Hacker News: iamalizard

New comment by iamalizard in "It is time to give up the dualism introduced by the debate on consciousness"

iamalizard — Mon, 18 May 2026 23:32:17 +0000

If qualia is just an emergent property, it should follow that ethics exists just as a means to achieve a practical end like order or societal stability. What would be the answer to "in an isolated universe, would torturing a being capable of experiencing qualia be good, bad or neither?". I can't accept it would be neither. Pain is negative and that's obvious to me even though I'm a masochist. Suffering is negative if you want to get more precise.

I don't know what qualia is, but it IS something. Some people don't seem to get any arguments and debates about it, at all. Others do. I doubt the people that don't get it are zombies but it's weird that someone can't even comprehend what the issue is about. When I say "red" or "pain", they talk about neurons and whatnot. Of course that's true, but don't they feel the redness and the pain subjectively in a way that makes them question how that feeling relates to the atoms, neurons and other levels of abstraction could be used to describe the physical reality?

And I think, having read a bunch of philosophy years ago that solved nothing, dualism or not is not the right question right now, in our level of understanding. It's not even the right answer because what's "physical" is not well defined either. If we can explain qualia, why would that explanation not count as a "physical" one? If there's some logic to it, it's as physical as anything else.

Lots of ill-defined questions and assumptions. I think we should accept qualia is not understood and won't be for some time. We should realize we can suffer and so can beings similar to us. Where do we draw the line - we'll have to base that on what we know about biology. To me it's obvious many animals are capable of suffering. I think that's a good place to start with our ethics. Suffering is shit, let's reduce it as much as possible.

New comment by iamalizard in "Mozilla to UK regulators: VPNs are essential privacy and security tools"

iamalizard — Sun, 17 May 2026 22:59:06 +0000

The easiest, and the fairest way in my opinion, is to realize parents can and should be responsible for what their children read. Just like you wouldn't give your kid access to your BDSM porn magazines from the 80s, you shouldn't let him online without supervision.

Other than that, there is no "online harm". No root cause of anything that would need to be addressed, no problems whatsoever. It's just information passing through from one person to another.

Laws like age verification will just push kids to even weirder corners of the internet. When will 4chan or motherless implement age verification? On pornhub you see vanilla porn on the front page. On 4chan or motherless you see CP (AI, but still), (fake) rape or (fake) murders. And there are many more sites like those.

New comment by iamalizard in "We Are All Rankers Now: Or Why the Internet Has Turned to Shit"

iamalizard — Sun, 17 May 2026 19:27:45 +0000

> In the country where I live even if you want to make just a tiny website for family and friends you essentially have to set yourself up for doxxing. You are required to put your real name on, as well as city and in case of something like a blog the whole address.

If you don't mind my asking, where does that happen? Is it required for registering ccTLD, would it be available by WHOIS? Is it enforced, and how, if you make make your site on another TLD but are clearly a resident of that country?