you don't see her suffer.
going back to this; I really, strongly dislike CP2020/2030/RED/77s "Cyberpsychosis" concept. It's always just "Wheelchairs make you evil". And it does that crappy "Do not do the cool thing!". "Getting chromed up will dangerously alienate you from humanity because using a mobility aid invests you with the dark power of satan! This is an important moral choice that will define you! But, like, you'll look cool as fuck and it will give you massive gameplay advantages."
Like peak "Don't do the cool thing". They don't make it a pain in the ass to keep high end gear in spec, they don't give you shitty commercial ware that malfunctions at bad moments, The don't give you super clunky military kit where you're constantly knocking shit over becuase your feet are size 37 all terrain armored spider feet. It's just "All these super cool toys that let you do cool things are bad and will make you in to a monster! Which isn't represented in game! Because this is really just unexamined ableism!"
Also, why does everyone in the Cyberpunk 2077 have all the ports FOR THEIR BRAIN open and their wifi turned on? The quickhacking thing just bugs me, it doesn't make any diegetic sense.
Like I see a few options
-
No one has any encryption on their cyberware and they just keep all their ports open and their wifi on and discoverable at all times
-
Somehow a little nobody rookie has backdoors for alll of the cyberware, including both commercial stuff and heavy-hitter military and security cyberware, and can execute them on the fly with no resistance
-
Somehow V has a deck that can cut through all enemy encryption in seconds, suggestion that they have, like, 2 bit encryption and their passwords are stored as plaintext.
It took me a while to figure it out but the whole quickhack system in the game is a magic spell system with a tech veneer. Like you can set people on fire with a hack? How? Like literally how does that work? People's cybernetics should blow physical fuses before something like that is possible. There are lots of things you could do that would make diegetic sense - get in to their eyes and ears and spin their sensory environment around until they fall over and puke, spoof random sensory input to induce some kind of seizure, flip their contrast and saturation from 0 to 100 so they effectively can't see anything, spoof their visual input so they walk in to wall. Trigger emergency fail-safes to force their systems to eject batteries or coolant, or other safety features that would render them incapacitated. Just blast really loud music at them from their own augments. But setting them on fire? How? What is even happening there? There should be built in firmware or even hardware limiters to prevent most things that could be really dangerous to the user from happening. And then things like hijacking someone's entire motor system to make them grab and ready one of hteir own grenades, then set it off while they're holding it? How does that work? Taking over another person's entire motor system, their prioception, that does not seem trivial. Like it's not just moving the hand, it's know there is a grenade or whatever, knowing where it is in relation to their hands, maneuvering the hands there while the victim probably doesn't want you to do that, going through the whole multi-step process of arming a grenade, and then preventing them from doing anything aboutit for the next five seconds.
Like none of htat is trivial, that's all a very complicated operation. Like setting aside why would people even have their motor neurons open to the internet, you're doing a lot of complex stuff on the fly. and you'd think pretty much anyone who shoots people for a living would very specifically have hardware, software, and firmware level protections against someone doing that exact very precise thing.
I can kind of accept that every single thing in the future has built in internet-of-things bullshit with no security so you can glitch TVs and make soda machines dispense junk, but as a proud, dedicated pedantic grognard asshole I really struggled to suspend my disbelief with the quickhacks, especially when I was able to instantly run hacks on heavily borged out gang hitters or US army combat mechs.
Idk, it's just like, you're this nobody, and six months later yo should still be a nobody, and as a nobody you should have to be clever. Like find a node for a network, access it, overcome it's security, then you can control device on that network specifically. Being able to brute-force smash your way in to other people's cyberbrains should be high end stuff, something you work towards and unlock gradually. like, congratulations, you did a job for a corp and as a bonus to your pay they gave you some zero-day exploits for eyes manufactured by one of their competitors, so now when you encounter dumbass cops or street level shooters who don't keep their firmware up to date you can mess up their vision if they use that brand of hardware.
But it's not that at all, it's just magic spells that inflict status effects. It didn't make me feel like a cool wizard hacker, or any kind of hacker. It made me feel like i was playing an action RPGFPS.
Like, hell, if I was going to do it, the only way to get in to a military cyberbrain would be if you had some fancy sci-fi bullshit single use quantum cryptography sledgehammer you could use to smash through their encryption, and those would be expensive, hard to come by, extremely illegal, and would still have limits - They'd have to have their radios on, and you'd only have a short amount of time to fuck around in their head before whoever was running the squad's network security booted you.,
Idk, I clearly want very different things from teh game, or any game that's trying to reflect the genre, than the vast majority of people playing it.
