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[silverspawn]

Asking ChatGPT a question about what the liteature shows is so much easier than trying to research it

if only I could rely on it being true

[silverspawn]

I know I've talked about how very smart autistic people are great writers, and they do, but man for normal people being autistic is hard. Because your tone pattern-matches to deliberate trolling which means you will be accused of such all the time without meaning to.

[silverspawn]

Did the Big Five personality test for the first time. Results (spoilered in case someone wants to guess first)

Openness -- 65%
Conscientiousness -- 60%
Extraversion -- 46%
Agreeableness -- 48%
Neuroticism -- 42%

[silverspawn]

Now I know this will come as a shock, but I feel like these are way less interesting than the MBTI axes. I also feel like Agreeableness and Extraversion throw a bunch of different things together.

I certainly don't think it's all bad though; the first two are definitely meaningful axes, and I think of them as fairly well-defined.

[silverspawn]

That was a stupid way to spoiler it; should have been this

Openness -- 65%
Conscientiousness -- 60%
Extraversion -- 46%
Agreeableness -- 48%
Neuroticism -- 42%

[silverspawn]

So I'm trying to read/listen to Daniel Dennet's "Consciousness Explained" (the illusionist manifesto), and I'm getting extremely annoyed at the writing style. Who'd have thought I know. But actually I didn't expect this, I just expected to be mad at the philosophy, not at the smugness.

[silverspawn]

(We might call the Freudian model the Hamlet model, for it is reminiscent of Hamlet's devious ploy of staging "The Mousetrap" just for Claudius; it takes a clever devil indeed to dream up such a subtle stratagem, but if Freud is to be believed, we all harbor such narrative virtuosi.)

this is just one example, but my poor sensitive signaling sensors are going into overdrive reading this. The entire sentence is completely unnecessary to the broader point, hence the parentheses, so the only reason to include it is to signal sophistication.

[silverspawn]

In order to imagine this, you really have to know quite a lot of what science has discovered about how brains work, but much more important, you have to learn new ways of thinking. Adding facts helps you imagine new possibilities, but the discoveries and theories of neuroscience are not enough — even neuroscientists are often baffled by consciousness. In order to stretch your imagination, I will provide, along with the relevant scientific facts, a series of stories, analogies, thought experiments, and other devices designed to give you new perspectives, break old habits of thought, and help you organize the facts into a single, coherent vision strikingly different from the traditional view of consciousness we tend to trust.

Honest Translation:

You have to be very smart to understand my theory. And very knowledgeable. Actually you have to be smarter than neuroscientists. It's ok because I'm all of these things and I'll be there to guide you. But I don't think you're smart enough to get it if I put it simply, so I'll stretch out everything with pretentious dribble. The result will be awesome.

[silverspawn]

oh my god this guy makes me so angry. How come no one ever told me that Dennet's famous book  is the most elitist pile of &*%(#^&*^( ever written?

Just. Listen to this.

The mystery of consciousness has many ways of introducing itself, and it struck me anew with particular force one recent morning as I sat in a rocking chair reading a book. I had apparently just looked up from my book, and at first had been gazing blindly out the window, lost in thought, when the beauty of my surroundings distracted me from my theoretical musings. Green-golden sunlight was streaming in the window that early spring day, and the thousands of branches and twigs of the maple tree in the yard were still clearly visible through a mist of green buds, forming an elegant pattern of wonderful intricacy. The windowpane is made of old glass, and has a scarcely detectable wrinkle line in it, and as I rocked back and forth, this imperfection in the glass caused a wave of synchronized wiggles to march back and forth across the delta of branches, a regular motion superimposed with remarkable vividness on the more chaotic shimmer of the twigs and branches in the breeze. Then I noticed that this visual metronome in the tree branches was locked in rhythm with the Vivaldi concerto grosso I was listening to as "background music" for my reading.

[faust]

oh my god this guy makes me so angry. How come no one ever told me that Dennet's famous book  is the most elitist pile of &*%(#^&*^( ever written?

Just. Listen to this.

The mystery of consciousness has many ways of introducing itself, and it struck me anew with particular force one recent morning as I sat in a rocking chair reading a book. I had apparently just looked up from my book, and at first had been gazing blindly out the window, lost in thought, when the beauty of my surroundings distracted me from my theoretical musings. Green-golden sunlight was streaming in the window that early spring day, and the thousands of branches and twigs of the maple tree in the yard were still clearly visible through a mist of green buds, forming an elegant pattern of wonderful intricacy. The windowpane is made of old glass, and has a scarcely detectable wrinkle line in it, and as I rocked back and forth, this imperfection in the glass caused a wave of synchronized wiggles to march back and forth across the delta of branches, a regular motion superimposed with remarkable vividness on the more chaotic shimmer of the twigs and branches in the breeze. Then I noticed that this visual metronome in the tree branches was locked in rhythm with the Vivaldi concerto grosso I was listening to as "background music" for my reading.

