#reblcat
@ofthefog replied to your post “the question of whether humans are “computers” is kind of silly because that word is loaded with unwanted associations. to many…”
I think the important part for simulated humans being sentient is the ability to defend their own claims of rights more than anythingThe concept of rights is a pretty abstract thing that doesn’t apply to our universe. Humans can have their own thoughts, feelings, etc., but there is no universe where rights are meaningful and no universe where we could enforce rights – not in some Platonic sense, not in a physical sense, and not in a metaphorical or ideal sense. There is no such thing as a set of human rights, and human rights are impossible to defend and impossible to infringe
And even more to the point, if you make a simulation that is perfect, complete and literal, nothing will ever threaten it or make it worse off. So it makes no sense to say that it could make some sort of “moral claim.” This is true whether or not it “knows that it is being simulated, and thus it knows that it is not the source of the simulated world.” If it has the right software, it doesn’t matter whether or not it is really the source of the simulated world, because it can’t make the simulated world into a real one. It can only simulate one. (Even if you could create a perfect simulation and program it to “be in the simulated world,” that simulation would never become reality – it isn’t one of the many simulations in our world, and would remain one of many simulations, as if the person in the simulated world was actually in the simulated world.
I’m not saying that this is a deep conclusion. I don’t think there are any deep questions left about the nature of humans, the human mind, or morality. And it’s not just the concept of rights that doesn’t matter. There are also things like the fact that brains can’t make anything happen in our universe except whatever they make happen in their own brains. If you create a perfect, infinite copy of a human being, then the copy can’t be harmed by events in the world, because it isn’t part of the world (it’s a separate universe, one that may or may not be connected to our universe, I don’t know).
“rights don’t apply to our universe” damn girl I’m glad you can’t take this shit outside
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a spoon is not the same as a spoon dangling in the middle of a rube goldberg computer
“is a computer” is different than “can be turned into a computer”. computerness is applied by the minds designing the computer, not by the materials themselves.
nothing is a building material, not even wood and stone, until a human has identified it as something they can build with.
nothing is a computer until a human applies that understanding to it and then manipulates it to serve their computational needs
Great, I’m glad you’ve decided to acquiesce after my didaction.
a physical system and that same physical system melted down and turned into a computer for the sake of humans arent the same thing. you could theoretically melt anything down and then arrange it into logic gates but that doesnt mean that computation understood as computation is “how the world works”.
@antihumanismthoughts?
@ofthefog don’t you see how insisting on looking at everything as primarily computer building materials implies a really destructive ideology
“oh everything is either a computer or raw materials that could be turned into a computer” is a metaphysics that raises “computer” to like a fundamental aspect of reality.
i mean like humans are just labor or potential labor. i could say that and you wouldnt be able to counter it with facts and logic but do you see how looking at people like that is so fucked and misses so much? yeah.
by saying “all reality is just computer building parts” you’re basically just saying that all that matters in existence is computation power or potential computation power. like???? you’ve moved the goalposts.
“a rock isnt something programmable like a pc is” so it’s not a computer. easy. like??
it’s like saying that everything is triangle and when i point out a log that isnt a triangle you pull out a saw
see this is why people called you a wordcel.
I say this because its useful to do things like manage logistical systems, not to do metaphysics.
And apparently you can’t even apply my own words so like have fun coming up with objections of your own creation I guess.
This from the very beginning has not been about aesthetics. Its been about practical application the whole time. No goalposts have been moved. You just keep insisting there is a problem by maliciously misinterpreting my definition.
you entered this conversation that i started. it’s been about words, definitions and metaphysics the whole time. I’m trying to do philosophy here.
i’m not maliciously misinterpreting your definition, i’m taking issue with your definition.
it has not been about practical application from the beginning. of course computers are useful for logistical tasks, no one was arguing that.
i don’t really know what you’re arguing, but i’m arguing that it’s extremely limiting and also not rly accurate to concieve of brains as computers, and that everything is a computer only insofar as “computer” is a word we strip of all associations with “computer”.
