MyHeritage is having a promotion right now. Click here - bit.ly/AlexOConnor_MH - to find out your ethnic origins. Use code "alexoc" at checkout for free shipping! To support my work and get early, ad-free access: www.alexoconnor.com
Hi Alex, any advice on how you stay present I find social media is making me a bit foggy in the brain. Do you know anything about this to do with psychology and your thoughts on this? I’d love to know
You are wrong in #2: There is no universal frame of reference for speed but yes for acceleration. Earth is accelerating around the sun because it changes both direction and escalar speed. Also we change speed as earth spins because we change the direction of our movement. If earth was really static there wouldn't be coriolis effect and centrifuge acceleration.
The stache can stay so long as the beard is allowed to rejoin it. If he's gonna keep the pedostache, however, may as well lean fully into and grow out a mullet.
The child soldiers take stops short. By their logic, anyone over 40 should be conscripted too, many of whom would probably be more effective in combat than children and teenagers.
That's making a generalization, age is not the most accurate quota to measure functional value from. It's likely based on a bunch of factors including those in the nature and nurture of the individual. There is also the issue of knowingly living in a society that with assess you based on a quota, where ones goal may be to gimmick some rating system in order to avoid conscription than to actually be a productive member of the society. Edit: Saw a good point that Functional value also changes based off the needs of the society, a child in an underpopulated area is functionally more valuable than one in an overpopulated area. The situation that happened with birth restriction in China is a great example of the nuance on how this moral philosophy could play out.
Sending all elderly to fight would be like burning own libraries. They need to stay for propagation of wisdom and culture. Whereas bunch of 10 year olds lost in war can be quickly replaced as long as adults are willing to breed like rabbits. Take my punjabi spicy take.
He's English with Irish ancestry, no one in Ireland would consider him Irish 😂 A big chunk of English people are of Irish ancestry, they just don't make a big deal out of it like people from the US with Irish ancestry dp. Something like 10 of the 23-man England national team have Irish ancestry lol. Almost everyone will have or will know someone who has an Irish grandparent and the percentage increases if you start going back to the 1800s like the yanks tend to. It's not that big of a deal here. (I'm from Ireland but have lived in England for 6 years)
I take issue with saying incest is wrong on the basis that it's icky. If we use that line of reasoning, then what about the people who have that same visceral gross-out reaction to homosexuality? Is homosexuality wrong because people find it icky?
@@Raadpensionaris Some people like having sex while covered in food, and other people like keeping giant spiders as pets in their home. I find both of those things viscerally revolting, but if I'm not involved I don't see those things as immoral or wrong.
I think I agree with the friends above mostly, but there's one difference. With homosexuality, eventually we should realize "well this is silly. Live and let live, *they're not hurting anyone"*, about homosexuality as a whole. Now, if we allow for such in the cases of incest where there's objectively nothing at risk between the two people involved, there's still a risk for society as a whole. By allowing incest in the "acceptable" cases, you indirectly support it as a whole a bit more, leading to more incest, leading to more genetic problems.
i think the difference is you can make rational statements about why honosexuality is not harmful and change someones mind, but even if you make rational statements about incest in cases where there are no percieved negative effects (although i 99% disagree with this), its hard for most people to accept it as "okay" or socially acceptable, which is where the emotivist point of view comes in.
Are you saying that minty and spicy are NOT opposites? It’s possible that peppermint is a sort of oxymoron. I don’t know how I feel about it, but what I do know is that mint and spice feels very similar in my mouth while still being different. Spicy is a sort of hot, zingy feelings, while mint is a more cold, relaxing feeling while both are still extreme flavor profiles. Speaking of which, it’s like hot and cold, even though they are opposite, at the extreme they often feel pretty similar. If you touch something insanely hot, you will pull your hand away in the same manner as if you were to touch something insanely cold.
Peppermint is not a kind of pepper. It's only called a peppermint because it is more pungent or "spicier" compared to its parents spearmint and water-mint. Mint is chemically the opposite of spice since the active ingredient in mint is Menthol which tricks your mind into tasting cold. Spice does the opposite of mint through the chemical Capsaicin, tricking your mind into tasting hot.
First off peppermint is not a kind of pepper. It's only called a peppermint because it is more pungent or "spicier" compared to its parents spearmint and water-mint. Mint is chemically the opposite of spice since the active ingredient in mint is Menthol which tricks your mind into tasting cold. Spice does the opposite of mint through the chemical Capsaicin, tricking your mind into tasting hot. All that's left arguing what 'mild' means, bland or barely spicy.
Alex, Been watching your videos for a while now, I remember being a kid in middle school and learning what I thought about my own beliefs in the context of a lutheran family and finally converting to atheism through your videos. I remember trying to learn how to play "with you" because I thought that song was the shit. To see you grow to where you are now with the level of success and knowledge you gained from your studies alongside my own growing up and almost finishing my own degree has been a pleasure. Keep it up.
On the point at 9:15 - it's also worth noting that babies born of incest _aren't_ 'often' born disabled. While inbreeding increases your relative risk substantially, in absolute terms the baby is still probably going to be completely fine. This is particularly true if you are talking about cousin incest - it's been a while since I looked at the stats, but I think in absolute terms the likelihood of a child having major congenital issues goes from 3% to 4.5%, if it's over a single generation. Which is comparable to having kids when you're older, and potentially less risky than having kids if you know you and your partner carry deleterious recessive alleles. Sibling or parent-child incest is risker, but still. Probably fine. It's not really a philosophical point, just getting it out there that the idea that all or most children born of incest look like Quasimodo is mostly a myth.
They are very common when it's sibling or parent-child couple -- around 50% in a couple of studies I could find. It all depends on how many genetic defects the parents are carrying. First cousins are a lot less of an issue, as you say, though if it is widespread in extended families over several generations, the mental and physical decefits do become a cause for concern.
@@EnglishMikeI believe you're misreading that statistic. It likely says 50% increase, which would mean 3% to 4.5%. There is absolutely no way a study found 50% total probability. It will certainly be below 10%.
@CosmicSkeptic So given ethical emotivism, are you cool with people saying homosexuality is immoral because it’s icky (even if you disagree with them?). I’ve seen anti gay prejudice used as a knock on Christianity by a lot of atheists, but it would seem like on emotivist grounds; there isn’t exactly anything wrong with this type of argument against homosexuality
It would be just a fact that they feel that way, no moral value at all. But they cannot base their argument in that feeling, as that feeling has no moral force. They could say it is icky to me when people are gay, ok, but that has no bearing on whether or not people should or can be gay.
@@timm9818 but on Ethical Emotivism that’s all that ANY moral claim is, so “it’s wrong to murder” also means “I think it’s icky when people murder” Frankly since studies show that straight people find gay kissing etc to be grotesque and that’s the majority of the population, I don’t see why on ethical emotivist terms there’s not at least a plausible path to social conservatism on something like homosexuality
@@davidcooke4384 you are taking it backwards. yes, ethical emotivists say that moral claims are just someone’s feelings about something. you are saying that someone’s feeling, therefore, has objective moral weight. that is not an argument made by emotivists, and i also think is untrue. the best emotivists can get you is the argument “i subjectively think homosexuality is wrong, because it feels bad to me” that is fine, it is a good reason for you to not be gay, but if someone else feels differently they would have no reason to listen to your argument
and the idea that if the majority felt bad about something it shouldn’t be allowed, on what grounds? how are you grounding the argument that people shouldnt feel bad in emotivist terms? that feels very utilitarian
@@timm9818yeah but people that are against homosexuality are against public displays of homosexuality because of how they react to it. For them it's the equivalent of having a pile of trash instead of a container, or fixing a car with duct tape instead of having it repaired. And for the religious it's a sin, not so different from adultery.
Not sending child soldiers to the front lines of a war is no where near a purely emotional moral intuition, it has an obvious functional benefit of long term continuation of the species and the next generational source of mental and physical labor. Any society that values preservation and wishes prosperity or comfort for individuals past the "ideal age" will want to preserve a stock of children to perform those tasks they carried out in their young adulthood. If humans had evolved to value the lives of adults more than children, we would not have survived a few generations. It's much more functionally arguable that the elderly should be sent the front lines, if it weren't for their declining physical fitness.
I agree with the conclusion, but your line of argument is flawed. "Preservation of the species" can be advanced by 30-year-olds. Whether you kill off 90% of children or 90% of young adults, either will drastically impact the continuation of the species. But 30-year-olds aren't impacted as much from having and raising children as a generation of children raised with half the parental guidance and knowledge pool. I guess it also depends on how you select your soldiers. If the 10% that stay at home survive and are great parents, now killing off the more brutish 90% of 30-year-olds in war becomes less of an issue. At that point we're getting a bit lost in the details though.
This is true. During WWII, the Soviet Union lost the majority of several years' worth of 18-year-old males in combat. I don't firmly remember which it was, but there was one cohort of men born in a certain year, of whom less than 20% survived the war (it was probably 1923, as they would've turned 18 in 1941 and been expected to fight through the whole conflict). Adjacent cohorts also fared very badly. It left a huge demographic hole, which negatively impacted both the workforce and fertility rates. The repercussions are still being felt over 80 years later, so conscription narrowly targeting the young is not a good long-term strategy.
To me, whether incest should be permissable or not comes down to whether or not we think a State ought to enforce eugenic standards for breeding. If there is no proper interest in The State enforcing genetic standards, then incest should not be banned. If there is a proper interest in The State enforcing genetic standards, then that would not only make the banning of incest proper, but it would also prompt the question as to how far we should go in enforcing eugenic standards for breeding. Why wouldn't it also be proper to force everyone to get a genetic test, and, before you reproduce with someone, you have to compare your genotypes from that test to find out how particularly risky your particular pairing would be, and, if the test shows that your pairing would be much liklier to result in a disabled baby than an averaged pairing, should that couple not be banned from breeding as vociferously as we would ban incestuous pairings? Because, at the end of the day, the logic is the same: you are preventing particular people from breeding because you have demonstrated that their pairing is uniquely dangerous to the health of the prospective child.
Nothing to do with level of risk, but rather excessive red tape and government overreach. I'm not going to apply to have a child, that's weird and authoritarian.
@@sheridan5175 I think there´s what´s called reasonable and unreasonable interference and compelling government interest. To generally have a licensing system for parents is not a legitimate government aim, as you say it would grossly violate people´s privacy and their right to a family life. However, something like banning incest is a legitimate government aim and it can be done without a massive surveillance state.
I second another point being the massive problem in possibly grooming when talking about parent to child incest. But beyond that, it's alright. Has problems but about as bad as our current rules
The incest question is interest to me cuz people always focus on the disability of the child. Well, it is proven that older mothers have much higher rates of disabled children. Should we look at someone having a baby at 40 the same way as we look at an incestuous couple?
'O'Connor's Law', similar to 'Godwin's Law' - As an online philosophical discussion grows longer, the probability of the topic of incest approaches 100%. Mild.
12:10 The nuclear thing for Spongebob is a bit more than a theory. Bikini Bottom is a reference to it being under Bikini Atoll, where the US tested nukes in the Pacific. How directly they are affected is up for discussion, of course, but there is a canonical basis for it.
Regarding controversial take #1, the "transactional, mathematical morality" that explains why a child's life is considered more valuable than an adult's is that a child has more life left to experience and is therefore being robbed of more in dying than an adult. If you had to choose between saving the lives of three 80 year old humans or two 25 year old humans, you could morally justify saving fewer people with more life left to experience using this basic math. If the average life expectancy is 75, the value of the two groups is 100 years vs -15 years. I'm not fully endorsing this logic, but its pretty straightforward and isn't based on emotion.
All moral evaluations are based on emotion regardless of people trying to convince themselves otherwise. Life needs to be given a " net positive value" for this to make sense.
@@tangerinesarebetterthanora7060 Broadly speaking, you may be correct, but the "net positive value" of life assumption was built into the original question, so I added no extra emotion in my response beyond what was already presupposed.
No, that's not it. It's about resources. Evolutionarily speaking, children are much less likely to reproduce (not as a child of course, don't go there). You have already put the resources into the 25 year old, and they have proven they can survive. So transactionally it makes more sense to save the ones who can contribute to survival. That would be the 18-35 first, older but healthy second, older children third, and the sick and infants last, since they are the most likely not to survive anyway. Which is why infanticide was common at some points in history.
@@littlebitofhope1489 If the premise of your argument is that the highest value people in a society are those with the most resources, then the "older but healthy" group that you list second would actually be first. They typically have more material wealth then military aged males. They also typically (and not coincidentally) have more power and influence than military aged males, and usually make up the majority of the political class who send military aged males into combat to protect them, their wealth, and the women and children who make up their society. Arguing that people should be prioritized based on resources is not a hot or spicy take, its business as usual. The second part of your argument, that adults have "proven they can survive" (with the clear implication being that children have not), falls apart with a cursory glance at data on mortality. Even prior to modern medicine, a child who made it past the age of two had a standard life expectancy, and now there is essentially no higher risk of death for infants as long as they are born healthy. There are also no infant child soldiers, so if we are staying on topic, its a moot point. Children of all ages do require resources that they are not fully able to provide from themselves (though some of that is cultural, since farming and agricultural work were done by children throughout history and are still done by them in other countries) and that cost is largely passed on to older members of society, but you'd have to weigh that against the negative societal costs of adults aged 18-35. Adults in the 18-35 group are far more likely than young children to engage in a whole host of damaging, dangerous and self destructive behaviors (drinking, drug use, self harm, violent crime, etc). All of this is fun to discuss but is a digression from my original point. Whether you agree with it or not, an argument exists for prioritizing the lives of children over the lives of adults that can arise from a "transactional, mathematical morality" rather than a purely emotional one.
Fully agree with the AI take. People who use "AI is theft" or "it's just rearranging other people's work" as the crux of their argument for why it's immoral or 'not art' are building on very shaky foundations. As someone who dislikes the current state of AI art I've fought against these arguments and instead gone with the following: - Our economic system means that automation makes the average person poorer and funnels wealth to the top - this sucks bus isn't specifically an AI issue. - AI art in its current form is bad art. It's so focussed on imitating other styles without an understanding of them that it creates technically proficient pieces that say nothing. Much in the same way that a plain photo of the Mona Lisa, tribute bands and someone who only makes fake Mondrians are bad art.
I think AI art is often bad art in the sense that it doesn't convey much intentionality, I think AI art makes fine image, though. Clip art or birthday party invitation decorations, etc. There's a lot of images that are used that aren't used because they "capture the human spirit" but instead are used to convey information or provide utility Are you fundamentally opposed to all automation, then?
@@_Squiggle_ 100% agree with the point that there's so much art that nobody cares about or wants to be making and that it's a perfect use-case for AI. Elevator music and corporate slideshow art are my go-to examples. I also think there are things that AI art is uniquely good at, like capturing the uncanny. Just like how the best photography doesn't seek to imitate still-life fine art, I think the best AI art will go in a direction untrodden or poorly trodden by existing art forms. I'm fully in favour of automation and other increases to efficiency, I just think the economic system needs to be restructured to accommodate it. More production for less labour is a fundamentally good thing (unless we want to get really get into the weeds of it), but it has disastrous results in a society that requires people be doing that labour to afford to live.
"AI art in its current form is bad art" - there is plenty of art where the artist sets a system going and the final piece is what the system made on its own without explicit design from the artist - for example, swinging a leaky paint can on a string. Artist sets up the initial conditions, and takes the result. AI art is similar to those kind of things. There's also plenty of AI art out there that you wouldn't know is AI without someone telling you, so this idea of "says nothing" is a bit weird. And wow, tribute bands = bad art is an awful blanket statement. They engage with the audience and get their juices going, and if you have decent musicians who can read the crowd, you've given the audience a great night out. There are bad bands, yes, but that doesn't mean the form itself is bad.
There is also the fact that the way copyright law exists for humans is already entirely broken, so a lot of the AI debate is muddied due to that. A great deal of art should be in the public domain that is not. Many cultural touchstones that have a personal impact on all our lives are owned by a bunch of people who didn't make it and have no personal connection to those who did. The iterative nature of art means that each new piece is a conversation with the last: look at ancient myth or fairy tales where new generations who grew up with the stories would put their own spin on it. But we have outsourced that to corporations who have no connection to the material, and now we are letting AI do what humans arent allowed to do. They will iterate and blend are together without thought or connection, further separating people from culture.
Exactly what I was going to say. It is the only Planet in the Universe where life exists, as far as we know. Considering how far away most of the universe is, that doesn't tell us much.
This is the mintiest of all the takes in this video, I don’t understand the Indian spicy rating. Outer space being the shared heritage of humanity? The mere fact that we call it outer space, as if we’re somehow separate from the rest of it? Any sci-fi with alien civilizations, where somehow humans usually end up as the dominant culture in the universe. And again, even calling extra-terrestrial life „aliens”? All normal stuff, all geocentric and anthropocentric. How is this a spicy take?
Spicy take: Incest (with consent and without reproduction) is not only okay but almost a moral obligation. One of the biggest things that in my opinion make western societies great is this unspoken value we have of pushing the envelope as much as possible in any way that seems, logically or intuitively good. As cringe as the prhase has turned and as misued as it is, Diversity (of ideas) truly is our strenght. You can see this in more emblematic cases, like how the US is a nation of immigrants with countless different cultural backgrounds working together, wich has yielded countless inventions. You can see this in our acceptance of homosexuality wich has its own benefits at all levels. But you can also see this in more individual habits, that come from the same value, for example the tendency to try a food you used to dislike to check if you maybe like it more now. The same goes with music, we usually dont say ''this song is bad'' we say ''i just cant seem to *get* this song'', the implicit idea there is that not enjoying something is a failure on our parts, and that ideally we would sort of learn to like it, we would aquire that taste, and that would make us better people, i belive its this very mindset that has yielded us so many advancements at all levels. You can probably see were im going with this, if we cant condemn incest morally, beyond a visceral feeling that its not good, pushing ourselves to proactice it until we enjoy it, until we *get it*, is the same as listening to a new genere of music, trying out a new food, or even trying specifically to make friends with someone from a cultural background that to you has many negative stereotypes, they are all ways to grow, get over biases, expand your perspective, and thus enrich yourself and your surroundings. The benefits of enjoying incest might not be super obvious, but they are also not that hard to find, just like enjoying a new type of music or having more diverse friends, you can make the argument that it doesnt matter but deep down you know theres benefit to all of those, the only difference is that youre not allowed to openly show disgust towards cultures or ethnicities, or even claim that a specific food is objectively trash (that type of statement is almost always a joke) but we are allowed to not only dislike incest, but make it a point of pride and moral righteousness. This, to all levels is like allowing a child that doesnt like veggies to feel proud that he doesnt eat them, instead of treating it as a flaw, wich encourages the child to grow.
