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[silverspawn]

hm good point.

Also plants don't have feelings.

[silverspawn]

Rewatched The Hateful Eigth a bunch in the past couple of days. (Kinda ran out of new movies ). It's so good! I'd weirdly compare it to early Game of Thrones in that it has a bunch of real-feeling characters with real-feeling utility functions interacting. It's less than 1% as complex, but for while it lasts it's every bit as good.

I do wish Tarrantino's movies didn't have the violence porn aspect, but I guess if they didn't they wouldn't be popular and he wouldn't have as much money in the films he does make, so maybe it's necessary. I don't really care about the last ~quarter of the film, but everything up to that is great.

[Awaclus]

it feels kinda strange to argue against you from the left/activist side

Is it though? In practice I feel like hypocrisy arguments are coming from the right more often than the left. I mean the right often don't even justify their beliefs with any coherent moral code, so there's nothing to be hypocritical about.

I do see a lot of hypocrisy arguments being used against the right (as in conservatives), e.g. when they justify anti-LGBT or anti-abortion positions with the Bible but then are completely fine with supporting other stuff that's arguably more explicitly condemned by the Bible like extreme forms of capitalism, or when they're super terrified about the possibility of a very small number of trans teenagers voluntarily going through gender-affirming surgery and call it mutilation but then also go and get their own male infants circumcised, or when they're worried about freedom of speech being compromised because of cancel culture but then also advocate for the state to ban books from libraries, etc.

[Awaclus]

Also plants don't have feelings.

How do you know that?

[faust]

it feels kinda strange to argue against you from the left/activist side

Is it though? In practice I feel like hypocrisy arguments are coming from the right more often than the left. I mean the right often don't even justify their beliefs with any coherent moral code, so there's nothing to be hypocritical about.

I do see a lot of hypocrisy arguments being used against the right (as in conservatives), e.g. when they justify anti-LGBT or anti-abortion positions with the Bible but then are completely fine with supporting other stuff that's arguably more explicitly condemned by the Bible like extreme forms of capitalism, or when they're super terrified about the possibility of a very small number of trans teenagers voluntarily going through gender-affirming surgery and call it mutilation but then also go and get their own male infants circumcised, or when they're worried about freedom of speech being compromised because of cancel culture but then also advocate for the state to ban books from libraries, etc.

Yes, these things happen. I'm not sure I would file all that under hypocrisy though; it's more like general inconsistency. I'm not convinced these are good arguments to make either way. Arguably the "plant have feelings" argument is also more like this, so that was a bad example for me to use.

But hypocrisy in my mind is more like failing to live up to your own perceived standards. So like, if some anti-abortion politician pressures their lovers to have an abortion (I vaguely rememer a case like that). I think on average the right is more prone to exploit such personal failings, and when the left does it a lot of the time it goes against other lefties rather than the other end of the political spectrum.

[silverspawn]

Also plants don't have feelings.

How do you know that?

So for something to have qualia, you need a physical structure that is functionally isomorphic to the qualia of, in this case, any particular feeling, and I think we can rule out such a thing in a plant. Like, if an animal has a feeling like pain, this corresponds to a physical thing in the brain, and aversion and desire to get out of pain corresponds to the physical response of the brain to that thing. So at a bare minimum, this requires some pretty sophisticated computation at a centralized location. But afaik the intelligence in plants doesn't go beyond relatively simple mechanisms (that are also not electrical) which we've mostly reverse-engineered.

I ofc think consciousness is an EM field thing, but I think you can rule out plant consciousness without being so specific.

[silverspawn]

oh snap there's a sixth season of black mirror? Should I subscribe to Netflix again to watch it??

I could also torrent it but then I would have to wait . . .

It's really hype because I thought they wouldn't make another season. I remember a statement from a creator that was like, well now that Covid is a thing I think people want happier stuff so we're gonna make a comedy or some shit I don't care about, I and I was like

[silverspawn]

ok I'll be patient and torrent it, but good try user-specific e-mail generating algorithm!

[Awaclus]

Also plants don't have feelings.

How do you know that?

