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#15162253
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Capitalism likes profit and efficiency. My assumption is that ie: shipping something off to be assembled in China with parts from Africa and Europe and shipping it back to the US to sell is the most efficient and profitable way to money.



The video makes the point that corporations lobby government to get favorable national trade policies, as regarding taxes, and part of that has to do with what 'nationality' a particular product is officially recognized as -- routing the stages of an incrementally-finished product through several various countries serves that national-designation purpose, and so is *politically* expedient, moreso than a strict 'brass-tacks' estimation of core production costs.

This shows that, for business interests, political concerns are intimately tied-up-with *financial* concerns, which themselves may have *zero* to do with the production logistics and costs of the item / commodity itself. So while *logistically* simpler, more cost-effective production avenues may exist -- as localists, for example, tend to argue -- when *financial* and *political* dynamics are mixed-in, which are inevitable, the calculus is no-longer simple in structure, and pricing is readily complexified well beyond the production costs / dynamics of the product / item / commodity itself.
#15162275
ckaihatsu wrote:I don't know what 'intelligent' or 'deterministic' physical force you may be referring to here -- you're being *vague*, and I've never been religious. You may want to elaborate.

As I've said before, modern physics can tell you a lot. You can rather easily predict the orbit of planets and so forth. You can build internal combustion or jet engines, use thrust to overcome drag, use wings to generate lift and overcome gravity, and so on. However, it's much more complex to describe animal behavior. When you get to human behavior, and you want to use a basic physics model, you can't well describe something like a deli sandwich.

Think about a roast beef sandwich with mayo, mustard, pickles, pepperoncini, lettuce, tomato, onion and a slice of sharp cheddar cheese on a sourdough roll. What's the probability of that happening? With physics models, you'd get some infinitesimal probability and people will say, "Ah, but it's possible so current physical models are good enough." I say no, because when I order a roast beef sandwich, I know with 99% certainty I'm going to get that sandwich. Basically, physics doesn't well explain the counter to entropy--that life gets more and more complex, not less.

I'm not being deliberately vague. I do not have the answer, and I'm perfectly comfortable with saying so. However, I do think there are other forces in play that we do not understand--just as we didn't understand electricity 400 years ago.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, you're actually being quite even-handed here, providing examples of both *leveraging*, and of *artificial scarcity*.

I'd be interested to hear more about how you *would* characterize the Vietnam War economically, and in terms of political economy.

Also, you may want to address *use values*, as stated here -- why can't more people get diamonds affordably (use-value), instead of the capitalist market's *artificial scarcity* reigning, for the sake of *exchange* values, for the / any cartel -- ?

We'd start steering well off the enlightenment topic. As for diamonds, most people have no real utilitarian use for them other than a decoration. If people could get diamonds affordably, diamonds wouldn't be a status symbol. So you're not dealing as much with capitalism per se as you are with human behavior and status symbols reflecting social stratification. In a utilitarian capitalist sense, industrial diamonds are typically used for cutting rock, etc.

ckaihatsu wrote:Oh, okay, then how do you explain 'market failures', like the existence of *roads*, which are administered by *government*, and not by the capitalist markets -- ? How does "biology" fit into *that*, exactly -- ?

Well, market failure is a broad topic. I would say at least one would be human behavior. Humans are not "capitalist." For example, pure self interest is not Pareto efficient; yet, an individual human is not necessarily going to care fuck all about efficiency. As I've said before, humans that adapted to survive in severe climates like Northern Europeans and Asians have no choice but to learn how to capture more food than they need immediately and store it for a long winter when they will be very limited in hunting, fishing and gathering. That behavior is not fully governed by the more rational frontal cortex. It's why, for example, smart people can become drug addicts.

ckaihatsu wrote:Okay, again, no contention, but you're just proving my point *for* me, here -- it's the advent of a material *surplus* that gave rise to *class-divided* human society.

Well, a major difference in our approach is that yours is much more ideological and mine is much more biological. Hunter gatherers also learned to produce a surplus to survive winters. I think that is hard-wired into humans, and not a product of ideology.

ckaihatsu wrote:Yes, exactly, and this societal *specialization* is far from benign, as you're depicting it -- it's been just as socially deterministic as the elitist ruling-class control of the material surplus itself.

