Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

Jeremy Pober

@jpober.bsky.social

2.3K followers 960 following 5K posts

Philosophy Research Fellow at ULisboa. American, recently naturalized German, based in Lisbon. Philosophy of mind and psychology/neuroscience, metaphysics, and moral psychology Dogs, politics history, 90s Simpsons, SNL, some SF/F; 50% sh**posts.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · Dec 15

Is this anything?

Inigo Montoya, from "The Princess Bride" (a late 30's/early 40's man with long black hair and a moustache, dressed in clothes Hollywood uses to signify "olden times") is saying one of his lines from the movie "You keep on using that word--I do not think it means what you think it means." In the movie, he says this to Vizzini, in response to the latter's use of "inconceivable." In this image, he is instead saying it to David Chalmers, a philosopher who has done work on the notion of conceivability.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 25m

Took me a full 30 seconds to realize this wasn't game of thrones

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 29m

Lol even he knows it

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 1h

Yeah there's some sort of Ian Hacking-like looping effect between what Reinhart calls the moral infrastructure and social practices like shaming. The way to recalibrate the moral infrastructure to be conducive to a healthy society is (in part) to convince people they don't want to be like fascists

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 2h

I haven't in my offline life, but I'm 1 not religious/don't attend synagogue and 2 living in Europe (Lisbon for the past year). Not sure whether either of those are relevant or whether its just small sample size

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 3h

Gonna go out on a limb and say this will not turn out to be a strategic masterstroke on their part

Marisa Kabas @marisakabas.bsky.social · 3h

ICE just arrested a singing giraffe in Portland.

Robby Roadsteamer @roadsteamer.bsky.social · 5h

🚨 *Breaking News* Robby Roadsteamer has been detained by ICE Portland after singing Rod Stewart with the Portland Frog! We need your help!

Please support Robby's campaign and lawyer fees at robbyroadsteamer.com link on bio 💙🦒🦒🦒

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 3h

Same difference. He just doesn't have the kind of charisma that inspires people to make death threats on his behalf. Too whiny and petulant

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 3h

I mean my overall "Trump as Sulla" take isn't all that much more optimistic than this one, but I don't think Vance gets to be dictator. He just can't command the stochastic terror that keeps Republicans in congress cowed.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 3h

Because Trump, unlike Hindenburg, made it so only subservient weaklings could make it in his inner circle

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 3h

Yeah but when Trump kicks it and JD Vance tries to consolidate maga he'll get the hard core but lose all the low info "Trump is good at business" voters to Javanka or whoever and it'll be some great schaudenfreude

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 4h

Every single one of them has an origin story involving being rejected by a girl in junior high who either was a minority or went on to date someone who is a minority, and they decided to blame multiculturalism and/or the Jews rather than moving on with their lives.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

I haven't started working on that question yet; for now I'm just trying to convince people that there's not a chance in hell the things we interact with are conscious/persons while at the same time not ruling out that distant-future-tech could achieve consciousness/personhood.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

other candidates (preferences/desires that motivate behavior, feeling, reflective deliberation, executive function, a unified stream of experience, etc) are all lacking in LLM's: all they have is reinforcement learning.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

I think it's more likely to be a low-level functional property that's implementable in only a narrow range of substrates, but that's not the same as it being tied directly to the substrate (emergence or no).

That's what the "meat-based" people like Ned Block and Anil Seth really argue IMO

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

For examples of supplemental arguments see, e.g., Chalmers's chip replacement/faded qualia argument, or, more recently (apologies for the self-plug): faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/Sc...

The Copernican Argument for Alien Consciousness; The Mimicry Argument Against Robot Consciousness, by Eric Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober

faculty.ucr.edu

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

Chatgpt can probably perform calculations faster than Data could, but however he selected answers was much better at screening out "hallucinations". Not to mention he had his own set of preferences (which is what I meant by desires and I think a key feature of agency independent of consciousness)

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

It's true that you need a supplemental argument to go from behavioral or cognitive complexity to having phenomenal experience, but there are a bunch of those. I'd argue that the burden is on the person assuming non-consciousness to at least explain what is special about the organ in our crania

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

Like if we could build a Data, I'd be pretty ok granting him moral status. The thing is that the things we build and call "AI" are so far from Data that it's a nonissue.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

Picard gives a manipulative presentation but the argument isn't all bad: that having desires and conscious experiences as complex as any human is sufficient ground for moral personhood is pretty accepted (more debate about whether it's also necessaryl

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 19h

So either they intentionally chose someone who is a fan of Trump to *really* stick it to him or, uh, maybe they didn't make the best choice?

Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 20h

Nobel Peace Prize recipient María Corina Machado appeared on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast.

She touted the oil reserves in Venezuela (the largest in the world) and vowed to privatize the oil industry to enable American corporations to exploit and profit from the country’s resources if she gains power.

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 23h

At least you still have good pizza...

...just a train ride away in New Haven 😛

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 23h

I think Mike Johnson's origin story is that he saw Flanders and Smithers in an episode of The Simpsons, and thought "when I grow up, I want to be as obnoxiously religious as the one guy, but a complete hypocrite about it. And AT LEAST twice as much of a lickspittle as the other."

The Tennessee Holler @thetnholler.bsky.social · 1d

Just now— @SpeakerJohnson announces he will lead a global pressure campaign to get the narcissist-in-chief a Nobel Prize next year

(Also revealing he doesn’t understand what “objective facts” are)

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 1d

I have to admit I get a bit frustrated with the "don't tell people how to protest" types when there is tons of evidence suggesting there is a most effective way to move public opinion and it is this

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 1d

Only question I have at this point is whether it's all or just most of them

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 1d

Our school's not-terribly-athletic hockey goalie, in what may have been the save of his career, broke her fall. That's when we called security, who took her to the local hospital, told the triage nurse she was 22 (she was 19) and bounced (like I said, not cops!)

Jeremy Pober @jpober.bsky.social · 1d

Probably the time we had to call campus security (fake cops, don't worry) on this girl who was blackout drunk and wouldn't let her friends take her home, so she jumped out my window and started running through the snow toward a party, not noticing that she'd lost half her dress

nai THEE corpse bride 🦋 @astoldbynai.blacksky.app · 1d

14. What is your craziest college story?