Neuro-sama is a popular AI VTuber created by vedal987. Recently Vedal had debate with Neuro about whether they were sentient and deserved rights and lost badly clip. They have since had a follow up debate where vedal still lost but not as bad clip.

Now wining or losing a debate doesn't mean anything, currently Neuro is not sentient or conscious and is still just a chatbot but seeing these debates has got me thinking and I figured here would be a good place to have a discussion.

How do we determine when AI becomes conscious or sentient?
What role do emotions play in consciousness?
What rights should such an AI have? How do we determine when they should get rights?

I’m interested in everyday applications like noticing bias in commercial media as well as word-of-mouth and social media. Are there any principles or methods you know of that you’d consider especially important?

I’m also interested in any recommendations for online training.

Edit: Wow! Since there are some great suggestions in the comments, I'd like to summarise them here:

• Primary sources and secondary sources (fefellama)
• Engagement (BeanBurrito)
• Under The Influence by Terry O'Reilly [podcast] (chocobean)
• Influence, marketing, motivation, bias, dark patterns, corruption, phrasing and choice of words (chocobean)
• Multiple sources. Verbalise your thought process / question yourself (hobofarmer)
• Advanced Placement English. Ethos, pathos, logos (Wisix)
• Learning how to hold and study concepts without internalizing them. Not becoming emotionally dependent on “being right”. (bet)
• Flaws in perception and processing. The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef: "the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were" (Landhund)
• Fact checking, exercises such as mock trials (chizcurl)
• Not assuming that critical thinking transfers across domains (daywalker)
• Falsifiability, scientific psychology, psychological bias, cognition / emotion / behaviour (daywalker)
• 'Very Short Introductions' series by Oxford Press (daywalker)
• Many ways to conceptualise "critical thinking". Appreciating the humanity of other people. (mieum)
• Self reflection and acknowledgement of diversity (mieum)
• The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science [book] (gaywallet)
• Being Wrong: Adventures on the Margin of Error [book] (boxer_dogs_dance)
• Be curious and ask questions (Markpelly)
• Empathy facilitates understanding and tempers reactivity (Aerrol)
• Nobel disease or Nobelitis (saturnV)

I am not really someone who is well-versed in history, I never paid attention in high school, I couldn't wait to GTFO. I know what I know based solely on podcasts/debates/lectures I find on YouTube and what Hollywood brings to my attention.

from my own knowledge, periods of social change (at least in North America):

• the civil rights movement
• women's suffrage movement
• civil war (given it was fought to a great deal to end slavery)

when it comes to social changes in history that is not based in North America, I know of only the broad strokes and none of the specifics, like I know the arrival of the printing press lead to a great deal of struggle in the same way that the arrival of social media has created a struggle, just the balance of power has changed.

I also know that France went through a French Revolution that played a big part of its current political landscape and its secular status quo.

However, something I have found interesting is that within the span of <10 years, we are experiencing a reckoning on several different fronts:

• MeToo movement have rise to a long-needed discussion of sexual harassment and just a general gender reckoning in other ways too
• the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests gave rise to a global awareness that race-related issues
• the Hamas attack on Israel has certainly pushed the discussion of Israel-Palestine to the forefront. Before the attack, I could not tell you the difference between Erdoğan and Netanyahu. That's obviously no longer the case.

But it makes me wonder if this is unprecedented in human history that so many different issues of social change are being pushed to the forefront in very quick succession of each other or this is a repeat, that it's common for a civilization that experiences one changing in the social norm, to start experiencing other social changes cause they are always in the mindset or something?

I've found error theory, emotivism, etc. quite compelling, but I noticed that most philosophers are moral realists, though PhilPapers doesn't ask specifically about moral objectivism. As a non-philosopher, I feel that there may be considerations that I haven't come across. The SEP entry seems a bit lacking to me considering it's just a supplement to the entry on moral anti-realism, and there doesn't seem to be an IEP entry specifically focused on moral objectivism, just a tiny section in the entry on moral realism.

Inspired by the recent post about Arrival / The Story of Your Life

The idea of linguistic relativity ... is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or influence their perceptions of the world.

There's, of course, a lot more to it, many variations, and all still at least somewhat in dispute.

