I still feel that the distinction is not so clear.

Why is “banning lead” seen as a biological “change”, but “banning soda” is tagged as a “social effort”?

I re-read it and I get a feeling that what it’s talking about is not so much “biological” vs “social” but rather… “physiological” vs “psychological”, and arguing that psychology can be a lot more complex to deal with than physiology. Which I guess is fair.

The Free Software movement wasn’t really anti-commercial, they explicitly allow commercial purposes as part of the freedoms to protect, it’s part of the first freedoom they defend, “freedom zero”.

And it’s not like the open source movement wasn’t inherently political either… wanting more companies to join the movement is actually a political position.

But also, it’s not like the Free Software movement didn’t want to have more companies adopt their philosophy… they did want that, I mean that would have been awesome if it had happened. And when possible the FSF has actively tried to convince companies to get on board, they even have run programs to help companies promote themselves as certified by the FSF, such as the “Respects Your Freedom (RYF)” certification.

What makes the Free Software movement different is that they actively see proprietary software as evil. They see freedom as a right, something mandatory, not something to merely be “open” to. Going out of your way to not use closed source software, to the point of crippling yourself digitally if necessary, is then the ethically correct behavior. Whereas the “open source” movement sees it more as an option, something that can be useful but not strictly necessary, they wont consider it inherently bad/evil to use proprietary.

This is akin to someone considering buying ethically sourced shoes as something optional vs considering it a moral obligation so as to not be complicit to evil practices. Or say… saving energy being an option that might be convenient for you personally vs a moral obligation with the planet.

The business model at the time for most commercial projects was based on offering software as a product, not as a service, so they didn’t want to release their code. When eventually the shift towards services started to happen, companies gravitated towards the “open” side because it allowed them to take advantage of free software while retaining proprietary software for those situations in which it benefited them, without being flagged as “evil” by the same community they were working with.

It’s ironic how WebP lossless mode is actually better at compressing the image than the lossy mode.

I bet most people would use the default thinking that they are making a compromise and that increasing the quality would make the compression worse. They wouldn’t know unless they tested making the images themselves, because it’s not easy for users to differentiate lossy webp from lossless webp.

This imho is why lossless should be in its own format, instead of trying to make a single container format do everything, like WebP was trying. A new compression level for PNG would be most welcome.

The social and the biological are deeply interconnected and there’s a point that the differentiation becomes arbitrary rather than something fundamental. Our instincts, our goals, our desire for survival, our push towards surrounding ourselves with people to feel protected, our desire to feel loved and cared for, our feeling of empathy… all kinds of ideals, objectives and goals, everything that comes “from the heart” is deeply linked to our biology, it’s not something that comes from rationality and logic, they only make sense “emotionally”, and emotions are deeply rooted in evolution and our animal brain.

I honestly don’t think the left is more social or less biological than the right. It’s true that the right is less flexible to change, but that doesn’t mean they are any more (or less) rooted in the biological than the left is.

There are many philosophers of the mind that agree that intelligence and consciousness are separate things.

Some examples are Daniel Dennett and John Searle.

There are also currents of thought in philosophy of the mind that disagree that even things like “slime mold” are mindless. Both from the materialist direction (like panpsychysm) and from the idealist direction (Bernardo Kastrup’s idealism).

Most philosophers of the mind would disagree that the reason for their field to exist really has anything to do with any specific terminology / position. I’d say it has more to do with curiosity and the interest for seeking truth. Like most fields of philosophy do.

Your definition of intelligence, which is what the AI companies use, has made people more confused than ever about “intelligence” and only serves the interests of the companies for generating hype and attracting investor cash.

I’d argue it’s your definition, which includes consciousness, what makes AI an attractive term for investors. Precisely because you say intelligence include awareness and it can lead to people to misinterpret AI as self-aware.

Promoting your definition helps the interests of the companies who want to generate hype, and causes just as much confusion as you attribute to mine in that regard.

At least mine is simpler and makes it easier to invalidate the hype, since if intelligence isn’t awareness then AI isn’t awareness. Many philosophers have agreed with that, for years, before LLMs were a thing. John Searle for example is famous for the Chinese room experiment.

Why is it a problem?

Generally, I’d say having clear, specific and useful definitions is a good thing to help communicate and understand what we are talking about and avoid misinterpretations.

What is the reason you think philosophy of the mind exists as a field of study?

Playnite

Interesting. Does it support gamepad input? I wonder how does it compare with things like Heroic Games launcher?

Then I think we had a different understanding. My understanding was something akin to what bluesky does with the PDS, the data service just hosts data and hands it over to the other service which is the one actually doing the indexing of that data and aggregating it into communities. The data of the community might be hosted in the hosting services, but it’s accessed, indexed and aggregated through the authentication service.

The access management, the accounts, the distribution of data, etc. that’s still in the server managing the federation. That’s the way I understood it, at least (I’m not the person that originally started this train, that was @TheObviousSolution@lemmy.ca ).

This allows the content to potentially not be completely lost if an instance dies because it would be easier to carry your data to another instance without losing it. It’s the same principle as in bluesky but applied to the fediverse.

it is more interesting to have users to build a local community than just being a storage server.

Imho, it comes down to how much you care about the content of the community you are building. The reason I’m in lemmy.ml and not some smaller instance is because of problems like the ones showcased here.

If I could self-host my own content I would not mind being somewhere else. In fact, I’m considering setting up something through brid.gy. The fact that there isn’t a separation of the hosting means that if I want to secure my content I need to have my own 1-person instance which is not something the protocol is very well suited for. Plus it’s likely most lemmy instances would not federate with it anyway since, understandably, they may prefer an allowlist approach rather than blocklist. The only sane way would be to have the instances have full control of the access as they are now, with storage being in a separate service that can be managed separately, the hosting service.

it is currently recommended to mod from local accounts

Would this change at all if there was a hosting service?

I expect you would still be recommended to mod from local accounts (the “authenticator”), even if the content hosting was a separate service. The local account would continue being the primary source of access to the content… note that having a separate hosting service doesn’t mean that the hosting service must be the one managing access to the content from the fediverse.

Hosting involves removal of content

Exactly. That means instances would not longer have that responsibility. That would be on the hosting service, meaning less pressure for the instance. Once they ban the user, the content would not be shown, it would be purged from the federating network of that instance, regardless of whether the hosting service actually deletes it or not (but I expect it would be better if the protocol makes it so banning a user sends a notification to the hosting service).

At the moment, if a Lemmy.world user spams CSAM content everywhere, other admins can reach out to the LW admins, they ban the users and purge the content.

It’s more complex than that, at the moment, because the purge also involves mirrored content in other federating instances. The interesting part is that after it’s triggered, then the process is pretty much automatic. When purging, Lemmy.world admins don’t have to manually go around asking to all the other instances to delete the content. The purge request is currently being notified automatically to instances federating with it. Why would it be any different for a content hosting service?

Since he said that the authenticator is the one that handles the communication & access, I expect banning the person from the authenticator would already automatically prevent anyone using that authenticator (or any other authenticator federating with it) from seeing the content.

As I understand it, the only thing the content provider would do is hosting the data. But access to that data would be determined by the service doing the access control, in the same way current instances are doing it.

I don’t know, I feel it’s actually the opposite. Awareness is something you can only experience subjectively, it’s “qualia”, a quality that you cannot measure outside of yourself or detect externally. There’s a reason IQ (“intelligence” quotient) tests use puzzles/problems and don’t test conscious awareness. Most of the time in science intelligence is defined as problem solving and capacity to adapt/extrapolate because that definition makes it observable and more scientifically useful.

If it were to include awareness then we can’t in good faith answer the question: “is it intelligent?” …we can only say we don’t know. This is the main struggle of philosophy of the mind, what is often called “the hard problem of consciousness”. Empirical analysis would not show if something is having (or not) the conscious experience of being aware.

Yes, that’s what I meant 2 comments above by “fungus” (though to be fair, whether slime molds are fungi depends on your definition, they used to be classified as one, before “protist kingdom” was made up to mix protozoa, algae & molds, but I keep preferring the traditional autotroph / absorptive heterotroph / digestive heterotroph division).

I also mentioned ants who can find the optimal path by simply following scents left by other ants without understanding how this helps with that.

You can be intelligent without being aware of your intelligence, or you can be stupid without being aware of your stupidity… like how humans are actually creating problems for themselves in many cases.

Intelligence != awareness

Yes there there as many types of intelligence as there are types of problems. Emotional intelligence deals with emotional problems, social intelligence deals with social problems. This doesn’t conflict with my definition, it’s still problem solving.

Just because a being is intelligent does not mean it can solve all the problems of all kinds, it would require general intelligence, and even a generally intelligent being needs the right training… if you are trained wrong or trained for a different kind of problem that does not fit the current one then your current experience might actually get in the way, as you point out.