The idea of traumatized child soldiers coming back to society in huge numbers sounds scary as fuck. I think that adults having more attachment to societal norms due to their familiarity with them makes them more stable or at least more likely to internalize their trauma so it doesn't come up and blows up at everyone around them, since children are less likely to handle this the same way you may be running into a much bigger risk of just bringing the war back home
A woman in Florida once shot her son in the back of the head at a gun range because he hadn’t been old enough to have sinned yet, but she already resigned herself to the belief that she had sinned and was going to hell regardless. She guaranteed his trip to heaven while not altering her situation any. Also emotivism is wrong, but I can’t possibly explain why here.
Okay, a few points here: 1. 0:11 This case completely falls apart once you consider that, from a purely _practical_ standpoint (not even moral), children don't make good soldiers. You're telling me that a six-year-old who doesn't even know where to start when told to clean his room is capable of operating heavy artillery, flying a fighter jet or aiming an AR-15 at the appropriate target on command? 😂 2. 1:45 I would very much like to know what evidence the commenter and Alex have that intelligent life doesn't exist _anywhere else_ in a universe that is 93+ _billion_ light-years across, with planets just like Earth that potentially number in the trillions. 3. 3:00 Factually incorrect. It has long been established that genetics plays a critical role in shaping who we are. The question currently being asked is whether it is _totally_ determinative of all that we do (the nature vs. nurture debate), and I strongly lean towards no. 4. 4:58 This is clearly false. If the human creative process was sufficiently similar to that of AI, the arts (visual, music, architecture, and so on) would not exist. Unless one believes that humans learned art from another intelligent species (tying back to a previous take for a moment 😂), art _must_ have come into existence at some point in the past (caveman drawings?) purely due to a conscious creativity that AI, in its current stage of development, cannot replicate. In other words, AI requires input (a database consisting of prior works of art) to produce output (new AI-generated artwork)-- humans do not. 5. 6:18 This assumes that 1) children are not "predestined" to go to hell regardless (as Calvinists believe) and 2) children cannot hold any sincere religious convictions of their own (in which case the vast majority -- Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on -- will just go to hell sooner anyway) and/or that they won't be trapped in purgatory (as Catholic doctrine teaches). 6. 7:43 As a committed _classical_ utilitarian (not a negative one like the commenter at 9:49 arguing from a harm reduction standpoint) whose only objective is to maximize the well-being of sentient creatures (as opposed to minimizing suffering), I believe to my core that there is nothing ethically objectionable about two consenting adults engaging in whatever activity produces happiness in private no matter who they are. End of conversation. 7. 10:28 As a moral semi-realist, I am not vulnerable to such an interpretation. 😂 8. 11:09 Ayn Rand sucks. Ask any academic philosopher, they'll tell you. Nobody who has actually studied her work has ever accused her philosophy of being coherent.
Not at all. Some believe there is other life, making us not the only observers. Some accept the fact that we are so tiny and insignificant as part of a worldview like Nihilism. And so on…
Arguments over semantics seem to usually be about deeply held values and what words SHOULD mean. The geocentrism one seems so mild to me because it offers a neat perspective, makes everyone think “That’s cool,” and then everybody moves on because nobody cares lol
@@thechosenone5644 geocentrism in this sense could be further extrapolated to the feeling every observer inescapably experiences- that of being the center of the universe because you perceive things relative to yourself. The “observable universe” is centered on earth, not the sun, not any other point. because that’s where we are. In this sense geocentrism is not much a statement.
5:30 I feel like there’s a difference between someone taking inspiration from art and an AI generating art because a person can bring their own experiences and creativity into the art, which an AI could never replicate
and the music example is not very good because there are a finite number of patterns in pop music so some chord progressions or melodies are going to repeat in different songs from time to time
That is just a bald assertion. Who is to say an AI can't do that? By what metric are you measuring creativity and experience other than your feelings? I say it can, so what now?
weird way to put it. it's not as if the AI don't experience. experiencing things magnitudes of degrees more than the average human can is kind of their whole schtick creativity makes a bit more sense but it's not really anything anyone can measure, and it's really kind of a meaningless word. creativity at the end of the day is the ability to come up with things that haven't existed before, which is already something AI can do
AI is also copy protected from using content produced by major corporations whereas the general public has to hide their content on private platforms that limit their reach just to avoid having it mass produced by robots working for millions of people and creating content within seconds.
I work in both the music and software industry. I think the original take is completely correct. Creativity is a vague concept. The standards for copyright infringement when it comes to AI art should be the same as with human art. If someone listens to a bunch of Stevie Wonder songs and then writes one that sounds stylistically similar but doesn't directly copy any of them, that would not be considered plagiarism. Same should apply to AI music.
"The strong defending the weak" (argument against child soldiers) is a very important ethic in a social species like ours. Where it holds, it ensures that the vast majority of people can live in relative safety compared to places where the strong only look after themselves. Protecting other people's children is just a part of that.
Adults have also already had the chance to produce offspring, and war was often a way of thinning the unmarried male population to prevent them from becoming restless and violent within the community.
This also goes with the idea that, the strongest people were once weak people who were protected and trained to become strong, instead of left to fend for themselves. If i throw a kid in hte streets, he will probably survive, and he will probably become a certain kind of ''strong'' he will have a specific kind of independent mindset and toughness, however that kid will probably not be as well fed as he could be, so physically speaking he will be less strong and beautifull. He will not have the same role models he otherwise could have, so he wont be as morally strong. And even a normal child with parents can decide to challenge themselves physically and mentally to become as mentally tough as the kid thats left in the streets, but with all the other advantages of a more sheltered life. This idea that hardship breeds character makes mediocre and resentfull people, the absolute elite of humanity right now are often children of middle to upper class parents with enough money and good values that allow for optimal development. If a kid knows he might be sent to war at anytime, he wont have the mental bandwith to learn an instrument or philosophy, or even become a top athlete, hell be tougher than a decent amount of people but beyond that he wll be worse, and when it comes time for him to have children, he wont be able to raise them better than he already is, so its just a downward spiral for all human qualities besides the readiness to die in war, not a good tradeoff even from the most utilitarian view.
@@ErinMagner82medieval days the rich fought and poor stayed at home. They had a warrior knight system. The more ypu had to lose the more you had to fight. Nobles and rich people were legally required to carry swords so they can fight to defend land any time an invasion happened. It was not uncommon that the king himself would lead the battle in frint of every other soldier. We live in the opposite world but always claim people were so dumb and wicked back then.
@MicahMicahel well I think that was true for Poland but I remember Poland having an unusually strong army because of that and that's why they were decisive in the Siege of Vienna. But the nobles funded the war and the army still did consist of peasants, it's just that warriors would be an upper class and engaged in regular defense.
@@MicahMicahel That's a very naive way to think of the feudal system. There is also a much cynical way: people with money can afford weapons, horses and armor, and, thanks to that, extract goods and services from the people without money. They justified their extractive position like the mafia does, selling their 'protection'. Wars were band-conflicts between those extractive groups, not between the poor.
It does until you realize that there is great benefit to human society as a whole when the strong (those with the power) defend the weak. You're much more likely to be in the "weak" category (it's a numbers game), so it is greatly to our benefit when society as a whole places greater value on defending the defenseless.
@@EnglishMike This still places more value on the strong, take a trolly problem with one productive age 30 man vs. a 3 month old baby, many would say the moral option is to save the baby over the functioning member of society. The difference comes down to defending the weak vs. sacrificing for the weak.
@@Plasmapigeon except that the value of the strong in this context is in defending the vulnerable, to the point of sacrifice if need be. If we don't allow the strong to go to war, instead we have the weak do so, because the strong are valuable and the weak aren't, then the value of the strong ceases to be.
@@UntoTheDepths But by this logic the weak then become the strong because they are sacrificing themselves for the strong (which are now the weak). The ability to sacrifice in your example is not exclusive to the strong, yet you say it's the only value the strong have. I'm saying, at a surface level glance, the strong have other values that make them worth prioritizing over the weak.
@@Plasmapigeon I'd argue that the weak don't sacrifice for others (self-sacrifice), which is a part the the reason they belong in the "weak" category. Cowardice and being overly selfish is a moral weakness whereas self-sacrifice is a moral strength. Sacrifice is the value of the strong in the context I commented under. If you want to expand upon the values of the strong we can get into that.
Actually, about the child soldiers thing. I believe that morality is some mix of emotivism and striving for the success and evolution of forms of life closer to an individual, where the closer it is, the more an individual will want it to succeed. In the case of child soldiers, it is wrong because children are the next generation. They are "more evolved" than fully grown adults. It is also not particularly easy to make a new child. A family that loses their child in a war will be more hesitant to make another one
Abrahamic monotheism is not primarily a religious system. It is a political conspiracy. The story of the Exodus occurred in history however all of the details were deliberately reversed in the Holy Bible, in one of the first propaganda spin stories, in order to make the monotheists look like the victims and the Egyptians look like the aggressors. In reality, it was the monotheists who were the aggressors and the Egyptians were the victims. In the 13th dynasty of Egypt - 3,500 years ago - people known by modern historians as the Israelite pharaohs, AKA “shepherd kings” or "Hyksos", conquered northern Egypt taking control of its throne for their own purposes. This foreign occupation lasted for about 300 years until a pharaoh descended of those original conquerors named Amenhetep the 4th tried to force monotheism on the Egyptian population; taking as his new name, one of several aliases, Akhenaten. An alias referencing his singular god “Aten”. For the native Egyptians, who had long suffered the machinations of their foreign rulers, this was the last straw. Five Egyptian generals funded by the southern treasury of Egypt launched a military coup and exiled Amenhetep along with his Levitical priesthood. It was after his expulsion that, realizing he couldn’t work openly anymore, Amenhetep took his last alias - “Moses”; a name truncation derived from one of his relatives named Thutmoses. From that point, the propaganda of the Holy Bible was written.
I don't think that a political conspiracy and a religion are necessarily mutually exclusive. Regardless of its origin, the Abrahamic faiths are still religions. Also, having a single story be factually incorrect does not exclude any spiritual significance from other unrelated books in the Bible (or other scripture). In fact, it doesn't even preclude spiritual significance from being in the factually incorrect story
I am sympathetic to the idea that that the Hyksos settling, rule, defeat and expulsion in lower Egypt inspired the biblical stories in in the latter part of Genesis, and in Exodus, but the details here don't seem right to me, so I would be interested to know your sources. Yes, the Hyksos arrived at the end of the 13th Dynasty, but they took the throne of the contemporary 14th Dynasty in Avaris. The 13th Dynasty moved from Memphis and Itjtawy to Thebes and were succeeded by the 16th, 17th and 18th Dynasties, who ruled upper Egypt. The Hyksos ruled lower Egypt from Avaris for about 100 years (the 15th Dynasty). The 17th Dynasty in Thebes attacked Hyksos cities with some success, and the Hyksos were finally defeated by Ahmose I, the first ruler of the 18th Dynasty. Akhenaten ruled about 200 years later and was descended from Ahmose I, so was on the wrong side of the conflict to be an heir to the Hyksos legacy. He was buried in Egypt. So I don't think he can be identified as Moses just because he was decended from a line of Thutmoses and Ahmoses, and established a brief period of monotheistic worship of Aten. Some scholars think he could have been the Pharoah of Exodus (there was a plague towards the end of his reign) while others think that the Amarna letters (which began with Akenaten) show contact with Israelites, perhaps even Saul and David. None of this invalidates your overall thesis that Exodus may have been in part propaganda to portray the Israelites as victims rather than oppressors. Certainly their conquering behaviour after leaving Egypt suggests that !
The common generative-AI-apologist statement that AI isn't doing anything that humans aren't doing I find disingenuous in multiple ways: 1) the artists actually consented and generally were compensated for me "training" on their creation -- ie: I actually pay to watch movies, read books, listen to music, etc. I don't break into a library and steal the entire fantasy section as "training" for my own attempts to write a fantasy novel. 2) the "training" is simply not of the same nature; gen-AI doesn't understand what it's doing and so is only ever trying to copy *surface patterns*, whereas humans who "train" on other artists' production try to understand the *underlying rules and structures* so that they can produce stuff that reflects their own interests and not just be really good parrots 3) gen-AI by its very nature is seeking to reproduce patterns as faithfully as possible, which is antithetical to originality -- that is, to *intentional* and *meaningful* deviations from an existing pattern. The better gen-AI gets at its task, the *less* original its output is. The best gen-AI in the world trained on classical murder mysteries will never come up with Columbo, because the whole point of Columbo is to break the long established pattern of "the audience finds out who the killer is at the end".
"the artists actually consented" What? If I post some creative OC on twitter, everybody who sees my work will be influenced by it, wether I like it or not. The pictures get into their brain and rearange their neural network. The only effective way to not consent is to keep your art to yourself. "I actually pay to watch movies..." If I learn to draw from looking up pictures on google, entirely for free, and then make money selling my art, am I a thief?
"trying to copy surface patterns, whereas humans [] try to understand the *underlying rules and structures" When an artist decides to study the "surface patterns" and then reuse them in a fashion that is disconected from the original "underlying rules and structures", we call that innovative and cool and it's art. But if an AI does the same thing, it's bad.
"The best gen-AI in the world [] will never come up with Columbo, because the whole point of Columbo is to break the long established pattern..." This is a very weird argument. You say the best AI is the one that doesn't innovate at all, but then you say it's bad because it doesn't innovate? You're just contradicting yourself. Being 100% faithful is bad, sure, and that just means the best AI isn't 100% faithful. Which they aren't anyways. Generative AI can break away from people having 5 fingers, of course they can also break away from murder mysteries revealing who the killer is at the end.
Regarding (1) Everything the AI is trained on you could have seen for free - How do you think they get it? They just crawl the web and it was only on the web so that actual humans could view it for free. (3) You can easily make current AI genuinely original simply by modifying the model weights by a random amount. This is actually much easier than for humans who, whatever they may think, are always using their unconscious knowledge (See any magicians act that start with "Think of a number ....." )
Incest is actually one of the topics that a lot of people feels like its wrong, but only with themselves. I don't see people getting mad when they meet some married relatives, for example.
It's also very culturally dependent, growing up in a family with a muslim background, people around around me regularly made fun of the "goddless west" marrying their sisters either indirectly (because no one there knows who their parents are) or some times even directly (those godless heathens have sex with their mothers and sisters). Yet since I was like 4 or 5 I was all but officially engaged to my first cousin, and our parents are still abit sore that me didn't actually get married 😂 In my cultural at least 1st and 2nd cousin marriages are seen as superior because they keep it in the family, I think it's a culture of honor thing. That internal visceral disgust reaction is totally absent from this, it is not suppressed it is literally just not there.
@@Mo95793 Cousin marriages were perfectly normal in the West until very recently - Einstein and Darwin were both married to cousins. I don't really know why it stopped. Interesting question!
@shenanigans3710 yeah i bet that's a great topic for a video essay, unless there is some mundane answer we just didn't think of, like the cultural sensibility towards the age of marriage
I think the issue gets mixed up when people say something along the lines of ' it does not seem morally wrong in situation X and Y so therefore shouldn't be illegal' Because law, social order, crime and punishment for a certain thing is a different argument, people think that laws automatically are the same as morality or individual morality. A good example is gambling 'well what is wrong with sticking $10 on black at roulette' ...well nothing is wrong but it might be wrong for a casino to arrive and turn your town into a tourist place for degenerates and attract crime, it could still be a social ill or something you discourage and set rules against. With law you have to consider a wider perspective.
I have to respectfully disagree sir. Alex's mustache is only 2nd to mrThoughty2's. It is a moral duty of society to preserve, for the reason of being an example for future generations to see what an intelligent, intellectual man should look like and be immediately recognized among a group of ppl. Think of the goat, Nietzsche. Who would benefit from his work had he shaved that glorious stache??
No hate on the commenter, but i think the spongebob hot take is the definition of mint, absolute zero. Its yet another ''this piece of media is a critique of our materialist capitalist system''. Sure its one of the infinite themes in sponge bob, but that applies to anything set in the modern world, or in this case an imitation of the modern world
Emotivism will not lead you to say incest is wrong, for the same reason it will not lead you to say homsexuality is wrong. Namely, our emotion to not deem it justifiable to imprison or deem immoral consenting individuals for their love just because of an emotion and no robust ethical reason outweighs the emotion of finding it bad. This is why we do not accept just emotions in relation to condemning individuals for their love. It is why we view it as barbaric to call homosexuality or interraciality disgusting, even if we might feel that way.
On this line of thinking, emotivism has the same conclusion about murder. Everything is in the realm of emotion, including the idea that it causes “harm”
Children have potential value. Maybe we take that into account as well. We not only evaluate based on present capabilities but also on the potential for future value?
Exactly we train adults who mostly aren’t capable of doing much else to be soldiers and train kids to be useful to society. Those soldiers will be more effective than poorly trained children. After that though it would probably be efficient to immediately start training children and making as many as the budget allows for a continual supply of sacrificial pieces. Morbid ideas but that would probably be what we’d do if we were purely rational beings.
Future value of children is not the only thing to consider, since it requires resources to raise children into the state when they can provide that value. Raising children into adults is a long-term investment. The reasoning for an adult being more valuable is because the cost of raising the person (education, food, healthcare, time, etc) has already been mostly paid.