It's not all "control of material surplus." There are biological drivers here too. We have a situation where poor people are fat and have access to enough resources to procure heroin. It's much easier to see the behavior studying rat models, because you're not going to inject capitalist rats and communist rats, etc. However, social isolation and surplus tends to lead to destructive behavior in social animals.

ckaihatsu wrote:Consider, for example, the great monolithic constructions of the ancient world that continue to mystify us today -- I came across a video that says that the ancient Egyptians were able to use *concrete* and *melt granite*, to create the Giza pyramids, and then traveled the globe to help other societies to create *their* monolithic structures, similarly, though covertly.

Well, I think part of the "mystery" is that today's scientific minded think that nobody was able to do anything that they didn't first read in a book in a building called "school." Humans didn't need sex education until the 1960s, for some reason. It's amazing we survived. Yet, humanity did a lot before basic literacy was a thing.

ckaihatsu wrote:BJ, the following depicts *your* concept of artificial intelligence:

Yes, I'm quite an eccentric guy. I don't watch mainstream television shows at all. Today, I watched a Lex Fridman interview with Jim Keller. I don't know how you spend your free time, but this is how I spend some of mine:



@Wellsy, I'll cue this up about five minutes before he makes a point I made here, and people here seem to struggle with the mathematical limitations. I cued it up where Keller points out something interesting--that physicists and philosophers are the ones who tend to score highest on the GRE.



Right at about 1:01 in, he makes the point I made here. When you get to the edge, things are found to be uncomputable, undefinable or uncertain. Both of these guys are really smart. Lex works on the AI around self-driving cars. Jim designs microprocessors.

@ckaihatsu, what's interesting in listening to these two guys talk is that Lex works on AI and Jim brings him right back to the basics of a microchip, adders, subtractors, multipliers, etc. So Lex will argue like you and say everything is much more complicated, and Jim comes back and breaks down the abstractions to first principles. They kind of get into it when Jim says that self-driving cars aren't that complicated and Lex disagrees. He then relents a bit on the algorithms but re-asserts that the human eye and spatial processing is very complex. It's a fascinating discussion for someone like me.

ckaihatsu wrote:Why Are Modern Supply Chains So Needlessly Complex

Because they are trying to avoid the built-in costs of the Western 20th Century regulatory state.
#15162348
About a decade ago, there was something called the Outside Asylum. It no longer exists.

But it had a bunch of high powered intellects, and we used to argue about AI from time to time. One of my favorite posters was the guy that owns BAT, Balanced Audio Technologies. We disagreed about everything, but his engineering skill was terrific.

Anyway... he would argue that we would never get AI. I didn't agree, of course, but he certainly had some points in his favor. We started talking about AI in the 1950s, and we expected we would build it in the mid term future, a few decades from then. It's over a half century since then, and my impression is that the perceived difficulty of creating it has only grown with time.

There have been a lot of writers that have argued we are close to an era where technological synergy will vastly increase our ability to do stuff. I think it's already started. The COVID vaccine is a combination of technologies that the medical community has wanted for a generation. Astronomy is on fire with new discoveries becoming routine. I can remember when companies bragged that their products had a transistor, my video card has billions...

So.

I think we will eventually get AI. But you guys may not live long enough to see it. It also may be the spontaneous result of something we've done. Computers need us to build them and feed them and repair them. It would be illogical to bite the hand that feeds them.

It would also be logical to think that an AI, or a family of AIs (there will likely be different types) would want to maintain that relationship even after they don't need us. Granted, the relationship would change, but I favor the scenario where they build colonies for themselves. First around the solar system, and then traveling to other systems.

Humans have a long history of fearing new stuff. This is especially true of technology. Frankenstein was the fear of the knowledge of the electricity that makes humans work. I've been considering buying that. Because nowadays it's a little box that will kick your ticker when you've had a heart attack. They are everywhere, in schools, in homes, in police stations, even libraries and school buses.