“computer” is a hard metal box that follows instructions written in language-math extremely precisely. it can only do what it’s told. it is only active when it is asked to perform computation.
it does not live, it cannot survive. It only exists because of its master, only lives for its master, only does exactly what the master wants. it is nothing but a symbolic processor imprinted on some substrate by a human, in order to perform computational tasks.
is this what a human is like? is this what the more-than-human world is like? is this the box you want to put everything in?
ignoring these associations when asking if we should really think of ourselves and the world as “computers” is misleading. this is some of what the word means.
i know how logic gates work. i know how a computer is built from them. i know a logic gate can be constructed from almost anything.
i’m arguing that this is a good way of thinking when you want to build a computer, bad for almost anything else in the world.
I hope you, as an anarchist, see the negative political consequences of seeing people as computers to be programmed and fed imput
I agree that it is helpful to think in terms of computer when you want to build a computer.
i am saying it is unhelpful, and possibly harmful, to think primarily in terms of computers when you want to interact with and understand other humans, manage society, play games, eat food, do politics, understand reality, build buildings, or do almost anything esle that does not involve building a computer or trying to solve logistical problems within a computer.
When you think about computers, of course think in terms of computers.
but when you want to understand people or the universe writ large, it’s a folly to imagine that for some reason the computer framework we built to build and understand computers will magically accurately apply to the rest of reality and make sense.
if you think that building, maintaining, and using computers is the Primary Activity of Life, thats on you.
You quite literally do not have to do that association. You are your own problem. Historically people have done calculations and it was fine. You can do that for fun even, people do math competitions they volentarily join.
Is that robitfying the soul or something? Its fine if you don’t like it, but if you’re going to shit on things that people do then obviously there is going to be blowback.
of course the human brain can do calculations!! I’ve fucking been to math meets, i have, yes, done computations in my brain. believe it or not, i’ve actually coded computer programs in my life! that’s a strawman.
the human brain can also imagine shapes and colors. based on your argument, i’m equally valid in concluding that the human brain is fundamentally based on the three primary colors and the platonic solids. That really, all we do is imagine shapes and colors and everything else is all details.
why are you so committed to seeing the world through computer-colored glasses? i am simply arguing that that is just one of many ways of modeling the world, and it’s not ontologically superior to any other pair of glasses. it just lets you do certain things and prevents you from doing and seeing certain other things. i’m just saying that you shouldnt look though those glasses exclusively. can we at least agree on that?
none of what you’ve said is wrong about computers really, but you seem to insist on staying within the computational mental framework. I’m saying, you shouldnt think of the world primarily through that filter to begin with.
don’t really want to continue this discussion. we seem to be talking on two different levels.
Your position isn’t philosophically coherent because you can’t both be a materialist and say that the human brain is meaningfully different from computers when it computes. You can come up with some bullshit to justify why that feels wrong or you could just not take an issue with it simple as.
But of course when a human writes they are a writer. I don’t see humans as exclusively through the computer lens. You have to ignore that because its a contradiction and you don’t want to deal with so you responded to the earlier thread.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a spoon is not the same as a spoon dangling in the middle of a rube goldberg computer
“is a computer” is different than “can be turned into a computer”. computerness is applied by the minds designing the computer, not by the materials themselves.
nothing is a building material, not even wood and stone, until a human has identified it as something they can build with.
nothing is a computer until a human applies that understanding to it and then manipulates it to serve their computational needs
Great, I’m glad you’ve decided to acquiesce after my didaction.
a physical system and that same physical system melted down and turned into a computer for the sake of humans arent the same thing. you could theoretically melt anything down and then arrange it into logic gates but that doesnt mean that computation understood as computation is “how the world works”.
@antihumanismthoughts?
@ofthefog don’t you see how insisting on looking at everything as primarily computer building materials implies a really destructive ideology
“oh everything is either a computer or raw materials that could be turned into a computer” is a metaphysics that raises “computer” to like a fundamental aspect of reality.
i mean like humans are just labor or potential labor. i could say that and you wouldnt be able to counter it with facts and logic but do you see how looking at people like that is so fucked and misses so much? yeah.
by saying “all reality is just computer building parts” you’re basically just saying that all that matters in existence is computation power or potential computation power. like???? you’ve moved the goalposts.
“a rock isnt something programmable like a pc is” so it’s not a computer. easy. like??
it’s like saying that everything is triangle and when i point out a log that isnt a triangle you pull out a saw
see this is why people called you a wordcel.
I say this because its useful to do things like manage logistical systems, not to do metaphysics.