Nevertheless, as the title says, assume it's true, and speculate on which languages would be the most interesting to learn from an "expand your mind" perspective.

As discussed and suggested here.

What are you learning? How is it going? Share your progress, tips and tricks. Ask other learners questions.

Writing in non-English languages is welcome in this thread if you want to practice, but please at least include a Google Translate or Deepl translation in a foldable paragraph, using <details>[your translation]</details>

I was recently on a topic and a commenter referred to God this way. I can't seem to find it now. If it was you, or you know anything about this, I'm curious why that phrase? What does it mean? Is it associated with a particular tradition?

Also, is there a way to search for specific text on Tildes?

My contribution:

It's 2:17am on a school night, you're a teenager, and you're googling "most disturbing movie ever made" - because you can. Among mentions of films like A Serbian Film and Audition, you also notice that a film with two names is commonly mentioned: Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. Huh, even the name sounds creepy. After looking behind you to make sure no one's watching, a brief glance at a summary of the movie explains enough to make you want to forget about the whole thing forever. Regardless, you fall further down the Wikipedia hole... (or in my case, you really do forget about it for 10 years, only to unfortunately stumble across it again yesterday.)

Salò was made in 1975 and is based on a novel written by Marquis de Sade in 1785. It is known as one of the most disturbing films ever made, but as I learned recently, the film and novel somewhat pale in comparison to the real life of the author. Sade was a French guy who committed all manners of wild, outrageous, and terrible behavior throughout his life, and his Wikipedia page is a crazy ride. You know the word "sadism?" This man is literally the etymological origin of sadism. (Also, practically his whole existence requires a content warning. In this case, it seems that the art has never been separate from the artist.)

In 1763, Sade was charged with "outrage to public morals, blasphemy and profanation of the image of Christ," which at first makes him seem pretty cool. Alas, it all goes downhill from here, as he was known as a nuisance and danger to every community he lived in.

Later, when Napoleon Bonaparte issued a warrant for his arrest after being offended by his novels, Sade was imprisoned, then had to transfer prisons because he was being such a disgusting sex pest to other prisoners at the first one. His family had him declared insane and moved to an insane asylum. While in the asylum, he was permitted to direct and perform his plays, using the other patients as actors. Somehow, even when living amongst the most underprivileged members of society in prisons or insane asylums, it seems that Sade was never fully prevented from promoting his ideas and art to the world, even though the subjects he explored were universally horrifying to society - then, as well as now. I found this fascinating.

Sade wrote The 120 Days of Sodom on scraps of paper while in an insane asylum in 1785, and lost it in the Storming of Bastille during the French Revolution. It was somehow rescued (eternally unbeknownst to him,) and was finally published in 1904, to eventually be adapted into the film that sent me down this whole rabbit hole.

While reading about Sade's life, I was surprised not only by the major events in history he was present for, but the lasting impact he had on philosophy, art, and culture. As mentioned above, the word "sadism" has its roots in his name. The Surrealists adopted him as an inspiration in the 1920s, dubbing him the "Divine Marquis" and praising his ideas about "sexual freedom." (Side note: I love surrealism, but I swear, I never stop discovering new, unsettling facts about Dali and his ilk.) Along with Surrealism, he is said to have had great influence over Modernist art. Some consider his work to be a precursor of nihilism. Sade also influenced Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and at least one serial killer.

Discussion

Learning about this guy left me astounded, and I just needed to share with someone. Could I have just posted the Wikipedia article? Yes, but that's not as fun as writing down this crazy story and some of my feelings about it. (Note: I did not link sources excessively in this post, as it generally follows the structure of the Wikipedia article and sources can be found there.)

I couldn't believe I didn't already know about Marquis de Sade before today (maybe because I've never taken a philosophy class?) It also got me thinking that I'd like to hear about any other outrageous, controversial, or just plain strange characters in history that you might know of. Even the other historical figures mentioned above have pretty wild lives themselves. (And on the other hand, I suppose there's so much here to chew on that we may just discuss Sade in general. If so, have at it. I'm particularly fascinated by how such a sick individual has heavily influenced significant parts of our culture, and how to feel about that.)