CW: alienation, body horror, violence, capitalism, any of the other frightening stuff Cyberpunk weighs and deals with.
> “We never see the face of power in Blade Runner. Instead, we see an errand boy, Gaff, but we never see the top level. And Deckard doesn't think about what he's doing, he doesn't really question it. Some power that is tells him to kill replicants, who might well essentially be people, but the whole point when he leaves with Rachel is that he doesn't save the replicants. He saves Rachel and goes away. That's not a hero's tale. That's somebody saving his skin and the skin of someone he cares about, but it's very cyberpunk. That idea of feeling that the chance that we have with each other, and the chance of a better life, is worth incurring the wrath of these unseen and mighty powers.”
Reading an interview with Pondsmith and I'd like to hear him elaborate on this. Because Deckard is the villian, the ruthless cop assassin hunting down the former slaves who are fighting to claim a life they were never supposed to have. Deckard doesn't save the replicants, the replicants save him. Roy has Deckard in his grasp, but at the end of his life he decides he's done killing, he doesn't need revenge, and lets Deckard go. Roy gives Deckard his freedom, gives Deckard his chance to stop being a cop, stop being a murderer, go be a human being for the first time in his life. So, I'd like to hear Pondsmith elaborate this because I'd like to know how he views Roy's role in the Drama.
> Look at what's been going on in Russia right now and tell me the Soviet State isn't still around. They just changed the paint and got a new symbol.
Oh no he's a lib. : (
Still reading various takes (not just Pondsmith's). It's extremely weird to me that people think Deckard is the, idk, most important character in Blade Runner. He's mostly passive. He follows his orders like a good dog. He has no real agency. It's the replicants who have goals, agency, dreams, a future. Rick just exists.
OMG people whose opinions I'm reading, cyberpunk is about the alienation we experience due to our reliance on technology that is hostile to us. It's not about metal arms or cool hair, it's about how our increasingly high tech world is driving us all further and further apart, turning us in to machines ourselves, cogs in the corporate profit machine. Most of Gibson's stories are about a band of freaks and losers coming together, finding something like family, and briefly escaping that alienation while punching someone much bigger than them in the jaw. That is the core theme; Technology hasn't liberated us, it's both subjugated us and atomized us. It's not just about megacorps, it's about corporations, which is to say large power blocs that aren't accountable to anyone, which is to say capitalism, using tech to control us; by using violence against us, by controlling our labor, by stealing, hacking, subverting our attention. The central warning that the movement was screaming is that the furturist, positivist vision of a world where technology makes life free and easy wasn't coming, that our machines were becoming our jailers. The "punk" isn't about literal studded jackets and chelsea cuts and big black shitkickers, it's about an ethos of defiance, of indifference to authority, of viewing the system as something that exists outside you, that you're not part of and that cannot compel your obedience by any means but violence. The punk is being an outsider, a low life, a criminal, or just unemployed, in a world where the only way you get rights, healthcare, protection, real food, is selling you body and soul to a corporation. It's that "eat trash be free" meme with the racoon. In so far as there ever was an authentic punk, which is a subject of constant debate, the hand-made, ripped out, outlandish and offensive clothes were a symbolic refusal to participate, to be part of the machine. Most of them were never really outside, but that was what was desired, what was trying however ineptly to be accomplished. The individualistic helplessness of the punks, their inability to conceptualize revolution or take meaningful action against their society, was a reflection of the "what no theory does to a mf" of the desolate ideological wasteland of 80s suburbia.
V's fucking thrilled about her cyberware. You never see her saying "man I fucking hate these immune suppressants I've been shitting water since I got my first network implant". You never see her startle when she looks in the mirror and sees something that isn't her staring back. She never wakes up with bruises because she had a nightmare and hit herself with her own chromed up arms hard enough to leave marks. You don't see her cussing as she limps around trying to find her toolkit because the joints in her leg seized. you don't see her suffer.
> Very enjoyable read. I loved that particular Rick Roderick lecture myself- he's fun to watch. I think there's one thing here that helps tie together several of the themes and tropes associated with Cyberpunk- whether machines/cyborgs/androids, virtual realities and the internet, postmodernism, etc, and that's the post-Marxist tradition of thought in which several of these themes originate. Marx was the one who tied together ideas about productive power, technology (automatons and proto-cybernetics specifically, too, which also manifested in the later Communist obsessions with cybernetics) qualitatively changing human experience, machines dominating humans, alienation in both the technical and mundane sense, vast income inequality (arguably a feature of all major cyberpunk to date,) due to runaway capitalism, and fears of oligopolies and megacorporations, all in that particular form that cyberpunk authors repeated, even if they weren't citing him specifically. Baudrillard and Lyotard are both working within a post-Marxian tradition as well, as their writings on postmodernism attest. Marxism always had an inherent connection to sci-fi (also see Star Trek, which has more than a little Marx in its DNA, too, but on the utopian end,) but I think Cyberpunk is specifically where Marxian themes can be found most directly in popular culture (which is of course not to suggest that these authors or works are Marxist themselves.)