IMDUO (in my distinctly unhumble opinion) panic is a lot more dangerous than AI.
#15162358
blackjack21 wrote:
As I've said before, modern physics can tell you a lot. You can rather easily predict the orbit of planets and so forth. You can build internal combustion or jet engines, use thrust to overcome drag, use wings to generate lift and overcome gravity, and so on. However, it's much more complex to describe animal behavior. When you get to human behavior, and you want to use a basic physics model, you can't well describe something like a deli sandwich.

Think about a roast beef sandwich with mayo, mustard, pickles, pepperoncini, lettuce, tomato, onion and a slice of sharp cheddar cheese on a sourdough roll. What's the probability of that happening? With physics models, you'd get some infinitesimal probability and people will say, "Ah, but it's possible so current physical models are good enough." I say no, because when I order a roast beef sandwich, I know with 99% certainty I'm going to get that sandwich. Basically, physics doesn't well explain the counter to entropy--that life gets more and more complex, not less.



Yeah -- that's called 'biology'.

(Unfortunately the Western reductionist approach keeps these various fields quite *segmented* from each other, so you wind up with that physics problem that can't account for the life sciences, organic growth, etc.)


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blackjack21 wrote:
That [A.I.] is [a] positive development in my view, but I'm skeptical that such approaches will demystify gravity straight away or incorporate some sort of "intelligence" or "deterministic" force into physics that is clearly present in our daily lives, while not inconsistent with other forces. We just don't have a complete picture yet.



ckaihatsu wrote:
I don't know what 'intelligent' or 'deterministic' physical force you may be referring to here -- you're being *vague*, and I've never been religious. You may want to elaborate.



blackjack21 wrote:
I'm not being deliberately vague. I do not have the answer, and I'm perfectly comfortable with saying so. However, I do think there are other forces in play that we do not understand--just as we didn't understand electricity 400 years ago.



Well, regardless of intent or not, you *are* being vague -- what's 'the answer', or what's 'the question', for that matter? You seem to be looking for A.I. to answer *philosophical* questions that you have about the natural sciences, but I don't think that that's really in the AI *domain*, which itself deals with *empirical*, *quantitative*-type sets of data.

The following is what happens when one expects an AI to be a *conversational* partner:


AI vs. AI. Two chatbots talking to each other




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blackjack21 wrote:
We'd start steering well off the enlightenment topic. As for diamonds, most people have no real utilitarian use for them other than a decoration.



Regardless, technically this is *still* 'use value', as distinct from capitalism's 'exchange values', or prices. To elaborate:


ckaihatsu, at RevLeft wrote:
My favorite illustrative scenario for this -- if you'll entertain it -- is that of a landscape artist in such a post-commodity world.

They make public their artistic endeavor to drape a prominent extended length of cliffs with their creation, and they'll require a custom-made fabric that is enormous and must be made with a blending of precious and rare metals formed as long threads.

Who is to deny them? (Or, how exactly would be this treated, politically?)



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blackjack21 wrote:
If people could get diamonds affordably, diamonds wouldn't be a status symbol. So you're not dealing as much with capitalism per se as you are with human behavior and status symbols reflecting social stratification. In a utilitarian capitalist sense, industrial diamonds are typically used for cutting rock, etc.



I'll *simplify* this, in terms of political economy -- either something is being viewed in terms of social 'use', or 'use value', or else it is being measured by capitalism's market exchanges, in terms of *exchange values*.


blackjack21 wrote:
Well, market failure is a broad topic. I would say at least one would be human behavior. Humans are not "capitalist." For example, pure self interest is not Pareto efficient; yet, an individual human is not necessarily going to care fuck all about efficiency. As I've said before, humans that adapted to survive in severe climates like Northern Europeans and Asians have no choice but to learn how to capture more food than they need immediately and store it for a long winter when they will be very limited in hunting, fishing and gathering. That behavior is not fully governed by the more rational frontal cortex. It's why, for example, smart people can become drug addicts.



Good to hear that you're forfeiting the 'free-market', individualist position -- yes, the dimension of *scale* is important, since specific individual human behavior has little to do with overall, *societal-scale* political economy.