And apparently you can’t even apply my own words so like have fun coming up with objections of your own creation I guess.
This from the very beginning has not been about aesthetics. Its been about practical application the whole time. No goalposts have been moved. You just keep insisting there is a problem by maliciously misinterpreting my definition.
you entered this conversation that i started. it’s been about words, definitions and metaphysics the whole time. I’m trying to do philosophy here.
i’m not maliciously misinterpreting your definition, i’m taking issue with your definition.
it has not been about practical application from the beginning. of course computers are useful for logistical tasks, no one was arguing that.
i don’t really know what you’re arguing, but i’m arguing that it’s extremely limiting and also not rly accurate to concieve of brains as computers, and that everything is a computer only insofar as “computer” is a word we strip of all associations with “computer”.
“computer” is a hard metal box that follows instructions written in language-math extremely precisely. it can only do what it’s told. it is only active when it is asked to perform computation.
it does not live, it cannot survive. It only exists because of its master, only lives for its master, only does exactly what the master wants. it is nothing but a symbolic processor imprinted on some substrate by a human, in order to perform computational tasks.
is this what a human is like? is this what the more-than-human world is like? is this the box you want to put everything in?
ignoring these associations when asking if we should really think of ourselves and the world as “computers” is misleading. this is some of what the word means.
i know how logic gates work. i know how a computer is built from them. i know a logic gate can be constructed from almost anything.
i’m arguing that this is a good way of thinking when you want to build a computer, bad for almost anything else in the world.
I hope you, as an anarchist, see the negative political consequences of seeing people as computers to be programmed and fed imput
I agree that it is helpful to think in terms of computer when you want to build a computer.
i am saying it is unhelpful, and possibly harmful, to think primarily in terms of computers when you want to interact with and understand other humans, manage society, play games, eat food, do politics, understand reality, build buildings, or do almost anything esle that does not involve building a computer or trying to solve logistical problems within a computer.
When you think about computers, of course think in terms of computers.
but when you want to understand people or the universe writ large, it’s a folly to imagine that for some reason the computer framework we built to build and understand computers will magically accurately apply to the rest of reality and make sense.
if you think that building, maintaining, and using computers is the Primary Activity of Life, thats on you.
You quite literally do not have to do that association. You are your own problem. Historically people have done calculations and it was fine. You can do that for fun even, people do math competitions they volentarily join.
Is that robitfying the soul or something? Its fine if you don’t like it, but if you’re going to shit on things that people do then obviously there is going to be blowback.
just because I can write with my brain does not mean that it fundamentally runs on text
damn i guess no one can be a writer then?
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a spoon is not the same as a spoon dangling in the middle of a rube goldberg computer
“is a computer” is different than “can be turned into a computer”. computerness is applied by the minds designing the computer, not by the materials themselves.
nothing is a building material, not even wood and stone, until a human has identified it as something they can build with.
nothing is a computer until a human applies that understanding to it and then manipulates it to serve their computational needs
Great, I’m glad you’ve decided to acquiesce after my didaction.
a physical system and that same physical system melted down and turned into a computer for the sake of humans arent the same thing. you could theoretically melt anything down and then arrange it into logic gates but that doesnt mean that computation understood as computation is “how the world works”.
@antihumanismthoughts?
@ofthefog don’t you see how insisting on looking at everything as primarily computer building materials implies a really destructive ideology
“oh everything is either a computer or raw materials that could be turned into a computer” is a metaphysics that raises “computer” to like a fundamental aspect of reality.
i mean like humans are just labor or potential labor. i could say that and you wouldnt be able to counter it with facts and logic but do you see how looking at people like that is so fucked and misses so much? yeah.
by saying “all reality is just computer building parts” you’re basically just saying that all that matters in existence is computation power or potential computation power. like???? you’ve moved the goalposts.
“a rock isnt something programmable like a pc is” so it’s not a computer. easy. like??
it’s like saying that everything is triangle and when i point out a log that isnt a triangle you pull out a saw
see this is why people called you a wordcel.
I say this because its useful to do things like manage logistical systems, not to do metaphysics.
And apparently you can’t even apply my own words so like have fun coming up with objections of your own creation I guess.