>I also bring this up more generally because a lot of people love Cyberpunk aesthetics and the anarchic, labyrinthine, high-tech and high-speed vision associated with a lot of it, and of course that stuff is cool in many ways, but it's also important to remember that Neuromancer, for example, is explicitly a dystopian novel, as that Rick Roderick lecture so wonderfully explains. That future, at least for several of the main authors, is supposed to be disturbing and not simply exciting, which is key to a lot of the philosophical discussions it generates.
This post from ten years ago fucking nails it and is very different from a lot of modern discussions that view cyberpunk as casual entertainment and aesthetic.
Is it fair to say we both think the chinese room is a poor thought experiment that doesn't actually do what it claims to do?
In any case, Chinese Room is not really relevant to the topic of if considering brains to be computers is somehow erroneous.
My understanding was that the point of the chinese room was that a deterministic system with a perfect set of rules could produce the illusion of consciousness without ever understanding what it was doing? Is that not analogous to our discussion?
I'm trying to pick up the slack but I'm kinda glad he's not here because I am an absolutist physicalist and he's definitely not. Like I don't care what stupid shit tech bros believe, the stuff is all there is.
I've heard people saying that the Chinese Room is nonsense because it's not actually possible, at least for thought experiment purposes, to create a complete set of rules for verbal communication. There's always a lot of ambiguity that needs to be weighed and addressed. The guy in the room would have to be making decisions about interpretation and intent. He'd have to have theory of mind.
This whole thing is incredibly frustrating. Like his guy did draw a representation of a dollar bill. It was a shitty representation, but so is a 640x400 image of a Monet. What's the argument being made, even? It's just an empty gotcha. The way that image is stored and retrieved is radically different from how most actual physical computers work, but there is observably an analogous process happening. You point a camera at an object, take a picture, store it to disk, retrieve it, you get an approximation of the object as perceived by the camera. You show someone the same object, they somehow store a representation of that object somewhere in their meat, and when you ask them to draw it they're retrieving that approximation and feeding that approximation to their hands to draw the imagine. I don't get why the guy thinks these things are obviously, axiomatically uncomparable.
Well, Traumadumpling isn't going to read this, so I'm just amusing myself.
we cannot bridge the gap between subjective internal experience and objective external physical processes, not even hypothetically, there is not even a theoretical experiment you could design for it, there is not even theoretical language to describe it without metaphor. We could learn and simulate literally every single specific feature of the brain and it would not tell us about internal subjective experiences, because it is simply not the kind of phenomena that is understood by the field of information processing.
This is all because subjectivity isn't falsifiable and is not currently something that the scientific method can interact with. As far as the scientific method is concerned it doesn't exist. idk why people are even interested in it, I don't see why it's important. The answer to "P-zombies" is that it doesn't matter and isn't interesting. If something performs all the observable functions of an intelligent mind with a subjective experience... well... it performs all the observable functions of an intelligent mind. Why are you interested in subjectivity if you can't evaluate whether it's even happening? You can't test it, you can't confirm or deny it. So just put it back in the drawer and move on with your life. It's not even a question of whether it does or doesn't exist. It's that the question isn't important or interesting. It has no practical consequences at all unless people, for cultural reasons, decide that something that performs the functions of an intelligent mind doesn't deserve recognition as a person because of their ingrained cultural belief3 in the existence and importance of a soul.
I do see this as directly tied to atheism. Part of making the leap to atheism and giving up on magic is admitting that you can't know, but based on what you can observe the gods aren't there. No one can find them, no one can talk to them, they never do anything. If there are transcendental magic people it's not relevant to your life.
Phenomenology is the same way. It just doesn't matter, and continuing to carry it around with you is an indication of immaturity, a refusal to let go and accept that some things are unknowable and probably always will be. Hammering on and on that we can't explain how subjectivity arises from physical processes doesn't change the facts on the ground; We've never observed anything but physical processes, and as such it is reasonable to assume that there is a process by which subjectivity emerges from the physical. Because there's nothing else. There's nothing else that could be giving rise to subjectivity. And, again, we don't know. Maybe there is a magic extradimensional puppeteer. But we don't know in the same sense that we don't know that the sun will rise tomorrow. It's one of the not particularly interesting problems with the theory of science - We assume that things that happened in the past predict things that will happen in the future. We do not, and cannot know if the sun will rise tomorrow. But as a practical matter it isn't important. With nothing else to explain the phenomena we observe, we can assume within the limits in which anything at all is predictable that the subjective experience is an emergent property of the crude, physical, boring, terrifyingly mortal meat.
