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There is a certain sense where this is communism's central failing. If we remove all the moral components of mass starvation due to idealistic utopianism, the

by yters 6y ago

There is a certain sense where this is communism's central failing. If we remove all the moral components of mass starvation due to idealistic utopianism, the central tenet of communism is materialism and consequently that all human ingenuity reduces to computation. This means that we should in theory be able to replace human capitalists with a giant computer. But, if materialism is wrong, and humans have a trans-computational reasoning ability, then this means even at a theoretical level communism is fatally flawed, because the economy is intrinsically reliant upon human ingenuity and thus must be capitalistic, because the economy rides upon the locus of the individual human mind which can never, not even in theory, be replaced by a computer. In a certain sense, the amoral repudiation of communism is even more powerful, because even the cold blooded bureaucratic bean counters behind the revolution can no longer even appeal to clear minded rationalism to justify their political philosophy. It is not a coincidence that Marx envisioned a mechanical singularity as the apex of the inevitable communist revolution. Also may explain the strong communist and materialist leanings in the elite of the tech sector, along with the collaboration between the tech elite and the CCP.

sudosysgen 6y ago
A cold blooded amoral répudiation of materialism is almost certainly impossible. There is literally no reason to think that the human mind is anything more than the human body, a material construct.
- yters 6y ago
  There are plenty of reasons to think the mind is much more. Namely, consciousness, the portal for everything else we know about the material world, is itself completely impervious to a materialistic account.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Absolutely not. There is no reason at all that consciousness is impervious to a materialistic account. Consciousness can be framed as an emergent property of systems that can process the concept of self and actualize upon it and their environment. You might say that qualia is impervious to materialistic account, however, arguments based on qualia that attempt to be a refutation of materialism are circular - for example, the p-zombie argument, that says that there could conceivably be a "zombie", that acts exactly the same as a human but lacks consciousness, which is only possible if you accept that one could act perfectly human but lack consciousness, which is itself only possible if you accept that something may be different but indistinguishable from something else, which is itself only possible if consciousness is special in some way - which there is no reason to believe. And so, I disagree that the existence of consciousness is inconsistent with materialism.
    - yters 6y ago
      Sure, people can make up explanations for consciousness all day, but saying it is 'emergent' is not a meaningful materialistic description. If you tell me the Linux source code 'emerges' that gives me no understanding of how it works or how to write the thing myself. It is no different an explanation than to say 'god did it'. Materialism is the promise that we can break a thing down into components that when reassembled give us the same thing back. 'Emergence' is completely antithetical to this idea. As of right now, there are zero materialistic accounts for consciousnes, and no reason to think one is forthcoming. The only people holding out are those who presume materialism a priori, which is just circular.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        That is not what is meant by emergent property. An emergent property is a property of a system that is not a property of its constitutive parts. For example, none of the lines of code of the Linux kernel alone have the property of being an operating system, but as a whole it does have such an attribute. So, a materialist would say that consciousness is an emergent attribute of matter, in that in a certain configuration matter obtains the property of being conscious whereas it didn't before. This account is faillible, because it makes the following prediction : changing the material configuration changes consciousness, and that one can create consciousness via material means. The first one is indeed a correct prediction, the second one cannot be proven yet. As for a mechanism for how exactly this happens, you are right that there are no satisfactory propositions yet, but non-materialists cannot generate one ether. There are ideas of how this could happen, for example I would suggest reading "I am a strange loop", by Hofstadter. There is no reason to believe that a materialist theory is impossible, though. In the end, I fail to see why one should abandon such a useful framework as materialism because of consciousness.
        yters 6y ago
        It's preferable to drop a incorrect explanation in favor of acknowledging we don't have an explanation. Like AA, the first step is to acknowledge the problem.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> This means that we should in theory be able to replace human capitalists with a giant computer. The unknowns that humans would be calculating are the cost and utility of all these goods. All the computation power in the world applied to this problem would get you a simulation of what each consumer does already when they bid on products.
- yters 6y ago
  Sure, but that would take the messy, volatile human element out of the equation, and also throw the much faster computational horsepower at the problem. If it could be done, a centralized computational system would seem to be superior to the free market.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    The messy, volatile human element is the product of the calculation process. Lets say you want to know whether consumers should spend $20 at Chuck-e-Cheese or $200 at Walt Disney World. You can let them spend their money and see, and some will be happy about their choices and make the same choice next time, some will be regretful and make different choices, and some will be on the margin and either conclude that they are regretful or satisfied because of psychological and social factors. Now imagine that you simulated all these people and determined that 70% of them would prefer Chuck-E-Cheese and 30% would prefer Disney. What do you do with this information?
    - yters 6y ago
      Use our super computers to allocate resources appropriately? I'm not sure what you are getting at. Marx's critique of capitalism is since a few rich people owned all the means of production, they can oppress the poor, and neglect to give them what is needed for normal life. The promise of communism is that by taking the means of production out of the hands of a few greedy individuals and somehow running the mechanisms with an objective metric to ensure all people's needs are met we will end up with a society where the poor are not oppressed by the rich, and all can live lives free from things like starvation and lack of shelter or medical care. Of course, when the communist revolutions took the means of production out of the hands of capitalists, the new hands were no more noble, and continued to oppress with even greater brutality. One might hope then for a communism run by objective, malice free computers by encoding human needs as a goal function for algorithmic optimizers. Within a materialist paradigm this is at least theoretically possible.

