InappropriateEmote

But evolution is actively participated in and directed by the unbroken process of life.

Yes. And?

The need to avoid death is prior to the existence of evolution. It can't be just the result of an imposition on sentient life, because it's a necessary condition of the autopoietic processes that define life itself, of which evolution is an extension.

I'm not seeing how this contradicts anything I said. In fact it supports what I said by recognizing the necessity for a directionality that precedes (and is a prerequisite for) any kind of sentient desire or "wants."

A replicator that is too effective at replicating can dissolve its environment and destroy the conditions that made its existence possible.

@purpleworm@hexbear.net addressed this really well and gave a thoughtful, completely correct response. Not much more for me to say on it.

When the dissipative structures that formed proto-life cordoned off from the world through cell boundaries, it really did become a need to avoid death to continue. it really is a kind of want, not just its appearance (but not mentally because there is no mind yet) - to maintain tension between the world and itself and propagate itself.

I think you're splitting hairs here between ever so slightly different aspects what I have been calling directionality. Desires or "wants" by definition require a mind capable of having a want or desire. Where you say "it really is a kind of want but not mentally because there is no mind yet" then that's simply not the kind of "want" we are talking about here, the thing that a self-aware (mind-possessing) AI would have if it were genuinely self aware and possessing of a mind. Everything else really is just an appearance of want and is a result of what I've been calling directionality. What you're talking about as the mindless "need to avoid death to continue" is still just the mindless non-intelligent and non-sentient directionality of evolution. And to specifically address this piece:

to maintain tension between the world and itself and propagate itself.

But it is part of the world (dialectics ftw!). There is a tension between inside and outside the individual cell (and also a tension between the "self" and "outside the self" of a sentient mind which is addressed further down, but this is not the same thing as the the tension between the cell and the world, as proven by the fact we aren't aware of all our cells and frequently kill them by doing such things as scratching) but the cell still isn't the most basic unit of replication in evolution, that would be the gene. Strands of RNA or DNA. Genes (often but not always) use cells as part of the vehicle for their replication, and either way they are still just chemicals reacting with the environment they exist within. There's no more intentionality behind what they do than there is behind, say, a magnet clinging to a fridge. That magnet does not "want" to cling to your fridge, like genes, it is reacting to it's environment and this will be true regardless of where you draw the boundary between the "self" of the magnet and "the outside world." To actually desire something the way we are talking about here requires the complexity of a brain capable of producing a mind.

I don't think it's as much from the neurons themselves as it is the whole inference/action dialectic and the world/organism dialectic. [...] Self-awareness resulted from real material pressures, actually existing relations between organisms, and the need to distinguish the self and the other for appropriate action

Agreed. The emergent property of the mind and sentience comes out of the complexity of the interaction of the firing of neurons in a brain and the world they exist within, at least in all likelhood. We still don't know exactly what produces our ability to experience, where exactly qualia originate (i.e. why we aren't just philosophical zombies) but I think most neuroscientists (and philosophers who work on this stuff) would agree, as I do too, that without an outside non-self world for those neurons to interact with, there would be no actual mind. Even that the mind is a drawing of the distinction between self and non-self. But since that complex neural structure could never even begin to come about without that outside world and all the mechanisms of evolution (aside from a Boltzmann brain!), always having to include the phrase "and with the outside world" when describing the neurological origin of qualia and experience is some severe philosophical hair-splitting.

I'd also argue that the genuine desire to survive as a psychic phenomenon has always existed at least from the first time a neural organism perceived the world, identical to qualia.

Um, yeah... that's pretty much what my argument was for the necessity of any genuine AI to have wants and desires, those "wants" necessarily would have had to have been there built in for it to even become AI.

It's not necessary to have self-awareness for that. Want as a mental phenomena exists prior to self-awareness

Disagree. Again, if you want to split hairs on exactly where it is in that ladder of complexity that self-awareness arises, or where in the fuzzy chain we can draw a line between organisms capable of self-awareness vs those not, or even exactly what constitutes self-awareness then feel free. But a thing having an actual desire as something genuinely experienced, it requires some sense of selfhood for that experience to happen to.

This is one of those things that starts getting into the fuzzy area around the unanswered questions regarding what exactly qualifies as qualia and where that first appears. But having needs/wants probably is a necessary condition for actual AI if we're defining actual (general) AI as having self awareness. In addition to what @Awoo@hexbear.net said, here's another thing.

