How would DNA alone let you construct a person? There are a lot of things other than DNA that affect their brain throughout their lifetime.

You're thinking of an identical twin. They are frequently very different (and, yes, frequently similar).

Sharing your DNA would not accomplish that at all. You're thinking of your brain, not your DNA, and a lot of things other than DNA affect the brain in huge ways.

A human sharing your DNA is not "you". It's an identical twin. You gotta get into the brain for any "self" to be involved in any way, and the brain is heavily influenced by life experience.

The things that normal humans have been doing in russia despite the despots are actually worth recognizing despite russia's evil past and present.

Iirc, they somewhat function but it's very difficult to sell russian securities, especially as a foreigner. And ruble forex trades are strictly controlled by the government. Yeah, it is artificial for appearances. They have to look strong in order to get Ukraine to surrender, and outlasting Ukraine is their only card except using nukes.

Don't worry, they are. Both sides are working overtime to tighten and evade the sanctions. It's an ongoing thing and russia's conscripts aren't even fully equipped. They would be getting missiles and parts from a lot more places than just iran otherwise.

I think causality + the existence of suffering give most animals, like humans, genuine purpose and meaning in life.

There is a more difficult conversation about entropy that might address the "flowing" of time or the experience of it as sequential. I'm not super qualified to talk about that particular issue though.

My basic understanding is that time and entropy together (with the initial conditions of the universe, hot with low entropy) create a physical universe that includes causality. Then, consciousness relies on causality because it's about recieving information, processing that info, and acting. Then, we can consider natural selection, and think about how our consciousness appeared in this world in the first place.

Sorry that's not rigorous. I don't have a full answer. You bring up some good points. Still, I think entropy is related to the answer about time flow, and I think that how we experience time is a result of both its physical properties and our brains' physical properties.

Edit: the entropy, time, and big bang stuff is a Cosmology topic, btw, for whoever's into this sort of thing

> So here we are in a philosophy subreddit, where we can reasonably expect something more narrow, so as to not automatically apply to any observable.

I ask about physics because physics is what this philosophical article is about. It is NOT overly narrow for this situation; the article is explicitly about the philosophy of time, and misunderstanding what time is (i.e. thinking it's some sort of construct and ignoring physical evidence of its features) makes it impossible to talk about this with any gravitas (ba dum tsss).

Is space physical? Electromagnetism? Your rationale applies to many things that it would be innacurate to say aren't physical, not just time.

If you haven't studied special and/or general relativity with some rigor, then you might not be qualified to answer questions about it.

Have you studied physics for long?

You're right that general relativity and quantum mechanics aren't compatible at extremely high energies. We can verify that time is physical without using a model by making a physical experiment.

Consider a clock in space and a clock on earth. The clock on earth moves slower from the perspective of space, and the clock in space moves faster from the perspective of earth. That's a simple experiment that has been done plenty, and in fact, we have to account for that in satellites. This difference in time has clear physical features.

Time is physical. Our models about all areas of the universe, time and everything else, are not perfect. So maybe nothing is real and solipsism is the answer. Taking the existence of the physical universe for granted, time is physical, even if our models of it are not perfect.

Time literally is physical, like space or light. We can verify that experimentally, and we have. I recommend reading up on relativity.

The idea of cyclical time is completely theoretical.

> Good vs Evil in this implicit Christian sense that we all understand it to mean. To speak though as if this is the case, that 21st century Anglophone countries operate on a Good vs Evil basis, is absurd.

Also - why does the absense of some former, implicitly abrahamic morals imply that the West no longer operates considering good and evil? Not sure how that is connected. Christianity is a source of morality, and it is not unique in that way.

Edit: obviously, people in the west do bad things, but you're ignoring a huge portion of people if you think people in the west at large don't consider morals in their actions.

You're making the assumption that the people who wield moral authority use that control to prevent harmful actions, in general. Frequently, that is not the motivation of people with moral power. Frequently enough that it is innaccurate to say that moral control of the masses is categorized as "good" in and of itself.

> Evil (bad) means selfish, greedy, and condemning the strong for acting upon their strength

If that's Neitzche's definition of evil, I have to say, it is not at all a general definition of evil. "Condeming the strong for acting upon their strength" doesn't enter into it. "Condemning the strong for acting upon their strength by oppressing people" is what I, and many people whose morals are about preventing human suffering, think.

That control that you're talking about has caused both great suffering and great advancement in different places and contexts. To say that having a few people (moral authorities) morally controlling the masses is a straight-up "good" thing in and of itself is incorrect if you consider mass human suffering to be evil.

> That's different than believing in no truth, which I see as offering the subject no thought at all.

Careful not to accuse your opponents of not even thinking just because you strongly disagree. People carefully think about and consider things that they do not have a definite truth for all the time, and even someone who questions everything and believes only in subjective reality (i.e. no objective truth) might think deeply about things.