6) There’s no need to condemn incest directly, not because morality is a product of emotions but because morality is a product of evolution and reproduction. Humans are naturally more attracted to people outside family and incest is a minority. It happens naturally that too much of incest doesn’t yield good reproductive fitness, so it can’t become a too large phenomenon. There’s just no need to do anything at all. No moral judgement, no validation. It’s a pointless discussion. Same with LGBT
I think the main philosophical problem with incest right now is that, as far as we know for the first time in history, most sex is being conducted for non reproductive reasons. Before the idea of incest without reproduction while technically possible, would be too tied to reproduction to not cause negative emotional reactions that emerge from evolution, in short ''you were doing the reproductive thing with your sister, thats not good, even if somehow you dont reproduce''. As of today recreational sex and reproductive sex are separate enough that that emotional argument has dissolved, and the only thing holding the floodgates closed is the desire of people to conformp, we all kinda know incest can be okay, but we dont want to be the guy that chooses that hill to die on, because we know its suicide and not important enough. However, we are also a society founded on enlightenment values, and that has led us to try to be accepting of new ideas and to put logic as our chief value, so to a certain extent, the idea that we accept all sexualities because they harm no one but we reject incest is in contradiction with our values. For most people thats okay, because they accept a degree of contradiction in life, but the more philosophical you get, the more commited to finding the truth you get, the more the incest question presses you.
On AI Human referencing art is meaningfully different different from AI The take that it isn’t seems to be coming from ppl that are not deeply involved with art. - The way we practice or learn from each other in art is very specific. You ask a million questions and try to answer them trying to think like the artist you are studying, the process feels like a conversation of problem solving. And after we learn what do we do? Do we just replicate others' art endlessly? No, we incorporate technique or mindset into parts of our own work. Is it fully original no ofc nothing is as you said, but what makes it ours is the reflection of our life experiences, likes and skill level into the artwork. - So what at the end of the say you copied from someone somehow why is it different from the AI. Well we are all artists duh we give each other a pass cuz we know how deep the study process is and the fulfillment of learning. And even if we didn’t we can’t copyright shit, other people have lived similar lives, found similar techniques you can’t be sure almost ever, but we don’t care. All we would do is be intrigued if someone has a similar taste like us or be glad someone found inspiration in us enough to sit down and learn our thought process. - And that is the heart of the issue, why did an artist do it cuz they loved something and wanted to learn/recreate or adapt that is their goal - Be for real what is the goal of doing an AI artwork: it's a quick product for free or to compete with the people you stole from for money. Typing words is not showing me you want to learn or that you love my art enough for you to pick up a pencil and even try, not only that but you want to compete with me with my own work. How can I give this a pass? - And worst of all it's useless. This technology is a full waste of energy. Keep that where it belongs in research and medicine. TLDR; we don't care if its an artist cuz it comes from interest and respect + it doesn't hurt us and we care when its AI cuz its from a place of greed + it hurts us
mfks really think im about to sue a 12 year old for copying me, but i just wouldn't care if a billion dollar company scrapes our work with no permission and go on with it. even if they were doing the same "copy" (they aren't doing the same) don't you guys see the problem of putting these 2 examples next to each other and treating them the same?
Its not whether its right or wrong, its whether its meaningfully different, and I don't believe it is, except in order of magnitude, as you stated. This does read like special pleading, though. Yes it hinders you. Yes it encroaches on your field. But so do other artists(sometimes). The specific parameters of the neural network *is* your guesswork. The neural network is doing something functionally similar to the process you mentioned. Every network is different. AI art is a means for people without skill or time to be able to invest the energy in a way they are comfortable with. In essence, its a powertool. The complaints here, I'd imagine, are functionally similar to complaints about needing less hands in the field to farm, with the industrial revolution, for example. Good art can come out of AI, and its actually a skill to invoke it properly. I actually think its a good thing, In a word: It gives more people access to "make"(as this is your contention, but I think make works perfectly fine) beautiful things without giving up early.
This is so hard to read without any punctuation. I still don’t understand what you think the meaningful distinction is between the two, it just seems like you’re saying ‘I like one and I don’t like the other one’
AIs "learn" by discovering patterns in art and so do people. I don't think AI is copying art at all, instead it's discovering patterns and then combining them with noise to produce new images. I think you are ultimately saying that AI images have low value, which is not really a hot take.
With AI art, there's a bit of an important difference between human inspiration and AI. The difference is that, while art is not produced in a vacuum, neither was it produced from a dataset. It was produced as a combination of inspiration, from art that we've seen and experienced, as well as feelings and emotions of the artist, their thoughts, their intentions which may be unrelated to other inspiring art, their skill--which is an incredibly important factor, given AI art is only as good as its data but human art has evolved over time without the need for other data to directly inform it (just look at the history of painting styles). Human art is inspired by others but not created from others. If you took a human who had only ever seen classical paintings, and described to them what modern abstract art was without them ever seeing it, then told them to make some, they could probably do a pretty good job (yes, in part due to it being a broad category). If you described it to AI in a prompt, which had only every been fed classical paintings, it would probably give you 1: a mess, and 2: something that didn't resemble what you asked it at all. Future AI might be able to apply more creativity to its outputs and then maybe the copyright thing is less of an issue, but for now it makes sense. There's other reasons that AI art is an issue though. For one, it puts artists out of their jobs (in a field which is difficult enough as is), and two it isn't really art. The reason I'd say it isn't art is because of what I described earlier, how art made by humans takes into account emotions and subconscious aspects of ourselves that can't even be described aloud, let alone reproduced by a machine. If a truly sentient AI, like say an artificial human brain, were to make art, then sure it could be art if the entity producing it was actually capable of reaching some level of the complexity of a human. But for now AI art is the comparatively basic output of an algorithm incapable of true creativity due to its lack of internal complexity and, importantly, its inability to experience anything and to translate that experience into emotion, which might then be expressed in the form of art.
Disappointing take on AI, I know it's a fast paced video but there are so many things that could have been touched on like: - There's no compelling evidence that AI is actually intelligent or aware or feels emotion, and good reason to think that 'AI' is simply a marketing term to evoke science fiction and futurism in place of words like 'algorithm' and 'machine learning'. People are already anthropomorphizing AI, and that's good for business. - Can something be considered art if the author is simply the unfeeling churning of statistical algorithms? - Can you really say it's the same thing for a person to grow up exposed to a variety of art and transmute the abstract impressions of that art into something entirely new, which has intention, humour, vision and finely tuned details that all work together in an original way? AI simply recognises patterns via statistical analysis based on a perfectly remembered and vast data set and guesses what should go next to what. This data only captures the structure of art, whilst a human memory revolves more strongly around the emotions a person felt when they experienced it, and the values and aspirations it played into. AI has nothing like any of that relationship with the art it's trained on. It is unfeeling statistically correct slop churned out with no intention or attention or aspiration. It's the Soylent Green of art.
That really was a disappointing take and the first thing is that people place the blame on "AI" when really the issues should be split into those regarding the person doing the prompting and those regarding the scraping to do the dataset and customising the generating tool (like when they remove "Pixar" from the list of words you can use to generate an image :) ). If they had to remove artists still living or those who haven't died 80 years ago and aren't in the public domain yet or whatever, the dataset would be laughably small... and they know it. Oftentimes people just get those mixed up and think that if one gets a pass then so should the other. Big brands are already ahead of it, making sure the algorithm won't recognise whatever you wanted when you type in "Disney". They've protected themselves well. What can a beginner artist without a lawyer do? Nothing, ofc, just watch how his work gets their watermark removed without any notice. People stopped posting their works anywhere online just for this reason alone. I'm sure a great deal of democratisation (whatever AI fans claim AI brings) was lost when professional artists are now only in few local galleries. It just shows how little Alex knows about the subject. Or he would rather ignore the "real" part of it - he's doing a Jordan Peterson level of work with this one. edit: let's not forget about the big no-no's of midjourney: sure, it's reasonable that you can't use terms to creative aggresive imagery, or abusive or whatnot, but guess what other random terms are banned from use? Xi JinPing, Putin...
No, "AI" is just the actual term for it. Artificial Intelligence is a whole academic field that has been around since at least the 1970s (at least that's when the core training technique underpinning what we have today was invented). The business world adopted a product of science, not the other way around. There is a simple mathematical proof you can do to show that no, these programs cannot just be "perfectly remembering" everything. I'll use Stable Diffusion as an example, here goes: Training Dataset (LAION-2B) Size: 100 TB Model Size: 5 GB Keep in mind that 100TB dataset is already compressed, and yet the AI has somehow "perfectly remembered" its contents despite throwing away 99.995% of it. You talked about guessing what should go next, which sounds like you are talking about language models, but those work in an entirely different way to image generators, which don't do anything word by word; they affect the entire image a little bit on each step. But regarding LLMs, if you'd like to see what "recognizing patterns via statistical analysis" actually looks like, try using your phone's autocomplete. You'll see that this is not anything like what we have now. And finally, even if we accept calling how it actually works a statistical trick, you still haven't proven that isn't how human brains work under the hood. What we call emotions might just be effectively vectors of numbers that alter the most likely next word we produce.
@@joanabug4479 I think that's a different topic. Disney and other companies don't want AI to generate images of their copyrighted characters. Artists don't want AI companies to steal their *style*.
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy I understand that this is the scientific field of study's name for it, but the way it is used commercially right now to indicate true intelligence is still a misnomer because it's not supported by evidence, and there's no doubt this term is deployed in this way because it's good marketing and not because it's an accurate representation of the truth. The name AI is currently still aspirational, we are not there yet. That requires the ability to think; to be conscious. Digital compression is not analogous to the imperfect and impressionistic recall of human memory. Yes I refer to LLMs but this line of reasoning applies just as well to music and image generators because it is the passionless algorithmic following and blending of patterns, there are different sophisticated mechanisms but without thought or emotion or inspiration that's all they can be at the highest level. And finally you've reached the crux of it by asserting that I have to prove that AI does not operate the same as a human mind; not so. This is a positive claim proponents of AI make all the time, and the burden of proof is on the claimant. It's not my job to prove it's not true, it's your job to prove it is. And that evidence simply does not exist.
On the subject of incest, it seems real likely that there is a somewhat iffy underlying power dynamic that could be more objectionable than the act itself. Even if it's two consenting adults, the dynamic and the bonds between them will have been developed when at least one party was too young to meaningfully consent. That sounds a lot like grooming to me.
1:32 yes absolutely morality is based on functional value. The same way a neural network is mathematical. Our emotional reaction is just a long term calculation and the time it took to evolve into these emotions, optimizing for our survival. Ethical emotivism can also be reduced to the computation that is evolution.
Children by definition are more flexible than adults, mentally speaking. They learn from the virtues AND flaws of adults, and that requires alot of energy. If children had to fear potentially going into war they would start acting as adults from that point on, without the maturity that comes from getting to be a child first. Even if those children die in a war and the adults make more, the next generation will also have the same fears, thus reducing the quality of people in that given society the further this goes on. Yet another W for intuitive morality
Alex, what is your take on the problem of the Laplace demon? In this case I am talking of the problem that emerges when you take the position that Laplace suggested (an intelligence capable of knowing every position and speed of every particle in the universe, and with this, it would be able to see the future entirely) the problem is, if that intelligence is programed to be rebel or to deny the future, in this case it would go against what it predicted that it would do, but this of course creates a loop and a logical problem, the thing is, this doesn't necessarily create any problems on the deterministic view because its impossible( for what we know at least) to know every position and speed of all the particles in the world in the same instant, because of how observation in the quantum realm works. But a more interesting idea, would be if we develop this problem to the Christian god, because it wouldn't be limited by observation, god technically is omniscient so it has exactly the same position as the Laplace demon, falling exactly to the same logical issue. I have worked around this idea for a while, and I believe it proves that an omniscient and omnipotent being with free will, cannot exist. Most christians argue that god is not in time so he doesn't fall to the same problem, even though I don't really see how that takes the problem away, because there clear instances of actions, like the creation of our universe, and if he had an instance of action ( even if he isn't just in a point of time) he still falls to the same problem. I would be really glad if you contemplated around this idea.
1:47 I want to point out that Earth is not an inertial reference frame and hence NOT a valid reference point when doing any type of physics. so an indian spicy take, but one that doesn't really hold up to our current understanding of physics
For someone who's not a moral realist, Alex frequently assumes that we share intuitions about morality. Especially if you're an emotivist, what morality is "really about" is entirely subjective and changes from person to person. I actually do have an intuitive need to weigh suffering against wellbeing. I always have, for as long as I have memories. It's not a "cold calculus." I care so much about people's subjective experiences that I want to do my best to get it as right as possible. And going off of vibes isn't as effective as stopping to consider all the potential impacts. It's extremely weird to me that others don't have this intuition, but you don't see me claiming that their intuitions are impossible.
I think your utilitarian worldview is ultimately based on how you feel though. Why do you believe that other people's happiness is important except that it feel right to you?
@_Squiggle_ oh absolutely! I don't deny that for a second. I just think that if you acknowledge as much, I don't know how you can make statements about what ethics is "really about" without the qualifier "to me." Or how you can talk about "our intuitions" rather than "my intuitions."
Moral anti-realism doesn’t necessarily imply relativism, and it’s important to bear in mind that ‘subjective’ and ‘relative’ don’t mean the same thing. We could all be emotivists and also all believe that the human psyche is identical, or near-identical, in all who possess it; this means that it’s at least conceivable that we can be emotivist and also believe in shared moral intuitions.
I am honored, and since I’ve heard you touch on ethical emotivism that line from scripture has rang in my ears. Not to draw on theism too heavily, but I can’t help but wonder if the actual authors of scripture understood the emotional underpinnings of our ethics and (as with many facets of humanity) attempted to explain it with divine intervention. Not to get too deep or circle jerky either, but it’s sort of like seeing the philosophical fossils of a wisdom long since lost.
If you believe that the life of people born disabled is less valuable than able bodied people then you must also agree that less resources should be spent on extending their lives than those of able bodied people. If you don't then your argument fails. (This is an iconvenient problem with the NICE healthcare cost effectiveness assessment based on QALYs)
The problem with pinning morality to emotional response alone is that literally anything can be condemned just because someone doesn't like it. It means every moral panic and culture war backlash against a harmless, victimless act or identity was morally justified because the witch hunters had some big emotions about their alleged witches. What atrocity couldn't be justified with, "Well, we just felt like doing it because we didn't like them"?
6:10 I could not disagree more with this take. “Why can’t AI take from multiple sources like a human does?” Because it is AI. In a perfect world I would agree that there is no harm, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live a world where humans get fulfillment and virtue from creating something. We also live in a world where people need to have a profession of some kind to be able to survive. Automating this process and taking it away from living humans from my perspective is morally abhorrent in both a personal and economic standpoint. On top of that it is taking the working artist work and using it to push them out of what fulfills them in life and puts food on the table. By moving to an ecosystem that has generative AI as a widely accepted tool or process, you are effectively turning people into consumers when they would be creators. Which from a psychological and personal perspective is much less beneficial and is more harmful to the person. In my opinion it is harmful to the creative spirit of humanity itself. This level of spice of that take should put your ass in the fucking hospital.
Do you think all automation is harmful to society or just automation that displaces artists? What makes an artist's job more valuable than a plumber, or a programmer, or a factory worker?
@ Great question. I think automating something that defines or grows human experience is immoral in a broad sense. Obviously what defines human experience is a slippery concept that means something different depending on the person and perspective. With something like art or creation in general there is a long tradition of the act of creation adding meaning to one’s life, and adding a depth that wouldn’t have been there without creating something new. With a more blue collar job like plumbing that becomes a grey area. Non-plumbers would certainly just see plumbing as meaningless labor or work so they think “Why not automate plumbing?” It would save time and free up that persons time for something else. But that plumber might get all of their meaning from solving problems related to that. Their “music” in life comes from the satisfaction of making a very clean and efficient piping system work for people. That the act itself adds to the person’s life, and if something means that much to someone should we deprive it systematically? This concept could be applied to basically any type of profession. So from that angle any type of automation could be taking away something from a person’s experience and meaning in life. But obviously there is a lot of automations in our life that are useful, and someone might have enjoyed doing something industrial by hand in the past that is now a widely accepted automation. In practice, I think it depends on the case at hand. I think we should not be taking away opportunities from real individuals to have real experiences of creation from a philosophical level. From an economic perspective it is taking away creative opportunities from the individual and giving it to cooperations with comparatively way more power already. But ultimately I have no idea on where the line is. I am just an artist and professional artist that is in love with the act of creating itself, and my heart bleeds for the implications going forward for human made art in the commercial space.
@@troutfish8590 Thanks for having a balance and nuanced take on this issue. I think I ultimately believe that automation of image creation outweights the negative impact of artist job loss. But I realize there is a give take
@@_Squiggle_ lemme ask you this Is your ultimate wish for society that we eventually sit in pods with all our needs are handled by robots and we simply experience a digital specifically designed to make us happy? Because the ultimate conclusion to automating everything is that. Art isn't a necessity for survival, it's something we do to add meaning to our lives, that's the sole thing it is for. So why are we trying to automate it?
@@CorralSummer That scenario sounds like a dream for artists. All the mundane needs are taken care of and they can spend all their time creating art, wihthout restraining themselves in any way, i.e. to make their art better suited for the market.
Initially I was outraged by mint being the opposite of spicy. But my girlfriend pointed out to me that the coolness of menthol mint works by latching onto your mouths coolness receptors in the same way that capsasin does that to heat receptors for spice. Therefore working identically but on receptors measuring the two ends of the same spectrum. All in all, I now agree with you.
Art might not be produced in a vacuum, but AI aren't people. AI are owned by someone, and has no personhood. AI is a fancy brush. And what it's painting is copies. And the people owning the AI are doing a plagiarism.
The vast majority of AI images are not copies of existing work, they are actually new images. They have recurring styles, and sometimes people's styles are clearly ripped off, but the image is unique, that's kinda the whole point.
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy In theory AI can "create" an image which has never existed, those pixels or colour patterns have never existed before. Even if it has "taken inspiration" from various sources so do we. Its an interesting point which i want to disagree with but ive never heard it worded that way and im inclined to agree right now
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy what is a new image in this context? Because the "AI's" that we're using now aren't really AI's. They can't actually make new things. They can only really combine existing artworks directly. They can't find a new style. They can't create a novel motif. An image being unique isn't the point. If I create a copy of the Mona Lisa, that copy is unique. That is not in question. It is still a copy of the Mona Lisa.
