> By ‘consciousness’ we mean phenomenal consciousness. One way of gesturing at this concept is to say that an entity has phenomenally conscious experiences if (and only if) there is ‘something it is like’ for the entity to be the subject of these experiences.
Stopped reading after this lol. Its just the turing test?
One of the primary issues with Nagel's approach is that "what is it like" is - for reasons I have never been able to fathom - a phrase that imports the very ambiguity that Nagel is attempting to dispel.
The question of what it would feel like to awake one day to find that - instead of lying in your bed - you are hanging upside down as a bat is nearly the complete dual of the Turing test. And even then, the Turing test only asks whether your interlocutor is convincing you that it can perform the particulars of human behavior.
The "what it's like" is often bound up with the additional "what would it be like to wake up as", which is a different (and possibly nonsensical) question. Leaving aside consciousness transfer, there's an assumption baked into most consciousness philosophy that all (healthy, normal) humans have an interior point of view, which we refer to as consciousness, or in this paper and review as "phenomenal consciousness". Sometimes people discuss qualia in reference to this. One thing that I've noticed more very recently is the rise of people claiming that they, themselves, do not experience this internal point of view, and that there's nothing that it is like to be them, or, put another way, humans claiming that they are p-zombies, or that everyone is. Not sure what to make of that.
My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.
I think there is an element of "right country, right time" when it comes to being able to escape poverty with hard work and grit, though hard work and grit always helps.
I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the US. My outcome would have been vastly harder to achieve almost anywhere else. Even in the US it was far from certain.
I'm immigrant that come to the us and always that the Americans complain is hardd to understand, like for example inflation they complain about being 3% in my country there was hyperinflation 1000%, also I didn't use to have running water(water would come every 3 days) and electricity would stop working every few days and it would take several hours or days to get fixed.
then working here there is so many jobs and you can gain skills and double your income. Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury) latest ¡phone (also a luxury) and most don't cook by themselves also a luxury. I have a year here and I quickly got a comfortable living and I just don't understand it when they complain.
It's perfectly normal for a person to complain about being screwed over even if the person next to him is being screwed even harder. There will always be somebody somewhere who has it worse than you, but that doesn't mean that you shouldn't expect better for yourself than what you have, especially in a country like the US where a small number of people with more money than they could ever spend relentlessly exploit others and take from them.
Starting from nothing, it's easy to gain income and then double it, but most people eventually hit a wall and find that they can't improve their circumstances no matter what they do. Our society will conspire against them to keep them in their place. It will lay out traps for them to hold them back. Some of those traps, like payday loans, you might be able to avoid. For other traps, like our healthcare system, you will have to depend on luck to limit the number of times you are caught. Medical expenses are the reason most people in the US fall into bankruptcy.
Wealth inequality, and a lack of social mobility are huge problems in the US.
In the "wealthiest nation on Earth" 1 out of every 8 Americans can't make enough money to feed themselves without government assistance, but even for the others it's easy to gain a false sense of comfort where you are well feed and entertained, but still live paycheck to paycheck and don't have savings to protect yourself from sudden unavoidable expenses. 'Today you are fine, but always one bad day from ruin' is not a comfortable way to live.
Americans complain because even though things can always be worse, they should also be better than they are. I hope Americans never stop trying to improve their situation and the situation of those around them.
> Most Americans have a car (in my country this is a luxury)
Using this as an example to illustrate a broader point: Most Americans can't afford not to have a car. Public transit in the US is next to non-existent in many places. If you want a job, you probably need a car to drive to work every day. So you take out huge loans to pay for the cheapest car you can find: now your financial situation is precarious because you're in debt. Because you bought a bad car, you're constantly at risk of having it break down and having to pay to repair it, which is another layer of precarity.
Similarly, poor Americans do not have the latest iPhone—they have a cheap, used iPhone which could break any day, and they're extremely dependant on it. I can't speak to what life is like in the developing world, but living in poverty in the US is extremely stressful.
To be fair to iPhone point, that's sort of like saying they have a used Gucci bag. A new Motorola phone is cheaper than a 5 year old used iPhone ($130 for a new 2024 moto g vs ~$150-200 for an iPhone 12). A used Motorola is even cheaper (sub $100). Apple has always been a luxury brand. It's basically trivial next to housing, but I still can't imagine buying an Apple product.