Generalizations-Characterizations

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blackjack21 wrote:
The problem is that not all humans settled down. Raiding an agricultural area would be perfectly normal for non-agrarian civilizations. Much of the Roman story of the barbarians or the medieval story of the Vikings is about being raided by groups that aren't particularly settled societies. So you end up having to build up a military to defend your surplus.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Okay, again, no contention, but you're just proving my point *for* me, here -- it's the advent of a material *surplus* that gave rise to *class-divided* human society.



blackjack21 wrote:
Well, a major difference in our approach is that yours is much more ideological and mine is much more biological. Hunter gatherers also learned to produce a surplus to survive winters. I think that is hard-wired into humans, and not a product of ideology.



Technically- / actually-speaking, surviving the winter isn't really a 'surplus', because that extra food in storage is then used-up during the winter months.

I included a description of the historical development of a *constant* surplus, from irrigation techniques -- in grainaries -- that then had to be *administered* over, by a priestly class, which freed them up to explore the sciences, etc. (So it wasn't *all* bad.)

This is human *history*, not ideology, and your biological-determinist position is *still* displaced, regardless.


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blackjack21 wrote:
Specialization of labor, specialization of knowledge (when to plant, when to irrigate, when to harvest, how to preserve, etc.). To the illiterate masses, those with special knowledge and literacy probably seemed like sorcerers. I work on cloud computing. If I start talking about what I did for the day in a social context, invariably most people stop me and say, "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about." Lots of people in highly specialized jobs have that experience.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Yes, exactly, and this societal *specialization* is far from benign, as you're depicting it -- it's been just as socially deterministic as the elitist ruling-class control of the material surplus itself.



blackjack21 wrote:
It's not all "control of material surplus." There are biological drivers here too. We have a situation where poor people are fat and have access to enough resources to procure heroin. It's much easier to see the behavior studying rat models, because you're not going to inject capitalist rats and communist rats, etc. However, social isolation and surplus tends to lead to destructive behavior in social animals.



We're talking apples-and-oranges, here, BJ -- you're *insisting* on a social-psychological approach, even after you *agreed* that specialization of know-how is part-and-parcel of the class division in society.

You're going off on a tangent, to discuss psychological addictions, which has *zero* to do with the societal production / specialization / administration of a societal surplus.


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blackjack21 wrote:
Well, I think part of the "mystery" is that today's scientific minded think that nobody was able to do anything that they didn't first read in a book in a building called "school." Humans didn't need sex education until the 1960s, for some reason. It's amazing we survived. Yet, humanity did a lot before basic literacy was a thing.



Okay, fair enough.


blackjack21 wrote:
Yes, I'm quite an eccentric guy. I don't watch mainstream television shows at all. Today, I watched a Lex Fridman interview with Jim Keller. I don't know how you spend your free time, but this is how I spend some of mine:

Nb2tebYAaOA



blackjack21 wrote:
@Wellsy, I'll cue this up about five minutes before he makes a point I made here, and people here seem to struggle with the mathematical limitations. I cued it up where Keller points out something interesting--that physicists and philosophers are the ones who tend to score highest on the GRE.

Nb2tebYAaOA?t=3205

Right at about 1:01 in, he makes the point I made here. When you get to the edge, things are found to be uncomputable, undefinable or uncertain. Both of these guys are really smart. Lex works on the AI around self-driving cars. Jim designs microprocessors.



blackjack21 wrote:
@ckaihatsu, what's interesting in listening to these two guys talk is that Lex works on AI and Jim brings him right back to the basics of a microchip, adders, subtractors, multipliers, etc. So Lex will argue like you and say everything is much more complicated, and Jim comes back and breaks down the abstractions to first principles. They kind of get into it when Jim says that self-driving cars aren't that complicated and Lex disagrees. He then relents a bit on the algorithms but re-asserts that the human eye and spatial processing is very complex. It's a fascinating discussion for someone like me.



It's because of fairly-recent enormous increases in computational power that we're able to now pursue an *inductive reasoning* approach to analyzing complex data -- like that from the human eye (or 'machine vision'), and spatial processing / robotics, which is all under the umbrella of AI, or 'machine learning'.


inductive vs. deductive reasoning

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ckaihatsu wrote:



Why Are Modern Supply Chains So Needlessly Complex



blackjack21 wrote:
Because they are trying to avoid the built-in costs of the Western 20th Century regulatory state.