I don't know any other languages, but I can say that it's easy for most people to laugh off misunderstandings when someond else says something wrong. Sounds like they know it was a mistake, so I think it will be forgotten in no time. I get the embarrassment tho lol.

Similar response to someone else:

Yes, language changes naturally over time. If it is an intentional change on his part, I think it's a bad change.

What do we call our old version of "seriousness" now? Why change it, why lose it? Why tie up "closedmindedness", which we have a word for, with a related but totally distinct thing?

He's conflating two different things and using then using one of those two things to denounce the other. I do not abide that in an essay about openmindedness. He absolutely didn't have to choose a specific, different word.

Yes, language changes naturally over time. If it is an intentional change on his part, I think it's a bad change.

What do we call our old version of "seriousness" now? Why change it, why lose it? Why tie up "closedmindedness", which we have a word for, with a related but totally distinct thing?

He's conflating two different things and using then using one of those two things to denounce the other. I do not abide that in an essay about openmindedness.

That's not the meaning of 'seriousness' in English, though. That's my point. This author is using 'seriousness' as a stand-in for being committed to rules or being closedminded. Just refer to the thing itself or make a new word rather than defining a word that already has a different, relevant definition.

Literally, that's not a definition of seriousness. Defining seriousness such that serious things and people are always closed-minded really seems like a bad idea. Seems very closed-minded in itself.

>but he's talking about philosophy, which is inherently general,

Philosophy needs to be precise aswell, and it absolutely must relate to actual events the real world (such as engineering, art, socializing, etc), or else it is not useful at all (maybe still interesting, though). The author involves real-world specific context in his article plenty.

It's not good form to make an extremely broad and general statement in philosophy unless you can back it up by elaborating. Maybe he elaborates in his book, but in this article, he denounces "seriousness" - an incredibly broad and frequent feeling in humans - without being precise enough for it to be meaningful.

> btw the most exciting products of engineering are always the ones which are attempting to break paradigms.

I completely agree, and I firmly believe most of those engineers take their jobs seriously. Even as they break boundaries.

He's pretty flippant about discarding certain views with without much explanation. For instance, the idea that seriousness is an inherently closed view of reality. Some people are too uptight, sure, but you can absolutely take seriously the task of being openminded and exploring the world.

It's normal to care deeply about some parts of the world, and thus take them seriously, while keeping an open mind. It's actually really important. For one example, think of a time when a friend or family seriously fucked up and needed help. Like if they had an addiction or financial problems. A lot of people would take their situation seriously and be open-minded in order to empathize with the person who's suffering despite their own part in their suffering. That's just an example of a serious attitude being important for openmindedness. Someone who's flippant or too playful about their friend's problem might not be helpful if, indeed, their friend requires help. You'll have a hard time being empathetic if you don't take someone's situation seriously.

You can be serious about finding and exploring the world around you in all sorts of things, including stuff like art and engineering design.

It seems like the author's statement on seriousness being an inherently closed view of the world is not totally accurate. Playfulness is valuable, and legitimately important for thinking laterally; but being playful can be limiting in itself, especially in a complex topic, like engineering or empathizing with trauma, where care is absolutely needed in order to make much progress. So I think the author made a highly generalized statement that, as a result, isn't too useful imo. I think that's not great for an essay where the main idea is openmindedness and considering the whole world as-is.

I agree that imitating humans is a crapshoot. I think artificial consciousness and general intelligence is possible, even if it be well below the level of humans.

Yeah, maybe an AI could have some form of an ego or emotions. AI already demonstrates creativity. But your point is taken that it does NOT look like human feelings and creativity at this time.

I'm gonna answer in terms of mass automation and machine intelligence instead of consciousness specifically. I think artificial consciousness is already a part of AI to a small extent, and will propel automation.

Whether mass AI automation helps or hurts people will, I think, depend almost entirely on how it is adopted, by whom, when, and for what. That's the story with technology: it's a crapshoot whether a new tech is adopted, whether it's useful or not. For instance, in England, they used gas lanterns instead of electric lanterns for quite a long time because that is what the infrastructure had been built to support, and it costs money to change - despite that elecrric lights take less labor, are safer, leave the air cleaner for the city's people, etc.

Likely, if artificial general intelligence becomes widespread, it'll be controlled by the people who own tech companies. Some of these people are beholden to morals and ethics, some are not. Who specifically ends up with some relevant patent may well shape how this technology develops. If someone who is interested in military and security gets a hold of this sort of tech, expect synthetic super-soldiers at first. If a philanthropist gets it, expect robots to do dangerous or humanitarian work. Those initial uses will probably shape how the technology develops in the future: people usually optimize technology for its determined uses.

Source: my ass and a Tech & Society class I took some years ago.