I'll have to think harder to come up with the exact number, but I've had approximately 3 Android phones and 3 iPhones in my smartphone-career (changed phones more often in the beginning than at the end).
iPhones just last longer (and retain value a lot longer), even when compared to high end Androids (I did research online & bought the recommended brands at the time, like Google Pixel). I currently use an iPhone 11 (6 years old model at the moment, bought slightly-used a few years ago when it was a fairly new model) and have no plan to replace it anytime soon.
It is however very much a "rich people can afford to save money" boots-type situation.
A smart phone is increasingly required to do things like banking, pay bills, order things.
I live within a bike ride of a lot of places, but it would still add up to hours more a week. And for 3 months of the year there's ice and snow that are rough on the equipment.
In a democratic society, complaining is very important. It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
If you don't complain, you eventually won't be able to complain. If you can't complain, you take anything shoveled to you by the government, poverty being the foremost.
> It is probably why, by people complaining about a 5% inflation, the government had to take drastic moves to suppress it.
This is only a half-truth. Complaints are only worth respecting if people hold their governments accountable. There's a reason why single-payer healthcare polls higher than either party in the US. Inflation gets attention because it affects a minority of the population that matters more.
Steve Cutts <https://www.stevecutts.com> explains American unhappiness and tendency to complain (even though we've had it better than almost everyone ever).
The Pursuit Of Happiness is humanity's universal right, but our culture and the economy depends upon everybody always wanting more, and better...
Some things are fake issues created by the media to give people a reasonable sounding cover to vote for politicians that have reactionary politics that they wouldn't cop to in public.
This is why you hear people say they vote for Trump because of "the economy", even though when he and his party were in power the first time, the economy was on the downturn after he implemented policy (even before COVID) and every economist said Trump's proposed policies in 2024 would be bad for the economy. They were proven correct.
People would rather seem like single issue voters who don't understand that issue than be thought of as racist, supportive of pedophilia, misogynistic, etc. See also: "but her emails"
American living standards have declined from their peak in the mid-to-late 20th century. If you’re under 40 you will likely be materially worse off than your parents even if you are better educated than they are. It isn’t like this in the developing world, so there is still an optimism there for the young professionals benefitting from the development.
It's not so much the absolute amount you have, but rather your situation in comparison with your country men.
Yes, I know what 3rd-world poverty looks like, but, in a sense health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US). Also, the morale-destroying aspect of poverty hits harder in advanced countries, because people assume you're poor because of what TFA talks about: being lazy, dumb, etc.
Poverty exists people think it ought to, that's the simple reason it exists. People think a world where some deemed unworthy have to experience crushing poverty is a more meaningful world, that's it. Certainly there is absolutely no reason that any person has to go to bed hungry, as a lot more food is produced in the world than is needed.
But the difference is that I can respect people who complain about having absolutely nothing, but I can't take seriously the complaints of rich people that they aren't richer.
You misunderstood my response. Let me explain better: I'm not saying what matters is the relative amount of money you have in relation to your peers; it is about the relative claim you have on resources, power, respect, mental health, etc.
Money and those other things may be correlated, but focusing on those things emphasizes how much money is a proxy for them.
So for example, even if you earn 100k, but many/most people are earning 500k, it cause a huge power imbalance that enables them to easily make your life miserable on a whim. It also causes society to see you as a failure, causing mental/emotional distress that further pull you into a spiral of despair.
> health care is more accessible to poor people in 3rd-world countries than in some advanced countries (e.g., US).
Do you seriously believe it's even remotely comparable? In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
> In 3rd-world countries even basic healthcare is totally inaccessible unless someone in your family is at the top level of government. If you're a worker or in a worker family even glasses are probably almost impossible to get.
I know for sure this is totally wrong, because I have lived in 3rd world countries, and I was born in one. You're just imagining stuff.
I visited a few rural cities in the Central African republic ~15 years ago and this situation definitely exists (existed?) there. Your best bet is to try to get care in a monastery, but it's not like they have glasses or anything other than basic medicine.
The root of your disagreement lies in the fact that "The Third World" isn't really a useful abstraction anymore.
Plenty of former 3rd world countries are middle-income now. There is just no comparison between living in Thailand vs. South Sudan, even though there might be in the 1950s.
Time to toss the expression entirely, it doesn't really describe anything concrete anymore. The world has changed.
That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
For all its faults, the US is just such a place. I suspect that many other nations are starting to improve.
At one time, the UK was a nation that you couldn't get ahead, unless you were of a certain class. I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays. You can hear lots of cockney accents in Harrods.
> I think that it is much more like the US, nowadays.
