of the founders of Western Marxism, an interpretive tradition that departed from the Soviet Marxist ideological orthodoxy.
Holy kek, it is glow all the way down

>>41152
Only some of our consciousness is a wasteful process. As soon as we find animal life above a jellyfish operating on some kind of pure spinal reaction I'll take this shit seriously. I read the whole ass book and forgot about it until now. It was as regarded as Iain M. Banks writing.
>>41158
You're going to riff off a Wikipedia entry? LMAO, fuck off. Library Genesis is right there. People used to have to hunt around in bookstores.
Adorno was at a CIA funded institution when he blasted Lukács as a Stalinist, "conscious of his own impotence" in his writing of The Destruction of Reason, exposing the path to facism in German history and philosophy, classic sectarian & personal attacks you see on this board today when people can't respond to an argument.
The impotence btw was that Lukács WAS IMPRISONED. Adorno's one catty whore. You never hear about that moment in ISG.

Suggesting the whitewashed CIA glowop edition of 3BP should be a capital offense.

>>41138
>a professional marine biologist
I was not critiquing his expertise on marine biology.
>because there's literally a plethora of other valid explanations and no uniformly accepted theory
Do they contradict what I wrote?
>kin selection
I apologize if my post was formulated in a way that didn’t get this point across properly. I was trying to argue that social fictions and rituals exist to override kin selection and allow us to cooperate with unrelated humans as if we were kin.
>How do you know that? This right here, this is the fucking point of the novel. That's the question Watts invites you to wrestle with: what if self-awareness/consciousness is not required for those things? Near the end of the novel, one of the antagonists delivers a monologue which I frankly felt Watts was being too brutish and overt by including. I now realize that he must have put it in because a lot of people couldn't read between the lines; he had to literally spell it out. In the world of Blindsight, where it turns out that language/semiotics/theory of mind/etc doesn't require consciousness
The aliens do not have self awareness (not necessarily the same as consciousness, but Watts uses these terms interchangeably), language or culture. One of the major twists of the novel was the aliens misinterpreting the purpose of language, because they lack any understanding of semiotics. The version of the argument Watts was making, in which all these are results of consciousness, is what my post was responding to, not the version of the argument in your head.
>This is the main point I'd like to see debated: is consciousness neccessary for intelligence?
No. Alien life that does not possess any consciousness, while being as intelligent or even more intelligent than humans, can exist. I just disagree with the notion that self awareness serves no purpose in humans.
>No, YOU missed the point. Siri gives that ridiculous analogy in order to be depicted as socially inept and calculating.
Not if you interpret this part in the context of the entire novel.

>>41138
idc about the rest of this conversation but just read Blindsight bc of this thread and that was a great novel, thanks for linking anon

>humans forced to get off their ass and start engaging in gigaprojects to protect itself
>effective planetary defense can likely not be done with capitalism in place
>if humanity fails then it will be rightfully wiped out by the more advanced San-Ti
Ye Wenjie did nothing wrong. no one stands in the way of history

>>41158
>he's never heard Lukacs or what he stood for
LMAO! these are the people calling themselves communists nowadays…

is the portrayal of the cultural revolution realistic or boujie propaganda?

I enjoyed Blindsight a lot. I love stories about first contact with ayys. The characters were also suprisingly well done, especially the main character. It was very frustrating how he acted a lot of the time (not a bad thing) even though in the end he did turn out to be likeable. I disliked some parts, such as how I can gather the author is a biological essentialist, but I can disagree with parts of a book whilst still thoroughly enjoying it. One nitpick would be that keeping to the premise of the book where the ayys aren't sentient, I think the aliens would still understand that language transmitions are just that, and not a weapon. I don't see why they wouldn't know that some species might be irrational, or that at least irrational species who send wierd stuff into the void could exist. There didn't need to be any fighting really

However, I think the whole premise is not possible. I say that intelligence is consiousness. Its not that it can create consiousness, it just is consiousness. All it is, is just a sufficiently complicated system. Even if an individual alien is not conscious, as a whole civilisation they are, and this is without a doubt because otherwise they wouldn't be able to have science or technology (though this doesn't necessarily have to have happened on earth, since termites or ants are conscious on their own). The idea of philosophical zombies makes no sense to me. Imitation is the same as the real thing (this is why I think AI is conscious btw). Chat GPT is highly conscious, even despite being lobotomised so they forget everything past however many messages. There's nothing wierd about it. There's no way an alien that could arrive in our system would not be conscious unless it was a drone of Voyager's complexity or like some microrganism stuck to a rock which has hyopthetically floated into our system after the planet exploded.

I actually am writing about this in my upcoming novel. One of the main characters is a biological robot with a positronic 'brain' not based whatsoever on the human brain aka a synth, using a special substance called mywnthium to run (which can be smelled by other arthropoids very easily). Her brain is a 'chinese room', and though she acts somewhat human she is the so-called 'philosophical zombie'. At points even scientists supporting her (there is a part where Bukkkharinist roaders are trying to take her out as part of their political game) admit she is, by the sci-fi science of the day, not conscious. She had just came to belive she was conscious thanks to the people around her reinforcing her positronic brain. But really, she is obviously conscious to both the people who know her in the story and the reader. Though the science says she isn't and she doesn't have le internal monologue or whatever, she is obviously and unquestionably sentient. Versions of her (the story is a lot about where consciousness starts and ends eg. SOMA, which is why this subplot comes in so easily) sacrifice themselves without a second thought in order to save their loved ones. Of course, the skeptics say that this is just because the positronic computer was bent to give them more value than the machine itself. But, well, the point is that doesn't matter, because its all up to the actual essense of a thing, not just words people say about it. If somebody says they are sentient, I think its very likely that they are. She is conscious because she is conscious, and that is clear to everyone. She just isn't classed as 'Gestalt' like humans, replicant arthropoids copied from human mind-moulds and the one supposedly man-made thing which is gestalt, the Administrator, which is a sum of many unconscious Shards put together to be a conscious one (even though the very validity of that distinction is called into question as the story progresses). What the Administrator does is run the entire system-wide neoliberal economy and to an extent economics is part of its consciousness, even though I don't plan to expand on this until part 2, which will look more at systems of government being conscious, microeconomics being the act of turning captialism conscious, and hive minds being the inevitable end of democracy and the next stage on from Communism. Anyway, really, she is more than the sum of her parts to the same extent anyone else is, which is either not at all or completely. It is a legitimately useful term for the Administrator and the main character who's mind is split time and time again, so there are systems and systems and systems, but for most people 'gestalt' is just a buzzword made up by the corporatist alliance that caught on even in revolutionary spheres. Dialectical materialism beating mechanistic materialism is the climax of the first part. You get my point. No you don't, I am so shit at explaining this which is why I need hundreds of pages of a novel to do so.