Urban75 Home About Offline BrixtonBuzz Contact

Is Elon Musk the greatest visionary or the greatest snake oil salesman of our age?

kabbes said:
Well, we are all born into a world not of our making
Click to expand...

Just wanted to jump in on this to air out something that has been niggling me a bit. I've seen some people talk as if being born was some kind of curse or imposition, usually in response to someone else demanding that they be thankful to their parents for birthing them or something like that. Now I don't think anyone should be grateful for being born, but the idea that being brought to life in general is a net negative (anti-natalism?) seems to me to be an over-correction in response to demands that children should swear eternal gratitude to their parents for spawning them.

Considering how vastly different individual lives can turn out, ranging all along the spectrum from wholly blessed to utterly cursed, it seems absurd to me to adopt some kind of universal stance on the goodness or badness of being alive in general. Also, I believe that such generalised opinions miss the point. it's not like we as individuals are completely passive and powerless in shaping our own lives for the better. Sure, there are always going to be things which are beyond one's powers to influence for the better, some of them important. But to completely rob ourselves of any agency whatsoever strikes me as being a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
 
NoXion said:
Just wanted to jump in on this to air out something that has been niggling me a bit. I've seen some people talk as if being born was some kind of curse or imposition, usually in response to someone else demanding that they be thankful to their parents for birthing them or something like that. Now I don't think anyone should be grateful for being born, but the idea that being brought to life in general is a net negative (anti-natalism?) seems to me to be an over-correction in response to demands that children should swear eternal gratitude to their parents for spawning them.

Considering how vastly different individual lives can turn out, ranging all along the spectrum from wholly blessed to utterly cursed, it seems absurd to me to adopt some kind of universal stance on the goodness or badness of being alive in general. Also, I believe that such generalised opinions miss the point. it's not like we as individuals are completely passive and powerless in shaping our own lives for the better. Sure, there are always going to be things which are beyond one's powers to influence for the better, some of them important. But to completely rob ourselves of any agency whatsoever strikes me as being a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Click to expand...
Indeed. If you want the more complete quote from Marx that I was referring to, then, it would have been, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

People make and remake their lives, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
 
bimble said:
Not you and me personally sue, the whole shitshow we live in obvs. He's bang in the middle of a venn diagram of the internet capitalism & alienation isn't he, not that i'm crying for him.
Click to expand...
yes - agree with this. This is not just him being a Sad Bellend, it's also actually what he has been turned into by the mechanisims that surround and harras us each day. He has "forever online" written all over him.
 
Santino said:
See also Heidegger's concept of thrownness.
Click to expand...
or that our own very conciousness, including all thought and decision, is prior to anyone claiming it. it's a happening. just like willful thoughts. arriving out of nothing, instead of selected. JC had it right: "forgive them for they know not what they do".

Musk still a bell end though.
 
Santino said:
He is always Das Man, the They, never himself.
Click to expand...
But then you have Billig’s notion of the ideological dilemma. To run through 50 years in an paragraph: All thought is dilemmatic, because without a dilemma there is no need for cognition. Those dilemmas include the clash of ideologies presented by different traditions, practices, power relations etc. Different “Theys”, if you like. This clash creates agency, as personal subjective experience is injected from the first-person standpoint. So there is no “situation”, there is only the situation for me. And I bring to that situation my unique set of ideologies, experiences, understandings and so on, such gives me the agency to remake the situation.
 