IIRC, mobility indexes crossed quite a few years ago. IOW, UK is better than the US in this respect. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index, though it's a claim I've read based on other data and before that particular index was compiled.
Social mobility doesn't measure financial welfare and is only weakly correlated with the ability to improve your financial situation. It is largely a measure of wage compression in the economy. If everyone makes similar wages then the population will be highly socially mobile even if those wages are mediocre.
Absolute economic mobility matters much more in terms of having an opportunity to get out of poverty. High economic mobility increases wage variance and therefore naturally reduces social mobility scores since the latter is a relative rank measure.
There are countries where increasing your income $10k makes you "socially mobile" and other countries where increasing your income $50k does not.
It is a maths problem, not one of economic theory, and a well-understood limitation of "social mobility" as a measure in this context. Social mobility between two countries is only meaningfully comparable if their income distributions also have a similar degree of compression since it is a rank statistic. The large differences in wage compression between e.g. Scandinavia and the US are well documented, such as this[0] recent NBER paper, and not controversial.
Increasing rank is much easier than increasing income on a compressed distribution. Being able to easily increase income is much more important than being able to easily increasing rank if you are optimizing for economic opportunity.
Yeah, median income in the UK is about at the level of Mississippi, as is much of Western Europe (Western, not Eastern!). The US is just ridiculously wealthy, and our income inequality is largely a matter of the absurd heights reached at the top, with wide distributions. OTOH, wealth disparity (or even just the perception of wealth disparity) can be politically destabilizing and lead to some pathological social issues. Greater relative social mobility and greater (perceived?) wealth equality seems to result in a better sense of fairness, a sense of fairness is key to social cohesion and trust, and social trust is key to producing wealth. Though, social trust is necessary but hardly sufficient. Likewise, perceived mobility and equality seems necessary but not sufficient for healthy political and civic culture.
That lady has some serious chops, but she said she had to leave the UK, as she was denied opportunities, because of her "Distinctive Northern Accent" (In the UK, the "North" is considered kind of "Redneck," like our South).
Trying hard not to be and using some flimsy pretext to justify it probably accounts for 3/4 of state laws that don't pertain to a) a procedural matter b) a matter with an identifiable victim, or at least that's how it looks by my unscientific observation.
> That, and an environmnet that allows folks "from the wrong side of the tracks," to get ahead.
Vast swathes of this country look no better than the developing nations Sarah McLaughlin would go to to sing sad music and hold little kids to beg people for money in television ads.
Like I don't think you're wrong necessarily but at the same time, it really, really matters which tracks you're on the wrong side of.
> The average income is just $18,046 (£13,850) a year, and almost a third of the population live below the official US poverty line. The most elementary waste disposal infrastructure is often non-existent.
> Some 73% of residents included in the Baylor survey reported that they had been exposed to raw sewage washing back into their homes as a result of faulty septic tanks or waste pipes becoming overwhelmed in torrential rains.
...
> An eight-year-old child was sitting on the stoop of one of the trailers. Below him a white pipe ran from his house, across the yard just a few feet away from a basketball hoop, and into a copse of pine and sweet gum trees.
> The pipe was cracked in several places and stopped just inside the copse, barely 30ft from the house, dripping ooze into a viscous pool the color of oil. Directly above the sewage pool, a separate narrow-gauge pipe ran up to the house, which turned out to be the main channel carrying drinking water to the residents.
> The open sewer was festooned with mosquitoes, and a long cordon of ants could be seen trailing along the waste pipe from the house. At the end of the pool nearest the house the treacly fluid was glistening in the dappled sunlight – a closer look revealed that it was actually moving, its human effluence heaving and churning with thousands of worms.
Yup. Also: everyone reading this, celebrate that Flint, Michigan finally has water that's clean by Federal standards after just over ELEVEN. FUCKING. YEARS. That's right, America, land of opportunity, the wealthiest country on the face of the Earth (at time of comment), needed just over eleven years to get one city's inhabitants water that wasn't full to the tits with lead.
That's not NO lead, mind you, it's just now below the levels where the feds were willing to say it was a legitimate crisis. With a nod to who the feds are right now, and with a second nod to that's just at the supply line level, fuck knows how many homes still have lead pipes leeching into the taps.
Shocking absolutely no one who pays one damn bit of attention to this sort of thing: yes, Flint, Michigan is majority black.
“Used to be” such a place. Stagnating minimum wage while inflation proceeds unchecked, the rise of marginal employment and contract work. Skyrocketing housing costs.
I don’t think the us is such a place anymore. It fast becoming a place that is not.
