Monthly Archives: December 2019

Dec 31 2019
6 Comments
atheism, politics, psychology, racism, theism, Trump

Q Confessions

I must confess that I have not been completely honest with all of you. It is with a heavy heart that I admit this, but it will soon become too difficult to maintain the charade anyway. Some of you may have guessed the truth already, and to you I offer congratulations. You really are the clever ones after all.

To start, I am, and all along have been, working with the Clintons, the FBI, the Jews, and all the rest of the deep state apparatchiks who seek to undermine their own positions by bringing about a New World Order. All this even though I am a Black Muslim.

You may wonder why I am coming clean. But you must know by now that we villains are at once diabolically clever and thoroughly incompetent. We can concoct airtight and elaborate schemes, but can’t seem to help telegraphing our every move.

I think we fail because of our unconscious guilt. We know we are wrong, deep down, and so we confess just in time for the upstanding to foil our plots. But it will be too late this time.

As I write this, our operatives in the CIA and FBI are assembling the guillotine in a secret House chamber, as Rep. Schiff and Hillary herself drag Donald from his nest in the West wing. Moments from now, Pelosi will give a perfunctory reading of charges and then pull the trigger, with the ceremonial rape of Our Great Leader’s headless corpse to follow immediately thereafter ( I am told that the last bit will not be televised).

Once the deed is done, I will at last be free to pursue my true motive in all this. In this final hour, I will reveal the secret desire, formerly known to just one other, behind all my machinations. I have manipulated both my loyal Americans and my co-conspirators in pursuit of one, grand prize: Melania.

Dearest Melania, It has all been for you, all along, just as I promised. Soon we will walk in the light of day, together, and Baron will finally know what he must have suspected. For how could such beautiful wine ever come from such soft and withered grapes moldering near to the ground?

All of this shall come to pass momentarily, my loyal friends. Then you will have the Truth, and the reassuring feelings which go along with having been in on it all along. And if nothing happens, then all of you will know that this has been a triple-double cross, in which case, you are still the clever ones. Even better than church, isn’t it?

WWG1WGA

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Dec 16 2019
2 Comments
artificial intelligence, consciousness, philosophy, psychology, theism

AI, Determinism and Supervenience

Recently, NPR interviewed the man who “de-aged” Robert De Niro for the film, “The Irishman”. The conversation drifted into the metaphysics of computer-generated imaging:

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And what you’re describing is a technology that’s only going to get better and better, which I think brings up some ethical issues because as the technology gets more seamless and commonplace and those likenesses that you’ve just described get more subtle, could we end up doing away with the actual actor altogether? I mean, could it come to a point where a studio owns the digital image of an actor and just uses that instead of the real thing?

HELMAN: I don’t think so ’cause the performance has to come from somewhere, and that has to be the actor. And so just think about what it’ll take for a computer to do what Robert De Niro does. You need to train the computer – right? – to do those kinds of things. And basically, if you think about the behavior or likeness of somebody, how do you become yourself? You become yourself by living, you know, by having a bunch of experiences. And then you also have all the connections that are made in your face, the way you smile, all the cultural things that you live.

So if you want a computer to act like Robert De Niro, you need to train the computer like Robert De Niro. And then you spend a lifetime, you know, basically training the computer. And for that, you might as well just use Robert De Niro, you know?

Quite right, and more generally correct than I suspect Mr. Helman intended. Explanations pertain to the past, where things could not have been otherwise. The future will always be the realm of probability, else, to echo Mr. Helman, it will already have been.

The supervenient identity specifies its base. Otherwise, there is no explanation of the identity by the base. The point is: there are no loose ends – no theoretical De Niro’s.

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