More and more philosophy's dogged adherence to these ideas strikes me as an refusal to let go, to grow up, to embrace the unpredictable violence of a cold, hostile, meaningless universe. Instead of saying we don't and cannot know, and therefor it's not worth worrying about, philosophers cling to this security blanket of belief that we are, somehow, special. That we're unique and our existence has meaning and purpose. That we're different from the unthinking matter of stars or cosmic dust.
mechanistic physicalist reductionist worldview
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physicalism
Like this is just materialism. Physicalism isn't a belief, it's a scientific observation. We haven't found anything except the physical and as much as philosophers obsess about subjectivity and qualia and what have you those concepts, while mildly interesting intellectual topics, aren't relevant to science. You can't measure them, you cannot prove if they exist or do not exist. Maybe someday we'll have a qualia detector and we'll actually be able to do something with them, but right now they're not relevant. I'm a reductionist physicalist mechanist because I'm tired of hearing about ghosts and souls and magic. No question is being raised. There's no investigation that can proceed from these concepts. You can't do anything with them except yell at people who think, based on evidence, that physics is the only system that we can observe and investigate. And it's not "these things don't exist", it's whether they exist or not, we can't observe or interact with them so we can't do anything with them. You can't test qualia, you can't measure it. If we can some day, cool. But until then it's just... not useful.
AI is everywhere.
I didn't read the article, just commented on the excerpts. And when I do read the article this is the first line? Conflating LLMs and neural nets with AI? Accepting the tech bro marketing buzzword at face value?
Terms like “neural networks” certainly have not helped and, from Musk to Hawking, some of the greatest minds have propagated this myth.
Neural networks are called that because they're modeled on the behavior of neurons, not the other way around. Hawking could be a dork about some things but why put him in the same sentence as an ignorant buffoon like Musk?
Is what we're arguing here actually that psychologists and philosophers are yelling at tech bros because they think that neuroscientists using computer metaphors actually believe a seventy year old theory of cognition originating from psychology when psychologists were still mostly criminals and butchers?
Like saying the brain is a biological organ? That's not a gotcha when biological computers exist and research teams are encoding gigabytes of data, like computer readable data, 1s and 0s, as DNA. Whatever the brain is, we can build computers out of meat, we've done it, it works. There is no distinction between biological and machine, artifact and organ, meat and metal. It's an illusion of scale combined with, frankly, superstition. A living cell operates according to physical law just like everything else. It has a lot of componenents, some of them are very small, some of them we don't understand and I'm sure there are processes and systems we haven't identified, but all those pieces and processes and systems follow physical laws the same as everything else in creation. There's no spooky ghosts or quintessence down there.
Like, if the message here is to tell completely ignorant laypeople and tech bros who haven't read a book that wasn't about webdev that the brain does not literally have circuitry in it, fine, but say that. But right now we're very literally bridging the perceived gap between mechanical human artifacts and biology. We're building biological machines, biological computers. These are not completely different categories of things that can never be unified under a single theory to explain their function.
Let's take a step back, look at "Capitalism as a real god", what Marx called it, or "Holy shit capitalism is literally Cthulu" which is the formulation many people are independently arriving at these days. Capitalism is a gigantic system that emerges from the interactions of billions of humans. It's not located in any single human, or any subset of humans. It emerges from all of us, as we interact with each other and the world. There's no quintessence, no "subjectivity" that we could ever evaluate or interogate or find. We can't say whether capitalism has a subjective experience or cosciousness, whether there is an "I think therefore I am" drifting across the maddening complexity of financial transactions, commodity fetishism, resource extraction, and cooking dinner.
The brain has ~80 million neurons (plus glial matter I know I know bear with me). There are about 8 billion humans, and each of us is vastly more complex than a brain cell. So if humans actually are components in an emergent system that is intelligent and maybe self-aware, there's only one order of magnitude fewer humans than there are cells in a human brain that, given lack of any other explanations, we must assume give rise to a thinking mind.
Is it impossible for such a system to have a subjective experience? Is it a serious problem? As it stands we can't assess whether such subjectivity exists in the system, whether the system has something meaningfully resembling a human mind. The difference in experience is likely so vast as to be utterly unbridgeable. A super-organism existing on a global level would, likely, not be able to communicate with us due to lack of any shared referents or experiences at all. A totally alien being unlike us except that it emerges from the interaction of less complex systems, seeks homeostasis, and reacts to its environment.