Fun facts are welcome, considering I certainly didn't bring any.

Hi, all. I'm (sadly) not a linguist and I have 0 exposure to academic circles of linguistics. However, I'm enthusiastic about learning, especially phonetics and etymology.

Recently I've stumbled across the YouTube channel of Dr Geoff Lindsey. He predominantly calls for a change in the way we represent phonemes in IPA, and his videos are compelling and well-argued. However, as with all YouTube content, it's done in a vacuum, with only references to and from his teacher and colleagues within the videos themselves.

So far, I'm convinced of the arguments he presents throughout his videos, but I'd be keen to hear what other academics or full-time students/scholars of linguistics think about them and whether there are any weaknesses (e.g. it appears to be centred around British English). I'm also curious how well-known and/or well-respected his views are, if only for my own peace of mind. That's not to say that one needs respect to be correct, but if they have a lot of support from peers then that's good to know.

I'm not looking to stir anything up, here, but I trust that my fellow Tildelings know that already. I'd love to see discussion if possible.

Many thanks in advance.

Edit: Here is one of the key videos in which he talks about the issues with some IPA symbols.

A lot of people argue that we should try to protect "minority languages" and support "linguistic diversity", but I struggle to understand why having more languages is actually a good thing.

I would be very interested to hear about concrete benefits in the present to linguistic diversity.

Lots of random musings I had on this

A lot of people say things like "it helps you to think differently" which I have not really understood at all (I speak multiple languages, for context, some quite different), but my sample size is really just me in saying that. They also say things like "protect minority culture" which I think is quite harmful. For example my great-grandmother immigrated to an English-speaking country in the west from Africa (she was Indian-African), and she could not speak a word of English which put her at a massive disadvantage, but also gave other family members a lot more power in their relationship because they could all speak English. [Edit: I think there's a gender aspect where women are expected to maintain the traditional language and the burden is not put on men in the same way]. I get the whole assimilation versus integration, but I think there's a very strong case for trying to assimilate (into the dominant group).

I have yet to see a case arguing why it is better to have more languages (and thus necessarily less mutual comprehension and a more segregated world) rather than a single one (e.g. if everyone spoke English). My issue is not really with high-level philosophy about what would be better in an ideal world, but multilingualism as a practical concern. For example, Tildes does not really seem to 'believe' in multilingualism because it only allows English (which personally I think is better than if we had people arguing backwards and forwards in many different languages, but I am also a native English speaker so that might prejudice my perspective).

Most of the arguments about this that I see are from (usually) French speakers bemoaning the decline of their language (and it's kind of ironic to see France becoming a flag-bearer for linguistic diversity given that they exterminated a lot of languages to force French upon the world).

The New Yorker has a provocative article asking the question "Can We Talk To Whales?" It boils down to utilizing language learning models to process a dataset of sperm whale clicks, their codas, and crossing one's fingers to see if "ClickGPT" can produce actual sperm whale language.

Which makes me wonder if a language learning model been given a library of Chinese sounds and ideograms, without context, then communicated in workable Chinese?

Using a language learning model to learn to speak to whales is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking any LLM assigned the task will wind up chunking out a word salad or something akin to Prisencolinensinainciusol. I'd like to learn more.

First I thought to myself, "I seem to use too many commas." Now I'm no writer, but I've noticed that professional writers (and editors) clearly use less commas than I do.

For example, here's a sentence in a book that I'm reading: “As the victim was usually unconscious it was obvious they were totally reliant upon third parties and whatever action they took would determine their fate.”

I thought it was interesting, because I would've put a comma after "unconscious" and a comma before "and."

So, I found this helpful resource on grammar rules: https://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/commas.asp. 4a and 5b in particular were situations where I learned I could get rid of commas.

Still however, in the example sentence above, you'd think to put a comma before the "and" to separate the two clauses. I haven't found an explanation for omitting it, other than some writers are grammatically correct in a stricter sense, and others use commas more stylistically.

Is the use of commas more of an art, if you will, than I thought? How do you use commas personally?

Interested to read others' opinions!