This from the very beginning has not been about aesthetics. Its been about practical application the whole time. No goalposts have been moved. You just keep insisting there is a problem by maliciously misinterpreting my definition.
you entered this conversation that i started. it’s been about words, definitions and metaphysics the whole time. I’m trying to do philosophy here.
i’m not maliciously misinterpreting your definition, i’m taking issue with your definition.
it has not been about practical application from the beginning. of course computers are useful for logistical tasks, no one was arguing that.
i don’t really know what you’re arguing, but i’m arguing that it’s extremely limiting and also not rly accurate to concieve of brains as computers, and that everything is a computer only insofar as “computer” is a word we strip of all associations with “computer”.
“computer” is a hard metal box that follows instructions written in language-math extremely precisely. it can only do what it’s told. it is only active when it is asked to perform computation.
it does not live, it cannot survive. It only exists because of its master, only lives for its master, only does exactly what the master wants. it is nothing but a symbolic processor imprinted on some substrate by a human, in order to perform computational tasks.
is this what a human is like? is this what the more-than-human world is like? is this the box you want to put everything in?
ignoring these associations when asking if we should really think of ourselves and the world as “computers” is misleading. this is some of what the word means.
i know how logic gates work. i know how a computer is built from them. i know a logic gate can be constructed from almost anything.
i’m arguing that this is a good way of thinking when you want to build a computer, bad for almost anything else in the world.
I hope you, as an anarchist, see the negative political consequences of seeing people as computers to be programmed and fed imput
I agree that it is helpful to think in terms of computer when you want to build a computer.
i am saying it is unhelpful, and possibly harmful, to think primarily in terms of computers when you want to interact with and understand other humans, manage society, play games, eat food, do politics, understand reality, build buildings, or do almost anything esle that does not involve building a computer or trying to solve logistical problems within a computer.
When you think about computers, of course think in terms of computers.
but when you want to understand people or the universe writ large, it’s a folly to imagine that for some reason the computer framework we built to build and understand computers will magically accurately apply to the rest of reality and make sense.
if you think that building, maintaining, and using computers is the Primary Activity of Life, thats on you.
You quite literally do not have to do that association. You are your own problem. Historically people have done calculations and it was fine. You can do that for fun even, people do math competitions they volentarily join.
Is that robitfying the soul or something? Its fine if you don’t like it, but if you’re going to shit on things that people do then obviously there is going to be blowback.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a spoon is not the same as a spoon dangling in the middle of a rube goldberg computer
“is a computer” is different than “can be turned into a computer”. computerness is applied by the minds designing the computer, not by the materials themselves.
nothing is a building material, not even wood and stone, until a human has identified it as something they can build with.
nothing is a computer until a human applies that understanding to it and then manipulates it to serve their computational needs
Great, I’m glad you’ve decided to acquiesce after my didaction.
a physical system and that same physical system melted down and turned into a computer for the sake of humans arent the same thing. you could theoretically melt anything down and then arrange it into logic gates but that doesnt mean that computation understood as computation is “how the world works”.
@antihumanismthoughts?
@ofthefog don’t you see how insisting on looking at everything as primarily computer building materials implies a really destructive ideology
“oh everything is either a computer or raw materials that could be turned into a computer” is a metaphysics that raises “computer” to like a fundamental aspect of reality.
i mean like humans are just labor or potential labor. i could say that and you wouldnt be able to counter it with facts and logic but do you see how looking at people like that is so fucked and misses so much? yeah.
by saying “all reality is just computer building parts” you’re basically just saying that all that matters in existence is computation power or potential computation power. like???? you’ve moved the goalposts.
“a rock isnt something programmable like a pc is” so it’s not a computer. easy. like??
it’s like saying that everything is triangle and when i point out a log that isnt a triangle you pull out a saw
see this is why people called you a wordcel.
I say this because its useful to do things like manage logistical systems, not to do metaphysics.
And apparently you can’t even apply my own words so like have fun coming up with objections of your own creation I guess.
This from the very beginning has not been about aesthetics. Its been about practical application the whole time. No goalposts have been moved. You just keep insisting there is a problem by maliciously misinterpreting my definition.
At first i thought creamsicles were kind of a weird food but the extra calories are actually pretty nice as an alternative to the popsicle.
I’ll trust you on that. Personally I enjoy the texture. The humble popsicle can be a bit harsh like plain ice, but the cream makes it nice and smooth. Great cool down option in these hot times, fun even.