The US was never a place like that. Even in the mostly imagined "golden age" of the fifties, if you were the wrong family or color you would not be able to reliably get out of poverty no matter how much effort or guile you could afford
The bank did not care that you would be a profitable customer, they still weren't going to lend to you.
You're projecting the current onto the past. It was a problem, but it wasn't the show stopper it would be today. Not having access to credit wasn't as big a deal when there weren't subsidized credit products and you therefore weren't competing with people who had artificial access to cheap money.
The reason minority communities exist is because those people were wealthy enough to own land, have businesses, etc. And this was before the modern idea of a home or business as a leverage investments so when they bought homes or started businesses they mostly did it where people like them were, not where a bunch of snobbish white people who hated them were (because that's where the best investment growth potential is).
Pretty much every discernible ethnic group in the history of the US has made an upward march from generally poor to more or less the same as average. There are two exceptions, native americans and blacks. And the latter was poised to do so in the 1960s. Much has been written about both so I don't feel the need to opine here.
Yeah, society was racist AF back then and imparted a lot of glass ceilings and certainly kept certain groups a little more down, but the past wasn't simply like the present but with more racism.
Yeah, and they probably had to spend money to make that happen. Night courses at a community college aren't free. A higher minimum wage makes it easier to get your foot in the door for something better.
I think that's a comforting lie people like to tell themselves. Lots of hard-working people never get their due. In reality, people who escape bad circumstances often just get lucky. That's hard to accept, because nobody "deserves" to get lucky. We want to believe we earned what we have, and that, if we had to do it all over again, we'd still end up succeeding. But often that's not true.
I think it's more comforting to think that you could've done nothing about your life being bad. It's so obvious that you need both good luck and hard work.
Both my parents came to America with less than $20 and nothing else but what they wore. I constantly think of how hard they worked to let me live such a leisurely life.
You have to be pretty well off to begin with in order to be in a position to take out $250k of student debt.
It’s the kids who can’t even imagine going to college due to living in poverty growing up that are actually “less than dirt poor”. Someone who went to a fancy college enough to get that far into debt is going to be extremely privileged on average.
You do not at all need to be well off to take $250k in student debt. In fact, the worse off you are the easier it is to do so. It’s how the US federal student loan aide works, essentially. The less you have the more they’ll loan.
Friends who grew up in middle class to upper middle class suburbs and parenting all took on college debt to varying degrees and varying outcomes 20 years later.
Friends who grew up with me in the inner city around poverty and who grew up poor or worse didn’t even consider college as an option due to the costs.
Almost no one growing up in actual poverty is going to be considering taking on six figures of college debt. The concept itself is utterly foreign and absurd. You simply already know at a young age it’s out of reach short of a full ride (sports or academic) scholarship. Even if you wanted to, your family doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for you to graduate college before you contribute to helping care for parents or younger siblings. This fact is socially reinforced by both family and your peers.
The folks I know who ended up with massive life-ending crippling student debt all grew up insanely privileged compared to the average around me. They all pretended to grow up “lower middle class” but they are outright lying to themselves (and others) about it.
It’s been interesting watching the student debt forgiveness debate under this lense. I don’t think a certain class of people understands just how tone deaf they are on the subject.
Sure there are outliers, but I’m talking about generalizations here.
I mean maybe by being a poor person in college on federal student loans I ended up naturally around other poor people in college on federal student loans and it’s confirmation bias, but what you’re saying is a little too generalized for my lived experience. Lots and lots of people growing up in poverty take that FAFSA and run - it’s what everyone says is the only way out of poverty.
I’ll give you this, though: most of the poor college students I knew (myself included) never made it to the $250k line because we eventually had to drop out because things like having to work to afford food made it harder to do well enough to stay in school and graduate.
I could say "yeah, but that was your whole country", but that was definitely your parents and everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them. Amazing.
Edit: answer to @kragen. I have to do it like this as I'm (partially) censored on HN.
xe doesn't mention xir parents leaving China, from the context of this conversation I would assume they are still in China since we are talking about the environment where people thrived.
Well, the thing wagwang's parents did that improved the well-being of the people after them was to leave China.
What the Chinese society had been collectively doing for the previous ten years, however, was creating "the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million)." And the following ten years included the first six years of the Cultural Revolution:
> Estimates of the death toll vary widely, typically ranging from 1–2 million, including a massacre in Guangxi that included acts of cannibalism, as well as massacres in Beijing, Inner Mongolia, Guangdong, Yunnan, and Hunan. Red Guards sought to destroy the Four Olds (old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits), which often took the form of destroying historical artifacts and cultural and religious sites. Tens of millions were persecuted, including senior officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Dehuai; millions were persecuted for being members of the Five Black Categories, with intellectuals and scientists labelled as the Stinking Old Ninth. The country's schools and universities were closed, and the National College Entrance Examinations were cancelled.