But, like, who cares? Whether capitalism is a dumb system or an emergent intelligence there's nothing we can do about it. We can't investigate the question and an answer wouldn't be useful. So move along. Have your moment of existential horror and then get on with your life.
I think that's what really bothers me about this whole subjectivity, qualia, consciousness thing. It's boring. It's just... boring. Being stuck on it doesn't increase my knowledge or understanding. It doesn't open up new avenues of investigation.
The conclusion I'm coming to is this whole argument isn't about computers or brains or minds, but rather phenomenology having reached a dead end. It's a reaction to the discipline's descent in to irrelevance. The "Hard Problem of Consciousness" simply is not a problem.
I am going to write a paper titled "Subjectivity; A culture bound psychosis? And can it be cured?" This is a deliberate act of violence and I am going to mail a hard copy to every philosophy department in the English speaking world.
some randomness thrown in.
I remain extremely mad at the Quantum jerks for demonstrating that the universe is almost certainly not deterministic. I refuse to be cool about it.
The op its not arguing it has a metaphisical component.
Yes they are. They might scream in your face that they're not, but the argument they're making is based not on science and observation but rather the chains of a christian culture they do not feel and cannot see.
A faulty metaphor forces you to think the wrong way.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, if it's accurate at all, does not have a strong effect.
whats a metaphor if not a model?
To quote the dictionary; "a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable." Which seems to be the real problem, here; Psychologists and philosophers hear someone using a metaphor and think they must literally believe what the psychologist or philosopher believes about the symbol being used.
The deeper we get in to it the more it just reads as old man yells at cloud and people who want consciousness to be special and interesting being mad that everyone is ignoring them.
Almost all of this is people assuming other people are taking the metaphor to far.
The mind is best understood, not as software, but rather as an emergent property of the physical brain.
No one who is worth talking to about this disagrees with this. Everyone is running on systems theory now, including the computer programmers trying to build artificial intelligence. All the plagiarism machines run on systems theory and emergence. The people they're yelling at about reductive computer metaphors are doing the thing the author is saying they don't do, and the plagiarism machines were only possible because people were using systems theory and emergent behaviors arising from software to build the worthless things!
. The brain is much more complicated than that, and is very likely simply not amenable to that kind of mathematical reductionism, any more than economic systems are.
This author just said that economics isn't maths, that it's spooky and mysterious and can't be undersyood.
This is so frustrating. "You see, the brain isn't like this extremely reductive model of computation, it's actually" and then the author just lists every advance, invention, and field of inquiry in computation for the last several decades.
But looking at the workings of the brain in more detail reveal some more fundamental flaws with computational theory. For one thing, the brain itself isn't structured like a Turing machine. It's a parallel processing network of neural nodes - but not just any network. It's a plastic neural network that can in some ways be actively changed through influences by will or environment. For example, so long as some crucial portions of the brain aren't injured, it's possible for the brain to compensate for injury by actively rewriting its own network. Or, as you might notice in your own life, its possible to improve your own cognition just by getting enough sleep and exercise.
"The brain isn't a computer, it's actually a different kind of computer! The brain compensates for injury the same way the internet that was in some ways designed after the brain compensates for injury! If you provide the discrete nodes of a distributed network with the inputs they need to function efficiently the performance of the entire network improves!"
This is just boggling, what argument do they think they're making? Software does all these things specifically because scientists are investigating the functions of the brain and applying what they find to the construction of new computer systems. Our increasing understanding of the brain feeds back to novel computational models which generate new tools, data, and insight for understanding the brain!
You can build a computer out of anything that can flip a logic gate, up to and including red crabs. It doesn't matter if you're using electricity or chemistry or crabs. That's why it's a metaphor. This really all reads as someone arguing with a straw man who literally believes that neurons are logic gates or something. "Actually brains have chemistry" sounds like it's supposed to be a gotcha when people are out there working on building chemical computers, chemical data storage, chemical automata right now. There's no dichotomy there, nor does it argue against using computer terminology to discuss brain function. It just suggests a lack of creativity, flexibility, and awareness of the current state of the art in chemistry.
It's also apparently arguing with people who think chat-gpt and neural nets and llms are intelligent and sentient? In which case you should loudly specify that in the first line so people know you're arguing with ignorant fools and they can skip your article.
Humans rely on intuition, worldviews, thoughts, beliefs, our conscience. Machines rely on algorithms, which are inherently dumb. Here’s David Berlinski’s definition of an algorithm: “An algorithm is a finite procedure, written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary, governed by precise instructions, moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3, . . ., whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicuity, and that sooner or later comes to an end.”
