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"Are We Automata?" by William James (1879)
- TheBlight 3y agoSlightly tangential, but is anyone aware of an app/site that can take a URL like this one and convert the text to a format and layout that's easier on the eyes and easier to read in general? Like Kindle-fy a web page full of text?
- whoisthis12 3y agoTry the reader view in chrome or Firefox. For chrome on android I automatically got a prompt to view simplified page
- TheBlight 3y agoWow, this works great! On Android I recall getting the "simplified page" prompt but never found that to be all that great of a solution but using reader mode with Chrome is pretty neat. You can format it to basically be the same as reading a book from the Play store. One nit is that if I tab away from the page and tab back the highlighted area is wiped from the reader pane -- assuming I had unhighlighted it in order to start reading.
- stevebmark 3y agoOn iOS you can click the icon to the left of the URL input and select reader viewer as well. Hides ads too.
- anon84873628 3y agoIn Chrome it seems like clicking the pop up is the only way to access simplified view. If you exit, follow a link, tab away, whatever... I can't figure out how to get it back! Any tips? Really confusing that I'm either missing something obvious or the explicit option is missing.
- jabyess 3y agoMost browsers have a reader mode. Firefox has one built in, I just click the icon to at the right end of the URL bar and it does it nicely for me.
- IggleSniggle 3y agoSafari, Firefox, and Edge all have a built-in Reader mode that doesn't exactly the thing you want for the device that you are on. Lots of extensions do this as well. There's used to be a handful of websites but it seems they no longer exist (they were also commonly used to bypass paywalls).
- konto 3y agoYou can use browser extensions to send articles (blog posts etc.) directly to kindle. I am on mobile app at the moment so I don't have links for those extensions.
- ethbr1 3y agoDid not expect to see William James pop up on HN. If you're interested in philosophy (especially epistemology), the pragmatists were a fascinating offshoot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James IMHO they were a reasonable response to the irreducible complexity that accreted as a result of applying increasingly specific and complex empiricism to questions far broader than it might be suited to. (E.g. How do we know anything?)
- kaycebasques 3y agoThe Varieties Of Religious Experience was a great read for me
- sherr 3y agoBoth James and Pragmatic Philosophy have had their own program on the BBC's In Our Time radio show. Very good. https://www.braggoscope.com/2010/05/13/william-jamess-the-varieties-of-religious-experience.html https://www.braggoscope.com/2010/05/13/william-jamess-the-va... https://www.braggoscope.com/2005/11/17/pragmatism.html https://www.braggoscope.com/2005/11/17/pragmatism.html
- ethanbond 3y agoThe Metaphysical Club is an excellent book about how the pragmatists shaped all of American thought, too. Obviously doesn’t replace reading the source material but it does articulate how ideas become encoded into a society.
- ethbr1 3y agoIt's been a minute now, but I'm pretty sure that was on the reading list for my undergrad pragmatism course. Enjoyed it as well! PS: Hello to another Ethan, although we seem much more common these days.
- FrustratedMonky 3y ago1879 These arguments aren't new. This is good argument for why tech/science/stem need to read history, or 'older' science history. To at least be familiar with the science that has come before, either to know what was discarded, to be familiar with past dead ends, or forgotten knowledge that could still have value. A lot of the AI spurred arguments in the last year seem like so much re-hashing since they were being discussed in 1879.
- ryanklee 3y agoAbsolutely agreed. I find it embarrassing how STEM devalued non-STEM studies for years, and now that LLMs are center stage, so is the near-universal unpreparedness of interested parties and stakeholders to wrestle with issues of cognition, consciousness, and ethics. This, despite literally thousands of years of prior studies on these matters. Even now, I see basic refusal to engage with this extant literature, and a strong preference to just making shit up as if it's the first time anyone has anything interesting to say on these matters. Again, embarrassing. The industry is totally unprepared on an intellectual basis to wrestle with these issues.
- doublepg23 3y agoAre the STEM educated thinkers publishing AI doomsday think pieces or is it the supposedly enlightened non-STEM journalists?