by yters 6y ago

sudosysgen 6y ago

A cold blooded amoral répudiation of materialism is almost certainly impossible. There is literally no reason to think that the human mind is anything more than the human body, a material construct.

yters 6y ago
There are plenty of reasons to think the mind is much more. Namely, consciousness, the portal for everything else we know about the material world, is itself completely impervious to a materialistic account.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Absolutely not. There is no reason at all that consciousness is impervious to a materialistic account. Consciousness can be framed as an emergent property of systems that can process the concept of self and actualize upon it and their environment. You might say that qualia is impervious to materialistic account, however, arguments based on qualia that attempt to be a refutation of materialism are circular - for example, the p-zombie argument, that says that there could conceivably be a "zombie", that acts exactly the same as a human but lacks consciousness, which is only possible if you accept that one could act perfectly human but lack consciousness, which is itself only possible if you accept that something may be different but indistinguishable from something else, which is itself only possible if consciousness is special in some way - which there is no reason to believe. And so, I disagree that the existence of consciousness is inconsistent with materialism.
  - yters 6y ago
    Sure, people can make up explanations for consciousness all day, but saying it is 'emergent' is not a meaningful materialistic description. If you tell me the Linux source code 'emerges' that gives me no understanding of how it works or how to write the thing myself. It is no different an explanation than to say 'god did it'. Materialism is the promise that we can break a thing down into components that when reassembled give us the same thing back. 'Emergence' is completely antithetical to this idea. As of right now, there are zero materialistic accounts for consciousnes, and no reason to think one is forthcoming. The only people holding out are those who presume materialism a priori, which is just circular.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      That is not what is meant by emergent property. An emergent property is a property of a system that is not a property of its constitutive parts. For example, none of the lines of code of the Linux kernel alone have the property of being an operating system, but as a whole it does have such an attribute. So, a materialist would say that consciousness is an emergent attribute of matter, in that in a certain configuration matter obtains the property of being conscious whereas it didn't before. This account is faillible, because it makes the following prediction : changing the material configuration changes consciousness, and that one can create consciousness via material means. The first one is indeed a correct prediction, the second one cannot be proven yet. As for a mechanism for how exactly this happens, you are right that there are no satisfactory propositions yet, but non-materialists cannot generate one ether. There are ideas of how this could happen, for example I would suggest reading "I am a strange loop", by Hofstadter. There is no reason to believe that a materialist theory is impossible, though. In the end, I fail to see why one should abandon such a useful framework as materialism because of consciousness.
      - yters 6y ago
        It's preferable to drop a incorrect explanation in favor of acknowledging we don't have an explanation. Like AA, the first step is to acknowledge the problem.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> This means that we should in theory be able to replace human capitalists with a giant computer. The unknowns that humans would be calculating are the cost and utility of all these goods. All the computation power in the world applied to this problem would get you a simulation of what each consumer does already when they bid on products.

yters 6y ago
Sure, but that would take the messy, volatile human element out of the equation, and also throw the much faster computational horsepower at the problem. If it could be done, a centralized computational system would seem to be superior to the free market.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  The messy, volatile human element is the product of the calculation process. Lets say you want to know whether consumers should spend $20 at Chuck-e-Cheese or $200 at Walt Disney World. You can let them spend their money and see, and some will be happy about their choices and make the same choice next time, some will be regretful and make different choices, and some will be on the margin and either conclude that they are regretful or satisfied because of psychological and social factors. Now imagine that you simulated all these people and determined that 70% of them would prefer Chuck-E-Cheese and 30% would prefer Disney. What do you do with this information?
  - yters 6y ago
    Use our super computers to allocate resources appropriately? I'm not sure what you are getting at. Marx's critique of capitalism is since a few rich people owned all the means of production, they can oppress the poor, and neglect to give them what is needed for normal life. The promise of communism is that by taking the means of production out of the hands of a few greedy individuals and somehow running the mechanisms with an objective metric to ensure all people's needs are met we will end up with a society where the poor are not oppressed by the rich, and all can live lives free from things like starvation and lack of shelter or medical care. Of course, when the communist revolutions took the means of production out of the hands of capitalists, the new hands were no more noble, and continued to oppress with even greater brutality. One might hope then for a communism run by objective, malice free computers by encoding human needs as a goal function for algorithmic optimizers. Within a materialist paradigm this is at least theoretically possible.