And what the hell is this? Jumping up and down and screaming "i have a soul! Consciousness is privileged and special! I'm not a meat automata i'm a real boy!" Is not mature or productive. This isn't an argument, it's a tantrum.
The deeper we get in to this it sounds like dumb guys arguing with dumb guys about reductive models of the mind that dumb guys think other dumb guys rigidly adhere to. Ranting about ai research without specifying whether you're talking about long standing research trends or the religious fanatics in California proseletyzing about their fictive machine gods isn't helpful.
This whole discussion is becoming more and more frustrating bc it's clear that most of the people arguing against the brain as computer don't grasp what metaphor is, have a rigid understanding of what computers are and cannot flex that understanding it to use it as a helpful basis of comparsion, and apparently have just never heard of or encountered systems theory?
Like a lot of these articles are going "nyah nyah nyah the mind can't be software running on brain hardware that's duaism you're actually doing magic just like us!" And it's like my god how are you writing about science and you've never encountered the idea of complex systems arising from the execution of simple rules? Like put your pen down and go play Conway's Game of Life for a minute and shut up about algorithms and logic gates bc you clearly can't even see the gaping holes in your own understanding of what is being discussed.
Every time I see cat people now I ownder if the placement of their ears implies a different brain structure than baseline humans. What if most of their skull volume is devoted to smell and they're kinda dumb?
My opinion of tech bros is that anyone deserving the label "tech bro" is a dangerous twit who should be under the full time supervision of someone with humanities training, a gun, and orders to use it if the tech bro starts showing signs of independent thought. It's a thoroughly pathological world view, a band of lethally competent illiterates who think they hold all human knowledge and wisdom. If this is all directed at tech bros I likely didn't realize it because I consider trying to teach nuance to tech bros about as useful as trying to teach it to a dog and didn't consider someone in an academic field would want to address them.
"It's a bullshit diagnosis", with "cyberpsychosis" being "excited delerium" for cyborgs, works for me.
This is one of the key things that has kept me away from Cyberpunk the game setting and one of my main problems with Shadowrun (not my only problem by any means).
I genuinely don't know how to explain what evolution is as a process most of the time "imagine a drop of water seeking the sea, but the drop of water really wants to fuck, and sometimes it gets hit by an asteroid?"
"Complex self-replicating systems reversing local entropy while undegoing variation caused by entropy until they lose equilibrium and can no longer self replicate" ?
It's an incredibly simple concept. Water seeks the sea. And it's also an incredibly complicated, obtuse concept. I think a huge part of the difficulty is cultural - we anthropomorphize and ascribe agency to everything, and evolution is the absolute and total absence of agency, the pure action of entropy
🔫 7554: Glorious Memories Revived (2011) Full Game Longplay ============================== System Requirements: Graphics: 256 MB NVIDIA GeForce 7600 / ATI Radeon X1600 Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz / AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Memory: 2 GB RAM Hard Disk: 8 GB free OS: Windows XP/Vista/7DirectX: 9....
At 16:18 your character gets blown up. When they come to they're about to be killed by French troops when a comrade rushes in and fucking owns two French soldiers with a katana he must have captured at some point during the Japanese occupation. 10/10 this game is cool as hell.
Welcome to Bloxburg players are holding “Anti Communism” signs and throwing boxes of pizza into the ocean to protest an attempt to create income equality.
Gamer's traditionally have less political sophistication than a dead dog. Recent highly visible gamer moves have included review bombing Helldivers, screaming about not being able to see both labia t the same time in Stellar Blade, and whatever that Sweet Baby/DEI thing I haven't bothered to look at is. Idk what the scale of this roblox bs is, but i am interested in the phenomena of game rage campaigns where they get extremely self righteously mad over strange, often trivial shit and make it their entire life for a few days. Wtf is happening? Is this echoes of gamegate a decade later?
With the announcement that Steam is blocked in Vietnam I went looking for Vietnamese games to see what's out there. I found this. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available anywhere outside some sketchy abandonware sites so I found a long format playthrough to watch.
Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is one of the most popular pieces of the classical music repertoire. Here the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra, the University Chorus and Alumni Chorus, and the Pacific Boychoir perform at the Mondavi Center at UC Davis. [6/2007] [Show ID: 11787] Donate to UCTV to support info...
\aggressive headbanging
Carmina Burana is one of my favorite pieces. I have absolutely no idea what it's about.
My first impression is HELL TO THE FUCK YES
The first think you see in the menu is a person with a machine gun wearing a red bandana and standing next to a bunch of Red/Black posters with cog wheels and labor slogans on them. 10/10 and I haven't even started the game yet.