@@karl-erlendmikalsen5159 "what is a new image in this context?" you answer this. Give your criteria for what counts as a "new image". You won't. Because if you did, you'd see that generative AIs can do it.
"They can't actually make new things. They can only really combine existing artworks directly. They can't find a new style. They can't create a novel motif. " These are empty statements. It doesn't matter to you how the picture actually is, you'll just say it's not novel. If you learned that mona lisa was made by aliens using generative AI trained on the artwork of the time, you'd say mona lisa wasn't novel, was just plagiarism. Even tho when a human made mona lisa by training its biological neural network on the environment of the time, for some reason, it's no longer plagiarism, now it's creativity.
I'd like a bit of clarification on the ethical emotivism standpoint on incest mentioned here. You essentially stated that despite there not being a good reason to condemn it as wrong, simply having that "icky feeling" about it is enough to say that it *is* wrong. To me, that sounds awfully and uncomfortably similar to the reasoning many people have that leads to viewing things like gay sex as wrong. Is there any reason that exact same argument couldn't be used to justify homophobia, and if not, does my current "icky feeling" towards ethical emotivism mean that using ethical emotivism is wrong?
Yes, "wronger" is a word that is in common usage. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the first printed use of "wronger" in 1375, and the earliest known use of the noun "wronger" is from around 1449. :) "Wronger" is an adjective that means not according to a moral standard, or sinful or immoral. :) While "more wrong" has been more popular than "wronger" for most of the time, both forms are correct and in common usage.
5:34 really? There isn’t a meaningful difference AT ALL between a human being inspired to make their own art consuming an entire lifetime’s worth of art and a machine spitting it out at the press of a button? I mean, in your own description the process for a human is so much more in depth and requires so many more steps. No, you can’t create art in a vacuum, but surely there is something meaningful about the presence of a human’s perception in questioning what qualifies as art to begin with, right?
Alex is not an artist. It's troublingly easy for non artists to lack insight and empathy for why they're wrong when they equate what AI does to what the conscious/sentient can do.
It astounds me how people tend to forget that the imagination aspect of AI art still comes from humans. Humans provide prompts, guidance, and ultimately select which piece(s) of art to use and present. Like, yeah, most of the legwork is done by AI that uses references of lots of different work, but humans still give it some guidance. And the more guidance they give, the better the piece of work usually ends up being.
@@GoeTeeks That is nowhere near the level of control and _dialogue_ that an artist have with a piece tho. Artists don't randomly spawn pieces on a whim, it really is a process. Art is a process. AI skips over that part entirely and goes straight to the final result. It's the difference between the chef at the restaurant and the customer that orders the dishes, literally. The customer might have some control over what the final dish will be, but only one of them is a cook.
@@viewsandrates I am always baffled by the the fact that so many artists simultaneously insist that AI couldn't possibly do what they do, while also maintaining that AI steals their job. If your art can get replaced by AI slop, was it really art in the first place?
it's kind of a mistake to view moral choices in a vacuum or from a single position any choice is part of an emerging pattern and choices you make might seem irrelevant from our narrow perspective, but observing the ripple effect it can have through time is what shapes functional morality. Incest might seem innocuous in principle, but the ripple effect is increased chance of genetic degeneration in a population over time, we are always dealing with probabilities and influential downstream effects that said, we don't have a perfect way to gauge the validity until we explored potential dead ends (with death/survival being the ultimate deciding factor)
We don’t forcefully abort children who we know 1.are going to be born with disabilities, or 2. are carrying dna that has a high chance of a specific genetic abnormality. That specific reason for outlawing incest doesn’t hold up under critique.
@@DevourerSated 'we' don't do that because just a few hundred years ago nature took care of that for us, ensuring less viable genetics would not survive at significant scale. Whether it's a good & moral thing to allow certain disabilities and heritable diseases to permeate is yet to be seen, we might just be pushing the issues to future generations if fast forward 1000 years and the world was a horror show of genetic disorders and abnormalities, morals would likely be very different it's about understanding consequences over time, not altruistic grandstanding in the present (im not advocating for any kind of lawmaking, it's an organic thing just as our human morals are - if anything people should make such decisions themselves, but it's unnatural for most individuals to consider future consequences)
If you make the agrument a numbers game this would require a sufficiently large part of the population to be genuinely interested in incest in the first place, which I find highly dubious.
It's also a mistake to assume that incest always results in children; I think you have to separate the morality of intimate acts from the morality of creating children as products because they are not equivalent acts. Intimate acts have no impact of the gene pool unless they result in children.
regarding the spongebob topic, when you mentioned that you heard of Spongebob being described as representing the 7 deadly sins, this lead me to the thought that the 7 deadly sins themselves were surely based on observed general characteristics of people who had already existed making it sort of a backwards thought process, or "reverse causality" as google has let me know. in a similar sense, i felt that the "critique of materialism" idea is too meta for spongebob specifically, and applies to literally every aspect of imagination, as anywhere we make a material change, even down to including the material action of neurons moving thought to thought, is, at least the illusion of an attempt at rejecting the state that you would be in if you were otherwise lifeless material. in saying this, while the reactions of living things may appear more special than non-living matter in the very simple and surface level assumption that life is a successful rejection of the material world, upon deeper thought, it is nearly (leaving room for uncertainty) obvious that while we may certainly have different properties than non-living material, that we are equally bound by material laws and don't have any choice one way or the other but to be intuitively convinced that we are successfully rejecting the material world even though we are completely out of control in a meta-material sense. it seems as if there is a sort of catch 22 situation where life itself is a material illusion that it has any non-dependent ability to influence the world, because we very apparently do influence the world, and evidence even strongly suggests that we do, but fundamentally we are near (again leaving room for uncertainty) obviously entirely dependent on the laws of the universe and whatnot which are the real determiners of what is able to, and what is ultimately going to happen, which suggests exactly the opposite of anything even resembling "control" or "ability". peculiar state we find ourselves in! is this limbo?! i think by the definition of the word limbo meaning "uncertain awaiting", we sort of are :P
The most common response I've seen to the question of "Why is a child's death worse than an adult's death?" mentions some aspect of potentiality. I'm curious if you think the prospective future of a child is worthy of consideration. If so, would the same be said regarding a fetus?
that child or fetus has the same chance of adding nothing to society as it does adding to society plus it needs to be invested in. a full grown adult is already contributing to society with no need of investment of time or money
@@markjuckenburg6006 This view assumes a very short term growth mindset. If we didn't prioritize the potential futures of the next generation, the survival of the species would diminish and there'd be no assurance of a continued societal production value for individuals who live to old age.
But the child thirty years later will be more valuable than the adult 30 years later. In the end, their value would even out. And if we think that education is improving overtime then children might be slightly more valuable in the long run
@@_Squiggle_ Every abortion and discarded sperm cell is also wasted potential for the future. Is it wrong to abstain from procreation or have abortions? I think there is a problem with giving too much credence to the prospect of the future. There's infinitely many ways to create this value. I think potentiality is a flawed argument whether it's regarding sperm cells, fetuses, or children. It's most pragmatic to judge subjects based on their current merits. For what it's worth, I think there are other valid reasons for why a child's death could be worse. A child's death could be more detrimental to the parents mental health and leave them unsatisfied in their pursuit of raising a child. Also, in certain circumstances, a child's death could be indicative of a failure of societal regulations. (E.G. If we let a child walk into a lion's den at a zoo, as opposed to an adult voluntarily doing the same.)
the geocentrist take reminds me of my favourite stupid-but-accidentally-profound tweet which goes "Looking up at the stars always reminds me that stars are so small just little dots who cares. And I am enormous", which is the exact opposite of the specks on a floating rock in space mindset and I kind of love it
As someone who is into really niche art few artists produce actually good pieces on, AI has been somewhat of a blessing. Yes, 95% of it looks like garbage, yes 99% of it won't even get revised and uploaded with its typical AI artifacts and 'AI artstyle' but there's still the 1% of AI 'artists' who actually use these generative AI models to produce new (yes, new), AI *based* art that looks as good if not better than 'real' art. Can you zoom in and notice it's not actually drawn by a human? Most of the times, yes. Doesn't matter though because nobody analyses brush strokes of digital art and analysing lighting or colour theory on AI imagery can still be done.
Yeah, the real problem with AI art at the moment is the economic incentives, i.e. it's being used to replace actual artists, whilst using the art they create as dataset to train said AI, basically using the artists' own creations to strike against their careers, just for companies to be able to save a few bucks. But if we remove that aspect, AI can be used for creative pursuits. It can be just a new tool that people can use to create cool stuff. Just like photography didn't kill painting because we could find ways to use painting to express things by not having to just perfectly replicate reality, AND, at the same time, photography became an art in and of itself, the revolution brought by AI art could go in a similar direction. But ideally, we need to make sure the current artists don't actually suffer because of the economic issues brought by the ways the tool is currently being used.
IIRC it was the Renaissance philosopher Bruno who said the cosmos was a sphere of infinite size with an infinite number of centres. "He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center." I recalled incorrectly, because the inside of my head is infinite but my neurons are spread rather too sparsely across the expanse.
that ai take i think will only be valid once we have true ai and they alone are making art consciously without a human typing prompts into it and then getting mad when people call them out because they put no effort into the art "they" made
*"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"* ----Christian Minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
There's also the fact that a human artist can and should be expected to credit their inspirations and influences, but AI rips us artists off with no credit and no links back to the original.
Incest doesn't generally create a defect childern if its practised on a first generation or first time but the chances of defect is just points higher then people who doesn't share close common ancestor
Alex, I think there’s a bit of a mix-up here between emotivism and moral intuitionism. In one of the comment you highlighted, you suggest that ethical emotivism aligns with the biblical phrase "I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds." However, this passage actually reflects moral intuitionism, not emotivism. Emotivism is a meta-ethical stance where moral statements aren't truth-apt; they’re expressions of emotion or approval/disapproval, rather than statements of fact. A phrase like "murder is wrong" is non-cognitive under emotivism, comparable to saying "unicorns taste like Sunday"-neither true nor false. Moral intuitionism, on the other hand, holds that we can access moral truths through our intuitions, and it is actually more compatible with error theory than emotivism. Error theory allows for the possibility that moral statements aim to convey truths, even if they're ultimately mistaken. This aligns better with the Bible’s approach in passages like this one, where moral truths are assumed to exist, and we are told we can recognize at least some of them through our intuitions. This perspective presupposes a form of moral realism and cognitivism that’s incompatible with emotivism.
Here is something, let’s hear your input. I call it the “The law of balance” Things will always balance themselves… if something gets too extreme in one direction, it causes things to go extreme in the other direction.
was really disappointed to see you partnered with MyHeritage, supporting the gazan genocide aside some of the posts from their CSO on twitter are downright disgusting i hope you take more thought before selecting your next sponsorship
I think that AI trained on people's art is meaningfully different from real people making art as in, AI doesn’t have to eat doesn’t have to pay rent doesn’t have to work. AI art ‘tools’ were designed to replace artists in the industry and the fact that it was trained on their hard work to do so is in my opinion absolutely disgusting. People like to compare this view to that of the Luddites. But I fail to see the similarity because when the printing press and camera were invented they weren't built off the backs of working people.
I mean the producers of printing presses used the work of generations of scribes by using their typefaces, their word spellings, their recorded knowledge, etc. I think innovations have always used the work done by previous workers and innovators. Automation has been reducing jobs for hundreds of years and it turns out better in the end I think AI uses the data from images in a transformative way by definition. Each image only changes some of the weights in the model slightly and overall the model learns patterns from many thousands of similar images, not from learning any one distinguishable attribute from any particular artwork. And then an image produced is the combination of the patterns and a random noise pattern
The Nonidentity problem sounds very interesting. I will be looking forward to that. It ties into something I often think about regarding children born with disabilities that could have been screened for and avoided. My goto for it right now is "Everyone that exists has a right to exist, but anyone who doesn't exist yet does not have the right to come into existence"
If you consider the idea of consent, I don't think the first take makes sense at all. Notice that, at least in the United States, you can only enlist in the Army when you turn 17 years of age, and quote, "If you are enlisting at 17 and are not already emancipated, then permission is required from a parent or legal guardian and will need to be a part of the enlistment process." In other words, US society believes that children cannot consent to fighting in wars.
I think emotivisim is an interesting point of view that allows us to understand certain situations. For example when you stop pretending to have a logical reason to dislike incest, and you admit that, as far as you know its just an emotion, thats a step towards truth. However i dont think anyone should actually be an emotivist, in the sense that its their chief moral system. Because emotivism is just not good at explaining anything beyond tagging a ''it is what it is'' to whatever you dont understand, if i love that people of all sexualities can be free to practice them, and you think all gays should be stoned to death, from an emotivist standpoint we just both have emotions, mine are worth more to me but yours are worth more to you, thats not how you build consensus and civilisation. To me emotivism is like Marxist class analysis, you absolutely need to have it, youll understand both people and history way better if you take into account material conditions and social classes, however when you try to view history only trough that lens you lose the ability to explain alot. Why did two people from the same class fight eachother? oh its because the capitalist elite pushed them to do it to keep them dirstracted from the real issue... Okay then why do two 0,01% rich people fight eachother? uhhhh, capitalism agin, its not like they can have any other meaningfull difference. I think emotivism alone isnt enough for a moral system
I think we evolved to put emphasis on protecting children. If children die, they don't become adults and the species dies off. It has been known that infants and toddlers have many of the physical characteristics that people tend to find attractive in adults. The theory is that this compels adults to tolerate these young ages more and want to protect them.
Jordan Peterson says "you need to be the best toilet cleaner ever to find meaning in your life". I'd say f*** that. I'll wait for my dad to hire me as his business manager.
@trinsit nah, Jordan is an idiot. He doesn't even know what he means when he speaks. Personally, I wouldn't waste my time with mediocre tasks if I know I can do better. If I know this, I will pass on the toilet cleaner job and start piping the house for the toilet.
MyHeritage is having a promotion right now. Click here - bit.ly/AlexOConnor_MH - to find out your ethnic origins. Use code "alexoc" at checkout for free shipping!
To support my work and get early, ad-free access: www.alexoconnor.com
what do you thinkof solipsism
Hi Alex, any advice on how you stay present I find social media is making me a bit foggy in the brain. Do you know anything about this to do with psychology and your thoughts on this? I’d love to know
You are wrong in #2: There is no universal frame of reference for speed but yes for acceleration. Earth is accelerating around the sun because it changes both direction and escalar speed. Also we change speed as earth spins because we change the direction of our movement. If earth was really static there wouldn't be coriolis effect and centrifuge acceleration.
Isn't evolution necessary to continue the human race? Maybe protecting women and children makes perfect sense
can you imagine all the kids running around and getting bored of killing so they start making friends with the other kids
I feel like emotivism is wrong
I know that emotivism is wrong
Lol.
Funny thing you did there
😂👏🏼
it took me like 5 seconds to get this LMAO
much like Samson, Alex’s wisdom is now stored in his moustache. he has a moral duty to keep it for all time.
His moustache is watered and fed by the bitter tears of viewers who hate the thing...
YES YES YES!! I like the stache
The stache can stay so long as the beard is allowed to rejoin it. If he's gonna keep the pedostache, however, may as well lean fully into and grow out a mullet.
Samson and Wisdom in the same sentence is like saying Diddy and wholesome.
@@cazcow Finally, someone else has sense
The child soldiers take stops short. By their logic, anyone over 40 should be conscripted too, many of whom would probably be more effective in combat than children and teenagers.
i also agree with this. human value is a bell curve with the peak being a young adult
It's a transactional argument. It's even more expensive to reach 40 and they are valuable in other ways (wealth generation, etc).
That's making a generalization, age is not the most accurate quota to measure functional value from. It's likely based on a bunch of factors including those in the nature and nurture of the individual. There is also the issue of knowingly living in a society that with assess you based on a quota, where ones goal may be to gimmick some rating system in order to avoid conscription than to actually be a productive member of the society.
Edit: Saw a good point that Functional value also changes based off the needs of the society, a child in an underpopulated area is functionally more valuable than one in an overpopulated area. The situation that happened with birth restriction in China is a great example of the nuance on how this moral philosophy could play out.
@@markjuckenburg6006_modern_ human value.
Sending all elderly to fight would be like burning own libraries. They need to stay for propagation of wisdom and culture. Whereas bunch of 10 year olds lost in war can be quickly replaced as long as adults are willing to breed like rabbits. Take my punjabi spicy take.
bro hung out with destiny for an hour too long and started debating incest
Open relationships are a good idea.
@@jesseparrish1993 blue hair is not a cry for attention
Many such cases
@@jesseparrish1993 😭 😭
Don't forget dogwarts
A white dude in the British isles with the name O'Connor is Irish? Imagine my surprise...
He might as well be called Paddy O´Leary
There's a reason why these sorts of DNA testing kits are more popular in America than Britain.
there's nothing to find out for lot of people in the uk 😭
British Isles? You’re not Irish I’m guessing
He's English with Irish ancestry, no one in Ireland would consider him Irish 😂
A big chunk of English people are of Irish ancestry, they just don't make a big deal out of it like people from the US with Irish ancestry dp. Something like 10 of the 23-man England national team have Irish ancestry lol. Almost everyone will have or will know someone who has an Irish grandparent and the percentage increases if you start going back to the 1800s like the yanks tend to. It's not that big of a deal here.
(I'm from Ireland but have lived in England for 6 years)
I take issue with saying incest is wrong on the basis that it's icky. If we use that line of reasoning, then what about the people who have that same visceral gross-out reaction to homosexuality? Is homosexuality wrong because people find it icky?
People find it wrong because it is icky to them. You don't find it wrong because it isn't icky to you
Yes. To some people yes. We all just look at things and come to a conclusion based on our own feelings.
@@Raadpensionaris Some people like having sex while covered in food, and other people like keeping giant spiders as pets in their home. I find both of those things viscerally revolting, but if I'm not involved I don't see those things as immoral or wrong.
I think I agree with the friends above mostly, but there's one difference.
