Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

(But -on your reading, Obama would be liable, too! What a can of worms...)

Making traffic uncomfortable for cars (à la hollandaise)

Do you remember the times when even bicycles had to have licence plates?

Yet when I emerged from the train station in Shibuya, blinking jetlagged in the morning light after a night flight from Amsterdam, what actually caught me off guard was not the bustle but rather how quiet the city is. When you see cliched images of Tokyo, what invariably is shown are the enormous crowds of pedestrians crossing the roads, or Mount Fuji in the background of the futuristic skyline. I expected something like Los Angeles in Blade Runner, I suppose — futuristic and overwhelming. From photos, Tokyo can look almost unplanned, with neon signs everywhere and a huge variety of forms of architecture. You expect it to feel messy. What I experienced, however, was a city that felt almost like being in a futuristic village. It is utterly calm, in a way that is actually rather strange.

Since the advent of the automobile, architects and urban planners worldwide have found it almost impossible to resist building cities around roads and an assumption that most people will drive. Tokyo somehow managed not to. It rebuilt in a much more human-centric way.

For one thing, cars are far more enthusiastically inspected than in America or most of Europe. Cars must be checked by officials every two years to ensure that they are still compliant, and have not been modified.

But unlike America, the idea of making them free never seemed to cross politicians’ minds, probably because Japan in the postwar era was not the world’s richest country. Capital was not freely available. To build the roads, the national government formed corporations such as the Shuto Kōsoku-dōro Kabushiki-gaisha, or Metropolitan Expressway Company, which was formed in greater Tokyo in 1959.

What that meant was that, from the beginning, roads did not have an unfair advantage in their competition with other forms of transport.

Most infamously on this crossing the railway

In my view, effective traffic planning is largely achieved by restricting just one group: Cars. What is most needed is restrictions on car purchase and taxing their usage. This automatically leaves breathing space for all other road users. […]

Regulating road construction for different traffic is secondary. Netherlands has gone very far in special-purpose building for bicycles. It is far more straightforward to just tax cars, if you are really into environmentalism and safety etc.

This is in fact how it used to work in USSR. Getting a car was bureaucratically a very difficult, arduous and long project. As a result, even though roads were built for cars one might say, the cars on the roads were so sparse that pedestrians could walk anywhere. Something similar is in place in Japan: Before you can buy a car, you need to prove that you have a parking spot for it, and tax brackets are prohibitive for larger vehicles.

• What the local people want
• Many incentives and the very realistic option not to use a car
• Some disincentives to use a car

This is in fact how it used to work in USSR. Getting a car was bureaucratically a very difficult, arduous and long project. As a result, even though roads were built for cars one might say, the cars on the roads were so sparse that pedestrians could walk anywhere.

The solution is to slow cars down so that there is just one speed, and even the opposite-direction traffic isn't provided a separate lane on the same road.

But the teacher should not rely on students' self-learning. It's part of the teacher's job to verify that the concepts have reached the student by giving tests that are different than the introductory examples were.

It's not like they tell you about picaresque novels or something when you're six years old.

But I mean the concepts. Why else teach vocabulary than to elucidate concepts?

Well, thanks for the clarification attempt. I'm rather thick on some things when in philosophy mode. I still cannot parse the original statement after many readings. In philosophy you in fact cannot define terms for or against reality, as if reality were something different than yet another term to be defined. In philosophy, all you can do is define the terms, "reality" among them, starting from premises and elaborating from there. Not joking, by the way.

Darwinianism as a philosophical school of thought has been waning for a while now. I did not come up with it. In Soviet Union it went rather strong, even though in my times there emerged a new exciting semi-replacement to it - postmodernism, another theory that never deserved to enter the realm of philosophy. Darwin's a theory in biology, postmodernism is a style of art and art critique. Both broke out of their specialised limits into philosophy and made philosophy look worse. Anyway, if you are not a whole-hearted Darwinian philosopher, all inconsistencies are forgivable.

Okay, so that's your main rub, I guess, that the terms appear to be defined against reality. It is the wrong rub, fundamentally wrong. First, we are talking about a thought experiment, for cryssakes. Second, any argument or statement by a competing philosopher who does not share your own supposedly real-world-grounded common-sense presuppositions would more or less appear to be defining some or all terms against reality. Throwing whatever one thinks is reality out of the window for the purposes of entertaining an alternative train of thought is an everyday affair in philosophy.

And you do not call them incoherent, do you?

Snowflakeness is inconsistent with Darwinianism. Straightforwardly so, nothing subtle about it. Ethics, empathy etc. may be compatible with Darwinianism in the confines of the in-group, but no further. On Darwinianism, there is no way to advocate for truth and decency as universal norms. But I'm not surprised. Every philosophical Darwinian is inconsistent. Darwinianism should have remained a theory in biology. It did not deserve to become a school of thought in philosophy in the first place.