So for something to have qualia, you need a physical structure that is functionally isomorphic to the qualia of, in this case, any particular feeling, and I think we can rule out such a thing in a plant. Like, if an animal has a feeling like pain, this corresponds to a physical thing in the brain, and aversion and desire to get out of pain corresponds to the physical response of the brain to that thing. So at a bare minimum, this requires some pretty sophisticated computation at a centralized location. But afaik the intelligence in plants doesn't go beyond relatively simple mechanisms (that are also not electrical) which we've mostly reverse-engineered.

I ofc think consciousness is an EM field thing, but I think you can rule out plant consciousness without being so specific.

Well, animal consciousness is obviously different and more complex than whatever is going on in plants, but plants do still process information, and modify their behavior based on it to reach the goals they have, and they're genetically related to us (very distantly) and their intelligence has been produced by the same optimization process that produced ours. One could even argue that the kind of intelligence that plants have is specifically similar to e.g. the sensation of pain and not to something like reasoning, since they can only react, not e.g. anticipate.

[silverspawn]

Also plants don't have feelings.

How do you know that?

So for something to have qualia, you need a physical structure that is functionally isomorphic to the qualia of, in this case, any particular feeling, and I think we can rule out such a thing in a plant. Like, if an animal has a feeling like pain, this corresponds to a physical thing in the brain, and aversion and desire to get out of pain corresponds to the physical response of the brain to that thing. So at a bare minimum, this requires some pretty sophisticated computation at a centralized location. But afaik the intelligence in plants doesn't go beyond relatively simple mechanisms (that are also not electrical) which we've mostly reverse-engineered.

I ofc think consciousness is an EM field thing, but I think you can rule out plant consciousness without being so specific.

Well, animal consciousness is obviously different and more complex than whatever is going on in plants, but plants do still process information, and modify their behavior based on it to reach the goals they have, and they're genetically related to us (very distantly) and their intelligence has been produced by the same optimization process that produced ours. One could even argue that the kind of intelligence that plants have is specifically similar to e.g. the sensation of pain and not to something like reasoning, since they can only react, not e.g. anticipate.

Yes, and this would be a response to generic information-processing arguments. But what I said is more specific than that. Consciousness is not an emergent effect of arbitrary information processing. You need a single structure that can produce a bound experience. Functionally connecting a bunch of elementary mechanisms is exactly the same thing that also happens in a digital computer, and it doesn't produce nontrivial consciousness. And it's not relevant how many mechanisms you string together or how intelligent the emergent functional system is.

[silverspawn]

@Hypocrisy: I often get annoyed at people talking about hypocrisy because they're using a pretty weird definition that they don't make explicit, and that's different from the dictionary definition. I obviously don't think the dictionary definition is always what counts, but in this case, I think that captures the most useful version of the concept. And the dictionary definition (at least the one I've looked up) is "claiming to have standards you don't have"

which in particular implies lying. If you're honest, you're not hypocritical.  so I more or less align with what you said here @faust, but not completely. (Though what annoys me is really that people don't define it before they talk about it; if you do define it differently, that's fine.)

But hypocrisy in my mind is more like failing to live up to your own perceived standards. So like, if some anti-abortion politician pressures their lovers to have an abortion (I vaguely rememer a case like that). I think on average the right is more prone to exploit such personal failings, and when the left does it a lot of the time it goes against other lefties rather than the other end of the political spectrum.

So in this case, it would depend on whether the politician is fine with other people having abortions as long as they're legal. If they are, I think there's genuinely nothing wrong with wanting his girlfriend to have an abortion. "I want abortions to be illegal, but as long as they're legal, people are free to have them" is a coherent position. Ofc that's basically never the case; so yeah your typical right wing politician who judges people all the time would be very hypocritical in this case. But I like that the dictionary definition depends on the politician's judgment of other people since that's also intuitively what matters.

The more clear-cut example is what I've complained about before: there's absolutely nothing wrong with politicians advocating for term limits and then not voluntarily stepping down after the limit-that-isn't-yet-law has been reached. And accusing people of hypocrisy there sets horrendously bad incentives, which are probably a big reason why not more countries have term limits. At least the US has them for presidents.