With homosexuality, eventually we should realize "well this is silly. Live and let live, *they're not hurting anyone"*, about homosexuality as a whole. Now, if we allow for such in the cases of incest where there's objectively nothing at risk between the two people involved, there's still a risk for society as a whole. By allowing incest in the "acceptable" cases, you indirectly support it as a whole a bit more, leading to more incest, leading to more genetic problems.
i think the difference is you can make rational statements about why honosexuality is not harmful and change someones mind, but even if you make rational statements about incest in cases where there are no percieved negative effects (although i 99% disagree with this), its hard for most people to accept it as "okay" or socially acceptable, which is where the emotivist point of view comes in.
The minty - spicy controversy should really end once you think about the word peppermint.
My God....
Are you saying that minty and spicy are NOT opposites? It’s possible that peppermint is a sort of oxymoron. I don’t know how I feel about it, but what I do know is that mint and spice feels very similar in my mouth while still being different. Spicy is a sort of hot, zingy feelings, while mint is a more cold, relaxing feeling while both are still extreme flavor profiles. Speaking of which, it’s like hot and cold, even though they are opposite, at the extreme they often feel pretty similar. If you touch something insanely hot, you will pull your hand away in the same manner as if you were to touch something insanely cold.
His God 😮 @@phillystevesteak6982
Peppermint is not a kind of pepper. It's only called a peppermint because it is more pungent or "spicier" compared to its parents spearmint and water-mint. Mint is chemically the opposite of spice since the active ingredient in mint is Menthol which tricks your mind into tasting cold. Spice does the opposite of mint through the chemical Capsaicin, tricking your mind into tasting hot.
First off peppermint is not a kind of pepper. It's only called a peppermint because it is more pungent or "spicier" compared to its parents spearmint and water-mint. Mint is chemically the opposite of spice since the active ingredient in mint is Menthol which tricks your mind into tasting cold. Spice does the opposite of mint through the chemical Capsaicin, tricking your mind into tasting hot. All that's left arguing what 'mild' means, bland or barely spicy.
Alex,
Been watching your videos for a while now, I remember being a kid in middle school and learning what I thought about my own beliefs in the context of a lutheran family and finally converting to atheism through your videos. I remember trying to learn how to play "with you" because I thought that song was the shit. To see you grow to where you are now with the level of success and knowledge you gained from your studies alongside my own growing up and almost finishing my own degree has been a pleasure. Keep it up.
On the point at 9:15 - it's also worth noting that babies born of incest _aren't_ 'often' born disabled. While inbreeding increases your relative risk substantially, in absolute terms the baby is still probably going to be completely fine. This is particularly true if you are talking about cousin incest - it's been a while since I looked at the stats, but I think in absolute terms the likelihood of a child having major congenital issues goes from 3% to 4.5%, if it's over a single generation. Which is comparable to having kids when you're older, and potentially less risky than having kids if you know you and your partner carry deleterious recessive alleles. Sibling or parent-child incest is risker, but still. Probably fine.
It's not really a philosophical point, just getting it out there that the idea that all or most children born of incest look like Quasimodo is mostly a myth.
Good point
They are very common when it's sibling or parent-child couple -- around 50% in a couple of studies I could find. It all depends on how many genetic defects the parents are carrying. First cousins are a lot less of an issue, as you say, though if it is widespread in extended families over several generations, the mental and physical decefits do become a cause for concern.
@@EnglishMikeI believe you're misreading that statistic. It likely says 50% increase, which would mean 3% to 4.5%. There is absolutely no way a study found 50% total probability. It will certainly be below 10%.
of course this also only implicates straight relationships
How often do you normally stay abreast of the most recent statistics on incestrial defects?
@CosmicSkeptic
So given ethical emotivism, are you cool with people saying homosexuality is immoral because it’s icky (even if you disagree with them?). I’ve seen anti gay prejudice used as a knock on Christianity by a lot of atheists, but it would seem like on emotivist grounds; there isn’t exactly anything wrong with this type of argument against homosexuality
It would be just a fact that they feel that way, no moral value at all. But they cannot base their argument in that feeling, as that feeling has no moral force. They could say it is icky to me when people are gay, ok, but that has no bearing on whether or not people should or can be gay.
@@timm9818 but on Ethical Emotivism that’s all that ANY moral claim is, so “it’s wrong to murder” also means “I think it’s icky when people murder”
Frankly since studies show that straight people find gay kissing etc to be grotesque and that’s the majority of the population, I don’t see why on ethical emotivist terms there’s not at least a plausible path to social conservatism on something like homosexuality
@@davidcooke4384 you are taking it backwards. yes, ethical emotivists say that moral claims are just someone’s feelings about something. you are saying that someone’s feeling, therefore, has objective moral weight. that is not an argument made by emotivists, and i also think is untrue. the best emotivists can get you is the argument “i subjectively think homosexuality is wrong, because it feels bad to me” that is fine, it is a good reason for you to not be gay, but if someone else feels differently they would have no reason to listen to your argument
and the idea that if the majority felt bad about something it shouldn’t be allowed, on what grounds? how are you grounding the argument that people shouldnt feel bad in emotivist terms? that feels very utilitarian
@@timm9818yeah but people that are against homosexuality are against public displays of homosexuality because of how they react to it. For them it's the equivalent of having a pile of trash instead of a container, or fixing a car with duct tape instead of having it repaired. And for the religious it's a sin, not so different from adultery.
Not sending child soldiers to the front lines of a war is no where near a purely emotional moral intuition, it has an obvious functional benefit of long term continuation of the species and the next generational source of mental and physical labor. Any society that values preservation and wishes prosperity or comfort for individuals past the "ideal age" will want to preserve a stock of children to perform those tasks they carried out in their young adulthood. If humans had evolved to value the lives of adults more than children, we would not have survived a few generations.
It's much more functionally arguable that the elderly should be sent the front lines, if it weren't for their declining physical fitness.
I agree with the conclusion, but your line of argument is flawed. "Preservation of the species" can be advanced by 30-year-olds.
Whether you kill off 90% of children or 90% of young adults, either will drastically impact the continuation of the species. But 30-year-olds aren't impacted as much from having and raising children as a generation of children raised with half the parental guidance and knowledge pool.
I guess it also depends on how you select your soldiers. If the 10% that stay at home survive and are great parents, now killing off the more brutish 90% of 30-year-olds in war becomes less of an issue. At that point we're getting a bit lost in the details though.
This is true. During WWII, the Soviet Union lost the majority of several years' worth of 18-year-old males in combat. I don't firmly remember which it was, but there was one cohort of men born in a certain year, of whom less than 20% survived the war (it was probably 1923, as they would've turned 18 in 1941 and been expected to fight through the whole conflict). Adjacent cohorts also fared very badly.
It left a huge demographic hole, which negatively impacted both the workforce and fertility rates. The repercussions are still being felt over 80 years later, so conscription narrowly targeting the young is not a good long-term strategy.
controversial take- that moustache is fine
Indian Spicy
No.
agreed
No.
Lol it's not but go off lol
To me, whether incest should be permissable or not comes down to whether or not we think a State ought to enforce eugenic standards for breeding. If there is no proper interest in The State enforcing genetic standards, then incest should not be banned. If there is a proper interest in The State enforcing genetic standards, then that would not only make the banning of incest proper, but it would also prompt the question as to how far we should go in enforcing eugenic standards for breeding. Why wouldn't it also be proper to force everyone to get a genetic test, and, before you reproduce with someone, you have to compare your genotypes from that test to find out how particularly risky your particular pairing would be, and, if the test shows that your pairing would be much liklier to result in a disabled baby than an averaged pairing, should that couple not be banned from breeding as vociferously as we would ban incestuous pairings? Because, at the end of the day, the logic is the same: you are preventing particular people from breeding because you have demonstrated that their pairing is uniquely dangerous to the health of the prospective child.
I think that it´s to do with level of risk. Two siblings is about as high as it can get, or a parent and a child, having a child.
Nothing to do with level of risk, but rather excessive red tape and government overreach. I'm not going to apply to have a child, that's weird and authoritarian.
@@sheridan5175 I think there´s what´s called reasonable and unreasonable interference and compelling government interest.
To generally have a licensing system for parents is not a legitimate government aim, as you say it would grossly violate people´s privacy and their right to a family life.
However, something like banning incest is a legitimate government aim and it can be done without a massive surveillance state.
I second another point being the massive problem in possibly grooming when talking about parent to child incest. But beyond that, it's alright. Has problems but about as bad as our current rules
Finally another person I can respect.
“Mild Incest” is a sweet punk-bluegrass band name
Midwest Incest would be good too
What is mild incest 🤣😭
@@destructorzz7197 2nd cousins or cousins would be mild i think
@@simonpeyton-n3h I guess you're right!
@@destructorzz7197 cousins mild and siblings wild lol
The incest question is interest to me cuz people always focus on the disability of the child.
Well, it is proven that older mothers have much higher rates of disabled children. Should we look at someone having a baby at 40 the same way as we look at an incestuous couple?
It's very funny how the first reason people come up with when trying to explain why incest is bad is that they're pro eugenics.
@@warptens5652 tho tbh, literally everyone is pro eugenics to some level
@OP
If you're in some faction of the American right wing, the answer is yes.
2 solo videos from Alex in 1 week? Whatever this is, I love it.
This isn't YouP**n, this is UA-cam.. somebody needs to remind you once in a while 😁
Couldn't agree more
'O'Connor's Law', similar to 'Godwin's Law' - As an online philosophical discussion grows longer, the probability of the topic of incest approaches 100%. Mild.
12:10 The nuclear thing for Spongebob is a bit more than a theory. Bikini Bottom is a reference to it being under Bikini Atoll, where the US tested nukes in the Pacific. How directly they are affected is up for discussion, of course, but there is a canonical basis for it.
"my heritage made it pretty easy for me" is a sound bite the internet is gonna have a field day with
Regarding controversial take #1, the "transactional, mathematical morality" that explains why a child's life is considered more valuable than an adult's is that a child has more life left to experience and is therefore being robbed of more in dying than an adult. If you had to choose between saving the lives of three 80 year old humans or two 25 year old humans, you could morally justify saving fewer people with more life left to experience using this basic math. If the average life expectancy is 75, the value of the two groups is 100 years vs -15 years. I'm not fully endorsing this logic, but its pretty straightforward and isn't based on emotion.
All moral evaluations are based on emotion regardless of people trying to convince themselves otherwise. Life needs to be given a " net positive value" for this to make sense.
@@tangerinesarebetterthanora7060 Broadly speaking, you may be correct, but the "net positive value" of life assumption was built into the original question, so I added no extra emotion in my response beyond what was already presupposed.
No, that's not it. It's about resources. Evolutionarily speaking, children are much less likely to reproduce (not as a child of course, don't go there). You have already put the resources into the 25 year old, and they have proven they can survive. So transactionally it makes more sense to save the ones who can contribute to survival. That would be the 18-35 first, older but healthy second, older children third, and the sick and infants last, since they are the most likely not to survive anyway. Which is why infanticide was common at some points in history.
Was about to make this same comment until I saw yours
@@littlebitofhope1489 If the premise of your argument is that the highest value people in a society are those with the most resources, then the "older but healthy" group that you list second would actually be first. They typically have more material wealth then military aged males. They also typically (and not coincidentally) have more power and influence than military aged males, and usually make up the majority of the political class who send military aged males into combat to protect them, their wealth, and the women and children who make up their society. Arguing that people should be prioritized based on resources is not a hot or spicy take, its business as usual.
The second part of your argument, that adults have "proven they can survive" (with the clear implication being that children have not), falls apart with a cursory glance at data on mortality. Even prior to modern medicine, a child who made it past the age of two had a standard life expectancy, and now there is essentially no higher risk of death for infants as long as they are born healthy. There are also no infant child soldiers, so if we are staying on topic, its a moot point. Children of all ages do require resources that they are not fully able to provide from themselves (though some of that is cultural, since farming and agricultural work were done by children throughout history and are still done by them in other countries) and that cost is largely passed on to older members of society, but you'd have to weigh that against the negative societal costs of adults aged 18-35. Adults in the 18-35 group are far more likely than young children to engage in a whole host of damaging, dangerous and self destructive behaviors (drinking, drug use, self harm, violent crime, etc).
All of this is fun to discuss but is a digression from my original point. Whether you agree with it or not, an argument exists for prioritizing the lives of children over the lives of adults that can arise from a "transactional, mathematical morality" rather than a purely emotional one.
Fully agree with the AI take. People who use "AI is theft" or "it's just rearranging other people's work" as the crux of their argument for why it's immoral or 'not art' are building on very shaky foundations.
As someone who dislikes the current state of AI art I've fought against these arguments and instead gone with the following:
- Our economic system means that automation makes the average person poorer and funnels wealth to the top - this sucks bus isn't specifically an AI issue.
- AI art in its current form is bad art. It's so focussed on imitating other styles without an understanding of them that it creates technically proficient pieces that say nothing. Much in the same way that a plain photo of the Mona Lisa, tribute bands and someone who only makes fake Mondrians are bad art.
I think AI art is often bad art in the sense that it doesn't convey much intentionality, I think AI art makes fine image, though. Clip art or birthday party invitation decorations, etc. There's a lot of images that are used that aren't used because they "capture the human spirit" but instead are used to convey information or provide utility
Are you fundamentally opposed to all automation, then?
@@_Squiggle_ 100% agree with the point that there's so much art that nobody cares about or wants to be making and that it's a perfect use-case for AI. Elevator music and corporate slideshow art are my go-to examples.
I also think there are things that AI art is uniquely good at, like capturing the uncanny. Just like how the best photography doesn't seek to imitate still-life fine art, I think the best AI art will go in a direction untrodden or poorly trodden by existing art forms.
I'm fully in favour of automation and other increases to efficiency, I just think the economic system needs to be restructured to accommodate it.
More production for less labour is a fundamentally good thing (unless we want to get really get into the weeds of it), but it has disastrous results in a society that requires people be doing that labour to afford to live.
"AI art in its current form is bad art" - there is plenty of art where the artist sets a system going and the final piece is what the system made on its own without explicit design from the artist - for example, swinging a leaky paint can on a string. Artist sets up the initial conditions, and takes the result. AI art is similar to those kind of things.
There's also plenty of AI art out there that you wouldn't know is AI without someone telling you, so this idea of "says nothing" is a bit weird.
And wow, tribute bands = bad art is an awful blanket statement. They engage with the audience and get their juices going, and if you have decent musicians who can read the crowd, you've given the audience a great night out. There are bad bands, yes, but that doesn't mean the form itself is bad.
There is also the fact that the way copyright law exists for humans is already entirely broken, so a lot of the AI debate is muddied due to that.
A great deal of art should be in the public domain that is not.
Many cultural touchstones that have a personal impact on all our lives are owned by a bunch of people who didn't make it and have no personal connection to those who did.
The iterative nature of art means that each new piece is a conversation with the last: look at ancient myth or fairy tales where new generations who grew up with the stories would put their own spin on it.
But we have outsourced that to corporations who have no connection to the material, and now we are letting AI do what humans arent allowed to do.
They will iterate and blend are together without thought or connection, further separating people from culture.
Why do pieces have to say anything? Sometimes you just want something that pleases the eye, or you let your imagination do the work.
Re: Geocentrism.... only if there aren't one or more intelligent alien species somewhere in the cosmos.
Exactly what I was going to say. It is the only Planet in the Universe where life exists, as far as we know. Considering how far away most of the universe is, that doesn't tell us much.
Minty af, what would be a bit more spicey is to maintain that oneself is stationary and everything else moves.
This is the mintiest of all the takes in this video, I don’t understand the Indian spicy rating.
Outer space being the shared heritage of humanity? The mere fact that we call it outer space, as if we’re somehow separate from the rest of it? Any sci-fi with alien civilizations, where somehow humans usually end up as the dominant culture in the universe. And again, even calling extra-terrestrial life „aliens”? All normal stuff, all geocentric and anthropocentric.
How is this a spicy take?
Alex just want to let you know that you are a legend, love your work! You inspire me!
Spicy take: Incest (with consent and without reproduction) is not only okay but almost a moral obligation.
One of the biggest things that in my opinion make western societies great is this unspoken value we have of pushing the envelope as much as possible in any way that seems, logically or intuitively good. As cringe as the prhase has turned and as misued as it is, Diversity (of ideas) truly is our strenght.
You can see this in more emblematic cases, like how the US is a nation of immigrants with countless different cultural backgrounds working together, wich has yielded countless inventions.
You can see this in our acceptance of homosexuality wich has its own benefits at all levels.
But you can also see this in more individual habits, that come from the same value, for example the tendency to try a food you used to dislike to check if you maybe like it more now. The same goes with music, we usually dont say ''this song is bad'' we say ''i just cant seem to *get* this song'', the implicit idea there is that not enjoying something is a failure on our parts, and that ideally we would sort of learn to like it, we would aquire that taste, and that would make us better people, i belive its this very mindset that has yielded us so many advancements at all levels.
You can probably see were im going with this, if we cant condemn incest morally, beyond a visceral feeling that its not good, pushing ourselves to proactice it until we enjoy it, until we *get it*, is the same as listening to a new genere of music, trying out a new food, or even trying specifically to make friends with someone from a cultural background that to you has many negative stereotypes, they are all ways to grow, get over biases, expand your perspective, and thus enrich yourself and your surroundings.
The benefits of enjoying incest might not be super obvious, but they are also not that hard to find, just like enjoying a new type of music or having more diverse friends, you can make the argument that it doesnt matter but deep down you know theres benefit to all of those, the only difference is that youre not allowed to openly show disgust towards cultures or ethnicities, or even claim that a specific food is objectively trash (that type of statement is almost always a joke) but we are allowed to not only dislike incest, but make it a point of pride and moral righteousness. This, to all levels is like allowing a child that doesnt like veggies to feel proud that he doesnt eat them, instead of treating it as a flaw, wich encourages the child to grow.
Incest is indeed wincest
@vondas1480 pog
Getting MyHeritage sponsor in a video that involves incest is just chef's kiss
The idea of traumatized child soldiers coming back to society in huge numbers sounds scary as fuck. I think that adults having more attachment to societal norms due to their familiarity with them makes them more stable or at least more likely to internalize their trauma so it doesn't come up and blows up at everyone around them, since children are less likely to handle this the same way you may be running into a much bigger risk of just bringing the war back home
A woman in Florida once shot her son in the back of the head at a gun range because he hadn’t been old enough to have sinned yet, but she already resigned herself to the belief that she had sinned and was going to hell regardless. She guaranteed his trip to heaven while not altering her situation any.