Getting bahn mi as the most bodega bodega. Also, i would like to present the following; bodengist
I don't have anything else to post but i've already read the entire internet today and i'm bored to tears.
Came across this while I was looking for the MDC version. I wasn't able to get a working Invidious link for some reason. Look up the Haluci Nation, formerly A Tribe Called Red. Real cool.
I don't understand the appeal of a revisionist history that absolves the SPD of paving the way for Hitler. Doubly so a revisionist history that somehow, after all the sacrifices and all the horror, pretends that the Nazis could have been defeated with electoral politics.
The very basic premise just sounds like a revisionist re-writing of history to pretend the SPD didn't have a critical role in destroying the "Good Future". It promulgates the idea that fascism can be defeated with liberal electoral BS in what was, historically, the most stern rebuke of liberal democracy in history. I don't get it. Who is this for?
NOTE The guys I did not respond to; https://libreddit.kavin.rocks/r/fallacy/comments/mq7a6s/about_the_theremian_argument/
Bro is saying "Uhh, The witcher is either racist because it depicts racism, or it's not racist because there were no black people in fantasy poland" which is just the most !honk-enraged example of how chuds have no idea what is actually being critiqued when people talk about racism and represenation in media. rant follows;
The Witcher isn't racist because the author uses the story to explore racism as a system of violence and a hierarchy of power. Geralt, himself a minority subject to bigotry and violence from a hateful majority, stands in for the player as he encounters numerous people; Squirrels, dwarves, various "monsters" who are subject to the systemic violence of a fearful and ignorant majority.
Geralt himself has strong ideals that demonstrate his awareness of racism as a concept and his refusal of it; He won't hunt anyone who is intelligent without a good reason. A fat purse and fearful peasants aren't sufficient for him to turn his sword against a person whose only crime is being different.
The Witcher provides an example of a story where the author does not hide behind the Thermian Argument.
Likewise, the Elder Scrolls has always critically engaged with racism and imperialism. It's never hidden behind "the lore" or "That's what the characters would do".
Dunmer culture was notorious xenophobic, insular, and contemptuous of other peoples. Even after the armistice some Dunmer continued to enslave Betmer, and the non-Dunmer residents of Morrowind were treated with contempt. Even Dunmer born outside of Morrowind were considered outsiders and not true Dunmer.
And the story critically engages with this. It openly questions where Hlalu's enthusiasm towards emancipation is based on any principles, or simply a desire to take advantage of integration in to the Septim Empire. The Redoran grudgingly go along with the Hlalu king, not out of any concern or compassion for enslaved people, but because they view their loyalty to the King as more important than adherence to custom, but only barely. Dres continue to raid for slaves an employ slave labor.
Meanwhile, the Twin Lamps organization is clandestinely fighting against the remaining slaver holdouts.
The story doesn't say "There's slavery because that's just how things are in the story". It creates a complex interplay of different factions with different beliefs and attitudes towards slavery. Some oppose slavery for utilitarian reasons, others out of principle. Slavery is officially illegal, but Dres slavery is ignored and no one is stupid enough to anger the Telvanni by interrupting their studies to tell them they have to free their slaves.
This continues in all subsequent entries. The Knights of the Nine is premised on the return of an genocidal Ayleidoon demigod seeking revenge for the crimes of the ancient Alysseian Empire. The story is very clear that Umaril the Unfeathered is a total monster, a murderous bastard. But at the same time, the player has to mantle Pelinel Whitestrake to defeat Umaril. And when you learn about Pelinel you find out that he was an equally monstrous genocidal maniac (and an unstoppable war-cyborg from the distant future but that's more of a /r/teslore thing). And, to further complicate things, extent history books in the game tell that while Umaril and Peninel represent absolutist genocidal extremes, the reality of the Nedic revolt against the Ayleids was much more complicated, with Ayelids and Nedes alike changing allegiances for both utilitarian and moral reasons. The conflict between the Ayleids and the Nedes is not presented as an inevitable clash of civilizations or a fascist race war, but rather a violent political struggle where individual people and factions chose their sides for political and moral reasons rather than race essentialism.
Moving on to Skyrim, the story depicts the brutal aftermath of the Red Year. Many Dunmer are forced in to exile in Skyrim by the cataclysmic destruction of Vvardenfell. They find shelter with their historic racial enemies, the Nords. And not just any Nords, but with Ulfric's Nord Supremacist Stormcloaks. The Stormcloaks are willing to extend refuge to the Dunmer in their time of extreme need. But they're still racist; They hold great prejudice against the Dunmer and largely confine them to ghettos. Their position reveals the complexity of racism and humanity; They maintain their bigotry, but their specific system of racism does not extend to exterminating or enslaving an ethnic group they hate. The Dunmer are treated as second class citizens, but the Stormcloaks aren't Nazis or even Americans. They're a complex, real society, and their contradictory stance on the Dunmer reflects the often contradictory and complex nature of systems of racism in real life. The Stormcloaks aren't just racist because of the story says so, they offer an exploration of the complexities of racism, of the status of refugees, of ethnonationalist movements.