[silverspawn]

To expand on this more, like your standard could be "this thing should be law but it's not the job of people to enforce it individually". Imo there are lots of cases where this standard makes sense.

[silverspawn]

Joan is awful (BM S06E01)

So the premise of this episode is that there is a show on Streamberry Netflix that depicts the main character's life, and comes out hours after stuff happens, and the show is based on deepfake tech. Joan has no legal recourse because she agreed to basically everything when she signed the terms of agreement,and neither does the actress whose face was used for her.

Then they try to go to Netflix headquarters and smash the computer generating this stuff, and obviously it turns out they're actually inside a simulation on lvl 1; they're simulated so in the real world, the show can be watched about real Joan.

This episode was goofy and pretty stupid. The whole inside a simulation thing has already been done, not just in general but by black mirror. Obv it doesn't work because digital simluations aren't conscious, but even putting that aside, it was pretty cringe here. The thing devolves into comedy pretty quickly. The atmosphere stops being serious and so does the acting.

Was it entertaining? Yes. Would I watch the entire season if I knew it'd all be this good? Yeah, probably. Is it what I want out of Black Mirror? No. It's not. It's pretty disappointing. I liked all three episodes of season 5 more than this.

6/10

[silverspawn]

I think people generally were down on it, but I liked the Smithereens episode of season 5 quite a lot. And one the reasons is that it's so genuine. In that case it wasn't even sci-fi; it just depicts stuff that's already happened many times, and then builds a dramatic story on top of it. This episode just makes the issue into a joke. You don't have the information to create deepfakes on this level, and the whole "you agreed to the terms therefore there's no recourse hurr durr" is stupid; I guarantee it's stupid without actually knowing anything about the law. Obviously you could just write "and by signing this agreement, you agree to pay us arbitrary amounts of money whenever we ask for as long as you live" into the terms and services of any product and people would sign it, but it wouldn't hold up.

[silverspawn]

Loch Henry (BM S06E02)

So I had to watch another one because I wanted confirmation that the show is still good. And it was, well... halfway there. It wasn't amazing, but it was definitely better than the first episode. It felt serious, at least.

Gonna leave it there; I have nothing interesting to say about the plot. 7/10 probably. The third episode is like 80 minutes long, so maybe that one is sth special?

[silverspawn]

Ok so I'll watch episode 3 right away because my brain feels to mushy to work, but first I'll write a python script that removes all [ ] parts from subtitles

These whole [dramatic music playing], [x sighs], [somber music playing] things are so annoying and I don't understand why it's a thing and why I'm the only person who has a problem with it. It genuinely takes away from the atmosphere to have a subtitle pointing out what atmosphere the music is supposed to have. I understand that some people are deaf and it's there for them and that's great, but we could just have two subtitle tracks! But no, for some reason they're almost always in the default version.

[silverspawn]

Beyond the Sea (BM S06E03)

Nope, not buying it.

So the plot here is as follows: Two astronauts are 2 years into a 6 year mission. However, because of sci-fi tech™, they have a robot at home looking like them which they can "live in" whenever they want. But it's not like their consciousness is transported into the robot or something, it's just that they control it like a VR thing. So they lie somewhere in the spaceship, then look through the robot's eyes and control it, but their real body is still in the space ship. The robots are perfectly human like unless you cut them open. When they are needed on the space ship, an alarm goes off on a bracelet of their robot body, and they quickly lie that body down and go back to controlling their human body.

So naturally the astronauts spend most of their time controlling their robots but periodically visit their human bodies to eat, work out, and do stuff on the ship if required. This tech is not possible because it'd require faster-than-light connection through space, but that's fine, I'm totally cool with the setup.

Ok, so one guy's robot plus human family on earth gets murdered by fanatics, so now he (let's call him A2) is stuck with his human body in the spaceship permanently. The other guy (let's call him A1) decides lets him use his robot body sporadically, like one hour a week, so he doesn't get insane. Actually A1's wife suggested it.