I don't think any of that can be accurately described as "everybody else doing unpleasant things for a while to improve the well-being of everyone after them."
Chinese history, including in the 20th century, includes many of the brightest stars that have ever illuminated human history, and after the Cultural Revolution, a meteoric rise out of poverty, led by the same Deng Xiaoping whose son was tortured and crippled by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution. But specifically in 01962 "everybody" was creating that poverty and worsening the well-being of everyone after them.
Immigrants show up in America having been knocked down by life here zero times and then compare themselves to people who've been knocked down generationally.
Is "by life here" doing the heavy lifting in your comment? Because obviously immigrants haven't been knocked down by life here.
I agree that folks have a pretty tough life generationally in America's rust belt. I disagree that this is unique or uniquely bad compared to many other places in the world. Although there is something pretty unique about the way American culture processes or encodes the hardship. Individualism can really make things worse...
If, for example, society sees fit to deprive me of my right to security (for instance, perhaps it deigns to throw me in jail if I defend myself against a home invasion), then society doesn't get to demand I give my life for its security.
In this way, it is society that has broken the contract with me, releasing me of my obligations to defend it. Most people who claim "duty and obligation to society" conveniently forget this is possible. By accident, I'm sure.
> You can have multiple duties and they can conflict.
There's a very strong impulse in American society to say that, no matter what situation you find yourself in, there must be a path out of it that doesn't involve doing anything wrong.
If you start with that premise, it's easy to prove that it's impossible to have conflicting duties.
I think this viewpoint is insane, but it's common anyway.
How much raising of the typical pleb draftee do you think is done by the politician declaring the war? Society is just a collection of people. Even if there is some original debt from being raised that forms a binding contract with a minor that never consented to it, which I don't take on face, it's hard to imagine how politicians declaring a draft trump the senior shareholders of that contract (the family that did the bulk of the raising).
In any case I would hope we would reject the notion that you can become a slave and made to die for the state because you allegedly owe them for something they did for you before you were old enough to even wittingly object or agree to it.
Drafting people to fight in pointless overseas wars is a blatant violation of the social contract and the people who made those decisions should be hung. That doesn't mean you don't have a natural duty to defend the society that supported your very existence.
We all collectively move. Unless you have a massive amount of unmovable property to lose, that you're willing to die for, going to get torn to pieces by a drone seems like a stupid idea. Even if I'm the reason we win the war, my mom and dad probably won't be too happy receiving me in an urn with a complimentary food voucher. We can get a new house, No need to die over its bombed remains.
Of course you can. You are an adult. Your actions and perceptions define what kind of a person you are though. If you perceive your 2 year old son as your forced obligation you are a slave and other things as well. And it's by choice.
Your definition of choice is not really what I'm talking about then. I'm discussing natural obligations that have make society work. Of course you always have a choice to not fulfill your obligation and society always has a choice to cast you out, like when you don't feed your 2 year old.
There are no natural obligations. Societies don't require them to function. Sum of correct choices people take for themselves is always a stronger foundation for society than any "natural" obligations. Obligations are narrative fiction. Choices, laws and enforcement is what's real.
This is the same argument that utilitarians use to argue about how we don't have to define morals because everything is taken care of by a utilitarian calculus. The problem with that view is, even if you can define what correct for any choice (which you can't, lets be honest), you end up with a trillion parameter equation for arriving to that conclusion which makes the discussion worthless. So of course we have to rely on general truths and narratives to drive society forward, that's what your ancestors did using religion and tradition.
Couldn't I say that if you perceive fairly-operated, defensive war conscription to be a forced obligation that you are also several pejoratives? By choice.
At the heart of every fast destructive technology leap is the (econo-militaristic) competitive drive to not be left behind. Whatever sociological damage technology causes pales to the innate desire to avoid being subjugated. This is on the mind of every major leader right now.
Can't wait for the battle of the Thames river between the British North Sea fleet (purchased from China) against the imperial Russian fleet (also purchased from China)
On a more serious note, the problem with centering your economy on international finance is that it's only lucrative if no one else in the world has capital and access to worldwide industry.
Stopped reading after this lol. Its just the turing test?
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