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoDoesn't have to be 'doomsday'. Plenty of 'stem' thinkers expound on 'what is consciousness' by re-hashing old ideas as if they just occurred to them. It goes back to the old quote ~ "Stephen Hawking famously wrote that “philosophy is dead” because the big questions that used to be discussed by philosophers are now in the hands of physicist" And then the follow up, "physicists then proceed to re-invent bad philosophy"(unknown). The math behind the stealth bomber sat on a bookshelf for decades before someone realized what it could be used for. In STEM education, there should be some attempt at a 'rear view mirror', to know what has come before. AI is just the latest obvious area.
- Log_out_ 3y agoYes, we are and some observable Automatisms are hyper creepy. And if you become aware of them it turns society into a collection of walking grandfather clocks in some aspects. Not a recommendable direction to move, madness is preferable.
- at_a_remove 3y agoAn old Fritz Leiber novel, You're All Alone, aka The Sinful Ones, is about a man who discovers that most of the people in the world are automata, and he has been functioning as one for some time.
- stevebmark 3y agoI tried to read this but I can’t deal with the writing quality. I think it’s partly the historical nature of the piece, but James is a terrible writer. He is obtuse and pompous and clouds his meaning with confusing sentences. Even the first sentence is a nightmare to read. I’ll try again when I have more focus! And yes, we have no free will. Not sure if that’s related to this piece.
- suburbanwaste 3y agoYou just have bad taste.
- stevebmark 3y agoIt’s terrible writing AND I have bad taste*
- thriftwy 3y agoIt was kind of funny to me that Dostoevsky coincided with biology development which made him ponder painfully if we are just reactions of our neuron's "tails" and that there is nothing underlying (such as Soul and God).
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoFwiw nothing with outside influence is automata as the true randomness from quantum phenomena propagates. Eg. If you take in real world visual input to a system that from that point on is deterministic the output of that system is now non-deterministic. Similar to how Shrodinger talked about the macro scale cat being alive and dead at the same time. So the arguments that the neurons in the brain are deterministic or that the transistors in a computer are deterministic breaks down at the first introduction of real world input. The outputs of those systems actually aren't deterministic at all.
- cmrx64 3y agoI see no reason why that can't be modeled as an automata? Nondeterministic automata are still automata. I think your meanings of 'deterministic' are confused- it's about impulse response. A little bit of stochasticity in the thermal voltage doesn't ruin the determinacy of a computers ALU operational modes.
- atticora 3y agoDeterministic systems, or at least highly predictable ones, can arise for non-deterministic components, as for example the Boltzmann equation demonstrates. Other examples include the models that we build of automata on machines made of matter made of non-deterministic particles.
- HarHarVeryFunny 3y agoAs far as we've been able to determine, almost all macroscopic objects can be behaviorally described in terms of classical physics, and this includes neurons. Even in rare cases where quantum effects are seen, such as photosynthesis, or radioactive decay, it's extremely localized. The fact that a plant's efficiency of conversion of light to chemical energy appears to use quantum effects doesn't affect the rest of the plant or turn it into some "Schrodringer's cabbage" thought experiment. We can still understand the rest of the plant in classical terms. Even if it were to be discovered that neurons are sometimes (or even always for that matter) behaving randomly due to quantum effects, that would not mean that we have free will and are not automata. It would just mean we are non-deterministic automata.
- kouru225 3y agoWhen people say we’re nothing but computers, neurons firing, chemical reactions, etc they think they’re saying that humans aren’t special. But I take it to mean that the rest of the world is way more special than we’ve been giving it credit for.
- operatingthetan 3y agoSometimes I entertain the idea that inanimate objects have consciousness too and it's pretty disturbing because it would mean we are doing pretty much everything wrong.
- kouru225 3y agoYou mean we’re killing things?
- operatingthetan 3y agoNot sure about killing, but maybe harming.
- kouru225 3y agoI feel like it would mean we’re doing less damage than before: if everything is conscious then death isn’t what we think it is. Decomposing suddenly means something completely different.
- mgaunard 3y agoDo we even have consciousness or merely the illusion of it?
- operatingthetan 3y agoI'm not sure what the illusion of it would even mean. A known true statement for me would be "I appear to be experiencing something."
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- nataliste 3y agoI would strongly recommend the reading of Huxley's address^1 before reading James's response. The difference is palpable. --- 1- https://doi.org/10.1038/010362a0 https://doi.org/10.1038/010362a0