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.
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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.
Reminder that much of the Netherlands was bombed to pieces too. It's not clear to me from the article if this is actually true as written because I've seen the major improvements in Antwerp and Brussels over the past decade first-hand, comparable to what happened in the Netherlands from the '70s to the early '90s. In any case it's never too late to convert.
[Edit: later on it talks about how there was no money for roads and they sucked all around, so it's definitely plausible in that context.]
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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.
Er, hold on, every two years isn't standard everywhere?
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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.
Just a quick note that I've experienced more tollways in America than anywhere else including France and Italy.
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What that meant was that, from the beginning, roads did not have an unfair advantage in their competition with other forms of transport.
That looks exactly like how you'd imagine the Soviet Union might build things. I remember similar constructions from when I visited former East Germany in '94, except in typical communist fashion it wasn't just horribly designed but also full of potholes and otherwise collapsing. So this is just communist design with EU funds you say, just better asphalt? When I went again around 2000 most of that communist junk had been replaced by slightly saner West German designs, although they should've gone straight for Dutch if you ask me.
But yeah, in built-up areas crossings look like I already showed, or like this or that. That last one by pure coincidence seems to be a bike street, meaning a place where cars aren't allowed to pass bikes.
Edit: btw, to give an indication of vehicle tax on cars in the Netherlands, it looks like a car at around 1500 kilo (i.e., a stupid SUV) has to pay about € 217 per 3 months. It should probably be more, but over in Germany they typically pay about a quarter because they don't take weight into account, only the engine cilinder contents. You can play around with some values here; unfortunately I didn't see a convenient table or formula.
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.
With that strategic element omitted, you're simply describing exactly what the Netherlands (and to a reasonable extent also Belgium) does.
But cars will always need more space than bikes, different routes, etc. If you build for everyone, you build for cars. Period.
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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.
However, this shows a clear difference between what we would consider an authoritarian dictatorship and a consensus-based ("democratic") society. When you build what inhabitants want you get this.[1]
So we have:
What the local people want
Many incentives and the very realistic option not to use a car
Some disincentives to use a car
The end result is that almost no one I know owns a car anymore, which 20 years ago they probably would've.
It's not dissimilar to what you say is the Japanese approach, with the difference that it's not a restriction written into law at the time you buy a car. But who would buy a car they couldn't park? If you randomly dumped it somewhere you'd be fined, it would be dragged off and possessed, and you might even lose your driver's license.
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.
Note that this is also how it was in America a hundred years ago and the rich people who could afford cars invented the ludicrous concept of "jaywalking" so they could race around. So I'm hardly convinced that having a few rich and powerful as the only drivers is a good thing. Here in Belgium the rich were also notorious for making the roads unsafe back in those days.
1 Incidentally the new neighborhood right next to me in Antwerp is somewhat similar in many ways, although it doesn't go as far.↵
I don't know about Estonia, but I think you're simply describing how roads work. Unless otherwise specified all roads have a speed limit of 60, and that's basically all roads in the countryside. That'll be lowered to 50 or 30 depending on circumstances (i.e., where it's more built up or otherwise unsafe).
Having a separated cycle path is at the very least pleasant for any speed cars might go over 30, and on busy roads even when cars go 30.
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.
That's bog standard traffic calming, like here. If you're correct about railways crossings we just prefer people to cross railways as quickly as possible,[1] but note that in more built up areas crossings will often look more like this.
1 They're just the normal width of the road basically.↵
It comes across as unremarkable to me, but it's possible that it's slightly tighter than even the smallest here. Here's a link to a streetview in Belgium for a crossing on a small street. Here's another one near it. And another one.
Here's a link to the Netherlands. And another showing a bike path next to the road.
School, according to various rankings in a form closer to their implementation in for example the Benelux, Estonia, Finland and Japan than in the United States[1] is clearly beneficial to society. All citizens should have certain basic skills, otherwise society will be much worse to live in.
In context I was talking about how we're first taught the intricacies of these distinctions at around seven or eight years old, right alongside learning how to read and write. The very basics of reading and writing come a year prior. Then we spend another decade working with various genres of texts and enhancing our understanding. What, in other words, did these kids learn in English class? But the thing is, I've seen lesson plans for English from America that were excellent. Nothing to suggest the kids going through that system wouldn't be able to articulate the difference between a novel and a book.