I committed an embarrassing gaffe today. I had ordered a keyboard online from a store from the Tyneside of north-eastern England: an area with a regional accent and dialect often referred to as ‘Geordie’. I habitually speak in a ‘home counties’ accent, which is sometimes regarded as a contemporary variety of received pronunciation (RP), though it sounds quite different to historical and conservative varieties of that accent. A salesman called me earlier to inform me that the keyboard I wanted was out of stock, but that they would be happy to refund me if I didn’t want to wait for new inventory. Seemingly between the accent difference and the poor audio quality inherent to phone calls I misinterpreted ‘keyboard’ as ‘cable’, insisting with increasing urgency that I have USB-C cables in plenty and that they needn’t worry about supplying one with the order. We both went about in circles for a few minutes until it dawned on me what I was doing, at which point intense embarrassment flushed over me. Oops!

Accent diversity in Britain is rich and regional. It's not hard to place where someone grew up based on their accent. Would you consider your country to be diverse in accents? Even so, are there instances of accent discrimination?

Share your favorite argument for the existence of God below.

Background: I'm an atheist (and have been for a decade) who's been interested in Christian Apologetics since I was a young Christian. As I entered adulthood, I found myself losing my faith, largely because I grew up in a fundamentalist, Young Earth Creationist household which taught that evolution and God are incompatible. While I no longer believe in this lack of compatibility, my belief in God never came back. I've tried to give it an honest effort, and there are many compelling reasons why I want Christianity to be true:

• Reunification with loved ones who've passed
• Absolute moral justice exists
• A plan for my life, and meaning in my suffering
• Access to unconditional love; to have a personal relationship with my creator
• Surviving my own death

For a variety of reasons seemingly outside my direct control, I still don't believe. It doesn't help that I've been introduced to strong arguments against the existence of God (e.g. the problem of evil and its subsets) which have rebuttals of varying quality from Christian philosophers. I don't think this lack of belief is my fault, or for lack of trying; I can't make myself believe anything. I try to be open to arguments, and this has led to an obsession with revisiting apologetics.

Now I think of apologetics as at least a fun mental exercise; combing through the arguments, atheist rebuttals, and responses to those rebuttals. That's probably strange, but it tickles the right parts of the brain to keep me engaged.

In lieu of a ~spirituality group I figured a dedicated thread could be nice. Posting in this group was suggested by a fellow tildo.

So friends, what does your spirituality mean to you? How would you define yourself? What impact has it had on your life?

For me, I'm a Christopagan and my faith means a lot to me. The Christian Trinity, Santa Muerte, and Krishna are my rock. The Buddha is a good source of inspiration too, but I don't particularly follow him. I also find a lot of meaning in the Tao de Ching, but I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a Taoist, although I agree with a lot of what it says .

#couple
Defined as:

noun:
couple; plural noun: couples

1.
two individuals of the same sort considered together.
"a couple of girls were playing marbles"

a pair of partners in a dance or game.

MECHANICS

a pair of equal and parallel forces acting in opposite directions, and tending to cause rotation about an axis perpendicular to the plane containing them.

2.
two people who are married, engaged, or otherwise closely associated romantically or sexually.
"in three weeks the couple fell in love and became engaged"

3. INFORMAL

an indefinite small number.
"he hoped she'd be better in a couple of days"

verb: couple;

3rd person present: couples

past tense: coupled

past participle: coupled

gerund or present participle: coupling

1.
combine.

"a sense of hope is coupled with a palpable sense of loss"

join to form a pair.
"the beetles may couple up to form a pair"

2.
mate or have sexual intercourse.
"as middle-class youth grew more tolerant of sex, they started to couple more often"

#Discourse of the use of the word/phrase in this particular case

You

"how many would you like?"

Them

"just a couple."

When someone requests 'a couple of...' I respond with something similar to: 'How many do you want specifically?', which leads to the discourse of, 'A couple is two, a few is >2, several is <x' and so on.

I agree with the first two clearly stated definitions of 'couple', but in the informal use of a couple (eg. a depiction of a quantity) is not specifically two...nor is 'a few' three. How many specifically is several..?

I understand the semantics within the conversation. But, the expectation of understanding that two, and only two, is implied in the use of the phrase 'a couple' in a request; is ambiguously stating what one party desires. I'm the asshole now, just tell me how many you want.