It feels like I only comment here when there's something I disagree with. I'll make an exception for this. I fully agree.

[faust]

Now I know this will come as a shock, but I feel like these are way less interesting than the MBTI axes. I also feel like Agreeableness and Extraversion throw a bunch of different things together.

It's the main problem with science, isn't it? The bullshit results are always the more interesting ones.

[silverspawn]

It feels like I only comment here when there's something I disagree with. I'll make an exception for this. I fully agree.

Thanks. It helps to not feel kinship

[silverspawn]

* to feel kinship

[silverspawn]

Even purely on content, I'm shocked how bad this book is. So much of it is filler, and the arguments are so sloppy.

[faust]

I just did some brief research on this guy... and of course he did his PhD in Oxford. That particular Oxfordian mindset permeates his prose.

[Awaclus]

The mystery of consciousness has many ways of introducing itself, and it struck me anew with particular force one recent morning as I sat in a rocking chair reading a book. I had apparently just looked up from my book, and at first had been gazing blindly out the window, lost in thought, when the beauty of my surroundings distracted me from my theoretical musings. Green-golden sunlight was streaming in the window that early spring day, and the thousands of branches and twigs of the maple tree in the yard were still clearly visible through a mist of green buds, forming an elegant pattern of wonderful intricacy. The windowpane is made of old glass, and has a scarcely detectable wrinkle line in it, and as I rocked back and forth, this imperfection in the glass caused a wave of synchronized wiggles to march back and forth across the delta of branches, a regular motion superimposed with remarkable vividness on the more chaotic shimmer of the twigs and branches in the breeze. Then I noticed that this visual metronome in the tree branches was locked in rhythm with the Vivaldi concerto grosso I was listening to as "background music" for my reading.

This reminds me of Aalewis more than Aalewis himself does.

[silverspawn]

this guy?

[Awaclus]

this guy?

Yes.

[silverspawn]

I haven't followed the rules debate closely, but Moat definitely draws two cards when you play it. That is, unless you have a -1 Card token or the opponent has played Enchantress or you don't have two cards in play or you have a +1 card token or [xxx]

[Awaclus]

I haven't followed the rules debate closely, but Moat definitely draws two cards when you play it.

I'm pretty sure I am the one who draws the cards, not the Moat.

[silverspawn]

I haven't followed the rules debate closely, but Moat definitely draws two cards when you play it.

I'm pretty sure I am the one who draws the cards, not the Moat.

[silverspawn]

This is probably not much of a revelation, but I bet the main motivation for people to endlessly debate edge cases and such is because it's intellectually stimulating. It's like the feeling of running successful computations; you almost always find something relevant to say, so it's like a never ending supply of small dopamine hits

[silverspawn]

So I'm through chapter 5 on Dennett's book. My main analysis of his writing is that he's mostly doing two things

1. Arguing by Proxy (related to strawmanning/weakmanning/motte-and-bailey). He'll pick something, like the idea that we have an immaterial self that has free will, and argue against it. But he doesn't make it clear that he's strictly arguing against this one thing; it feels like he's attacking consciousness realism more broadly. This isn't an isolated thing, he does over and over again. The ability to be fooled about things in general as a proxy for the ability to be fooled about having experience. Our overestimating the fidelity of the visual field as a proxy for the idea that we see images at all. Our not being able to tell what weird phenomenological effects exist as a proxy for ignorance about phenomenology broadly. ...[^1]

2. Distracting you from the lack of substance by talking a lot and using analogies. Man, so much of this book is filler. He just keeps going on these elaborate metaphors to make a point that, at least as far I'm concerned, you could have just been stated plainly and I'd have gotten it immediately.

What's frustrating about this  is that this is so clear to me, like it feels like I'm seeing through his tricks so easily. And I want to just beam that understanding into other people's heads but I can't.

[silverspawn]

[^1]: this one backfired particularly hard because even the proxy didn't work. He was listing five propositions, and the point was that you're not supposed to know which one is false. But I guessed the correct one immediately.



(The false one is number   4  )

[silverspawn]

Daniel Dennett is basically the opposite of Steven Lehar