Philosophical Vegan Forum

Posted: **Sat Aug 06, 2016 7:01 pm**

Comparison to computers is a great way to understand cognition. It's a great way to understand ethics by understanding learning and interests.

And he thinks that the best way to understand ethics and cognition is to read books of old philosophers. To me, that sounds ridiculous. I mean, they are all just guessing. Their guesses are not better than mine ones. And I am trying to explore what's actually true. Reading the old philosophers is counter-productive for finding the truth. At best, it's a waste of time. What do you think? And he has a very negative opinion about Wikipedia and forums, even Internet in general. He says that I can inform myself on Internet, but that the only way to form my true self is by reading books (naturally, only ones that support his worldview).

Nice, what did you make?

Well, I've been on two competitions with my games. First time, I made a maze of fractals and you had to get out of it in as few moves as possible. Second time, I made a version of Snake in which it follows your finger on a touch-screen. In either case, others did way better stuff, but they were also probably from a better school. Recently, I made a playground in which you can move rocks, stick them together, unstick them, and make interesting shapes with them. As for programs, well, I've made my own very simple version of Excel, about which I talk in the thread on TFES forum I've recently linked to. Now I am interested in 3D animations and I'm learning GLUT and OpenGL 2.0.

Your father seems like the embodiment of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Sorry you have to deal with that.

I would consider trying to understand his complicated advices about programming if he knew something about informatics, which he clearly doesn't. He doesn't even know what is a compiler, yet alone knowing something about OpenGL or assembler. Yet when I tell him he talks absolute nonsense, and do my best to explain him why what he is saying is not even wrong, he gets insulted and won't even listen to me. He seems to think he knows enough about programming just by knowing a few programmers and comparing me to them. And he will not even let me know them, which I would like to, because he is affraid I will "insult" them also.

Posted: **Sat Aug 06, 2016 7:48 pm**

Another detail: those fractals in the maze were randomized, so the game was different every time.

Posted: **Sat Aug 06, 2016 8:23 pm**

Sounds like a cool game. Make a thread about it and post some pictures some time if you're up for it. I bet others will post some pictures of their own programming projects and games too.

teo123 wrote: And he thinks that the best way to understand ethics and cognition is to read books of old philosophers. To me, that sounds ridiculous. I mean, they are all just guessing.

Right, ancient philosophers were pretty ignorant of science. They believed some pretty crazy things about reality based on their fallacious deductions.

teo123 wrote: Reading the old philosophers is counter-productive for finding the truth. At best, it's a waste of time. What do you think?

It's probably not the best use of time. I'd say it's better to start with modern philosophers like Peter Singer and Daniel Dennett, or Sam Harris, who are more scientifically literate.

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 6:30 am**

So, I've tried to summarize what I've learned on (mostly) this forum in those two posts:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=65849.msg1808208#msg1808208
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=67051.0
The second one is linked to in my signature.
So, what do you (not only brimstoneSalad) think about them? Would you (again, not only brimstoneSalad) try to ball me out if someone attacks me there?

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 1:22 pm**

If I were you, I'd just stop going to that forum. Let them attack away; any intelligent and rational people reading are going to find your arguments intriguing.

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 2:22 pm**

brimstoneSalad wrote:If I were you, I'd just stop going to that forum. Let them attack away; any intelligent and rational people reading are going to find your arguments intriguing.

I will stop going on that forum. However, you know, there are probably still counter-arguments, and carnists will almost certainly find them more convincing. And, even if I were going on that forum, I still probably wouldn't be able to correctly respond to them. But I think that many people on THIS forum would be able to.

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 3:12 pm**

teo123 wrote:However, you know, there are probably still counter-arguments, and carnists will almost certainly find them more convincing.

Some will, and some won't. For some, their rationalizations will be weak, and they'll know they're weak, and it will nag at them: sometimes for years until they finally go veg.
The carnist reading or responding to our points will always have the "last word" to give a bad argument in reply (even if ours is the last reply, the reader, if a carnist, will think up an excuse too). What we can do is get people thinking. They outnumber us, so there's no time to reply to everything.

teo123 wrote:And, even if I were going on that forum, I still probably wouldn't be able to correctly respond to them.

Extended arguments are less useful, because people tend to be set in their ways. What's more useful is to give a lot of small arguments, and spread them around the internet. Just two or three replies (which is as much as many people will read). Keep the replies short and simple: the goal is to plant a seed and get people to think.

teo123 wrote:But I think that many people on THIS forum would be able to.

Maybe, but the important question is: Is it useful?
There's an opportunity cost to doing that, which means posting less somewhere else. It's probably better to comment on youtube, facebook, and other places. Small comments, and lots of them, rather than a single thread.