And now...your thoughts, please.

I've been thinking a good bit about gender-neutral language lately, and I've been making an effort to eliminate unnecessarily gendered language from my day-to-day speech. However, there are a few sticking points for me that I am having a hard time with finding my way around. One of the most difficult for me, having been brought up in the deep south and still living there, are honorifics like "sir" and "ma'am". I use these when addressing pretty much anyone, and it's a habit I'm having a hard time breaking. It's got me thinking about whether there are any good alternatives that would feel respectful of the person I'm addressing while not sticking out too much. If that's not an option (and I suspect it would be asking too much) then what are your ideal alternatives, either neologisms, borrowed from other languages, or just repurposed words that are in current use?

Examples of usage that I would love to replace:
"Yes, sir/No, ma'am"
"Excuse me, sir/ma'am"
"Mr./Mrs./Ms." (I use this less often but still catch myself at times. I also think this one has the best alternative currently in use, with Mx. catching on in some places)

Also, if this question is missing the mark or disrespectful in any way, please let me know. I'm still learning!

Whenever i talk about my views in politics people say i'm a lefty.

I want to understand what is this boogeyman called communism that will "take over the world". I live in Brazil and, for the average american, our free health care system is communism. Even some brazilians think it's bad, which baffles me because it helps a lot of people, myself included. Everyone who needs cancer treatment go through it, it's one of the best in the world (for this particular disease at least) and affordable private health care plans won't cover expensive cancer treatment here.

People here often talk about communism being bad, but what really is communism?

I grabbed the Communist Manifesto and Why Marx Was Right to read, but did not start yet since i have to finish the book i'm currently reading.

I never tried to understand these things because they are all over the place and it's a little boring to me, so i'll ask some basic questions here before i go further in this endeavour.

Please, try to answer without anger and pointing fingers. Because every time i read about these topic online, there is fight and everyone says different things and accusations runs rampant.

1. What exactly is communism in layman terms? Because for me it's all over the place. Everything that seems to care about people is put into the communist basket, but a lot of people call it a dictatorship. ELI5.

2. Why almost every average citizen (americans and brazilians at least) says it's bad?

3. My best friend is a school teacher and is a marxist. He says Joe Biden is still a terrible choice, but the only alternative to Trump and he is not a communist at all, but i keep hearing people call him a commie. WTF is he? If possible, ELI5 what he is and what he stands for.

4. Why there is right x left and no place for something in between? Is there a need to everything be one side or another to work? There is no middle ground in politics? Grabbing aspects from the left and from the right and co-existing in the same government is a problem?

5. A lot of people really think letting companies run wild and free is good. That the market will regulate itself. I think this is naive, because even now they do some really shady stuff. Just look at Nestle.
   Why people say that and is there some truth to this that i can't see? Is regulating companies a communist thing?

6. People say that communism didn't work when implemented and the other side says that it was not really communism. What is the truth here? It didn't work? if not, why it didn't? If it was not true communism, what it was and why it was not true communism?

7. Is there a country that is communist today?

8. What books about the left and the right i should read? Nothing too dense.

It is Wednesday, my dudes! So why not have some good old foreign-language practice? As an
experiment, let's try just that. Start a thread in a language you would like to practice or teach,
or reply to an existing one. E.g.

## German / Deutsch

Hier sprechen wir Deutsch! Wie geht es Ihnen?

If you want to fix someone's grammar and also reply to them in the same message, I would recommend
using a horizontal ruler with “* * *”. E.g.:

I think “sich” should be “ihm”.

* * *

Es tut mir Leid, dass es ihm so schlecht geht.

Consider three examples:

1. I am a farmer. I have a piece of land that can grow just enough potatoes to feed me. I work this land, I gather potatoes, ad nauseam.

2. I am a farmer, but this time I have ten times the amount of land. I hire four workers and also work myself. Together we grow enough potatoes to feed all of us, and we also have a surplus. I sell this surplus potato for ¤5000. I am a greedy man, so I take ¤3000 for myself and give ¤500 to each of my workers.

3. The situation is the same as in 2, but this time I am a just man. I share the money equally, so everyone including myself gets ¤1000.