Though presumably if you split the US up by state you'll get a picture closer to Europe. I also realize that Finland and Japan may well take a rather different approach, where the Finnish approach at least superficially comes across as much more appealing because it seems it does well on average while simultaneously people like you and I should be mostly fine there as well, but as I said that's a superficial impression.↵
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.
I still remember how I was one of the few who managed to add something like 97+6, whereas there were many who made up random answers or just gave up. They either didn't think a number over 100, which we'd never explicitly learned about, was allowed, or they somehow couldn't conceive of it despite knowing about 1–9 and about 10–99. I'm not sure why I particularly recall that example, but it's illustrative for pretty much every subject.
But granted, regardless if you'd already figured it out for yourself, such matters as books, novels, short stories, fiction and non-fiction, are a standard part of learning how to read and use the library, and it's not like school didn't dot some Is and cross some Ts for me. Going more in-depth about the differences between tabloids and quality newspapers did indeed elucidate, even though the differences as such were obvious. Conversely we also learned all kinds of bizarre robotic methods for "understanding" and "analyzing" non-fiction texts.
But I mean the concepts. Why else teach vocabulary than to elucidate concepts?
To a very large extent you learn vocabulary to be able to talk about things with other people. The concepts are something you'll generally have figured out by yourself years prior. If you're lucky there'll be some deeper analysis, but the steps in school are slow and late. It's not like they tell you about picaresque novels or something when you're six years old.
I should hardly think the distinction between book and novel[1] is something one has to be purposefully taught. You have books like encyclopedias, books about history, dinosaurs, biology and physics and then you have storybooks. At some point hopefully well over a decade before you're eighteen years old you osmotically learn that thicker storybooks are called novels, and that non-fiction books are not. It's the fancier vocabulary like fiction and non-fiction that you might have to learn because it's every so slightly more in the domain of jargon. Note that I explicitly mean the vocabulary, not the concept.
On the flip side, there are some supposed non-fiction books that might as well be novels.
1 Or rather, boek and roman, as @jax pointed out.↵
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.
I used it as shorthand for our model(s) of reality. It's not the same thing as reality of course, mea culpa.
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.
Is that Darwinism as in the rather peculiar Social "Darwinism"?
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.
I said literally the exact opposite of what you somehow think I said and what you keep incorrectly claiming I base my argument on.
"Something incoherent can easily be possible and something coherent can be impossible, unless you define the terms against reality."
In other words, something being coherent or incoherent is affected by your presuppositions, not by reality.
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.
To summarize, Darwinism should be what it is, and not what you came up with. Got it.
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.
That's a thing that is obvious in words, but not in the actual construction and programming of robots. We all have microplastics in our body, so an obvious potential failure state is that in the absence of what we think of as plastic, it detects microplastics as plastic. And in any case it's very much not a thing to offhandedly dismiss while you create such a robot.
You don't even need any AI at all for a doom scenario along those lines; any sufficiently advanced robot will do the trick. You merely need the proverbial gray goo or paperclip factory. Consider a school of self-replicating robots that consume plastic in the ocean to clean it up, operating on only a few very simple directives. Try to stick to the school, don't get too close to someone else in the school, and process any plastic you come across. At first it's all great, but one day years, decades, centuries or perhaps millennia later they run out of plastic and what do they do? Worst case scenario they start consuming all life to keep going. Or even just all algae or something. Did someone design it to be capable of both? Did something go awry during replication? Or even in a slightly less disastrous scenario, maybe suddenly all plastic is worthless, instead of just the bit you wanted to get rid of.
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
The Terminator may well be a weak p-zombie though, and I mean that even within the confines of the movie.[1] Regardless whether it gained consciousness and decided to kill all humans or whether it suffered from the proverbial y2k bug and its programming decided to kill all humans, its actions will be extremely similar if not identical. You'll be in for a bad time.
I suppose you might potentially consider it a war crime to bomb a factory full of innocent Terminators if they are conscious and of human-level intelligence, although in the movie they're more like heavily armed pigeons at best/worst. In this context it might be worth pointing out that the Cylons negotiated a peace treaty with the humans.
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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.
It was obvious literal decades ago (I guess I'm getting old) that this is what the thought experiment claims. Repeating it over and over doesn't make it so. This has nothing to do with possibility. Something incoherent can easily be possible and something coherent can be impossible, unless you define the terms against reality.
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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.
There are much closer real world analogies than sleep walkers. People who lack some qualia are a dime a dozen, and they usually just don't realize it.