During these visits, A2 (inhabiting the robot-body of A1) bonds with the wife of A1. Eventually, he makes advances on her. She's tempted but rejects him. Apparently A1 doesn't get intimate with his wife through the robot-body and she's lonely. (Still fine with all this so far btw.) She doesn't tell A1 about this. But eventually, A1 finds nude drawings of A2 (that he made in the spaceship) of A1's wife, and he gets ultra pissed. When A2 begs to at least go back once to apologize to A1's wife, A1 decides it's a good idea to humiliate A2 as hard as possible by claiming that his wife finds A2 disgusting, even though that's not true.

A2 fakes some kind of emergency at the ship and while A1 is outside dealing with it, A2 goes into A1's body and murders his family.

This plot is black-mirror-like on first glance. But I don't buy it. The problem is that it relies on both A1 and A2 being immature. A2 is stuck alone in a spaceship for months and the only female person he ever interacts with is A1's wife. So he draws her naked. Are you really going to get super angry about this? I feel like I'd be pretty understanding here. He's going to have sexual fantasies about her anyway -- almost inevitably, that's how the male brain works -- so drawing them is just kinda being honest.

If he actually slept with her, different story. And he did make an advance on her once. And that's bad. It'd make more sense to get angry about that. But A1 is shown to be angry about the drawings specifically. And that just makes him an idiot. Have some perspective!

And you can't write it off as him being emotional in the moment because this whole thing has been going on for months, which means he should have seen it coming! Something like this was inevitably going to happen. Most men will develop an attraction to a pretty woman if she is the only female (and one of only two humans period) they ever interact with for months. Don't be so bloody naive.

And similarly, murdering the family of A1 is dumb. I get the thematic thing -- now A1 will feel what it's like to have lost everything. But the family didn't do anything. Obviously A1 lied about what his wife said; that much was pretty obvious. I don't hate this part as much as what A1 did because (a) it makes more sense for A2 to be desperate/insane, and (b) it makes sense why he wouldn't just murder A1 since they're stuck on this mission and need each other to make it. But still. I don't think the story showed him being in enough emotional pain to do this. Yes you're in a space ship for months, but it's not that bad. It's not really worse than prison. And you have gotten your weekly visits.

Also the ending was like, after A1 saw what A2 did, he returns to the spaceship and A2 is just sitting there, holding out a chair for A1, sort of implying that A1 understands this on some level. I don't buy that, either.

It's not necessarily that there aren't humans who'd do this, but I'm more impressed by stories that can write a good plot with mature characters. Which other Black Mirror episodes did! If you want to show a man going insane and making terrible decisions, it's only really impactful if I understand on a visceral level how he got that way. When I go "I could definitely take this much without doing the same things", well then it's not nearly as powerful.

I like the concept, the fact that it was just a single relatively grounded (if impossible) scifi thing, and I like how the story kicks off, but I don't like what they did with it. I'd probably give this a 5 because while it was a better viewing experience than e01, the fact that it was so unsatisfying will just make it go down in memory.

[silverspawn]

Mainly people need to grow up and stop judging others for what they're fantasizing about and judge them for what they do instead.

[silverspawn]

Also the wife was Zoe Barnes from House of Cards which was a little distracting, and I think I like her better there. The movie could have done more with her character, whether it's casting or writing.

[silverspawn]

It's sort of a pattern where how easily characters give into provocations tends to be inversely related to quality, and you can often observe this within the same show (usually comparing early good episodes with later ones when it went downhill). I remember one of the scenes that made me drop Better Call Saul was when the really old guy was watching over his granddaughter(?) and she was unintentionally bringing up something hurtful to him, and it made him angry and take it out on her. When I saw that, I knew in my heart that I was no longer watching a good show. And it would not have happened in seasons 1+2.

[silverspawn]

Mazey Day (BM S06E04)

I no longer had high expectations after episode 3, but this probably fell short. What is this episode doing in this show? 4/10.

[silverspawn]

The season so far had a net total of 0 memorable characters

[Awaclus]

Moat

[silverspawn]

Demon (BM S06E05)

Nope 3/10

[silverspawn]

So in conclusion, Black Mirror sucks now. That's too bad, really.