Also emotivism is wrong, but I can’t possibly explain why here.
Could you give a link to the story?
She was obsessed with a mythical afterlife denying both her and her son to enjoy life on earth
@@hegeliandianetik2009Or, she helped her son escape the troubles of life, an Antinatalist would argue.
@ her actions were logical according to Christianity
@@Samuel43510 Logical to Christianity? Jesus didn't condemn murder at all didn't He?
3:30 I did the my heritage test, my ethnicity came back as nicotine 🤷
Oh you're Scottish too fam?
Yes the Nicotine Empire was in a century long struggle with the Byzantine Empire.
@@christianbenesch1 oh I thought I was a descendant of Nicodemus
@@naomistarlight6178 sure am. 57% nicotine, 40% alcohol and 3% filthy English
@@naomistarlight6178 sure am, 57% nicotine, 40% alcohol and 3% filthy Saxon
Okay, a few points here:
1. 0:11 This case completely falls apart once you consider that, from a purely _practical_ standpoint (not even moral), children don't make good soldiers. You're telling me that a six-year-old who doesn't even know where to start when told to clean his room is capable of operating heavy artillery, flying a fighter jet or aiming an AR-15 at the appropriate target on command? 😂
2. 1:45 I would very much like to know what evidence the commenter and Alex have that intelligent life doesn't exist _anywhere else_ in a universe that is 93+ _billion_ light-years across, with planets just like Earth that potentially number in the trillions.
3. 3:00 Factually incorrect. It has long been established that genetics plays a critical role in shaping who we are. The question currently being asked is whether it is _totally_ determinative of all that we do (the nature vs. nurture debate), and I strongly lean towards no.
4. 4:58 This is clearly false. If the human creative process was sufficiently similar to that of AI, the arts (visual, music, architecture, and so on) would not exist. Unless one believes that humans learned art from another intelligent species (tying back to a previous take for a moment 😂), art _must_ have come into existence at some point in the past (caveman drawings?) purely due to a conscious creativity that AI, in its current stage of development, cannot replicate. In other words, AI requires input (a database consisting of prior works of art) to produce output (new AI-generated artwork)-- humans do not.
5. 6:18 This assumes that 1) children are not "predestined" to go to hell regardless (as Calvinists believe) and 2) children cannot hold any sincere religious convictions of their own (in which case the vast majority -- Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and so on -- will just go to hell sooner anyway) and/or that they won't be trapped in purgatory (as Catholic doctrine teaches).
6. 7:43 As a committed _classical_ utilitarian (not a negative one like the commenter at 9:49 arguing from a harm reduction standpoint) whose only objective is to maximize the well-being of sentient creatures (as opposed to minimizing suffering), I believe to my core that there is nothing ethically objectionable about two consenting adults engaging in whatever activity produces happiness in private no matter who they are. End of conversation.
7. 10:28 As a moral semi-realist, I am not vulnerable to such an interpretation. 😂
8. 11:09 Ayn Rand sucks. Ask any academic philosopher, they'll tell you. Nobody who has actually studied her work has ever accused her philosophy of being coherent.
I think humans require input to be able to be creative as well. The dataset cavemen used was the images their eyes were able to see
However Ayn Rands promotion of free market ideas and her fight against collectivism certainly don't suck.
Humans absolutely require and are always receiving input. The input just doesn't have to be pre-existing works of the same type.
As always, thanks for the content, Pablo Escobar.
*Paul O'Scobar, as we found out from his heritage test.
The geocentrism argument is minty asf, considering that it’s essentially the way we all view the universe anyway.
Not at all. Some believe there is other life, making us not the only observers. Some accept the fact that we are so tiny and insignificant as part of a worldview like Nihilism. And so on…
No, it isn't minty. Its whatever the opposite of spicy is.
Arguments over semantics seem to usually be about deeply held values and what words SHOULD mean. The geocentrism one seems so mild to me because it offers a neat perspective, makes everyone think “That’s cool,” and then everybody moves on because nobody cares lol
@@thechosenone5644 geocentrism in this sense could be further extrapolated to the feeling every observer inescapably experiences- that of being the center of the universe because you perceive things relative to yourself.
The “observable universe” is centered on earth, not the sun, not any other point. because that’s where we are. In this sense geocentrism is not much a statement.
Since last Sunday I can call myself an official fan of O’Connor’s videos.
Congratulations:)
5:30 I feel like there’s a difference between someone taking inspiration from art and an AI generating art because a person can bring their own experiences and creativity into the art, which an AI could never replicate
and the music example is not very good because there are a finite number of patterns in pop music so some chord progressions or melodies are going to repeat in different songs from time to time
That is just a bald assertion. Who is to say an AI can't do that? By what metric are you measuring creativity and experience other than your feelings? I say it can, so what now?
weird way to put it. it's not as if the AI don't experience. experiencing things magnitudes of degrees more than the average human can is kind of their whole schtick
creativity makes a bit more sense but it's not really anything anyone can measure, and it's really kind of a meaningless word. creativity at the end of the day is the ability to come up with things that haven't existed before, which is already something AI can do
AI is also copy protected from using content produced by major corporations whereas the general public has to hide their content on private platforms that limit their reach just to avoid having it mass produced by robots working for millions of people and creating content within seconds.
I work in both the music and software industry. I think the original take is completely correct. Creativity is a vague concept. The standards for copyright infringement when it comes to AI art should be the same as with human art. If someone listens to a bunch of Stevie Wonder songs and then writes one that sounds stylistically similar but doesn't directly copy any of them, that would not be considered plagiarism. Same should apply to AI music.
"The strong defending the weak" (argument against child soldiers) is a very important ethic in a social species like ours. Where it holds, it ensures that the vast majority of people can live in relative safety compared to places where the strong only look after themselves. Protecting other people's children is just a part of that.
Adults have also already had the chance to produce offspring, and war was often a way of thinning the unmarried male population to prevent them from becoming restless and violent within the community.
This also goes with the idea that, the strongest people were once weak people who were protected and trained to become strong, instead of left to fend for themselves.
If i throw a kid in hte streets, he will probably survive, and he will probably become a certain kind of ''strong'' he will have a specific kind of independent mindset and toughness, however that kid will probably not be as well fed as he could be, so physically speaking he will be less strong and beautifull. He will not have the same role models he otherwise could have, so he wont be as morally strong. And even a normal child with parents can decide to challenge themselves physically and mentally to become as mentally tough as the kid thats left in the streets, but with all the other advantages of a more sheltered life.
This idea that hardship breeds character makes mediocre and resentfull people, the absolute elite of humanity right now are often children of middle to upper class parents with enough money and good values that allow for optimal development. If a kid knows he might be sent to war at anytime, he wont have the mental bandwith to learn an instrument or philosophy, or even become a top athlete, hell be tougher than a decent amount of people but beyond that he wll be worse, and when it comes time for him to have children, he wont be able to raise them better than he already is, so its just a downward spiral for all human qualities besides the readiness to die in war, not a good tradeoff even from the most utilitarian view.
@@ErinMagner82medieval days the rich fought and poor stayed at home.
They had a warrior knight system.
The more ypu had to lose the more you had to fight.
Nobles and rich people were legally required to carry swords so they can fight to defend land any time an invasion happened.
It was not uncommon that the king himself would lead the battle in frint of every other soldier.
We live in the opposite world but always claim people were so dumb and wicked back then.
@MicahMicahel well I think that was true for Poland but I remember Poland having an unusually strong army because of that and that's why they were decisive in the Siege of Vienna. But the nobles funded the war and the army still did consist of peasants, it's just that warriors would be an upper class and engaged in regular defense.
@@MicahMicahel That's a very naive way to think of the feudal system. There is also a much cynical way: people with money can afford weapons, horses and armor, and, thanks to that, extract goods and services from the people without money. They justified their extractive position like the mafia does, selling their 'protection'. Wars were band-conflicts between those extractive groups, not between the poor.
that first one is actually making sense in a terrible way
It does until you realize that there is great benefit to human society as a whole when the strong (those with the power) defend the weak. You're much more likely to be in the "weak" category (it's a numbers game), so it is greatly to our benefit when society as a whole places greater value on defending the defenseless.
@@EnglishMike This still places more value on the strong, take a trolly problem with one productive age 30 man vs. a 3 month old baby, many would say the moral option is to save the baby over the functioning member of society. The difference comes down to defending the weak vs. sacrificing for the weak.
@@Plasmapigeon except that the value of the strong in this context is in defending the vulnerable, to the point of sacrifice if need be.
If we don't allow the strong to go to war, instead we have the weak do so, because the strong are valuable and the weak aren't, then the value of the strong ceases to be.
@@UntoTheDepths But by this logic the weak then become the strong because they are sacrificing themselves for the strong (which are now the weak). The ability to sacrifice in your example is not exclusive to the strong, yet you say it's the only value the strong have. I'm saying, at a surface level glance, the strong have other values that make them worth prioritizing over the weak.
@@Plasmapigeon I'd argue that the weak don't sacrifice for others (self-sacrifice), which is a part the the reason they belong in the "weak" category. Cowardice and being overly selfish is a moral weakness whereas self-sacrifice is a moral strength.
Sacrifice is the value of the strong in the context I commented under. If you want to expand upon the values of the strong we can get into that.
Actually, about the child soldiers thing. I believe that morality is some mix of emotivism and striving for the success and evolution of forms of life closer to an individual, where the closer it is, the more an individual will want it to succeed.
In the case of child soldiers, it is wrong because children are the next generation. They are "more evolved" than fully grown adults. It is also not particularly easy to make a new child. A family that loses their child in a war will be more hesitant to make another one
Grinding to 1M
Respect
Your ad transitions are a piece of art!
Abrahamic monotheism is not primarily a religious system. It is a political conspiracy.
The story of the Exodus occurred in history however all of the details were deliberately reversed in the Holy Bible, in one of the first propaganda spin stories, in order to make the monotheists look like the victims and the Egyptians look like the aggressors.
In reality, it was the monotheists who were the aggressors and the Egyptians were the victims.
In the 13th dynasty of Egypt - 3,500 years ago - people known by modern historians as the Israelite pharaohs, AKA “shepherd kings” or "Hyksos", conquered northern Egypt taking control of its throne for their own purposes.
This foreign occupation lasted for about 300 years until a pharaoh descended of those original conquerors named Amenhetep the 4th tried to force monotheism on the Egyptian population; taking as his new name, one of several aliases, Akhenaten. An alias referencing his singular god “Aten”.
For the native Egyptians, who had long suffered the machinations of their foreign rulers, this was the last straw. Five Egyptian generals funded by the southern treasury of Egypt launched a military coup and exiled Amenhetep along with his Levitical priesthood.
It was after his expulsion that, realizing he couldn’t work openly anymore, Amenhetep took his last alias - “Moses”; a name truncation derived from one of his relatives named Thutmoses.
From that point, the propaganda of the Holy Bible was written.
I don't think that a political conspiracy and a religion are necessarily mutually exclusive. Regardless of its origin, the Abrahamic faiths are still religions.
Also, having a single story be factually incorrect does not exclude any spiritual significance from other unrelated books in the Bible (or other scripture). In fact, it doesn't even preclude spiritual significance from being in the factually incorrect story
I am sympathetic to the idea that that the Hyksos settling, rule, defeat and expulsion in lower Egypt inspired the biblical stories in in the latter part of Genesis, and in Exodus, but the details here don't seem right to me, so I would be interested to know your sources.
Yes, the Hyksos arrived at the end of the 13th Dynasty, but they took the throne of the contemporary 14th Dynasty in Avaris. The 13th Dynasty moved from Memphis and Itjtawy to Thebes and were succeeded by the 16th, 17th and 18th Dynasties, who ruled upper Egypt. The Hyksos ruled lower Egypt from Avaris for about 100 years (the 15th Dynasty). The 17th Dynasty in Thebes attacked Hyksos cities with some success, and the Hyksos were finally defeated by Ahmose I, the first ruler of the 18th Dynasty. Akhenaten ruled about 200 years later and was descended from Ahmose I, so was on the wrong side of the conflict to be an heir to the Hyksos legacy. He was buried in Egypt. So I don't think he can be identified as Moses just because he was decended from a line of Thutmoses and Ahmoses, and established a brief period of monotheistic worship of Aten. Some scholars think he could have been the Pharoah of Exodus (there was a plague towards the end of his reign) while others think that the Amarna letters (which began with Akenaten) show contact with Israelites, perhaps even Saul and David.
None of this invalidates your overall thesis that Exodus may have been in part propaganda to portray the Israelites as victims rather than oppressors. Certainly their conquering behaviour after leaving Egypt suggests that !
The common generative-AI-apologist statement that AI isn't doing anything that humans aren't doing I find disingenuous in multiple ways:
1) the artists actually consented and generally were compensated for me "training" on their creation -- ie: I actually pay to watch movies, read books, listen to music, etc. I don't break into a library and steal the entire fantasy section as "training" for my own attempts to write a fantasy novel.
2) the "training" is simply not of the same nature; gen-AI doesn't understand what it's doing and so is only ever trying to copy *surface patterns*, whereas humans who "train" on other artists' production try to understand the *underlying rules and structures* so that they can produce stuff that reflects their own interests and not just be really good parrots
3) gen-AI by its very nature is seeking to reproduce patterns as faithfully as possible, which is antithetical to originality -- that is, to *intentional* and *meaningful* deviations from an existing pattern. The better gen-AI gets at its task, the *less* original its output is. The best gen-AI in the world trained on classical murder mysteries will never come up with Columbo, because the whole point of Columbo is to break the long established pattern of "the audience finds out who the killer is at the end".
"the artists actually consented"
What? If I post some creative OC on twitter, everybody who sees my work will be influenced by it, wether I like it or not. The pictures get into their brain and rearange their neural network. The only effective way to not consent is to keep your art to yourself.
"I actually pay to watch movies..."
If I learn to draw from looking up pictures on google, entirely for free, and then make money selling my art, am I a thief?
"trying to copy surface patterns, whereas humans [] try to understand the *underlying rules and structures"
When an artist decides to study the "surface patterns" and then reuse them in a fashion that is disconected from the original "underlying rules and structures", we call that innovative and cool and it's art. But if an AI does the same thing, it's bad.
"The best gen-AI in the world [] will never come up with Columbo, because the whole point of Columbo is to break the long established pattern..."
This is a very weird argument. You say the best AI is the one that doesn't innovate at all, but then you say it's bad because it doesn't innovate? You're just contradicting yourself. Being 100% faithful is bad, sure, and that just means the best AI isn't 100% faithful. Which they aren't anyways. Generative AI can break away from people having 5 fingers, of course they can also break away from murder mysteries revealing who the killer is at the end.
Then using AI is about as wrong as pirating movies or games...
Regarding (1) Everything the AI is trained on you could have seen for free - How do you think they get it? They just crawl the web and it was only on the web so that actual humans could view it for free.
(3) You can easily make current AI genuinely original simply by modifying the model weights by a random amount. This is actually much easier than for humans who, whatever they may think, are always using their unconscious knowledge (See any magicians act that start with "Think of a number ....." )
Incest is actually one of the topics that a lot of people feels like its wrong, but only with themselves. I don't see people getting mad when they meet some married relatives, for example.
The same thing occurs with lots of things of the sexual nature, especially specific kinks/fetishes.
It's also very culturally dependent, growing up in a family with a muslim background, people around around me regularly made fun of the "goddless west" marrying their sisters either indirectly (because no one there knows who their parents are) or some times even directly (those godless heathens have sex with their mothers and sisters). Yet since I was like 4 or 5 I was all but officially engaged to my first cousin, and our parents are still abit sore that me didn't actually get married 😂
In my cultural at least 1st and 2nd cousin marriages are seen as superior because they keep it in the family, I think it's a culture of honor thing. That internal visceral disgust reaction is totally absent from this, it is not suppressed it is literally just not there.
@@Mo95793 Cousin marriages were perfectly normal in the West until very recently - Einstein and Darwin were both married to cousins. I don't really know why it stopped. Interesting question!
@shenanigans3710 yeah i bet that's a great topic for a video essay, unless there is some mundane answer we just didn't think of, like the cultural sensibility towards the age of marriage
I think the issue gets mixed up when people say something along the lines of ' it does not seem morally wrong in situation X and Y so therefore shouldn't be illegal'
Because law, social order, crime and punishment for a certain thing is a different argument, people think that laws automatically are the same as morality or individual morality.
A good example is gambling 'well what is wrong with sticking $10 on black at roulette' ...well nothing is wrong but it might be wrong for a casino to arrive and turn your town into a tourist place for degenerates and attract crime, it could still be a social ill or something you discourage and set rules against. With law you have to consider a wider perspective.
Very interesting content once again. Thank you for posting.
A moustache without a beard is like having frosting on a cupcake without the cake.
I have to respectfully disagree sir.
Alex's mustache is only 2nd to mrThoughty2's. It is a moral duty of society to preserve, for the reason of being an example for future generations to see what an intelligent, intellectual man should look like and be immediately recognized among a group of ppl.
Think of the goat, Nietzsche. Who would benefit from his work had he shaved that glorious stache??
New idea: a Mennonite punk band called "Unfrosted Cupcakes"
Alex have you played a game called The Coffin of Andy & Leyley?
I did not expect this crossover.
Lmao
The thumbnail is CRAZY!
No hate on the commenter, but i think the spongebob hot take is the definition of mint, absolute zero. Its yet another ''this piece of media is a critique of our materialist capitalist system''. Sure its one of the infinite themes in sponge bob, but that applies to anything set in the modern world, or in this case an imitation of the modern world
Emotivism will not lead you to say incest is wrong, for the same reason it will not lead you to say homsexuality is wrong. Namely, our emotion to not deem it justifiable to imprison or deem immoral consenting individuals for their love just because of an emotion and no robust ethical reason outweighs the emotion of finding it bad.
This is why we do not accept just emotions in relation to condemning individuals for their love. It is why we view it as barbaric to call homosexuality or interraciality disgusting, even if we might feel that way.