kabbes said:
But then you have Billig’s notion of the ideological dilemma. To run through 50 years in an paragraph: All thought is dilemmatic, because without a dilemma there is no need for cognition. Those dilemmas include the clash of ideologies presented by different traditions, practices, power relations etc. Different “Theys”, if you like. This clash creates agency, as personal subjective experience is injected from the first-person standpoint. So there is no “situation”, there is only the situation for me. And I bring to that situation my unique set of ideologies, experiences, understandings and so on, such gives me the agency to remake the situation.
Click to expand...
i get it - but there is an assumption of subjectivity itself in that. for some subjectivity doesn't exist at all. If I choose to have the thought "i will vote green this year", what was prior to it? A chooser? We have the cart before the horse - a choosing subject is assumed for each decision, but actually a subject comes after and during the decision - the "I" is implied only in the thought itself "I will vote green" - but there is no "I" prior or chosing the thought that arrives "I will vote green". where is the I - only in the thought itself. The thinker is the thought - but the thoughts arrive, constantly, without violition. therefore all freewill is happening by itself, and has nothing to do with a choosing or willing subject. Pratītyasamutpāda in buddhist terms, the impossibility of finding a first cause to anything. We act like dickheads, see Musk, but I don't believe, and I have thought about this for a long time, there is no single subject behind all of his shitty decisions. We live in atomised times, carrying the weight of each decision on our shoulders, the causeless, unfathomable context is forgotten. Maybe its useful to do that - it certainly is satisfying to see "him" (musk) fall, such is his arrogance. But free will and determinism has never been fully thrashed out and the finding of a "doing subject" has never been found, from Hume to Heidegger, both knew to try and locate the "doing subject" was a fruitless exercise. We have no compassion for ourselves or others because of the assumption of atomisation. i'll shut up now though
 
Where I (amongst others) disagree with that statement, BigMoaner , is that I would say that subjectivity amounts to the prediction that arises from the internal schema. This includes a prediction of what the self will do, which I (amongst others) would say is what identity is — the sense of self-continuity that arises as a result of the prediction engine using its own past actions as an input to predicting its future actions. A self-fulfilling prophesy, in the most literal meaning of those words. The agency might truly be an illusion, an artefact of this output, but it still exists, in that it has real-world effects. The unique configuration of that schema at that time produces dilemmatic cognition that results in a decision being made. A unique decision that arises in combination with the experience of subjectivity. This is very different to pure sociological determinism.
 
kabbes said:
Where I (amongst others) disagree with that statement, BigMoaner , is that I would say that subjectivity amounts to the prediction that arises from the internal schema. This includes a prediction of what the self will do, which I (amongst others) would say is what identity is — the sense of self-continuity that arises as a result of the prediction engine using its own past actions as an input to predicting its future actions. A self-fulfilling prophesy, in the most literal meaning of those words. The agency might truly be an illusion, an artefact of this output, but it still exists, in that it has real-world effects. The unique configuration of that schema at that time produces dilemmatic cognition that results in a decision being made. A unique decision that arises in combination with the experience of subjectivity. This is very different to pure sociological determinism.
Click to expand...
I don't actually disagree - but there's always "what is prior"? There's always the agonising problems of first causes - what has bought, what is bringing the internal schema into being? So i would respectfully say that the a) internal schema and b) the "subject" acting on the propelled prediction engine is still a atomised subject, it's just one layer back. So then because of the problem of causes, then yes agency - whether in absoloute or conventional sense - is an illusion. A very necessary one, but an illusion all the same. As I have prattled on about so often on here, there's two sentances that help with free will and determinism, and they articulate where I fall (and certainly huge swathes of eastern thought), Heideggers "we don't come to thought, thought comes to us". and JC's "forgive them for they know not what they do." It's another agonising outcome of "relative truth" vs "absoloute truth". We can use free will usefully, and we can go one step back like the prediction energine argument, but it's nowhere near the absoloute truth. "I am goign to the park for my lunch break" arouse a while ago. You could and probably right say that was my prediction engine firing, but then go back a step to what is bringing the prediction engine into being, and then a step after that? In an absoloute, "spritiual" sense there is then therefore a "releasing from Karma" as the Buddhist put it, and then a freeing up, a relaxing into the eternal now, the void, "causeless presence" etc.