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 4:27 pm**

So, I have two questions:
1) Was that, what I just posted on that forum, good, according to you? Considering it's quite long.
2) Isn't that forum a good way of learning how to spread veganism? Better to make mistakes there than on Youtube, because fewer people will see them, right? What if that Moravec's paradox argument isn't valid and effective? Isn't it better to learn it on FE forum than on some more popular one?

Posted: **Tue Aug 09, 2016 5:27 pm**

teo123 wrote:So, I have two questions:
1) Was that, what I just posted on that forum, good, according to you? Considering it's quite long.

Can you repost it here? My browser says TFES site is not safe, won't let me go there.

teo123 wrote: 2) Isn't that forum a good way of learning how to spread veganism? Better to make mistakes there than on Youtube, because fewer people will see them, right? What if that Moravec's paradox argument isn't valid and effective? Isn't it better to learn it on FE forum than on some more popular one?

It could be good to test on a small audience first. But TFES is not a good small audience, since they're a mix of lunatics. You want a small audience of "normal" people to find out if an argument works. Maybe a small face book group. Or just testing it out on a few meat eating online friends.

I can only tell you if an argument is sound, not so much whether it will be compelling to average people. Sometimes the most compelling argument for ordinary people is an emotional one, like Esther the wonder pig.

Posted: **Wed Aug 10, 2016 5:30 am**

Well, my last post is this on the veganism thread:

Ungrateful bastards!
I'm gonna eat them for that!
Well, you can't eat them all. Farmers will always keep some for breeding. In fact, if we eat more meat, they will, unless they are complete idiots, breed more of them.

It's actually funny that so many people suggest that humans are distinct from other animals by sapience, that is, higher cognitive functions. I think that this is, more than anything else, our culture of carnism that makes us assume such things, and that that's why Moravec's paradox is even called a paradox. Brains are like computers, and, for a computer, it takes way more intelligence to walk and recognize things around them than to do the math and logic. And one of the reasons we assume that other animals don't think about those things is because they don't communicate about them. Well, do you know how much more computing power is needed for a computer to communicate the basic math than to do it? If you program in some low-level programming language like Assembly language or a machine language, you will have a much harder time printing "2+2=4" on the screen (even if using high-level functions or BIOS interrupts) than to making the processor (ALU) add those two numbers. It is also way harder to make speakers pronounce the sentence "Two plus two equals four.". And is it even possible for today's computers to articulate that sentence using the speech organs? And do you have any idea how hard it is for a computer to understand what "10*(11+12)" means, and how easy it is for it calculate that once it understands that? I have made an entire thread on that:
https://www.theflatearthsociety.org/forum/index.php?topic=66603.0
And is it even possible for today's computers to understand the question "Quanti bis terni sunt?"?
The question that could be asked is whether the animal brains are actually Turing-complete. Well, human brain obviously is, we can simulate simple Turing machines in our heads. As for the brains of other animals, look, what's the probability that such complicated systems aren't Turing-complete? I think that the burden of proof is definitely on one who claims that animal brains aren't Turing-complete (and therefore being capable of thinking about whatever other computers, including human brains, can think about), but, anyway, here is an example of a neural network of only a few neurons, far less than most of the animals have, simulating Turing-machine.
http://stackoverflow.com/a/28852111
So, my suggestion is, take everything you think you know about sapience and throw it away! Sentience is what matters morally. And if you are going to invent hyper-computing human souls to escape the problem, then you are not a reasonable person.

I think I will go vegan when I grow up. I've been on some forum with vegans and they told me what wasn't so pleasant to hear. You know those diagrams that show that milk and eggs are better for the environment and more humane than meat? Well, they are entirely misleading because they don't account for the byproducts: new animals. No need to talk about the incidences of cows being raped when arguing for veganism, as some people do, and as I was doing before. And if we don't eat meat, those animals, truly, won't be slaughtered. But, you know what they do in India with old cows? They set those animals free and they starve to death. I mean, that's how grazing animals die in nature, they starve because their teeth get ill, but why not to just relieve them of that entire miserable existence by not breeding them? I was expressing worries that if we free those animals we will produce less plant food, because we are not feeding them, so that plant food will become more expensive. Well, actually, "Carum est quod rarum est." isn't true. This is the example they gave me: there is less shit than food, yet shit is not expensive at all, because it's not valuable. What will happen if entire world goes vegan is that the food will become less expensive because we will reuse the old machinery, now having to use less land. Oh, BTW, those vegans knew how to answer my puzzle about physiology.

I don't think I'll post here any more.

But, maybe you are right, it seems as though they just ignored all of those arguments. Do you think that's because it's too long? How could I shorten it?
The post linked to in my signature is me debunking the arguments for Flat Earthism I've used, about twenty of them, as clearly as I could, even using some diagrams (some of them are even yours), but it seems as though it didn't get much attention either.

Philosophical Vegan Forum

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