On this line of thinking, emotivism has the same conclusion about murder. Everything is in the realm of emotion, including the idea that it causes “harm”
Children have potential value. Maybe we take that into account as well. We not only evaluate based on present capabilities but also on the potential for future value?
Yes, but since it's easy to make those babies with the same potential value, value of babies overall decreases. What now???
Exactly we train adults who mostly aren’t capable of doing much else to be soldiers and train kids to be useful to society. Those soldiers will be more effective than poorly trained children. After that though it would probably be efficient to immediately start training children and making as many as the budget allows for a continual supply of sacrificial pieces. Morbid ideas but that would probably be what we’d do if we were purely rational beings.
Future value of children is not the only thing to consider, since it requires resources to raise children into the state when they can provide that value. Raising children into adults is a long-term investment. The reasoning for an adult being more valuable is because the cost of raising the person (education, food, healthcare, time, etc) has already been mostly paid.
6) There’s no need to condemn incest directly, not because morality is a product of emotions but because morality is a product of evolution and reproduction. Humans are naturally more attracted to people outside family and incest is a minority. It happens naturally that too much of incest doesn’t yield good reproductive fitness, so it can’t become a too large phenomenon. There’s just no need to do anything at all. No moral judgement, no validation. It’s a pointless discussion. Same with LGBT
I think the main philosophical problem with incest right now is that, as far as we know for the first time in history, most sex is being conducted for non reproductive reasons. Before the idea of incest without reproduction while technically possible, would be too tied to reproduction to not cause negative emotional reactions that emerge from evolution, in short ''you were doing the reproductive thing with your sister, thats not good, even if somehow you dont reproduce''.
As of today recreational sex and reproductive sex are separate enough that that emotional argument has dissolved, and the only thing holding the floodgates closed is the desire of people to conformp, we all kinda know incest can be okay, but we dont want to be the guy that chooses that hill to die on, because we know its suicide and not important enough.
However, we are also a society founded on enlightenment values, and that has led us to try to be accepting of new ideas and to put logic as our chief value, so to a certain extent, the idea that we accept all sexualities because they harm no one but we reject incest is in contradiction with our values. For most people thats okay, because they accept a degree of contradiction in life, but the more philosophical you get, the more commited to finding the truth you get, the more the incest question presses you.
Oh, man. You got this, you are nailing this new post-UA-cam-post-TV UA-cam based content and the delivery. I'm impressed.
On AI
Human referencing art is meaningfully different different from AI
The take that it isn’t seems to be coming from ppl that are not deeply involved with art.
- The way we practice or learn from each other in art is very specific. You ask a million questions and try to answer them trying to think like the artist you are studying, the process feels like a conversation of problem solving. And after we learn what do we do? Do we just replicate others' art endlessly? No, we incorporate technique or mindset into parts of our own work. Is it fully original no ofc nothing is as you said, but what makes it ours is the reflection of our life experiences, likes and skill level into the artwork.
- So what at the end of the say you copied from someone somehow why is it different from the AI. Well we are all artists duh we give each other a pass cuz we know how deep the study process is and the fulfillment of learning. And even if we didn’t we can’t copyright shit, other people have lived similar lives, found similar techniques you can’t be sure almost ever, but we don’t care. All we would do is be intrigued if someone has a similar taste like us or be glad someone found inspiration in us enough to sit down and learn our thought process.
- And that is the heart of the issue, why did an artist do it cuz they loved something and wanted to learn/recreate or adapt that is their goal
- Be for real what is the goal of doing an AI artwork: it's a quick product for free or to compete with the people you stole from for money. Typing words is not showing me you want to learn or that you love my art enough for you to pick up a pencil and even try, not only that but you want to compete with me with my own work. How can I give this a pass?
- And worst of all it's useless. This technology is a full waste of energy. Keep that where it belongs in research and medicine.
TLDR;
we don't care if its an artist cuz it comes from interest and respect + it doesn't hurt us
and we care when its AI cuz its from a place of greed + it hurts us
mfks really think im about to sue a 12 year old for copying me, but i just wouldn't care if a billion dollar company scrapes our work with no permission and go on with it.
even if they were doing the same "copy" (they aren't doing the same) don't you guys see the problem of putting these 2 examples next to each other and treating them the same?
Its not whether its right or wrong, its whether its meaningfully different, and I don't believe it is, except in order of magnitude, as you stated.
This does read like special pleading, though. Yes it hinders you. Yes it encroaches on your field. But so do other artists(sometimes).
The specific parameters of the neural network *is* your guesswork. The neural network is doing something functionally similar to the process you mentioned. Every network is different.
AI art is a means for people without skill or time to be able to invest the energy in a way they are comfortable with. In essence, its a powertool. The complaints here, I'd imagine, are functionally similar to complaints about needing less hands in the field to farm, with the industrial revolution, for example.
Good art can come out of AI, and its actually a skill to invoke it properly.
I actually think its a good thing,
In a word: It gives more people access to "make"(as this is your contention, but I think make works perfectly fine) beautiful things without giving up early.
This is so hard to read without any punctuation. I still don’t understand what you think the meaningful distinction is between the two, it just seems like you’re saying ‘I like one and I don’t like the other one’
AIs "learn" by discovering patterns in art and so do people. I don't think AI is copying art at all, instead it's discovering patterns and then combining them with noise to produce new images.
I think you are ultimately saying that AI images have low value, which is not really a hot take.
Or personality is from meat being shocked what makes you think a machine/human can't do the same
With AI art, there's a bit of an important difference between human inspiration and AI. The difference is that, while art is not produced in a vacuum, neither was it produced from a dataset. It was produced as a combination of inspiration, from art that we've seen and experienced, as well as feelings and emotions of the artist, their thoughts, their intentions which may be unrelated to other inspiring art, their skill--which is an incredibly important factor, given AI art is only as good as its data but human art has evolved over time without the need for other data to directly inform it (just look at the history of painting styles). Human art is inspired by others but not created from others.
If you took a human who had only ever seen classical paintings, and described to them what modern abstract art was without them ever seeing it, then told them to make some, they could probably do a pretty good job (yes, in part due to it being a broad category). If you described it to AI in a prompt, which had only every been fed classical paintings, it would probably give you 1: a mess, and 2: something that didn't resemble what you asked it at all. Future AI might be able to apply more creativity to its outputs and then maybe the copyright thing is less of an issue, but for now it makes sense.
There's other reasons that AI art is an issue though. For one, it puts artists out of their jobs (in a field which is difficult enough as is), and two it isn't really art. The reason I'd say it isn't art is because of what I described earlier, how art made by humans takes into account emotions and subconscious aspects of ourselves that can't even be described aloud, let alone reproduced by a machine. If a truly sentient AI, like say an artificial human brain, were to make art, then sure it could be art if the entity producing it was actually capable of reaching some level of the complexity of a human. But for now AI art is the comparatively basic output of an algorithm incapable of true creativity due to its lack of internal complexity and, importantly, its inability to experience anything and to translate that experience into emotion, which might then be expressed in the form of art.
Disappointing take on AI, I know it's a fast paced video but there are so many things that could have been touched on like:
- There's no compelling evidence that AI is actually intelligent or aware or feels emotion, and good reason to think that 'AI' is simply a marketing term to evoke science fiction and futurism in place of words like 'algorithm' and 'machine learning'. People are already anthropomorphizing AI, and that's good for business.
- Can something be considered art if the author is simply the unfeeling churning of statistical algorithms?
- Can you really say it's the same thing for a person to grow up exposed to a variety of art and transmute the abstract impressions of that art into something entirely new, which has intention, humour, vision and finely tuned details that all work together in an original way?
AI simply recognises patterns via statistical analysis based on a perfectly remembered and vast data set and guesses what should go next to what.
This data only captures the structure of art, whilst a human memory revolves more strongly around the emotions a person felt when they experienced it, and the values and aspirations it played into.
AI has nothing like any of that relationship with the art it's trained on. It is unfeeling statistically correct slop churned out with no intention or attention or aspiration. It's the Soylent Green of art.
That really was a disappointing take and the first thing is that people place the blame on "AI" when really the issues should be split into those regarding the person doing the prompting and those regarding the scraping to do the dataset and customising the generating tool (like when they remove "Pixar" from the list of words you can use to generate an image :) ). If they had to remove artists still living or those who haven't died 80 years ago and aren't in the public domain yet or whatever, the dataset would be laughably small... and they know it.
Oftentimes people just get those mixed up and think that if one gets a pass then so should the other. Big brands are already ahead of it, making sure the algorithm won't recognise whatever you wanted when you type in "Disney". They've protected themselves well. What can a beginner artist without a lawyer do? Nothing, ofc, just watch how his work gets their watermark removed without any notice. People stopped posting their works anywhere online just for this reason alone. I'm sure a great deal of democratisation (whatever AI fans claim AI brings) was lost when professional artists are now only in few local galleries.
It just shows how little Alex knows about the subject. Or he would rather ignore the "real" part of it - he's doing a Jordan Peterson level of work with this one.
edit: let's not forget about the big no-no's of midjourney: sure, it's reasonable that you can't use terms to creative aggresive imagery, or abusive or whatnot, but guess what other random terms are banned from use? Xi JinPing, Putin...
No, "AI" is just the actual term for it. Artificial Intelligence is a whole academic field that has been around since at least the 1970s (at least that's when the core training technique underpinning what we have today was invented). The business world adopted a product of science, not the other way around.
There is a simple mathematical proof you can do to show that no, these programs cannot just be "perfectly remembering" everything. I'll use Stable Diffusion as an example, here goes:
Training Dataset (LAION-2B) Size: 100 TB
Model Size: 5 GB
Keep in mind that 100TB dataset is already compressed, and yet the AI has somehow "perfectly remembered" its contents despite throwing away 99.995% of it.
You talked about guessing what should go next, which sounds like you are talking about language models, but those work in an entirely different way to image generators, which don't do anything word by word; they affect the entire image a little bit on each step.
But regarding LLMs, if you'd like to see what "recognizing patterns via statistical analysis" actually looks like, try using your phone's autocomplete. You'll see that this is not anything like what we have now.
And finally, even if we accept calling how it actually works a statistical trick, you still haven't proven that isn't how human brains work under the hood. What we call emotions might just be effectively vectors of numbers that alter the most likely next word we produce.
@@joanabug4479 I think that's a different topic. Disney and other companies don't want AI to generate images of their copyrighted characters. Artists don't want AI companies to steal their *style*.
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy I understand that this is the scientific field of study's name for it, but the way it is used commercially right now to indicate true intelligence is still a misnomer because it's not supported by evidence, and there's no doubt this term is deployed in this way because it's good marketing and not because it's an accurate representation of the truth. The name AI is currently still aspirational, we are not there yet. That requires the ability to think; to be conscious.
Digital compression is not analogous to the imperfect and impressionistic recall of human memory.
Yes I refer to LLMs but this line of reasoning applies just as well to music and image generators because it is the passionless algorithmic following and blending of patterns, there are different sophisticated mechanisms but without thought or emotion or inspiration that's all they can be at the highest level.
And finally you've reached the crux of it by asserting that I have to prove that AI does not operate the same as a human mind; not so. This is a positive claim proponents of AI make all the time, and the burden of proof is on the claimant.
It's not my job to prove it's not true, it's your job to prove it is. And that evidence simply does not exist.
Yes. Thank you.
I gasped when I saw the question and sighed when I heard the response.
A bit disappointing tbh
On the subject of incest, it seems real likely that there is a somewhat iffy underlying power dynamic that could be more objectionable than the act itself.
Even if it's two consenting adults, the dynamic and the bonds between them will have been developed when at least one party was too young to meaningfully consent. That sounds a lot like grooming to me.
1:32 yes absolutely morality is based on functional value. The same way a neural network is mathematical. Our emotional reaction is just a long term calculation and the time it took to evolve into these emotions, optimizing for our survival.
Ethical emotivism can also be reduced to the computation that is evolution.
Children by definition are more flexible than adults, mentally speaking. They learn from the virtues AND flaws of adults, and that requires alot of energy. If children had to fear potentially going into war they would start acting as adults from that point on, without the maturity that comes from getting to be a child first. Even if those children die in a war and the adults make more, the next generation will also have the same fears, thus reducing the quality of people in that given society the further this goes on.
Yet another W for intuitive morality
Alex, what is your take on the problem of the Laplace demon? In this case I am talking of the problem that emerges when you take the position that Laplace suggested (an intelligence capable of knowing every position and speed of every particle in the universe, and with this, it would be able to see the future entirely) the problem is, if that intelligence is programed to be rebel or to deny the future, in this case it would go against what it predicted that it would do, but this of course creates a loop and a logical problem, the thing is, this doesn't necessarily create any problems on the deterministic view because its impossible( for what we know at least) to know every position and speed of all the particles in the world in the same instant, because of how observation in the quantum realm works. But a more interesting idea, would be if we develop this problem to the Christian god, because it wouldn't be limited by observation, god technically is omniscient so it has exactly the same position as the Laplace demon, falling exactly to the same logical issue. I have worked around this idea for a while, and I believe it proves that an omniscient and omnipotent being with free will, cannot exist. Most christians argue that god is not in time so he doesn't fall to the same problem, even though I don't really see how that takes the problem away, because there clear instances of actions, like the creation of our universe, and if he had an instance of action ( even if he isn't just in a point of time) he still falls to the same problem. I would be really glad if you contemplated around this idea.
Why either rebel or deny though? What about neutral?
He already has stated that he believes an Omniscient and Omnipotent god cannot exist if free will exists.
1:47 I want to point out that Earth is not an inertial reference frame and hence NOT a valid reference point when doing any type of physics.
so an indian spicy take, but one that doesn't really hold up to our current understanding of physics
For someone who's not a moral realist, Alex frequently assumes that we share intuitions about morality. Especially if you're an emotivist, what morality is "really about" is entirely subjective and changes from person to person. I actually do have an intuitive need to weigh suffering against wellbeing. I always have, for as long as I have memories. It's not a "cold calculus." I care so much about people's subjective experiences that I want to do my best to get it as right as possible. And going off of vibes isn't as effective as stopping to consider all the potential impacts.
It's extremely weird to me that others don't have this intuition, but you don't see me claiming that their intuitions are impossible.
I think your utilitarian worldview is ultimately based on how you feel though. Why do you believe that other people's happiness is important except that it feel right to you?
@_Squiggle_ oh absolutely! I don't deny that for a second. I just think that if you acknowledge as much, I don't know how you can make statements about what ethics is "really about" without the qualifier "to me." Or how you can talk about "our intuitions" rather than "my intuitions."
@@lexaray5 People tend to project what would be their own motives onto others, but maybe I'm just projecting.
@OP i am curious as to what your answer for the trolley problem is. The original one (5 lives Vs one+your involvement)
Moral anti-realism doesn’t necessarily imply relativism, and it’s important to bear in mind that ‘subjective’ and ‘relative’ don’t mean the same thing. We could all be emotivists and also all believe that the human psyche is identical, or near-identical, in all who possess it; this means that it’s at least conceivable that we can be emotivist and also believe in shared moral intuitions.
I am honored, and since I’ve heard you touch on ethical emotivism that line from scripture has rang in my ears. Not to draw on theism too heavily, but I can’t help but wonder if the actual authors of scripture understood the emotional underpinnings of our ethics and (as with many facets of humanity) attempted to explain it with divine intervention. Not to get too deep or circle jerky either, but it’s sort of like seeing the philosophical fossils of a wisdom long since lost.
The problem with incest laws is they are functionally identical to eugenics. I do, in fact, believe children have a right to be “born well.”
If you believe that the life of people born disabled is less valuable than able bodied people then you must also agree that less resources should be spent on extending their lives than those of able bodied people. If you don't then your argument fails.
(This is an iconvenient problem with the NICE healthcare cost effectiveness assessment based on QALYs)
@ Where did you get that idea from? Reread my original comment and tell me where exactly I said disabled people’s lives were less valuable.
The problem with pinning morality to emotional response alone is that literally anything can be condemned just because someone doesn't like it. It means every moral panic and culture war backlash against a harmless, victimless act or identity was morally justified because the witch hunters had some big emotions about their alleged witches. What atrocity couldn't be justified with, "Well, we just felt like doing it because we didn't like them"?
6:10 I could not disagree more with this take. “Why can’t AI take from multiple sources like a human does?”
Because it is AI. In a perfect world I would agree that there is no harm, but we don’t live in a perfect world.
We live a world where humans get fulfillment and virtue from creating something. We also live in a world where people need to have a profession of some kind to be able to survive. Automating this process and taking it away from living humans from my perspective is morally abhorrent in both a personal and economic standpoint. On top of that it is taking the working artist work and using it to push them out of what fulfills them in life and puts food on the table.
By moving to an ecosystem that has generative AI as a widely accepted tool or process, you are effectively turning people into consumers when they would be creators. Which from a psychological and personal perspective is much less beneficial and is more harmful to the person. In my opinion it is harmful to the creative spirit of humanity itself.
This level of spice of that take should put your ass in the fucking hospital.
Do you think all automation is harmful to society or just automation that displaces artists? What makes an artist's job more valuable than a plumber, or a programmer, or a factory worker?
@ Great question. I think automating something that defines or grows human experience is immoral in a broad sense. Obviously what defines human experience is a slippery concept that means something different depending on the person and perspective. With something like art or creation in general there is a long tradition of the act of creation adding meaning to one’s life, and adding a depth that wouldn’t have been there without creating something new. With a more blue collar job like plumbing that becomes a grey area. Non-plumbers would certainly just see plumbing as meaningless labor or work so they think “Why not automate plumbing?” It would save time and free up that persons time for something else. But that plumber might get all of their meaning from solving problems related to that. Their “music” in life comes from the satisfaction of making a very clean and efficient piping system work for people. That the act itself adds to the person’s life, and if something means that much to someone should we deprive it systematically? This concept could be applied to basically any type of profession. So from that angle any type of automation could be taking away something from a person’s experience and meaning in life. But obviously there is a lot of automations in our life that are useful, and someone might have enjoyed doing something industrial by hand in the past that is now a widely accepted automation. In practice, I think it depends on the case at hand. I think we should not be taking away opportunities from real individuals to have real experiences of creation from a philosophical level. From an economic perspective it is taking away creative opportunities from the individual and giving it to cooperations with comparatively way more power already.