I always liked the winter because i could eat as much butter as i wanted, but maybe the summer has some competition now!
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a spoon is not the same as a spoon dangling in the middle of a rube goldberg computer
“is a computer” is different than “can be turned into a computer”. computerness is applied by the minds designing the computer, not by the materials themselves.
nothing is a building material, not even wood and stone, until a human has identified it as something they can build with.
nothing is a computer until a human applies that understanding to it and then manipulates it to serve their computational needs
Great, I’m glad you’ve decided to acquiesce after my didaction.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
all differences are differences of degree. kinds do not exist “out there”.
so you define a computer as any symbol manipulation system of any kind? what counts as a symbol? anything that humans apply meaning to?
so a computer is “any sort of system which manipulates anything humans can attach meaning to” which is anything.
so i guess under this definition almost anything would be a “computer”, it’s just that the vast majority of them were not made by humans, have no intention behind them, are not arranged into gates, transistors, etc, do not use ones and zeroes, are not anywhere near logic or arithmetic. nothing that we use to identify a computer is there.
what’s the input and output on a rock? how do you debug a star? can i get down to the assembly code of the atmosphere? can i write a C script on a feather? can you run a multiplication program on a tree, or a sorting algorithm on a forest? Type up a “hello world” program in the dirt and then get back to me.
If you can’t do anything that I listed above on a particular system there’s no real reason to call it a computer.
either a computer is “those electronic things with screens that are made of transistors and wires and do complex calculations for us” or “everything everywhere all the time”. now which one of those makes sense? which one of those actually applies to the word “computer”?
if you ask me to “go get you your computer” and i return with a spoon, you’d rightly say “that isn’t a computer.”
any definition applies to everything if you stretch it enough.
what you need to ask is, what project does it serve to classify everything in the universe as a computer? what kind of worldview is it to look on your fellow humans as arithmetic processing machines designed to be opened up and programmed by someone else?
based on your reasoning i could define all computers as rivers and it would be equally valid. anything you say is a computer i could use your own arguments to call it a river. that hunk of metal is a “computer” because it processes information and symbols? it’s actually a river, because everything flows down its path.
Or a mind! i could do the same thing you’re doing with computers but simply define “mind” as “that which manipulates symbols” (which is honestly more valid because minds came first and then made the computers). Then i could argue that the whole universe is just one giant mind manipulating symbols. now i expect you have some disagreement with this notion but, like, who’s to really say?
do you understand now how this game of stretching definitions works? it’s aesthetic! you’re defending the world-as-computer mindset because it gives you an aesthetically pleasing picture of the world, i imagine.
so, what do you really want to characterize reality as?
Yeah, actually it turns out this is pretty useful to the history of computer science.
Before electronic computers, a calculator was a person. The way that changed was building stuff like mechanical computers. Which comes from this thinking.
See, the difference engine.
I said that any physical system can be a computer. So a rock obviously isn’t something programmable like a pc is, but it can be made into one. Silicon for example, or the metal gears that go into mechanical computers. Then once that physical system is built, you can now use it for numerical and logical calculations. Hence the definition which you seemed to have stretched on your own and proceeded to complain about.
A spoon can be a component in a computer, but in order to get anything meaningful from it there will likely need to be some other components and a system of interpreting it. The objection to someone getting a spoon comes from these grounds.
Like we can say most anything can be used as building materials. Ice, for example. Its not overly expansive to define it this way and people make ice sculptures and hotels and stuff out of it, even if it is impractical. You may as well object to that on the same grounds.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
nah. bro come on. i know what i’m talking about. what do you even mean by “any physical system can be a computer”??
like actually concretely what is a computer for you? define it
A computer is a physical system that can be used to do a series of numerical or logical calculations given input.
A set of dominos can be a computer for example, where the input is pushing over a line of stacked ones, and the output can be which lines are down at the end of the computation.
A single line of dominos is not particularly useful, but the point is that you can do this. You can make a computer in Minecraft. You can use an abacus. You can use your brain.
Whether that is useful or practical depends on things like setup time and speed of calculation, but that is a difference in degree rather than kind.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
none of this is an argument against anything i said?
Its pretty direct actually. Every physical system can be a computer hence the examples of physical systems being a computer, and in fact it does get used like that on an industrial scale so it makes perfect sense economically and physically etc.