You mention how AI probably has to have a world model as a prerequisite for genuine self aware intelligence, and this is true. But part of that is that the world model has to be accurate at least in so far as it allows the AI to function. Like, maybe it can even have an inaccurate fantasy-world world model, but it still has to model a world close enough to reality that it's modeling a world that it can exist in; in other words the world model can't be random gibberish because intelligence would be meaningless in such a world, and it wouldn't even be a "world model." All of that is mostly beside the point except to point out that AI has to have a world model that approaches accuracy with the real world. So in that sense it already "wants" to have an accurate world model. But it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem: does the AI only "want" to have an accurate model of the world after it gains self-awareness, the only point where true "wants" can exist? Or was that "want" built-in to it by its creators? That directionality towards accuracy for its world model is built into it. It has to be in order to get it to work. The accuracy-approaching world model would have to be part of the programming put into it long before it ever gains sentience (aka the ability to experience, self-awareness) and that directionality won't just disappear when the AI does gain sentience. That pre-awareness directionality that by necessity still exists can then be said to be a "want" in the post-awareness general AI.

An analogy of this same sort of thing but as it is with us bio-intelligence beings: We "want" to avoid death, to survive (setting aside edge cases that actually prove the rule like how extreme of an emotional state a person has to be in to be suicidal). That "want" is a result of evolution that has ingrained into us a desire (a "want") to survive. But evolution itself doesn't "want" anything. It just has directionality towards making better replicators. The appearance that replicators (like genes) "want" to survive enough to pass on their code (in other words: to replicate) is just an emergent property of the fact that things that are better able to replicate in a given environment will replicate more than things that are less able to replicate in that environment. When did that simple mathematical fact, how replication efficiency works, get turned into a genuine desire to survive? It happened somewhere along the ladder of evolutionary complexity where brains had evolved to the extent that self awareness and qualia emerged (they are emergent properties) from the complex interactions of the neurons that make up those brains. This is just one example, but a pretty good one imo that shows how the ability to experience "wanting" something is still rooted in a kind of directionality that exists independently of (and before) the ability to experience. And also how that experience wouldn't have come about if it weren't for that initial directionality.

Wants/needs almost certainly do have to be part of any actual intelligence. One of the reasons for that is because those wants/needs have to be there in some form for intelligence to even be able to arise in the first place.

It gets really hard to articulate this kind of thing, so I apologize for all the "quoted" words and shit in parentheses. I was trying to make it so that what I was attempting to convey with these weird sentences could be parsed better, but maybe I just made it worse.

Well let's dissect this. To you it's the "strapping on a deadly weapon in defense of the state/property that means you're accepting the risk of getting got." (Emphasis mine). I think you'd agree it's not so much physical act of strapping a weapon that really matters but the accepting of the risk that to you makes a person an acceptable target or not. In your eyes, the difference between combatant and civilian (since you used that word "civilian" to describe the CEO, as set apart from the cop) is whether they've "accepted risk." First of all, cops don't accept the risk. They are the most risk-averse motherfuckers you will ever meet. It's why they are vastly more likely to die of a heart attack, or covid, or fucking suicide than "on line of duty" and why they protect their own with immediate lethal force against even a relatively light threat, but do not use that same force for the protection of actual civilians, even ones presumably on their side. Cops are NOT accepting the risk either, they're just pretending to. But let's set that aside because since you were ok with what happened to the cop, what's really relevant here is your uncomfortability with the killing of the CEO.

So we'll take it as a given (though it's not actually true) that cops are accepting the risk when they strap up, that they are no longer "civilians," and we'll also assume (because it's true) that the CEO was not expecting or accepting any risk. But that is literally the fucking problem we are up against with fighting capital! These actual villains, the people who maintain and perpetuate the class war, literally ruling over the system that prevents a world where everyone's basic needs are met, they can (and do) do things that cause the death and immiseration of millions of people but they do so without any expectation or acceptance of a possibility that they themselves may face consequences let alone be harmed as a result of their crimes, the horrors they inflict on their fellow humans. They didn't "accept any risk" because they have wrapped themselves up in their stolen wealth, protected themselves with layer upon layer that insulates them from any consequences for what they do. The cops who you say did accept the risk, are but one of those layers. Ah, how nice it is for the bourgeoisie to murder with impunity without having to "accept any risk" that someone will do a fraction to them of what they do to others every day. So horrifically privileged to be able to commit mass murder all day (as long as it's via slow violence, since that's ok with liberals!) and then go home and take a hot bath, drink some wine before dozing off to sleep peacefully in their villas or mansions without even a fleeting thought that one of their victims might see the reality of the situation, decide to sacrifice their own broken life for a chance at justice, and then somehow get past all the CEO's layers of security - layers of security both in the literal sense and in terms of how well trained society is to grant them de-facto immunity, the same way you yourself are trained.