On the defined terms, shouldn't they react only to plastic and otherwise just idle in standby mode? They would start eating other things only if plastic is ambiguously defined in the system or there's also the priority of survival that would make them nibble at something else in the absence of plastic.

For me the distinction is important. It is quite a difference whether military robots decide to take over the world as in the Terminator movie or a human pushes the button

It should have been clear a few posts ago by now that this is irrelevant. You are again talking about real-life possibility versus conceivability. As I have pointed out, conceivability is fully there. Even real-life approximations are there to illustrate the point. Nothing is incoherent in the thought experiment. And it's a thought experiment, not a physics/biology lab experiment.

For example, everything that you see in dreams can be "perfectly incoherent" in some sense (namely in some idiosyncratic sense that would not fly in professional philosophy) but it is not inconceivable - you just conceived of it in your dreams! As to philosophical zombie, sleepwalker is a real-world example of someone in a zombie state, so it's not just conceivable, but there are also real-world examples that work as functionally close analogies. There was not a single successful objection to the philosophical zombie thought experiment.

Yes, I keep sincerely wondering how materialist epistemology can be something else than junk. How do you define abuse? For example, when a male lion becomes the leader of the pack, he eats the cubs of the previous leader. Natural in the animal world. As a Darwinian, what objections do you have if humans behaved the same?

In some way the point has been all along whether movies like Terminator and Ex Machina represent a possibility that we should take seriously or we can treat them as mere fiction. Based on my metaphysics, concluding that there is exactly zero chance of AI waking up and taking over, I can calmly treat them as mere fiction.

Whereas you have trouble even following the timeline of AI. It has been with us for at least half a century or so. It is not hypothetical.

They are not identical to humans in every way, as I explained. Clearly, p-zombies are impossible for you to imagine despite explanations.

Clearly you have reasons for your stance and to reject other stances. Likely among the reasons is something like that truth matters. Interestingly, the concept of truth as explained by any materialist is internally incoherent. For hardcore believers of evolution, survival should be the value that trumps truth any day. Evolutionarily, truth-pursuers are always a weak minority and extra rare in high places. Th rulers are the powerful. In the animal world - and on consistent Darwinism there is no human world - truth-pursuers are not even a thing at all. On materialism, truth has no value and, for metaphysical consistency, must be construed as non-existent.

The idea^[1] that mind is an emergent property of certain kinds of matter's complexity is no better established than the Behaviorism of B. F. Skinner. We know so little true psychology that Freudian Analysis is making a comeback. (But I suppose it should have been expected: There are still believing Scientologists! Their scientific underpinnings are the same...) At least, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy knows its place.

I'll leave you pondering the fact that you did not reject, refute or even problematise any of the corollaries that I pointed out to you, such as the ethical corollaries following from the assumption that AI is intelligent to whatever degree.

And you had nothing to say about the sleepwalker analogy to clarify the definition of zombie for you. So I guess that one works well. The example of hypoesthesia on the other hand was not an analogy, not intended to claim at all that such condition is empirically identical to a healthy human. Rather, it was one in a series of illustrations to get you closer to the concept of philosophical zombie, which you still have failed at.

In my opinion the mind and the brain relate more like time versus watches and clocks. I'd like to suppose that you don't think that time is a process created by a watch, but I'm not quite sure anymore.

Now, knowing this, why would you assume your approach to how the brain and the mind relate has any resemblance to what is really going on? You just compared the airplane+flying to the brain+mind. Want to give it another shot?

Well, flying is not a process created by the airplane. Certainly there is absolutely nothing in the process that the airplane creates. Rather, it is what the engineers and pilots create based on the properties of air and aerodynamic components. To assume that the airplane creates the process is a horrendously false description of what is going on.

The philosophical zombie *is not* identical to a non-zombie. It is identical for empirical purposes, but the point of the thought experiment is to highlight that the empirical is not all there is.

Consider the following. When a healthy human being touches a hot stove, his hand gets burned AND he removes his hand *due to pain*. When a person with hypoesthesia (or whatever the loss of sensation is) touches a hot stove, his hand gets burned, but he does not feel the pain. Now, suppose there is someone who does not feel the pain when his hand gets burned, but since childhood he has learned that it is customary to remove the hand and wince when touching a hot stove, so that's what he does because everybody else does it. This is a baby-step towards the philosophical zombie.

In terms of a physical experiment in the current stage of civilisation, I agree with you. But in terms of a philosophical discussion you are frankly not on board what a thought experiment is.

Again, it so happens that the brain is among the physically and biologically less complicated organs. So, assuming that the brain is the mind (or any other fallacious version of the same, such as "the mind is a process of the brain" or "the mind is what the brain does"), complexity is the wrong description of what is going on even from the purely empirical point of view.