anyway, this has escalated. He's still a cunt :D
 
BigMoaner said:
I don't actually disagree - but there's always "what is prior"? There's always the agonising problems of first causes - what has bought, what is bringing the internal schema into being? So i would respectfully say that the a) internal schema and b) the "subject" acting on the propelled prediction engine is still a atomised subject, it's just one layer back. So then because of the problem of causes, then yes agency - whether in absoloute or conventional sense - is an illusion. A very necessary one, but an illusion all the same. As I have prattled on about so often on here, there's two sentances that help with free will and determinism, and they articulate where I fall (and certainly huge swathes of eastern thought), Heideggers "we don't come to thought, thought comes to us". and JC's "forgive them for they know not what they do." It's another agonising outcome of "relative truth" vs "absoloute truth". We can use free will usefully, and we can go one step back like the prediction energine argument, but it's nowhere near the absoloute truth. "I am goign to the park for my lunch break" arouse a while ago. You could and probably right say that was my prediction engine firing, but then go back a step to what is bringing the prediction engine into being, and then a step after that? In an absoloute, "spritiual" sense there is then therefore a "releasing from Karma" as the Buddhist put it, and then a freeing up, a relaxing into the eternal now, the void, "causeless presence" etc.

anyway, this has escalated. He's still a cunt
Click to expand...

Why do you think there has to be a prior entity? There is just the brain. The brain contains a model of reality, comprising sensory inputs, specialised interpretation areas, connecting processes and a global command unit. It is a two-way process, with the ability to predict and affect the world as well as make sense of the world. That’s it. I suggest that consciousness/subjectivity/self is an artefact of this prediction engine including itself within its own prediction. There’s no need for a prior entity to that process. But neither does it mean that the process is sociologically determined, in the sense that phrase is normally interpreted (namely that if you could theoretically create a complex enough model of society, you could then predict the individual human).
 
kabbes said:
Why do you think there has to be a prior entity? There is just the brain. The brain contains a model of reality, comprising sensory inputs, specialised interpretation areas, connecting processes and a global command unit. It is a two-way process, with the ability to predict and affect the world as well as make sense of the world. That’s it. I suggest that consciousness/subjectivity/self is an artefact of this prediction engine including itself within its own prediction. There’s no need for a prior entity to that process. But neither does it mean that the process is sociologically determined, in the sense that phrase is normally interpreted (namely that if you could theoretically create a complex enough model of society, you could then predict the individual human).
Click to expand...
In what context is the brain functioning? It's like the scientist, rightly so, focusing down and down on the smallest particle or whatever, focusing in on it, as he should do, but completly ignoring the context in which he, the microscope, the room, etc exists. That context is the prior I am talking off. We can reduce matter to matter, it's useful to do so, but it's never got close to explaining the grounding of free will, or subjectivity, in my view. The scientist peering into his microscope is standing on the floor "oh it's just the floor" he might think if he notices it all all, but you need floors to stand on. It's a question (and a mystery) of causality, certainly not a problem of selves or brains. But on a practical, relative, conceptial level it is of course productive to reduce to matter and brains etc.
 
BigMoaner said:
In what context is the brain functioning? It's like the scientist, rightly so, focusing down and down on the smallest particle or whatever, focusing in on it, as he should do, but completly ignoring the context in which he, the microscope, the room, etc exists. That context is the prior I am talking off. We can reduce matter to matter, it's useful to do so, but it's never got close to explaining the grounding of free will, or subjectivity, in my view. The scientist peering into his microscope is standing on the floor "oh it's just the floor" he might think if he notices it all all, but you need floors to stand on. It's a question (and a mystery) of causality, certainly not a problem of selves or brains. But on a practical, relative, conceptial level it is of course productive to reduce to matter and brains etc.
Click to expand...
You’re the one attempting to be reductionist! You’re denying subjectivity by saying “show me an atom of subjectivity” and by trying to reduce agency to sociological determinism. I’m saying that the mechanism of the meat doesn’t matter. It’s there, it works and it produces subjective experience through a mechanism we can broadly postulate. This produces something unique and not readily reduced to the intersection of particular social characteristics. The fact that it produces an experience of being human is undeniable. That experience is subjective. It needs no prior.

And yes, subjectivity doesn’t exist without its environment. That was inherent in what I said about it comprising a system that includes sensory input and the ability to affect the world. Those are all part of the subjective experience. Neither exists before the other, they exist as one.