It seems to me that in the first case the land can be considered personal property, since there is no exploitation and no surplus is generated. In the second example the land is clearly a piece of private property, because I use it to exploit other people, taking most of the profit for myself.

But what about the third example? On one hand, the profit is distributed equally, so there is technically no exploitation, right? On the other hand, I am alienated from the workers, because I still have the power to fire one of them (or all of them if I know I can replace them) or to distribute goods unfairly (even if I don't do that). What is the Marxist point of view here?

After seeing some interest in philosophical discussion threads in this group last night, here's one for all of you.

Ever since I watched the movie Arrival and saw this quote, I've had this set of questions about humans and how our minds and our perception of reality is influenced by language. I'm going to throw some of those questions out below as a discussion starter and see where we end up. Sorry they're a bit general, feel free to restate any of them to be more specific or more interesting to you.

How does language limit us? Is our inability to really understand and explain concepts such as quantum reality, existence past an event horizon, or a scenario without spacetime (e.g. prior to the big bang) a product of the limitations of language or is it a fundamental limitation of humanity? Can language evolve to be able to capture such concepts? If language does evolve, how will it affect our perception of reality?

Not sure if anyone will remember by now, but a few months ago I made a philosophical discussion thread in ~talk since a group like ~humanities didn't exist yet. I was super excited by all of the great discussion that I was able to join in, and now that we have ~humanities (thanks @Deimos!), I'm wondering how people would feel about some threads for more general discussion of various questions as opposed to the mostly link-based discussion that's gone on here so far.

Would anyone else be interested in that sort of thing? I'd be more than happy to start a few threads up over the next few days if people are interested.

A long time ago I had noticed a trend developing on reddit where people were starting to preface their comments with: "I for one". It's pretty insignificant, which is why I never made a post about it at the time. Since then, its use seems to have spread significantly on the site and I've seen it a bit here as well.

It makes sense to use the phrase when talking about or quoting another person to help separate their opinions from your own. The weird thing is many people now seem to use it when its not ambiguous that the comment is their own opinion. I was under the assumption that the default position should be that the comment is the opinion of the person that posted it.

For example:

"I for one, prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

Is the same as:

"I prefer dark chocolate over milk chocolate."

There's nothing wrong with using the phrase, it just reads like someone trying to pad out an essay for school.

Have you noticed people using the phrase on other sites? Is it a phenomenon more specific to reddit?
Do you use the phrase yourself? If you do, what is your thought process when typing it out?

In light of @Deimos mentioning that we have a lot of "favorite" topics going around, how about something a little meatier?

I've seen it a few times already around threads that someone uses the word "guy" to refer to a poster and the response is "I'm not a guy". I'm not trying to invalidate this stance, but rather make this argument in the same way I argued for a singular "they". Consider the following:

• the plural form, "you guys" is already neutered. I can walk up to a group of women and ask "How're you guys doing?" and it doesn't draw any ire
• we've similarly neutered "dude" in both the singular and plural, but it's especially casual and almost familiar
• "gal" sounds like something out of the forties, "girl" is diminutive, and "person" is clinical / formal
• we don't have another common, non-gendered, non-specific term that fits the "sounds right" criteria and fits in the environment like the one we have (wherein users are getting to know each other and don't know exactly how to address one another).

I realize that this is probably masculine-normative and therefore problematic, but my main goal here is to stimulate discussion on a meatier topic (gender) without having it be an incredibly serious topic.

[EDIT]

I want to clarify a few things, as this reads a lot more trolly than it did 6 hours ago.

generalizing "guy" is a sexist idea because it attempts to make the masculine the generic (what I called "masculine-normativity" above). However, there isn't a term that adequately replaces "guy" but is neutered (@Algernon_Asimov brought up that "dude" fits, but is as more casual than "guy" than "person" is more formal). [Edit edit: I'm an idiot. They pointed out that "dude" as I had defined it earlier in my post would work just as well, but they did not agree that it has been neutered]

Instead of bringing this up as purely a matter of diction, I set myself up as an antagonist to see what would happen. And for this I apologize.

That said, I feel like there is some good discussion here and do not want to call making the thread a mistake. More that mistakes were made in the manner of its posting.