Yes, I agree empirically here, since that's the conclusion presented by the video.

So any proponent of Western / capitalism has to reconcile -- if they can -- the free-flowing global-economics premise of capitalism, with the objective-reality need for administrative / political *oversight* over the same.

Marxists point out that this is inherently a *contradiction* -- why not just have the *workers* collectively control what they produce, instead of leaving it to the 'hands-off' 'invisible hand' of the market mechanism, since *some* kind of intentional oversight is objectively / indisputably required anyway -- ?
#15162394
late wrote:
Computers need us to build them and feed them and repair them. It would be illogical to bite the hand that feeds them.

It would also be logical to think that an AI, or a family of AIs (there will likely be different types) would want to maintain that relationship even after they don't need us. Granted, the relationship would change, but I favor the scenario where they build colonies for themselves. First around the solar system, and then traveling to other systems.



This is the kind of characterization of AI that I have to *object* to, late -- you're implying 'artificial life' here, and that's *not necessarily* how things have to be, unless we, as pre-existing sentient beings, *make* technology that way, and, more importantly, *treat* technological artifacts this way.

I think 'birthing' artificial-life entities -- as is so commonly depicted in sci-fi movies -- is a *bad idea*, and shouldn't be done, though opinion varies as to whether such is *inevitable* or not.

But we already have a precedent in how bad it *could* look, from as recently as 2017:



Sophia has been covered by media around the globe and has participated in many high-profile interviews. In October 2017, Sophia "became" a Saudi Arabian citizen, the first robot to receive citizenship of any country.[4][5] In November 2017, Sophia was named the United Nations Development Programme's first ever Innovation Champion, and is the first non-human to be given any United Nation title.[6]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophia_(robot)



The point being here that Sophia is never going to be 'socialized', the way babies of any organic species are -- no matter how many people are fooled, Sophia is still just a *simulation* of what personhood looks like, and is not going to be able to choose an individual 'life path' from internal self-reflection, and social options, the way people do.

At the end of the day it's probably hung up in a closet somewhere like a shirt or jacket.
#15162663
late wrote:Computers need us to build them and feed them and repair them. It would be illogical to bite the hand that feeds them.

I'm afraid ckaihatsu is right in this instance, and by afraid I mean I'm not happy that he's right about this. It rarely takes very long for the world's politicians and militaries to put a technology to use as a weapon. Consider a Predator drone. Consider surveillance technologies. They are literally used to target people--often for negative results, like imprisonment or a hellfire missile shot. In your instance, the AI has to have a survival instinct and some sort of moral compass. That sounds obvious, but it isn't when it comes to programming it.

Sometimes computer heads get disillusioned with working for the government and they make video games like the Watchdogs series--giving a hint at what's going on with government investments in technology to surveil, etc. to people who would otherwise not be too interested.



Maybe it's a bit paranoid on my part, but it's why I don't use the fingerprint scanners or facial recognition technologies for authentication on my computer, because that recognition can then be sold right back to the government.

late wrote:It would also be logical to think that an AI, or a family of AIs (there will likely be different types) would want to maintain that relationship even after they don't need us. Granted, the relationship would change, but I favor the scenario where they build colonies for themselves. First around the solar system, and then traveling to other systems.

That's quaint, but it highlights why I'm saying we have huge gaps in our knowledge; yet, we are learning so much at the same time.

For example, I'm currently reading "A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution" by Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg. Jennifer won the Nobel Prize in chemistry last year around her work on CRISPR, etc. It's a pretty fascinating book.

However, it strikes me--and this is the same problem with people who overstate Darwin's accomplishments--that we really have a limited understanding of WHY this stuff happens.

