this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Fuck AI
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Does anybody else feel rather solipsistic or is it just me?
I doubt you feel that way since I'm the only person that really exists.
Jokes aside, when I was in my teens back in the 90s I felt that way about pretty much everyone that wasn't a good friend of mine. Person on the internet? Not a real person. Person at the store? Not a real person. Boss? Customer? Definitely not people.
I don't really know why it started, when it stopped, or why it stopped, but it's weird looking back on it.
Andrew Tate has convinced a ton of teenage boys to think the same, apparently. Kinda ironic.
Puberty is rough, for some people it’s your body going “mate, mate, mate” and not much else gets through for 4-5 years, or like 8 maybe.
I’m about the same age. (Xellennials or some shit like that, apparently). And at the time, there was also a big movement in media and culture to sell more shit to people our age (we’d also been slammed toy and cereal ads as kids in the 80s). MTV was switching to all reality bullshit and Clinton was boinking anything that moved. We were doomed to only think about ourselves.
The problem is that a bunch of them never outgrew it, or made it their “brand” like Tate and his ilk.
A Cicero a day and your solipsism goes away.
Rigour is important, and at the end of the day we don't really know anything. However this stuff is supposed to be practical; at a certain arbitrary point you need to say "nah, I'm certain enough of this statement being true that I can claim that it's true, thus I know it."
Descartes has entered the chat
Edo ergo caco. Caco ergo sum! [/shitty joke]
Serious now. Descartes was also trying to solve solipsism, but through a different method: he claims at least some sort of knowledge ("I doubt thus I think; I think thus I am"), and then tries to use it as a foundation for more knowledge.
What I'm doing is different. I'm conceding that even radical scepticism, a step further than solipsism, might be actually correct, and that true knowledge is unobtainable (solipsism still claims that you can know that yourself exist). However, that "we'll never know it" is pointless, even if potentially true, because it lacks any sort of practical consequence. I learned this from Cicero (it's how he handles, for example, the definition of what would be a "good man").
Note that this matter is actually relevant in this topic. We're dealing with black box systems, that some claim to be conscious; sure, they do it through insane troll logic, but the claim could be true, and we would have no way to know it. However, for practical matters: they don't behave as conscious systems, why would we treat them as such?
I'm either too high or not high enough, and there's only one way to find out
Try both.
I don't smoke but I get you guys. Plenty times I've had a blast discussing philosophy with people who were high.
Underrated joke
13 year old me after watching Vanilla Sky: