> It looked like the syndicate’s warnings to Watterson were well-founded: Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation.
Oh, that sounds bad.
> It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through.
What. This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
Remember his strip was popular enough that papers didn't have a choice. People were buying newspapers to get the latest Calvin and Hobbes. They may not like what he did but he had the power. Most cartoonists people read and sometimes laugh but if they get replaced nobody will care.
The contrast between "Calvin and Hobbes was threatened with widespread cancellation." and "only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened" is quite stark.
If you are running a paper and are already under stress and trying to streamline operations and now some cartoonist demands you use a format that requires significant extra work, you'd probably complain too, even threaten to drop that content. Threats are free, and they might work, especially if a lot of papers made similar complaints and threats.
But, when it came right down to the actual decision, knowing how many readers really love that particular artwork, and would even cancel their subscriptions if it were absent from your paper, and the math told you those losses would exceed the costs you were trying to avoid, so you'd find the papers collectively lost the conflict, and you'd keep it, do the extra work, and keep the subscribers.
Thinking about it for a minute, it seems unsurprising the difference between the initial cost-free bluster vs the final whimper of a handful of costly cancellations would be quite stark?
I think the first threatened is from groups like moral majority or similar threatening we will get your papers to remove it, and then the second is the actual papers making the threat based on threats from moral watchdog groups. Anyway that is my interpretation of what happened.
ah sorry I had it confused in my mind with Berkley Breathed, should have read article first but I saw the cancellation thing and I thought oh yeah I remember that.
> No, there's a lot more to it. I never saw this kind of fuss about 2000
I roll to disbelieve!
We had hype about the year 2000 throughout the 20th century, and some earlier! When we were IN the year 2000, it was quite common in my circles to tack on some phrase or comment about it being the Future, now, so [whatever thing the person was on about].
A very different type of hype. I remember it. More about the Millennium Bug and the New Year celebration. It didn't have the same vibe at all. The authorities weren't trying to hit various targets since then.
The real Millennium turned out to be 11th September, 2001, which was use to bring in a lot of planned changes.
> Sure, so? We did that quite a few times in the past, that's how we dont' still have Pharaohs.
I'm not sure I'd agree. Mostly those in power in the past were overthrown by outside actors or failed gradually without an active "overthrow". The ones we think of as relatively successful are mostly those that are "stop being ruled by someone not local", rather than "change the form of government in place".
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
TIL about the proliferation of menu item icons in Tahoe. Perhaps I missed the outcry when Tahoe came out, but I got around to upgrading to it only a couple months ago, and this was not a change that stood out.
> I assume we all believe that bats have experience.
Humorously enough, earlier he refers to those who believe that non-human mammals are not all conscious people as "extremists", so it's clear he understands this is not a fully accurate assumption.
Two separate meanings of "have experience" are being swapped interchangeably, I think: one is "brain can sense the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions", and one is all that plus "implements a person, or point of view, or subjectively aware entity that supervises experiencing", which is to say, a person. What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat, but that doesn't actually imply that bats implement or contain a personal point of view. If they don't, then it might be that there is no "what it is like to be a bat", but at most "what it is like to experience being a bat as a person implemented by a system which is not a bat".
I think he makes it pretty clear he's only talking about the second one of your two definitions
>What it is like to be a bat could be rephrased as what it would be like to experience being a bat if a person were being a bat
He says:
>[what] it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat
The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?
> The point is that bats do have a subjective experience of the world which is very different from a person's. It seems like you think only humans have this?
This is definitely a possibility given the very basic level of understanding we have of this. The reality is that we don't know, and we don't even have a well defined way to know (that is, we don't even have any idea what kind of proof we would need to bring that animals have an experience of the world in some sense that is the same as ours but different from a rock's).
I'm with Alan Watts. It's consciousness all the way down, in a unified, Spinozan, sense. A rock feels rock like you feel you, just in rock ways. Tat Tvam Asi, in a way.
It's useful for us to have the concept of separateness, like it's useful for us to have the concept of names, or a foot, or dollars, etc. But it doesn't mean things really are separate.
> It’s far more likely than not that they do experience things.
I don't think this is a fair statement. I also happen to believe that there are no gods and that most animals have subjective experiences in some sense similar to our own (while I also believe that atoms and rocks don't), but I don't really think there is a meaningful probability you can associate with either position.
If I was certain that bats had a subjective experience of the world, it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer. Since we don't understand how personal experience happens in humans, yet, I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.
>it would mean I think bats are people, just non-human ones. That's what being a person is: a subjective experiencer.
Okay, I think this is part of what I found confusing about your initial comment, since "person" is often used interchangeably with "human". But if you're using it to mean something that has a subjective experience then that's fine.
>I can't be fully sure that bats aren't persons, but I would agree that I think it's unlikely they are.
This sounds like it would put you with the "extremists" then? It's widely agreed that all mammals if not all vertebrates have some subjective experience, consciousness, sentience, or whatever you want to call it.[1][2] As you've said though we can't be fully sure.
I don't know what you mean to say by claiming the distinction. Can you prove to me that you have a richer first person perspective than a bat? Or if that's too hard can you convincingly demonstrate that the bat doesn't have a richer first person perspective than you? If no to both it's all needles empty speculation and self aggrandisement.
I don't know with complete certainty that there IS a distinction, to be sure, since I don't know how consciousness/subjectivity/personhood works. Every previous grouping of entities we've accepted as people have said so themselves.
In the first phrase, thermostat can substitute for "brain". A thermostat has a sense of (or "method of collecting data about") something not in the thermostat, and can react to changes in data reported by that sense, and some can plan changes based on expected future reports. None of that requires a person interior to the thermostat receiving that data and processing it.
I disagree. You can sense something using a thermostat. The thermostat is just a tool based on a functional relationship. "Sensing" has no literal, unequivocal use here.
You asked in what way I was using "sense" differently from "has a subjective experience of". My reply was that I was using it to effectively mean "collect data about". I don't have much interest in arguing that "sense" means one thing or the other, but I can reword my initial statement which you quoted as
> "brain can collect data about the world around the entity, react to changes, and act or plan actions"
without any harm to my intended meaning, and without requiring you to agree that "sense" doesn't necessarily include subjective experience.
The question is ultimately meaningless. All we have are actions and reactions, and brain scans. We can talk perfectly well based on that, although, it will be a bit cumbersome.
All the qualia, subjective stuff etc. is just shorthand, for whta ultimately boils down to actions in the world.
That already presupposes a very narrow idea of what's meaningful that is quite far away from everyday life, where we talk about and evaluate subjective experiences all the time.
How do we talk about ethics in terms of actions, reactions abd brain scans please? That looks like an uncovered check.
In what sense are they a shorthand for actions in the world?
Ethics is just code for expressing how we feel about things. There is no "ethic" in nature, just the words we say to express it. Every day life, and the way we talk about it, _is_ far away, many layers of abstractions, and that was precisely my point. Thank you for providing an example.
That's one opinion out of many. Some say so, some say so.
But you did not answer my question on how we talk about ethics in terms of actions and brain scans.
The devil is in the details, and when you try to express why it is bad to kill people over a small argument in terms of actions etc., then you might find that this is not as simple as you insinuated.
"There is no 'ethic' in nature" is also easy said in the armchair, but becomes a lifeless abstraction pretty fast when confronted with real human suffering and tears.
This raises an interesting question: is experience possible without a "point of view" as you call it; without any subject, only sensing and reacting? I don't think so. A purely reactive system cannot experience the world. Subjective experience requires an object to be experienced and a subject experiencing the object.
In the case of the bat, the object(s) being experienced are all the signals coming from the sense organs of the bat plus the inner chatter of the bat's mind (if they have some). The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.
> The subject experiencing those objects is the exact same subject allowing us to experience "human-specific" objects.
That's the question, is it not? We don't know how that "subject" is implemented in humans, but assuming we figure it out, we'll be able to see if that process is happening in other brains as well.
That might be too much of an assumption to make because of the binding problem. Imaging knowing absolutely everything there is to know - measurably, quantifiably, down to atomic/quantum states - about what happens when a human sees red but only having experienced a black and white world. Do you learn anything new when seeing a cherry for the first time? You experience red for the first time.
Measurement is third-person by definition, and consciousness is irreducibly first-person. So no instrument, however precise, can ever close that gap.
Consciousness/"the subject" is the raw material of reality. Matter, sensory inputs and mind are experienced as objects in consciousness not the other way around.
So in that sense "the subject" is exactly the same for the bat or the human.
> Measurement is third-person by definition, and consciousness is irreducibly first-person. So no instrument, however precise, can ever close that gap.
In a "logical proof" sense, yes.
However, that doesn't stop us from being able to experiment and understand consciousness, any more than it stops us from understanding the rest of the world around us. For example, "readiness potential" experiments, and the reliable cessation of consciousness under anesthesia.
Interesting examples, thanks for the nice discussion!
I believe it goes deeper than the "logical proof" sense. It's a category mistake. Consciousness can never be "objectified".
About the readiness potential I'd argue that it's still happening in consciousness just not being registered by the mind of the participant. In the experiment "conscious decision" or "unconscious brain activities" are misnomers. Thoughts, decisions, memory, latent biases, etc. are processes of the mind not of consciousness.
Anesthesia and deep sleep are also useful scenarios to investigate. There is an interesting question to contemplate for those examples: are they an absence of experience or an experience of absence? I'd contend that it's the experience of the complete cessation of all workings of the mind and sense organs. But consciousness is still there. Otherwise how would you experience the transition from waking state to deep sleep/anesthesia and then back to waking?
> Do you suppose that, for example, insects are not conscious?
Not the OP, but: since there is no testable theory of consciousness, yet, I can't be sure, but my current assumption is that insects are not conscious, in the sense of there being someone implemented in insect hardware who experiences the world. That is, I would argue there is nothing it is like to be a bee, since there's no one being a bee.
I'm pretty sure there IS someone who is being me, at least much of the time.
> since there is no testable theory of consciousness
I can't argue with this, so I acknowledge that my interpretation is as bunk as anyone else's.
> my current assumption is that insects are not conscious
Some species act as hive-minds (like bees! How convenient for your example), so I imagine the hive as the consciousness, making each bee individually lacking conscious but collectively so. Like a single neuron is not consciousness alone, but the brain is... For some reason. Kinda like how you use different physics at different levels; Newtonian physics is always there, but negligible at quantum levels, so effectively not present at all. Even a human is a collection of minds, but only one conscious. My gut biome is independent biology and can even be removed and transplanted, but I don't believe my gut bacteria is conscious. So long as it is in me, it is nonetheless part of me, and I am one conscious. I also don't exist only at my brain, eyes, or hands (deaf/blind people have expressed to me that they feel like they are located at their hands in the way I used to think I was located behind my eyes), but as my whole body.
With this perspective, I still don't believe LLMs are conscious despite modeling thinking so well. At best, it is a highly accessible modeling software, like goat simulator but if it were so good that someone thought the goat was real. You are still steering the goat/LLM, and it doesn't exist when you aren't running it. I guess the missing piece for me is the lack of autonomy that a conscious has.
Then you can go into an argument on whether we actually have choice or it is an illusion, but that is a whole topic on its own.
I'm on season 6 of a rewatch with family right now, and I will say that one of the things I had not remembered was just how much of the time brute force IS the right answer in this show.
Oh, that sounds bad.
> It says something about the popularity of Calvin and Hobbes — not to mention Watterson’s pulling power as a cartoonist — that after all the outrage and arguments, only fifteen of the 1,800 papers running Watterson’s strip threatened to remove it from their pages. And only seven followed through.
What. This directly contradicts the first statement, does it not?
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