If you’re going to carry on insisting there is a prior entity needed before subjective experience can exist, I will have to ask you to either (a) explain what we experience as subjectivity if this is not actually subjectivity; or (b) describe what you think the prior entity is that is being relied upon.
 
kabbes said:
If you’re going to carry on insisting there is a prior entity needed before subjective experience can exist, I will have to ask you to either (a) explain what we experience as subjectivity if this is not actually subjectivity; or (b) describe what you think the prior entity is that is being relied upon.
Click to expand...
qood questions. a) i would say there is an experience of subjectivity, but that is not what is actually being played out. Being itself? Existance. I look at the universe, which is the universe looking at itself. No subject, as discussed, no object either - being itself, whatever the fuck that is. Which also answers b) the prior entity is being itself, again whatever the fuck that is.
 
To me this is the other end of material reductionism. Both can exist at the same time. One, i.e. matter, is observable and measurable, the other isn't. But they are one and the same thing. I understand this might seem a religious argument, and in certain contexts, that is true, but I believe one cannot replace the other. We have totally and utterly lost sight of this in western culture. Infact, Musk is a good example of this - he is the ultimate in do x, y an z: outcome. Reduce, reduce, reduce is one profitable way of looking at things (cancer treatments etc), but expand, expand, expand out is just as frutiful.
 
NoXion said:
Just wanted to jump in on this to air out something that has been niggling me a bit. I've seen some people talk as if being born was some kind of curse or imposition, usually in response to someone else demanding that they be thankful to their parents for birthing them or something like that. Now I don't think anyone should be grateful for being born, but the idea that being brought to life in general is a net negative (anti-natalism?) seems to me to be an over-correction in response to demands that children should swear eternal gratitude to their parents for spawning them.

Considering how vastly different individual lives can turn out, ranging all along the spectrum from wholly blessed to utterly cursed, it seems absurd to me to adopt some kind of universal stance on the goodness or badness of being alive in general. Also, I believe that such generalised opinions miss the point. it's not like we as individuals are completely passive and powerless in shaping our own lives for the better. Sure, there are always going to be things which are beyond one's powers to influence for the better, some of them important. But to completely rob ourselves of any agency whatsoever strikes me as being a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Click to expand...

I tend to agree with the view you're objecting to here. It strikes me as pretty much always better to never come into existence, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try and make the most out of life once you're here, for yourself and others.
 
ItStillWontWork said:
Am I missing something about this? Surely this is just a tube station but massively less efficient?
Click to expand...
It's supposed to be automated but the automation doesn't have regulatory approval so every car has a driver and speeds are limited.

techcrunch.com

The financial pickle facing Elon Musk's Las Vegas Loop system

Please see update below… Restrictions put in place by Nevada regulators are making it difficult for The Boring Company (TBC) to meet contractual targets for its LVCC Loop, Elon Musk’s first underground transportation system. The Loop system at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) is supposed...
techcrunch.com techcrunch.com

But yeah, even when working properly it's nowhere near as efficient as an actual train. The Victoria Line moves more than 10x as many people.
 
in other news Tesla cars have gone down 20% in price all over recently (admiteddly after massive recent hikes)
the reality of active competition in the EV market not vapour-selling auto-driving might just have hit...
 
they have buggered about with the options of what to see

1673741931966.png

'for you' means any old crap in random order

'following' has replaced the 'latest tweets' thing but seems to do the same thing (ETA - same thing as 'latest tweets' used to)
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

N
Is Trump's personality a result of self-loathing?
2 3 4
Replies
96
Views
4K
two sheds
two sheds
Serene
Will Hurricane Milton be a dud or will it be paradise lost?
4 5 6 7 8
Replies
233
Views
6K
petee
petee
krtek a houby
JD Vance's time is up
2 3 4 5 6
Replies
166
Views
8K
two sheds
two sheds
Sweet FA
Hopefully Sean 'Diddy' Combs' time is up
2
Replies
43
Views
2K
ID47
I
Pickman's model
George v's time is up
Replies
3
Views
643
tim
tim
Back
Top Bottom