[motohagiography]

I suspect my own comments on this site will probably age just as goatily. There was something that happened in the late 80s and 90s where difficult philosophy and just riffing on the logic of an idea got conflated. My 90's alternative high school english class taught by a cultural studies PhD assigned us BBS t-files and we got a lot of stuff like this. It was like philosophy, but without rigor or competence, and when you suggested it was just dissolving reason and meaning into gibberish, they would say "YES!" with a weird, manic triumphalism. Everyone was just talking past each other and reveling in the satisfaction of hearing their words echoed in someone elses nonsense. I probably spoke like that back then as well. It's hypnotic, it exploits the listeners basic agreeableness, elevates lunatics and demagogues, and emboldens the incoherent.

By the end of the article, you are left trying to untangle a set of interleaved similes and metaphors the writer has unhooked and completely decoupled from reason.

This is his conclusion:

> The qualia dial validates zagnets while still letting the universe exist independently. Zagnets frequently end up having to deny the existence of the objective universe in order to exist themselves. Sometimes, to get around this problem, zagnets propose that consciousness is a part of the natural world, just not the part that zombies are competent at observing. Taking this approach, zagnets can run but they can't hide. Eventually, some grandson of Dennett might be insulting Penrose-style zagnets with quantum measurement devices and Searle-style zagnets with group-mind detectors even though today we believe such devices to be impossible. The qualia dial gives both subjectivity and objectivity their due.

If you ever wonder how we got here, stuff like this was the prelude.

[javajosh]

>something that happened in the late 80s and 90s

There was a strong sense that AI was around the corner. Marvin Minsky gave our commencement address and expressed anger at us that we hadn't solved the problem of copying his consciousness onto a computer yet, and expressed the urgency that this problem be solved before he died (it was 2016 when he died, and we failed).

Goatishness was in the air, but it smelled like techno-optimism. Remember also that this was a brief, bright period between the fall of the Berlin wall but before 9/11 and well before climate change seemed all that serious, so we felt free to speak like this because it helped us convince ourselves and each other we were tackling big challenges so fearlessly we couldn't help but speak gibberish.

[mrcartmeneses]

> it exploits the listeners basic agreeableness

100%

The initial gambit is to make the reader part of a clever in-group by out-grouping “zombies”, then the writer proceeds to quickly gish-gosh a bunch of concepts that would require lots of further thought, but instead expects the reader to just go with it. You can get anywhere if you just go with it

Edit: But I do like JL on other subjects. I think it just proves the point that Plato made in the Defence of Socrates

[GolDDranks]

I don't think the author is totally lost in the woods, but I agree that his writing is unnecessarily unclear. I think that most of the "goatiness" comes from his choice in writing to mockingly call physicalist/reductionist types that disregard the experience of qualia or think of it as a non-problem, as "zombies", and people that think that the problem of qualia must be taken seriously as "zagnets", which unnecessarily muddies the waters, as those words are also used in different meanings by other authors. He also assumes that you are familiar with what various other authors think about the problem of qualia/consciousness.

If I understand correctly what the author is trying to say, I think that theoretical physicist Sean Carrol communicates similar kinds of ideas with a much greater eloquence. A recommended watching, "Poetic Naturalism": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xv0mKsO2goA But then again, maybe I'm just "riffing on" with them.

[GolDDranks]

Also, his portrayal of the "zombies" is kind of a strawman/weak man argument; I started off reading this as someone that he might have thought of a zombie, but then he proceeds to attribute some arguments to zombies that are hard to agree with, to the point that it becomes apparent that his underlying goal is not to communicate his ideas, but to just mock some people that he doesn't agree with.

[lmm]

I don't think there's any less rigour or competence here than in "respectable" philosophy; quite the opposite. There is no excess of metaphor, just an exploration of a technical subject in the terminology that it requires. It's using plenty of jargon and references, sure, but programmers are in no position to throw stones about such things; the jargon is meaningful and clearly defined (indeed, defined clearly at the start, in the case of "zagnets").

[motohagiography]

This is an interesting point, as there is a cognitive style among some programmers (but both STEM and critical people) who don't seem to have internal distinctions between a heuristic, a metonym, a functional synecdoche, a coherent abstraction, a generalization, a codeword, a black box, and a joke reference.

Few people are really dumb, but when we're designing, writing and teaching, it's important to keep track of what logical level of abstraction we are speaking at. My reading was that Lanier in this piece seemed to take a joke reference and a codeword (zombie/zagnet) and treat them both as black boxes, where there was no logical coherence in what the relationship or effect of one was on the other, and it just produced a wandering narrative.

[lmm]

If there's no relevant distinction then why make one? (Indeed, the ability to abstract over irrelevant details is the essence of intelligence). As far as I can see the piece uses "zombie" and "zagnet" entirely legitimately. It does wander, but that's not a crime.