They’re no more intelligent than an AC/DC converter

The problem is in the definition of intelligence.

To me, intelligence is simply problem-solving ability. It does not necessarily imply consciousness, having self-awareness or anything like that. A simple calculator is already displaying intelligence, even if limited to a very narrow situational set of problems, in the sense that it can resolve mathematical questions.

That doesn’t mean the calculator is self aware… it just means it can resolve problems. Biological systems can also resolve problems without necessarily being aware of what they are doing… does the fungus actually knows it’s solving a maze the scientists prepared for it when it just expands following what is preprogrammed by its biological instincts determined by natural selection? Do the ants really know what they are doing when they find the shortest path just by instinctively following a scent of pheromones left by other ants?

Knowing exactly what causes consciousness is an entirely different problem… and it’s one that has not been resolved by any scientist or philosopher in a satisfactory manner. So we simply do not know that.

No, what makes the poor majority choose to voluntarily vote against their own interest and shoot themselves in the foot is not the fact that there’s a powerful minority, it’s the manipulation.

Are you not aware of how popular capitalism is with the masses? the poor majority is primarily capitalist in all the capitalist countries. The majority disagrees with your idea of communism being the solution.

Manipulation is the name of the game. Appeals to compliance and stability, pushing narratives to vulnerable people in ways that is hard for them to examine them critically, politics being intermixed with social psychology, group-thinking and sometimes even reaching the levels of religious belief.

Manipulation is a tactic used by Nations of all colors… and it’s specially obvious with governments that explicitly seek lack of transparency, opaque systems, suppression of political opposition, silencing dissent, censorship… and… yes, lack of separation of powers (which does help with all of those). Like I sad before, the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in.

The moment you punish people for expressing being unhappy is the moment you can no longer trust that people will be honest when asked if they are happy. This adds extra levels of complexity, it only seems simple if you only look at it from a very superficial surface level.

Ah sorry, I misunderstood completely, I didn’t read it right. For some reason I thought you were talking about the router / wifi service being SOWPL.

what if, instead of a group of old men wearing weird wigs, it was actual representatives of the people chosen through democratic centralism?

You are assuming that people will never ever choose the group of old men… or that the group of old men isn’t gonna create an alternative progressive looking group that actually is just as bad, but happens to be very good at propaganda, marketing and appealing to popular social media poison trends / manipulation.

And I say “never ever” because the most dangerous thing is that a malicious group only needs to gain power once, in such a no-barriers system, to impose a dictatorship.

If electing officials were that easy, the people in Berlin would not have needed a referendum to push for this law, the elected officials would have pushed for it instead.

Of course, you can advocate for having direct democracy at any step of the way, but then you are essentially also doing separation of power, since you are essentially translocating the tribunal to the entire population, and it would be just as separate and varied as the whole country itself. I’d argue that direct democracy is the opposite of centralization of power.

It’s so much of a hurdle that all fascist regimes have been forced to weaken the division and ultimatelly break it completelly in order to build a fascist regime.

A “progressive law” is easy for a fascist in power to overthrow if they actually are able to weaken the division of power.

Why do you think Trump has been able to do a lot more in this term than in the previous one? Because he has been able to weaken that division, the judicial system is on his side, and he has a lot more connections with people inside the state now.

Ok,. so lets imagine your example from Berlin: would the situation have been better if there was no division of power and the same group of old men in a tribunal were the ones deciding the referendum should be made, deciding what laws should be passed, how should they be written and in which manner should they be executed, with which level of strength?

Division of power also means that if a group of old men in the legislative dictates a horrible anti constitutional law, there’s a chance the law can be repelled due to the judiciary being compelled to do so.

He didn’t say that separation by itself is sufficient. So naturally just having separation is not enough.

However, it’s a fact that a dictator needs, by definition, to break the separation of power in order to truly become the authoritarian leader with control over the country.

So NOT having separation of power is actually necessary to destroy a democracy.

I feel that trying to defend those things that someone would need to break in order to remove democracy is not a bad idea if we want to maintain democracy.

There are also a lot of other things that are necessary for a dictatorship… such as the dictator not being held accountable (meaning… transparency and mechanisms for accountability would be another principle to maintain democracy), or the dictator suppressing political opposition or dissent (so protecting opposition, whistleblowers and dissent, instead of prosecuting it would be another one). And I’m sure there are many others.

I mean… sure, you can, in theory, have a democracy without those things… but the more safeguards you remove the more and more you are allowing traits of dictatorship to creep in…