The "Big Bang" theory as a narrative starts with a singularity--again, which we cannot prove or disprove because it no longer exists--and that this "big bang" happens, only there's no sound (bad metaphor). Then, we get what we know of as a periodic table of elements, which starts with hydrogen, which we believe fuses into helium in stars, and this happens over and over until we get our periodic table of elements. Then we get chemistry which is rather strange--oxygen binds to iron and gives you iron oxide or rust, and so on. Yet, then we get to organic chemistry and we're seeing hydrocarbons creating self-sustaining chemical reactions we call "life." On the other hand, we use these hydrocarbons to fuel our society using the laws of thermodynamics, which tell us that in a closed system heat always migrates from a warmer place to a colder place. That we have entropy, which is ever increasing. Yet, life is doing exactly the opposite--increasing in complexity and order.

My big problem with people like Dawkins (and Rorty) is that they implore us not to ask why any longer, and focus strictly on how. It's also why I'm a bit of a skeptic of E.O. Wilson's tome Consilience. We can safely say that rust has no agency, but even in that video of Lex Fridman and Jim Keller, Jim points out that the most simple of life forms have something like a sensor and a motor at the most basic level. Life forms seem to want to live. Whereas, it's much harder to say that about something like rust, which just seems like a basic reaction between two elements.

Carbons behave in fascinating ways--graphene, graphite, diamond, nanotubes, etc. Yet, hydrocarbons behave in even more fascinating ways--forming the sugars like pentose, ribose and deoxyribose needed to create longer chain nucleic acids that are the basis of all life forms. They appear to carry information; yet, we don't seem to have a physical basis for understanding information. We could argue that information is just a configuration of molecules, but that misses how we are able to have an intelligent conversation. That may be a satisfactory answer for the creation of RNA, and for RNA creating proteins. It doesn't explain why life appears to want to live. Or that without the amino acids necessary for creating proteins, RNA would have nothing to do. Then, you get to the behaviors the amino acids can have. For example, glutamic acid operates as an excitatory neurotransmitter, but gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) which is synthesized in vivo from glutamic acid operates as an inhibitory neurotransmitter.

In computers, we could say programs have a self-sustaining quality in terms of iteration. We build sensors that convert information from physical sensors into data. However, I don't think anyone in their right mind believes that computers would have been created of their own volition the way life appears to.

ckaihatsu wrote:Yeah -- that's called 'biology'.

(Unfortunately the Western reductionist approach keeps these various fields quite *segmented* from each other, so you wind up with that physics problem that can't account for the life sciences, organic growth, etc.)

Well, that hasn't precluded an Eastern approach, but we still do not have anything close to a model of everything; and, I think part of why we can't arrive at a grand unified theory is because we're missing why something like biochemistry behaves the way it does--focusing only on the how while ignoring the why--and usually to avoid metaphysics.

ckaihatsu wrote:Well, regardless of intent or not, you *are* being vague -- what's 'the answer', or what's 'the question', for that matter?

Here's a simple question: if you are nothing more than a self-sustaining chemical reaction, why bother conversing with me? Why do you want to converse, debate, introduce ideas, criticize other ideas? What underpins all of that from a physical perspective?

In my opinion, we're missing one or more forces we have yet to define or understand.

ckaihatsu wrote:You seem to be looking for A.I. to answer *philosophical* questions that you have about the natural sciences, but I don't think that that's really in the AI *domain*, which itself deals with *empirical*, *quantitative*-type sets of data.

Not really. My roast beef sandwich example is inherently empirical. A roast beef sandwich is a physical thing.

ckaihatsu wrote:We're talking apples-and-oranges, here, BJ -- you're *insisting* on a social-psychological approach, even after you *agreed* that specialization of know-how is part-and-parcel of the class division in society.

Yes, but speaking in terms of classes is using abstractions that leave out one hell of a lot of information, and also make value-based conclusions--classes are bad. The big strong guy and the weakling are also in different classes of physical strength having nothing to do with specialization of labor or know-how. Likewise, men and women are in different physical classes. Yesterday, a female work colleague was complaining that female hair cuts are more expensive than male hair cuts. Usually, women got to other women hair dressers. Why do women oppress each other in this way? Ever been to a mall? Have you ever noticed how many women's shoe stores there are? How many different styles of shoes are made for women versus men? It's not trivial.

ckaihatsu wrote:You're going off on a tangent, to discuss psychological addictions, which has *zero* to do with the societal production / specialization / administration of a societal surplus.

