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This is barely passable as philosophy, Its a clickbait headline and the article doesn’t talk about anything meaningful, it’s all “what the world would look like if I had my way” And banality of evil? What does that even mean? A concept that may or may not exist outside of human perception, is unoriginal? I’m not sure what the purpose of that is other then just throwing big words into your title to make it sound better. I’ll figure out the problem for you. How do you make code in a computer, that has no emotional capacity, follow your moral principles? You code it differently. 🤯

Excerpt:

Hanna Arendt believed that the banality of evil is what happened when we don’t understand the full consequences of our actions. Thus, evil is a cognitive error born by humans’ limited intelligence.

The sentence seems butchered, but I agree with the overall conclusion. That evil can only exist in a warped perception of an individual.

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Yes, but is your threat credible?

That's not a basis of criticism.

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>But I disapprove of any attempt to use morality and moral reasoning to criticize them.

Then on what basis would you criticize them?

Yeah, applying the concept of "banality of evil" to something imaginary like an AI when capitalism is right there being the most banal and most evil thing humanity has yet to contend with is a kind of blindness one might expect if you're living within a banal enough evil.

Edit: Angry rate downs despite rising inequality, authoritarianism, climate change, and the threat of nuclear war - all at once.

Yum. Just want to let you know all those things were alive.

I think we have a similar lack of enchantment on this train of thought lol. Yes, I agree.

Death why not birth? After all, I can potentially consent to death, but I cannot consent to birth. It seems to me "violation of consent" is what badgers 19th and 1st half 20th century philosophy, in essence.

Well birth is far more an outrage than death then.

As to the here and now, and how it tends to not have room for such thoughts, I guess we can modify the saying: there are no absurdists in foxholes.

edit: "Then why phase in and out of it?" -- excellent way of putting the issue.

Well, that’s just the thing— if it’s nonsense to talk about occurrences not occurring, or possibilities not being possible, then it seems the universe must exist out of necessity. To say that it is possible that possibilities wouldn’t exist, is nonsense— therefore it is a contradiction to say that the universe could’ve not been.

Perhaps the universe only exists because it would’ve been a logical contradiction for it not to have.

Or perhaps the universe (not just the observable universe post big-bang, but the potential multiverse structure beneath it which you would also deem part of the “universe,” or “all that exists,”) has always existed, and is persistent unchanging in some sense, and therefore could not have not been either.

I’m just not sure that it made sense when you said that it’s possible that there would’ve been nothing, and that makes it beautiful that there’s something. I would argue that it’s either not possible that there was nothing, I.e. the existence of the universe itself is necessary, I.e. it’s non-existence would be a contradiction, or else other non-necessary entities may exist.

We assume not conscious . . .

This seems like an argument motivated by bitterness. The statement was that it's not so bad to be puppets, not that we shouldn't care about any particular things that take place. And how can the universe be a waste of time? Time can only be wasted from the perspectives of those that find value in time, and therefore it can only be wasted if you assign it some value. It has value to humans, so given that we don't exist independently from the universe we must appreciate the universe if we find value in anything at all.

Again.

Libertarian free will DOESN'T EXIST, but that doesn't matter since most people really mean compatibilist free will which is compatible with a deterministic universe.

Arguments about why libertarian free will doesn't exist don't apply to compatibilist free will. They are completely different things.

Compatibilist free will could be said to be based on the doctrine of determinism.

Hence it makes no sense to use any determinism based arguments against it.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

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Is it ridiculous to worry about evil AI when we are already ruled by evil billionaires?

It's like, "oh no, what if an AI takes over and does bad stuff? Let's stop the AI so that we can continue to have benevolent leaders like fucking Elon Musk and the Koch Brothers."

Maybe our AI is evil because it is owned by dipshits?

Tech firms are constantly surprised by unintended consequences of ML algorithms - there’s researchers who make careers studying them

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I agree. Cause->effect and starting point of something are basic things. Philosophy combines basic things into logical concepts to help us understand this world. You reject the classic doctrine of philosophy - hard determinism - by nothing but "it doesn't make sense" arguments.

You percept free will as a capacity to make a conscious choice. My point is that our capacity is pre-determined by consecutive interactions between our genes, life experiences, and external influences.

Consciousness as defined by many philosophers (that which experiences qualia, experiences which cannot be quantified) is not a coherent, or rather, falsifiable, concept. It does not scientifically exist.

>How can you know that there is nothing outside of our universe, or nothing beyond it?

Because the word "universe" literally means all that exists. If there's something beyond what we call universe, then what we call universe isn't universe at all.

>is it actually possible that the universe would not have been?

Is it possible that Possibility could not have been? ... is what you mean to ask. As I say, language fails.

>How could a particular state of affairs ever emerge from a non-state of affairs, except by random occurrence or necessity?

That is quite literally the Great Question, that no one is qualified to answer. But how could Occurrence itself be a random occurrence? "Randomness" refers to the interaction of possibilities; so how can randomness exist prior to existence and possibility itself?

fr! i’ve never been more scared for the future

The world is looking more and more like some portentous sci-fi novel every day.

How can you know that there is nothing outside of our universe, or nothing beyond it?

And assuming that you’re correct, and there’s nothing else— is it actually possible that the universe would not have been? How could a particular state of affairs ever emerge from a non-state of affairs, except by random occurrence or necessity?