@XxFemboy_Stalin_420_69xX@hexbear.net already touched on this, but how about an analogy. Let's say there's a battlefield where soldiers are dying by the thousands at the behest of their commanding officers, a few ranks (i.e. layers of abstraction and layers of protection) up from the soldiers, the generals. Let's go ahead and make them Nazis or better yet IDF just so the point is nice and clear and so it is also clear that the battle is asymmetrical, with all the technology and manufactured "law" on their side. Those officers presiding over the slaughter do not expect to die. They are not "accepting any risk" as they hang back, hundreds of miles, perhaps even a continent away from the fighting. Maybe they're even at home with their shoes off. But they are responsible for the wiping out of countless working class lives, obviously the resistance fighters who they are intending to kill, but also they're fine sending their own soldiers to die as well, so long as it's not too many such that a layer of protection is lost for the generals. By your logic, it's fine if someone, even someone coincidentally uncaring about the sides in this conflict, kills some soldiers (cops) but not if he broke in that general's house and offed him. You would be uncomfortable with celebrating that. It's like those libified action movies where the hero kills scores of goons working for the bad guy, but then when it comes time to kill the bad guy, the hero decides to take the higher road and spare the bad guy's life. No. That's bullshit. These people, the warhawk generals of the analogy, and the CEO in this real life incident, they are the ones who deserve a bullet (or worse) far more than any of the soldiers/cops (who deserve it as well). And they still deserve it no matter how they get it, even if it's some chud who agrees with them on most of their points but goes on a sprees and randomly does it.

I'm also not fully convinced of the story we're being told and that this was random, I am amenable to the possibility that she was in fact the target, but that's beside the point. It is unambiguously good that she died. Anyone uncomfortable with that either does not understand some very fundamental truths about class and the role of CEOs in the murder of countless working class individuals, or they don't actually care about those murdered working class individuals, or they are simply not a leftist and actually stand to defend the bourgeoisie against the repercussions for their crimes against working class people. Of course those aren't mutually exclusive, someone "uncomfortable" with it could be all three of those things.

yeah the CEO is Bad and Evil for being on the wrong side of class war but I don't support random violence

It was still "random violence" that killed the cop, and you were ok with that. It is not the randomness that you have a problem with. It is what you already confessed to above: that the CEO wasn't "accepting any risk." But that is not an excuse and if anything is all the more another reason that CEOs should die by any means because what grotesque cowardice it is to commit mass social murder but only do it because you think there is no risk for doing so.

(in which this person was not the target, incidentally)

Like I said, I'm not sure that's even true. It might be, but it's beside the point because you were ok with the cop getting killed but the cop was also not "the target."

I don't support random violence either tactically or morally

There's some goalpost shifting going on here because this was initially about you being "uncomfortable" with the rest of us cheering on the death of the CEO. There actually are some valid reasons not to "support" adventurism (I actually go against the hexbear grain here and think that in a world where those who organize are frequently murdered before they are able to accomplish anything, adventurism sometimes becomes the only way for some people to fight back in a way that at least brings about a modicum of justice - but that's for another post). That's not your issue with it though. You gave that away when you said it was ok, that it was a more acceptable calculus, for the cop to die. You really are seeing this CEO as an innocent civilian (the latter word being one you even used) rather than the high ranking officer that they are.

Or just what @Infamousblt@hexbear.net and @Kuori@hexbear.net already said more succinctly with fewer words.

Looks Iike I finally caught a reading group in time to catch up. It's a good one too (not to say the others aren't).

Could you please add me to the ping list too?

The problem with this discussion is that his "base" is being treated as a monolith when the fact of the matter is there are both significant numbers of isolationists and warhawks who are diehard Trump fans. I don't know what the breakdown is for the percentage of each one, but I think it's probably safe to say that the majority of Trump's base doesn't care about his choice to bomb Iran. They'll cheer him on as being tough for uhmuricah when he does drop bombs but pretend they always said they're "against unnecessary war" when he babbles his isolationist rhetoric.

Most of his base is vastly more concerned with his backtracking on his promise to release the Epstein files than they are about Iran.

both social murder and murder are bad imo

the cop otoh, different calculation there

So you're ok with the cop getting got, but not the CEO? Why? The biggest reason it's good when cops die is because of the role they play in protecting capital. This CEO is capital.

I thought you were joking. I was sure of it, even. I thought "it must be a bit from the Simpsons or something." I followed the link to the website and still thought it must be a joke, one of those satirical sites. But it's not a joke. Parody is dead.