But using the word conceivable that way is meaningless. Of course I can conceive of it in that sense. But then you're ignoring the definition of qualia from within suppositions of the thought experiment. And once you stop dreaming you realize that qualia are apparently not the relevant aspect, but that there must be something else, let's dub it ersia, that actually relates to consciousness. Or in short, either qualia or p-zombies as defined in the experiment are incoherent.
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?
At its most base level you would despise yourself as a hollow villainous shell of a human being, depriving yourself and others of our desire to live a fulfilling life in a safe environment. Any rational being would realize they're sabotaging their own chance at satisfaction states by living like that, and in this case it requires no thought at all because you'll be afraid for your life until someone manages to kill you. It's hardly subtle, is it.
1 The credulous opinions regarding its consciousness from some protagonist carry little weight. All they've ever done is fight the thing.↵
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.
You can rest easy knowing that the autonomous self-duplicating machines programmed to and crucially capable of destroying everything aren't conscious? You might want to think that one through some more. The distinction between "gained consciousness and decided to kill all humans" and "didn't gain consciousness, was programmed to kill enemies and started identifying everybody as enemies due to an error" or "didn't gain consciousness, but some maniac decided to program it to kill everybody" is hardly the point there.
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 may buzzword label it AI, but it's just some statistics and algorithms. You were talking about an AI on the level of a human. Pay attention to yourself and take the things you say seriously please, otherwise what are we even talking about.
They are not identical to humans in every way, as I explained. Clearly, p-zombies are impossible for you to imagine despite explanations.
One can imagine perfectly incoherent things. But the purpose of thought experiments is not the same as the purpose of science fiction. The problem is inherent and it has absolutely nothing to do with physicalism.
If a consciousness is necessary for human behavior, you can't have something that acts like a human when you take it away. It's incoherent to claim otherwise. By logical necessity, there will be a detectable difference. Not none. This has nothing to do with physicalism; it's inherent in the thought experiment. You just have to actually do it instead of taking your assumptions as a given. As long as the p-zombie recognizes it has qualia, either qualia or p-zombies are incoherent.
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.
That's akin to saying the abused child must cherish and perpetuate the abuse just because it happened. It's the kind of reasoning you might get if your epistemology is junk.
But it's not true even if we take survival being the greatest good as a given. If you don't care about the truth you'll inevitably make bad choices. An argument that anything else is the fittest for survival in the long run is doomed to fail. Our instincts only go so far, and they should be taken as valuable input but they can't reason, prod and consider. What you describe is merely sufficient for survival, a grand difference with being the fittest for survival.
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 believe zombies were originally posited as a counterargument to Behaviorism, weren't they? Which makes intuitive sense because Behaviorism is somewhat crude at its core,[2] but in that case one also wouldn't be taking the thought experiment seriously. Because you're not talking about a Behaviorist zombie imported through the back door, which could never be anything but unconvincing, but an actually perfect zombie.
2 Though we should distinguish the caricatures painted by both opponents and proponents; in an important sense Behaviorism is simply true otherwise you couldn't train animals.↵
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.
Why would I reject the logical conclusion to treat such a hypothetical AI appropriately as per their level of consciousness and intelligence? That wouldn't make much sense.
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.
P-zombies aren't hard to imagine. The incoherence comes from the fact that if they're identical in every way, the conclusion must be that qualia are identical to thinking you experience qualia.[1] You disagree, but naturally in my opinion it's you who's importing definitions of qualia from outside the thought experiment. In your example, it's not coherent to say that your hand is in pain from touching a hot stove but that you feel nothing. It's neither or both.
In any case, I doubt it's fruitful to continue further down that path. It's been trodden.
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.
In some sense they do. Clocks fool us into thinking time can be divided into concrete little chunks. But that aside, I do provisionally conceive of time as a process created by all "clocks"[2] put together.
1 Or the reverse, that no one has any. Given that we all think we have qualia that seems a bit sillier, though given an incoherent or incomplete definition of qualia it's certainly possible. But in that case we still have qualia; they're just not the particular thing called qualia here, so that would be a very unhelpful line of thought. Even if qualia aren't what we think they are, there's still a phenomenon we call qualia.↵
I'm not talking about being empirically plausible. I'm talking about actually doing the thought experiment. You have to remain conceptually consistent. The Chinese Room you mentioned is another example. Within the confines of the thought experiment, the man using the book may be dumb but the book still has to be capable of correctly speaking Chinese, so can you actually say the room as a system isn't conscious as the thought experiment pretends? All you've actually said is that the man is like some parts of the body, which isn't particularly interesting. You haven't said anything about consciousness.