Likewise, we've got the Thalmor. The nearest direct real world equivalent of the Thamlor would be genocidal ethnonationalists if they also wanted to unmake reality and plunge everything and everyone back in to primordial chaos. The Thalmor represent an extremely powerful mythofascist nation that claims to be a unified Merish ethnostate. But TES doesn't just reduce this to a race war, nor does it indulge in race essentialism. The Thalmor in no way represent all Mer, or even all Altmer. Their claim to racial unity is bogus. They display open bigotry towards Mer they consider "lesser". They're opposed by Men and Mer of all types, demonstrating that ethnonationalism is always built on shallow myths that aren't reflective of actual people.
And all of this is placed in contrast with the Mede Empire. The Mede Empire is a failing quasi-imperial state. The sad remnent of the once might Septim Empire, the Mede Empire is struggling to maintain control and legitimacy in the face of a disastrous military and mythopoeic defeat by the Thalmor. The Empire engage in imperialism and colonialism, but it is also a multi-ethnic and egalitarian state that rejects both racism and slavery as counter to it's goals of a united Tamriel. nontheless, it uses war and military occupation to achieve it's goals. In telling this story TES engages with the contradictory beliefs and actions of real-world Western imperialism; The Stormcloaks are bigoted ethnonationalists, but their national struggle to be free of an imperialist state has merit. The imperialist state opposes bigotry and slavery, but uses violence to impose it's will on others. The Thalmor are an openly and brutallity ethnonationalist state that engages in both ruthless imperialism and bigotry, and has the secret goal of killing everyone in the world and then killing the world. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? The Stormcloaks and Imperials are shown to be complex groups with justifiable goals and serious flaws. They're each contrasted with the Thalmor that represent an existential threat; The presence of the Thalmor motivates the Empire to invade Skyrim to retain control and prevent what is left of the Empire from fragmenting. The Stormcloaks desire for national liberation is justified in the face of Imperial occupation. The Thalmor are secretly manipulating the Stormcloaks in a plot to weaken the Empire.
None of this is shallowly justified by saying "that's just how the story is". The TES writers built a complex world of competing factions with competing goals. They created a war of brother against brother, of scheming nobility and shifting alliances, where two powerful factions are each fighting to achieve goals that cannot simply be dismissed as wrong or evil. The story does not give the player the luxury of picking a good guy and a bad guy. Whatever side of the conflict they choose to support there will be world shaking consequences where some will gain and others will suffer. And, further complicating matters, it seems that no matter what action the player takes or how the civil war in Skyrim ends, the greater scope villain of the Thalmor will be strengthened.
None of this is reductive "It's just this way because that's how the story is". All of these plotlines are structured not just to be consistent within the story, but also to investigate the nature of racism, power, violence, and empire. The Elder Scrolls is worthy of serious critique and consideration because it's stories are intended to give the player a space to explore, challenge, and justify their personal beliefs.
The storytellers openly invite the player to question and critique their story. They've created a space where important questions can be asked and wisdom can be nurtured. There's no need to say "That's just what happens in teh story" because they have consciously and deliberately refused the Thermian Argument. They're well aware that all stories are stories about ourselves, about humanity, about what we believe and why we believe it. They know that the story reflects the nature of the storyteller and the culture of which they are apart. They know that no one exists outside culture, and that no story exists alone, outside of history or culture and immune to critique.
That is why both The Witcher and TES are stories that engage with, discuss, and challenge racism.
Main
Seriously though no I've had it for a bit but I just loaded it up. Seems neat but I haven't gotten very far.
Stalin should not have agreed to spare the Nazi officer corps to appease Churchill /post
Wondering about this. Like "putin schill" gets thrown around so lightly, and what's being said is "you're not even wrong, you're just a brainwashed puppet making puppet noises at the behest of your sinister masters".
Like the libs don't even see it as an argument, it's just evil magic orc speech or something. Whatever we're saying is wrong because putin is making us say it, somehow
Thinking about how it ties in to ignorance or denial of various atrocities. Like " hey, Joe did this horrible thing" and getting back "no he didn't, and that didn't happen, and if it did you only think it's bad because putin mind controlled you" kind of thing.