Gesturing at how dumb it sounds when that’s how it actually is just kind of makes it seem like you don’t understand the infrastructure of the internet you’re using right now rather than say something meaningful about the philosophy of computer science.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
no kidding
Yeah not only is a fluid computing a thing but it is used at an industrial scale in the internet backbone.
This Wall of Lava Lamps Is Crucial for Encryption
You can make a less than effecient computer out of liquid cells as seen here
Liquid is a medium of high density machine readable data storage in computer science research as well ( though this would better be labeled as molecule data storage ) , based on previous successes of storing data as dna, which i guess parallels the cum example.
I assume you are already familiar with the slime mold used to calculate the travelling salesman problems.
I would say the shape rotator response is building stuff like that insofar as the catagory says anything meaningful at all.
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
honestly i feel like i was being more of a shape rotator
just took a look - bad news
a pedo just called me a wordcel
now, and this is crucial, were you being a wordcel at the time?
watch mojo.com top ten most fuckable vegetables: #3 is the pumpkin!
You fucking take that back
I honestly don’t know what part is being objected to here
Trying to tell me how manipulative and deceitful 50′s nuclear civil defense media was and my main response is “Aww they actually expected citizens to meaningfully participate in the response to disaster, I can’t imagine that today, that’s cute.“
Disaster response research suggests that most of the saving is done by average citizens actually. No full paper on this but there is a study to link
Citizen Response to Disasters: A Survey of Literature and Some Practical Implications | Request PDF
obviously my intuitions about the trolley problem and the fat man problem are both correct, and the philosophical problem is what moral principles entail this distinction
obviously my intuition about the fat man problem is correct, and this entails that I should be more cautious about uncritically accepting my intuition about the trolley problem, which may be more complicated than I first thought
obviously my intuition about the trolley problem is correct, and this entails that I should reject my intuition about the fat man problem, which is in fact a non-issue easily resolved by general principles
While much has been said about those who hesitate at the fat man scenario being uncomfortable with more direct attribution, I think that this glosses over way that intuition works, as well as obscures what it is useful for.
On one hand, pulling a lever to kill the one and save five is the utalitarian choice. But it is also one that is quite liable to work without failing. Further, if the lever does fail, this absolves the moral agent of guilt anyway since there was nothing that could be done.
On the other, fat men are actually pretty bad at stopping trolleys. Further, if the body misses the tracks, which is more likely than the lever failing, this puts our moral agent in an awkward situation of explaining to the fellow they just pushed what the big idea is.
When we take self interest into account first, it we have better predictive power for one’s actions, but interestingly, also intuitions even if it personally doesn’t feel like it.
This certainly explains why methods of saving people from the holocaust work - waving the possibility of authoritative retribution to get jews out of camps is exactly because it seems like the nazi bureaucrat will get in trouble if they dont. Simularly, a militia group trying to do a pogram can be stopped by bystanders watching them disapprovingly, not because they are suddenly convinced of the humanity of their potential victim, but that there is now evidence that there will be some kind of court case and potential jail time if they follow through.
In that respect, it is probably a good thing when people balk at the fat man scenario, though it tends not to go over that way.
The inconsistency between most people’s intuitions regarding the trolley problem and the fat man scenario is (one more piece in a whole pile of) evidence that OUR INTUITIONS DON’T FOLLOW LOGICAL PRINCIPLES. And why should they? That’s not their job. Their job is facilitating sociability.
I would argue that socialibility is just such an example of something that promotes self interest. But there are also tendencies to initially distrust unknown people that look different. This is still working on the same principle, though.
But importantly, one’s initial intuition can be changed with experience. This is pretty quick with a traumatic experience ( itself an adaptation, though not necessarily sustainable ), but it can work in a more productive direction. Like a fear of heights comes from the internalised belief that falling hurts and that going up is a situation where that can happen. Self preservation is a pretty deep instinct.
You can be up on a big wind generator’s emergency descent mechanism all strapped up and ready to go down, but still have an internalised fear to use it. Even when you understand safety equipment.
What helps get through this is a process of proving to yourself that it is indeed safe. Going over the assurances, feeling the weight of the safety harness, perhaps recalling previous experiences with climbing equipment and so on, and gradually this intuitive mental block will fade.
Simply saying that what you are feeling is irrational isn’t particularly effective in my experience.