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?
I don't understand thought experiments, but clearly you understand analogies. When you think about the context of the discussion it might become obvious why I purposefully picked a man-made machine, but swapping in a bird doesn't change anything about the analogy.
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.
Is this even an equivocation fallacy? It's the configuration of the wings and engines that creates the process of flight. That which caused the wings and engines to be isn't an active part of the process, but a prerequisite to it.
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.
Shocking, who'd have thought. Thought experiments can show the opposite of what they claim or they can be logically impossible. I rather doubt that's something you disagree with; you just think this one's decent.
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.
Ah yes, the person who's completely identical on account of hypoesthesia clearly demonstrates… wait a second.
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.
Of course thought experiments are useful, but you have to conduct them correctly.
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.
Saying the brain isn't complex is just downward silly.
"AI" is literally about as different as can be. AI is exactly the way in which a zombie could actually exist, contrary to the one described in the premises.
I should note that I mean this in the logical sense by which I reject philosophical zombies as incoherent. In actual practice it may not be possible to be sufficiently complex while processing certain types of information without experiencing qualia as a side effect, or perhaps rather as an unavoidable consequence.
The thought experiment should be enlightening with regard to AI. AI talks (and writes and "creates") human-like enough so as to fool many. Consequently, since it "behaves" like a human being, doesn't it follow that it really is creative and intelligent? Doesn't it follow that we should treat it like a human being the full monty, along with human rights and the whole nine yards? If you say no, then why? Doesn't "yes" follow on the empiricist-physicalist theory?
But of course the answer to that could be "yes". Turn it around. How do you know that's not what we're doing?
I don't understand why you keep saying things like that as if they're some kind of gotcha. It's fundamentally quite similar to whether it is or isn't okay to keep cattle as livestock or humans as livestock.
Or maybe — just maybe — I've actually read the text. There's this little trick in reading texts, namely using your brain — or your mind, if you prefer, but the English idiom uses the word brain — to draw logical conclusions based on the premises. And sometimes you'll find you come to the conclusion they didn't actually take their own thought experiment very seriously.
Are the empirically verifiable biological processes, including the firing neurons as observable by neuroscientists, identical to internal experience or not? In other words, is phrenology true (i.e. is the brain identical to the mind)?
The mind is a process created by the brain. To call them identical is to say that flying is identical to an airplane.
Alternatively, is it permissible to presume or assume that external reactions are sufficient signs of some internal reflection, self-reflection, introspective consciousness and experience of qualia (by some other possible theory than phrenology, as phrenology is known to be false)?
To be a philosophical zombie you need to be identical to a non-zombie, yet somehow not experience qualia, yet somehow behave exactly the same as a non-zombie. This is incoherent. The zombie will have to behave differently, that is to say that it doesn't experience the smell of wood or colors, or lie. The latter is also behaving differently, but in a form that will be detectable by — yes indeed — neurons in the brain. The zombie's brain will be different.
"AI" is literally about as different as can be. AI is exactly the way in which a zombie could actually exist, contrary to the one described in the premises.
Philosophical zombies are self-refuting because thinking you experience qualia is simply the same thing as experiencing qualia. That's what qualia are. Unless something is lying about experiencing qualia, but the philosophical zombie isn't lying by definition. This is a logical impossibility. If they're not lying about it, that means they're experiencing qualia.
Of course you could conceive of magical qualia but then you're not saying anything meaningful about qualia.
Also, are philosophical zombies a possibility? Physicalists, if they are consistent, should probably assume that a philosophical zombie is a human being, plain and simple, there is no difference between the two.
Philosophical zombies are incoherent. Of course there's no difference.
I remember similar constructions from when I visited former East Germany in '94, except in typical communist fashion it wasn't just horribly designed but also full of potholes and otherwise collapsing. So this is just communist design with EU funds you say, just better asphalt? When I went again around 2000 most of that communist junk had been replaced by slightly saner West German designs, although they should've gone straight for Dutch if you ask me. 
Unless otherwise specified all roads have a speed limit of 60, and that's basically all roads in the countryside. That'll be lowered to 50 or 30 depending on circumstances (i.e., where it's more built up or otherwise unsafe).