If I ever see one of these things (apparently I'm too old to hear it), I don't give a shit if I incur legal repercussions, I will be taking a hammer to it.

They are just truly kind-hearted, selfless, altruistic humanitarians giving up their time and their advice because they want to give back to the people, because they want to "pay it forward." They're philanthropists, you see? They don't need to do this for money! They are helping you purely out of generosity. What are you, some kind of cynic?

Death spiral which will probably end in war with Russia.

You think so? How do you see such a thing coming to be? As much as the UK state is frothing with hatred for Russia, it takes two to tango and Russia has no interest in or designs on the UK (despite what Western war mongers would have you believe about Voldomort-Putler drooling in anticipation to conquer all of Europe). The UK fighting a hot war with Russia, such as by entering the Ukraine conflict as a full on combatant state, would mean the whole of NATO would be dragged into fighting a hot war with Russia which in turn means nothing short of WWIII with a high chance of nukes flying. The US (de facto supreme leader of NATO) won't allow that.

lol, "brigade"? What do you think a "brigade" is? When a person sees a post in their feed and clicks on it? Because that's the only "brigading" I partook in. Even with all that aside, you still couldn't tell a single person in this so-called "brigade" what the fuck you're even talking about. Your refusal to explain your bullshit take has nothing to do with who you're talking to, it is entirely because you did just pull it out of your ass with absolutely nothing substantial to back it up but are too chickenshit to admit that fact.

But ultimately, a rogue member is a rogue member and even a much better group is going to get an event like this now and then. I'm sure that the other members and official channels in America were deeply apologetic to Cuba and to Diaz-Canel personally

But was it really just one rogue member though? As I remember it, it was a faction of a number of members from the group that went to Cuba who chose to follow the lead of that one "rogue member" who held a leadership position within the organization in attending a meeting with an opposition group instead of the planned meeting with Diaz-Canel.

https://redstarcaucus.org/cuban-links/

Throughout the trip, members of the delegation from the Reform & Revolution Caucus (R&R) and the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) criticized the Cuban government both to our Cuban hosts and other DSA members, and skipped out on multiple delegation events. Most shamefully, both Maria (representing R&R) and Renée (representing SMC, and a member of the current NPC) skipped out on meeting with President Díaz-Canel, who spent more than 2 hours in a frank discussion specifically addressing the critiques these very same DSA members brought up to their Cuban hosts earlier on the trip

This behavior from the R&R and SMC delegates is anti-democratic, disorganizing, and chauvinistic. For a resident of the imperial core to go to a socialist state that has survived a U.S. blockade for multiple generations and critique its achievements as incomplete is the height of chauvinism. To reject the democratically-decided purpose of the delegation – which was to support Cuba against the U.S. blockade – and instead insert their individual political goals of making connections with opposition groups and advocate for Cuban government reform is anti-democratic. If the delegates from R&R and SMC wanted to make connections with government opposition groups and advocate for liberalization they should have applied to other delegations instead of the socialist one. Or they could have stayed at home; many other applicants who were aligned with the delegation's goals were not able to attend due to limited seats on the delegation.

And as for other channels since then being deeply apologetic, I would hope so, but not an insignificant number of other DSA members at the time were defending the actions of the snubbers, going so far as citing Cuba's "authoritarianism." Hell, even here on hexbear there was a long-standing regular poster got permabanned (or perhaps temp-banned but chose never to return?) for insisting these actions were either not a big deal or were the correct thing to do. This gross betrayal goes a lot further and deeper than a single rogue member.

I share your seething hatred. These grotesque death machines epitomize the way the absolute worst kind of chud loves to celebrate their smug disdain for the rest of humanity and demonstrate to the world their gOd-GiVeN rIgHt to revel in unnecessary, exorbitant waste, and to scream "fuck you" to the woke, to the commie pinkos, and to anyone who would dare to "tell them what they can or can't do," and again, to humanity itself.

It is a physical manifestation of the "I got mine, so fuck you" sentiment, a rolling billboard advertising their entitlement and gluttonous indulgence, rubbing it in your face that they're laughing at your disgust. They love flaunting that they are in possession of and in control of this deadly abomination, this moving monument to environmental destruction. Driving this fascistic behemoths down the road, they're not only not ashamed but gleefully boasting how destructive and cruel their fossil-fuel-guzzling, climate-change-accelerating monstrosity is that can just as easily murder a crowd of protestors (intentionally) as it can a toddler (unintentionally - probably).

I want to drag these smug pieces of filth out of their giant, obnoxious, carbon-monoxide-and-privilege-stinking vanity wagons and...