But ultimately I have no idea on where the line is. I am just an artist and professional artist that is in love with the act of creating itself, and my heart bleeds for the implications going forward for human made art in the commercial space.
@@troutfish8590 Thanks for having a balance and nuanced take on this issue. I think I ultimately believe that automation of image creation outweights the negative impact of artist job loss. But I realize there is a give take
@@_Squiggle_ lemme ask you this
Is your ultimate wish for society that we eventually sit in pods with all our needs are handled by robots and we simply experience a digital specifically designed to make us happy?
Because the ultimate conclusion to automating everything is that.
Art isn't a necessity for survival, it's something we do to add meaning to our lives, that's the sole thing it is for. So why are we trying to automate it?
@@CorralSummer That scenario sounds like a dream for artists. All the mundane needs are taken care of and they can spend all their time creating art, wihthout restraining themselves in any way, i.e. to make their art better suited for the market.
Initially I was outraged by mint being the opposite of spicy. But my girlfriend pointed out to me that the coolness of menthol mint works by latching onto your mouths coolness receptors in the same way that capsasin does that to heat receptors for spice. Therefore working identically but on receptors measuring the two ends of the same spectrum. All in all, I now agree with you.
Bro if you're here who's moderating your subreddits
Art might not be produced in a vacuum, but AI aren't people. AI are owned by someone, and has no personhood. AI is a fancy brush. And what it's painting is copies.
And the people owning the AI are doing a plagiarism.
The vast majority of AI images are not copies of existing work, they are actually new images. They have recurring styles, and sometimes people's styles are clearly ripped off, but the image is unique, that's kinda the whole point.
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy In theory AI can "create" an image which has never existed, those pixels or colour patterns have never existed before. Even if it has "taken inspiration" from various sources so do we. Its an interesting point which i want to disagree with but ive never heard it worded that way and im inclined to agree right now
@@ThingsAreGettingTooSpicy what is a new image in this context? Because the "AI's" that we're using now aren't really AI's. They can't actually make new things. They can only really combine existing artworks directly. They can't find a new style. They can't create a novel motif.
An image being unique isn't the point. If I create a copy of the Mona Lisa, that copy is unique. That is not in question. It is still a copy of the Mona Lisa.
@@karl-erlendmikalsen5159 "what is a new image in this context?"
you answer this. Give your criteria for what counts as a "new image". You won't. Because if you did, you'd see that generative AIs can do it.
"They can't actually make new things. They can only really combine existing artworks directly. They can't find a new style. They can't create a novel motif. "
These are empty statements. It doesn't matter to you how the picture actually is, you'll just say it's not novel. If you learned that mona lisa was made by aliens using generative AI trained on the artwork of the time, you'd say mona lisa wasn't novel, was just plagiarism. Even tho when a human made mona lisa by training its biological neural network on the environment of the time, for some reason, it's no longer plagiarism, now it's creativity.
The complexity of the human brain and our unique journey through reality makes human shared experiences too important to be reduced to computation.
I'd like a bit of clarification on the ethical emotivism standpoint on incest mentioned here. You essentially stated that despite there not being a good reason to condemn it as wrong, simply having that "icky feeling" about it is enough to say that it *is* wrong. To me, that sounds awfully and uncomfortably similar to the reasoning many people have that leads to viewing things like gay sex as wrong. Is there any reason that exact same argument couldn't be used to justify homophobia, and if not, does my current "icky feeling" towards ethical emotivism mean that using ethical emotivism is wrong?
Morality is subjective, so no, you can't reach that conclusion
That was a cool format!
1:12 wronger should totally be a word 😅
Yes, "wronger" is a word that is in common usage. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists the first printed use of "wronger" in 1375, and the earliest known use of the noun "wronger" is from around 1449.
:)
"Wronger" is an adjective that means not according to a moral standard, or sinful or immoral.
:)
While "more wrong" has been more popular than "wronger" for most of the time, both forms are correct and in common usage.
3:16 I smell a sponsored segment coming.
By definition, the Earth is the center of the observable universe
Not necessarily
All of these takes so far (half way through) are so interesting
5:34 really? There isn’t a meaningful difference AT ALL between a human being inspired to make their own art consuming an entire lifetime’s worth of art and a machine spitting it out at the press of a button? I mean, in your own description the process for a human is so much more in depth and requires so many more steps. No, you can’t create art in a vacuum, but surely there is something meaningful about the presence of a human’s perception in questioning what qualifies as art to begin with, right?
Alex is not an artist. It's troublingly easy for non artists to lack insight and empathy for why they're wrong when they equate what AI does to what the conscious/sentient can do.
@@viewsandrates Good news! I'm an artist with a studio and gallery work and everything and I say Alex is 100% correct. Glad to clear it up for you
It astounds me how people tend to forget that the imagination aspect of AI art still comes from humans. Humans provide prompts, guidance, and ultimately select which piece(s) of art to use and present. Like, yeah, most of the legwork is done by AI that uses references of lots of different work, but humans still give it some guidance. And the more guidance they give, the better the piece of work usually ends up being.
@@GoeTeeks That is nowhere near the level of control and _dialogue_ that an artist have with a piece tho.
Artists don't randomly spawn pieces on a whim, it really is a process. Art is a process.
AI skips over that part entirely and goes straight to the final result.
It's the difference between the chef at the restaurant and the customer that orders the dishes, literally.
The customer might have some control over what the final dish will be, but only one of them is a cook.
@@viewsandrates I am always baffled by the the fact that so many artists simultaneously insist that AI couldn't possibly do what they do, while also maintaining that AI steals their job. If your art can get replaced by AI slop, was it really art in the first place?
Great video!! Lots of fun ❤
it's kind of a mistake to view moral choices in a vacuum or from a single position
any choice is part of an emerging pattern and choices you make might seem irrelevant from our narrow perspective, but observing the ripple effect it can have through time is what shapes functional morality. Incest might seem innocuous in principle, but the ripple effect is increased chance of genetic degeneration in a population over time, we are always dealing with probabilities and influential downstream effects
that said, we don't have a perfect way to gauge the validity until we explored potential dead ends (with death/survival being the ultimate deciding factor)
We don’t forcefully abort children who we know 1.are going to be born with disabilities, or 2. are carrying dna that has a high chance of a specific genetic abnormality.
That specific reason for outlawing incest doesn’t hold up under critique.
@@DevourerSated 'we' don't do that because just a few hundred years ago nature took care of that for us, ensuring less viable genetics would not survive at significant scale. Whether it's a good & moral thing to allow certain disabilities and heritable diseases to permeate is yet to be seen, we might just be pushing the issues to future generations
if fast forward 1000 years and the world was a horror show of genetic disorders and abnormalities, morals would likely be very different
it's about understanding consequences over time, not altruistic grandstanding in the present
(im not advocating for any kind of lawmaking, it's an organic thing just as our human morals are - if anything people should make such decisions themselves, but it's unnatural for most individuals to consider future consequences)
If you make the agrument a numbers game this would require a sufficiently large part of the population to be genuinely interested in incest in the first place, which I find highly dubious.
It's also a mistake to assume that incest always results in children; I think you have to separate the morality of intimate acts from the morality of creating children as products because they are not equivalent acts. Intimate acts have no impact of the gene pool unless they result in children.
regarding the spongebob topic, when you mentioned that you heard of Spongebob being described as representing the 7 deadly sins, this lead me to the thought that the 7 deadly sins themselves were surely based on observed general characteristics of people who had already existed making it sort of a backwards thought process, or "reverse causality" as google has let me know.
in a similar sense, i felt that the "critique of materialism" idea is too meta for spongebob specifically, and applies to literally every aspect of imagination, as anywhere we make a material change, even down to including the material action of neurons moving thought to thought, is, at least the illusion of an attempt at rejecting the state that you would be in if you were otherwise lifeless material.
in saying this, while the reactions of living things may appear more special than non-living matter in the very simple and surface level assumption that life is a successful rejection of the material world, upon deeper thought, it is nearly (leaving room for uncertainty) obvious that while we may certainly have different properties than non-living material, that we are equally bound by material laws and don't have any choice one way or the other but to be intuitively convinced that we are successfully rejecting the material world even though we are completely out of control in a meta-material sense.
it seems as if there is a sort of catch 22 situation where life itself is a material illusion that it has any non-dependent ability to influence the world, because we very apparently do influence the world, and evidence even strongly suggests that we do, but fundamentally we are near (again leaving room for uncertainty) obviously entirely dependent on the laws of the universe and whatnot which are the real determiners of what is able to, and what is ultimately going to happen, which suggests exactly the opposite of anything even resembling "control" or "ability".
peculiar state we find ourselves in! is this limbo?! i think by the definition of the word limbo meaning "uncertain awaiting", we sort of are :P
The most common response I've seen to the question of "Why is a child's death worse than an adult's death?" mentions some aspect of potentiality. I'm curious if you think the prospective future of a child is worthy of consideration. If so, would the same be said regarding a fetus?
that child or fetus has the same chance of adding nothing to society as it does adding to society plus it needs to be invested in. a full grown adult is already contributing to society with no need of investment of time or money
@@markjuckenburg6006 This view assumes a very short term growth mindset. If we didn't prioritize the potential futures of the next generation, the survival of the species would diminish and there'd be no assurance of a continued societal production value for individuals who live to old age.
But the child thirty years later will be more valuable than the adult 30 years later. In the end, their value would even out. And if we think that education is improving overtime then children might be slightly more valuable in the long run
@@_Squiggle_ Every abortion and discarded sperm cell is also wasted potential for the future. Is it wrong to abstain from procreation or have abortions? I think there is a problem with giving too much credence to the prospect of the future. There's infinitely many ways to create this value. I think potentiality is a flawed argument whether it's regarding sperm cells, fetuses, or children. It's most pragmatic to judge subjects based on their current merits.
For what it's worth, I think there are other valid reasons for why a child's death could be worse. A child's death could be more detrimental to the parents mental health and leave them unsatisfied in their pursuit of raising a child. Also, in certain circumstances, a child's death could be indicative of a failure of societal regulations. (E.G. If we let a child walk into a lion's den at a zoo, as opposed to an adult voluntarily doing the same.)
the geocentrist take reminds me of my favourite stupid-but-accidentally-profound tweet which goes "Looking up at the stars always reminds me that stars are so small just little dots who cares. And I am enormous", which is the exact opposite of the specks on a floating rock in space mindset and I kind of love it
As someone who is into really niche art few artists produce actually good pieces on, AI has been somewhat of a blessing. Yes, 95% of it looks like garbage, yes 99% of it won't even get revised and uploaded with its typical AI artifacts and 'AI artstyle' but there's still the 1% of AI 'artists' who actually use these generative AI models to produce new (yes, new), AI *based* art that looks as good if not better than 'real' art. Can you zoom in and notice it's not actually drawn by a human? Most of the times, yes. Doesn't matter though because nobody analyses brush strokes of digital art and analysing lighting or colour theory on AI imagery can still be done.
Yeah, the real problem with AI art at the moment is the economic incentives, i.e. it's being used to replace actual artists, whilst using the art they create as dataset to train said AI, basically using the artists' own creations to strike against their careers, just for companies to be able to save a few bucks.
But if we remove that aspect, AI can be used for creative pursuits. It can be just a new tool that people can use to create cool stuff. Just like photography didn't kill painting because we could find ways to use painting to express things by not having to just perfectly replicate reality, AND, at the same time, photography became an art in and of itself, the revolution brought by AI art could go in a similar direction.
But ideally, we need to make sure the current artists don't actually suffer because of the economic issues brought by the ways the tool is currently being used.
IIRC it was the Renaissance philosopher Bruno who said the cosmos was a sphere of infinite size with an infinite number of centres.
"He proposed that the stars were distant suns surrounded by their own planets (exoplanets), and he raised the possibility that these planets might foster life of their own, a cosmological position known as cosmic pluralism. He also insisted that the universe is infinite and could have no center."
I recalled incorrectly, because the inside of my head is infinite but my neurons are spread rather too sparsely across the expanse.
Am I the only one who thinks he looks like Chico Buarque with that moustache?
Found the brazilian! Also, I agree
Great video concept, love it!
that ai take i think will only be valid once we have true ai and they alone are making art consciously without a human typing prompts into it and then getting mad when people call them out because they put no effort into the art "they" made
Interesting. So, the human adding the prompt is what makes AI images different than human-produced images?
*"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy"* ----Christian Minister Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
The problem isn't AI art- it's passing off AI art as your own art. Plus the lack of an artist's consent for their art to be used in the dataset.
There's also the fact that a human artist can and should be expected to credit their inspirations and influences, but AI rips us artists off with no credit and no links back to the original.
Missed the point entirely.
the problem with regular art is the lack of an artist's consent for their art to be used in the dataset that trains other artists
Incest doesn't generally create a defect childern if its practised on a first generation or first time but the chances of defect is just points higher then people who doesn't share close common ancestor
Imagine if Alex shaves the moustache a little bit from the sides 😂😂
Should we then call him The Fuher?
Alex, I think there’s a bit of a mix-up here between emotivism and moral intuitionism. In one of the comment you highlighted, you suggest that ethical emotivism aligns with the biblical phrase "I will put my laws on their hearts, and write them on their minds." However, this passage actually reflects moral intuitionism, not emotivism.
Emotivism is a meta-ethical stance where moral statements aren't truth-apt; they’re expressions of emotion or approval/disapproval, rather than statements of fact. A phrase like "murder is wrong" is non-cognitive under emotivism, comparable to saying "unicorns taste like Sunday"-neither true nor false.
Moral intuitionism, on the other hand, holds that we can access moral truths through our intuitions, and it is actually more compatible with error theory than emotivism. Error theory allows for the possibility that moral statements aim to convey truths, even if they're ultimately mistaken. This aligns better with the Bible’s approach in passages like this one, where moral truths are assumed to exist, and we are told we can recognize at least some of them through our intuitions. This perspective presupposes a form of moral realism and cognitivism that’s incompatible with emotivism.
A NEW CHALLENGER HAS APPEARED..
*** KOREAN SPICY ***
Here is something, let’s hear your input.
I call it the “The law of balance”
Things will always balance themselves… if something gets too extreme in one direction, it causes things to go extreme in the other direction.
was really disappointed to see you partnered with MyHeritage, supporting the gazan genocide aside some of the posts from their CSO on twitter are downright disgusting
i hope you take more thought before selecting your next sponsorship
first off, what fucking genocide, second, what the fuck does MyHeritage have to do with that? for fucks sake go back to protesting starbucks
From my point of view, I'm the center of the universe.
I think that AI trained on people's art is meaningfully different from real people making art as in, AI doesn’t have to eat doesn’t have to pay rent doesn’t have to work. AI art ‘tools’ were designed to replace artists in the industry and the fact that it was trained on their hard work to do so is in my opinion absolutely disgusting.
People like to compare this view to that of the Luddites. But I fail to see the similarity because when the printing press and camera were invented they weren't built off the backs of working people.
I mean the producers of printing presses used the work of generations of scribes by using their typefaces, their word spellings, their recorded knowledge, etc. I think innovations have always used the work done by previous workers and innovators. Automation has been reducing jobs for hundreds of years and it turns out better in the end
I think AI uses the data from images in a transformative way by definition. Each image only changes some of the weights in the model slightly and overall the model learns patterns from many thousands of similar images, not from learning any one distinguishable attribute from any particular artwork. And then an image produced is the combination of the patterns and a random noise pattern
The Nonidentity problem sounds very interesting. I will be looking forward to that. It ties into something I often think about regarding children born with disabilities that could have been screened for and avoided. My goto for it right now is "Everyone that exists has a right to exist, but anyone who doesn't exist yet does not have the right to come into existence"
If you consider the idea of consent, I don't think the first take makes sense at all. Notice that, at least in the United States, you can only enlist in the Army when you turn 17 years of age, and quote, "If you are enlisting at 17 and are not already emancipated, then permission is required from a parent or legal guardian and will need to be a part of the enlistment process." In other words, US society believes that children cannot consent to fighting in wars.
I think emotivisim is an interesting point of view that allows us to understand certain situations. For example when you stop pretending to have a logical reason to dislike incest, and you admit that, as far as you know its just an emotion, thats a step towards truth.
However i dont think anyone should actually be an emotivist, in the sense that its their chief moral system. Because emotivism is just not good at explaining anything beyond tagging a ''it is what it is'' to whatever you dont understand, if i love that people of all sexualities can be free to practice them, and you think all gays should be stoned to death, from an emotivist standpoint we just both have emotions, mine are worth more to me but yours are worth more to you, thats not how you build consensus and civilisation.
To me emotivism is like Marxist class analysis, you absolutely need to have it, youll understand both people and history way better if you take into account material conditions and social classes, however when you try to view history only trough that lens you lose the ability to explain alot. Why did two people from the same class fight eachother? oh its because the capitalist elite pushed them to do it to keep them dirstracted from the real issue... Okay then why do two 0,01% rich people fight eachother? uhhhh, capitalism agin, its not like they can have any other meaningfull difference.
I think emotivism alone isnt enough for a moral system
Controversial take- We need Jordan + Dawkins part 2 with a more structured moderation.
I can live without that.
I think we evolved to put emphasis on protecting children. If children die, they don't become adults and the species dies off. It has been known that infants and toddlers have many of the physical characteristics that people tend to find attractive in adults. The theory is that this compels adults to tolerate these young ages more and want to protect them.
Jordan Peterson says "you need to be the best toilet cleaner ever to find meaning in your life". I'd say f*** that. I'll wait for my dad to hire me as his business manager.
Jordan Peterson also said that when the Bible said "Dragon" it meant "Predator"
You will still need humbleness to understand. For most, it doesn't hit till later in life.
If only ONCE, UA-cam could be without mentioning Jordan Peterson.. 🤮
@trinsit nah, Jordan is an idiot. He doesn't even know what he means when he speaks. Personally, I wouldn't waste my time with mediocre tasks if I know I can do better. If I know this, I will pass on the toilet cleaner job and start piping the house for the toilet.