You are making a Marxist assertion that poverty is inherently due to certain people maintaining a surplus and not sharing it with others. I'm saying we're well beyond 19th Century industrialism and its effects, and today we see classes of people such as the homeless and drug-addicted. In other words, you are complaining about the effects of 19th Century industrialization and urbanization, and we're in the 21st Century confronting very different problems that Marx had not even considered.
#15162665
blackjack21 wrote:
I think part of why we can't arrive at a grand unified theory is because we're missing why something like biochemistry behaves the way it does--focusing only on the how while ignoring the why--and usually to avoid metaphysics.



*Or*, you could have just *asked* -- ! (grin)

I'd say that the organic-life growing processes are due to local availabilities of *energy*, of various kinds, particularly the sun. Physics doesn't seem to want to acknowledge such 'counter-entropy' forces, for whatever strange reason -- I'd say it's *cultural*, basically, and obviously not scientific-minded.


blackjack21 wrote:
Here's a simple question: if you are nothing more than a self-sustaining chemical reaction, why bother conversing with me? Why do you want to converse, debate, introduce ideas, criticize other ideas? What underpins all of that from a physical perspective?

In my opinion, we're missing one or more forces we have yet to define or understand.



Ehhhhh, you're just continuing to be linear and Western-reductionistic, in line with the cultural tradition I just described.

Linear types like you need to get caught up on *complexity theory* -- which also explains why you're having difficulty comprehending neural networks and that whole type of strictly-machine-learning AI.


Order - Complexity - Complication - Chaos

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ckaihatsu wrote:
You seem to be looking for A.I. to answer *philosophical* questions that you have about the natural sciences, but I don't think that that's really in the AI *domain*, which itself deals with *empirical*, *quantitative*-type sets of data.



blackjack21 wrote:
Not really. My roast beef sandwich example is inherently empirical. A roast beef sandwich is a physical thing.



Just consider that there are increasing *qualitative* *levels* of evolutionary-type, and societal-type growth. A roast beef sandwich is *socio-material*, meaning it requires at least pastoralism, which provides a material surplus to society, which enables leisurely material *culture*, such as the trading of recipes and the experimentation with different types of dishes.


[1] History, Macro Micro -- Precision

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ckaihatsu wrote:
We're talking apples-and-oranges, here, BJ -- you're *insisting* on a social-psychological approach, even after you *agreed* that specialization of know-how is part-and-parcel of the class division in society.



blackjack21 wrote:
Yes, but speaking in terms of classes is using abstractions that leave out one hell of a lot of information, and also make value-based conclusions--classes are bad. The big strong guy and the weakling are also in different classes of physical strength having nothing to do with specialization of labor or know-how. Likewise, men and women are in different physical classes. Yesterday, a female work colleague was complaining that female hair cuts are more expensive than male hair cuts. Usually, women got to other women hair dressers. Why do women oppress each other in this way? Ever been to a mall? Have you ever noticed how many women's shoe stores there are? How many different styles of shoes are made for women versus men? It's not trivial.



Sorry, but you're stubbornly sticking to a whole different 'rap' here, BJ -- go ahead and discuss gender roles under capitalism if you like, but it's *still* social psychology, at best. I'm here for the *politics* / political-economy.


blackjack21 wrote:
You are making a Marxist assertion that poverty is inherently due to certain people maintaining a surplus and not sharing it with others. I'm saying we're well beyond 19th Century industrialism and its effects, and today we see classes of people such as the homeless and drug-addicted. In other words, you are complaining about the effects of 19th Century industrialization and urbanization, and we're in the 21st Century confronting very different problems that Marx had not even considered.



Okay, then what happened to the *class division*, then? Has it gone away, here in the 21st century?

You're continuing to prefer your own cultural and pathology-minded tangents, unfortunately.
#15162668
blackjack21 wrote:

Maybe it's a bit paranoid on my part


My big problem with people like Rorty is that they implore us not to ask why any longer, and focus strictly on how.



You don't say...

Say what?? I don't know a thing about that other guy, but you're dead wrong about Rorty.

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