Apr
28
2026

Cogito, ergo sum.

Sed de te incertus sum.

Google assures me that today's hed/subhed combo is translatable to "I think, therefore I am. But I am uncertain about you." Descartes could have added that second sentence, but apparently did not. It does, however, summarize Noah Smith's topic: The moderately easy problem of consciousness.

At some point, maybe when you were a teenager, a question probably occurred to you: What if I’m actually the only real person in the world? What if everyone else around me is just a cleverly programmed automaton — a “p-zombie”, an NPC in a video game — and I’m the only one who can actually think?

It’s a scary question, for sure. You know you’re self-aware, but that’s about it — you aren’t telepathic, so you have no way of seeing into anyone else’s mind and knowing what it’s like to be them. Actually, it gets worse — you don’t even know if you were really self-aware five minutes ago. For all you know, you could have been created by a powerful computer and given a complete set of false memories. The past version of you is just as alien to your currently self-aware self as any of the people around you.

This is known in philosophy as the “problem of other minds”. It’s closely related to the “hard problem of consciousness” — the question of how physical processes give rise to subjective experience. The problem of other minds means that the hard problem of consciousness will never fully be solved. Since you’ll never know whether other people are really conscious, you’ll never be able to get hard scientific evidence about why they’re conscious. You can never explain something if you don’t know if it’s true or not.

If you miss those late-night dorm room bull sessions, Noah's column should fix you up. He doesn't go into the related issue of free will, but he does go into how AIs could be conscious, and how we might be able to tell.

Noah also illustrates:

ObFeynmanQuote: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool."

Also of note:

  • Maybe they could change the name to "Solyndra Airlines". Robert H. Bork Jr. writes on Spirit Airlines and the New State Capitalism.

    If news reports are correct that the Trump administration plans to rescue Spirit Airlines in return for up to 90% equity in the company, passengers may soon be boarding a carrier that is basically government-owned. Will the renewed airline be decked out with a gold-leaf interior?

    Call it a bailout if you like, or dress it up as a “temporary intervention.” A controlling federal stake in a private airline is something new in America. Yet it won’t be the first time political power has merged with private enterprise. If the Spirit Airlines takeover happens (as seems likely), it will only be this administration’s latest adventure in state capitalism.

    Across multiple sectors, the Trump administration has mixed public money with private markets in ways that would have once been unthinkable in the U.S. The federal government has taken a minority stake in Intel. It has claimed a “golden share” in U.S. Steel. It has extracted revenue streams from Nvidia and AMD. It has shaped corporate strategy through tariffs, subsidies and regulatory favoritism—rewarding firms that align with political priorities or promise domestic investment.

    Yes, he does go on to mention Solyndra. And the Biden Administration's nixing of the acquisition of Spirit by Jet Blue, without which we might have found ourselves in a slightly better alternative universe.

  • Reminder: Communism is good at something. And that thing is: killing people. Ron Bailey commemorates one example at Reason. Chernobyl Wasn't a Nuclear Disaster—It Was a Communist Disaster.

    The world's worst nuclear disaster began 40 years ago at 1:23 a.m. on April 26, 1986, when Unit 4 at the Chernobyl nuclear power generation facility experienced an explosion and meltdown. Ironically, the explosion was caused by a botched safety test.

    The point of the test had been to see what would happen if the power plant lost its main electrical supply: Could spinning turbines generate enough power to run the coolant pumps until emergency backup diesel generators could kick in? The experiment had failed three times previously, but never as catastrophically as it did that night.

    Before the meltdown, Soviet officials had bragged regularly about the safety of their nuclear power plants and disparaged those in the West. In 1983, state-sponsored news agency Novosti reported that Soviet scientists had estimated the probability of a nuclear accident involving a radioactive discharge at one in 1 million. In 1984, Minister of Power and Electrification Petr Neporozhny called the country's nuclear plants "totally safe." Just two months before the disaster, the English-language propaganda magazine Soviet Life claimed: "Even if the incredible should happen, the automatic control and safety systems would shut down the reactor in a matter of seconds. The plant has emergency core cooling systems and many other technological safety designs and systems."

    (Major cognitive dissonance noted between the article headline and Ron's first sentence. Ah well…)

    Although Chernobyl's direct death toll wasn't as high as some estimates, deRon's bottom line notes some indirect effects:

    Chernobyl supercharged the anti–nuclear power movement, especially in Europe and the United States. As a consequence, nuclear power plant construction stalled around the world, resulting in more deaths from air pollution than would otherwise have occurred—plus increased greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to rising average global temperatures.

  • Don't we all? Kevin D. Williamson chimes in on that "unhinged rant": Clarence Thomas Deserves Better Enemies. (Dispatch gifted link)

    “But progressives only believe in nice things!”

    Thus went up the cry from the very dumbest and laziest corners of American public life after Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas gave a personally moving—and, as a matter of fact, entirely unobjectionable—speech at the University of Texas in which he outlined two sets of principles and assumptions competing for dominance in our political culture: the ideas spelled out in the Declaration of Independence 250 years ago and those introduced during the Progressive Era about a century ago.

    Justice Thomas gives a speech about Woodrow Wilson and Otto von Bismarck, and we get a howling chorus of partisan clods who apparently think he was talking about James Talarico—or Thurgood Marshall.

    Non-subscribers can (apparently) Read The Whole Thing without guilt, because the Dispatch is now doing "gifted links". About time!

  • A fine and necessary distinction. Charles C.W. Cooke comes out Against Oppositional Defiance Disorder in Politics. (NR gifted link)

    He tees off on this:

    It's only been a few months since I disclaimed: "I am no Trump fan, but I don't plan on going Full Bulwark anytime soon. Never go Full Bulwark." So I'm on Team Sean here. And also, apparently, on Team CCWC:

    I am a broken record on this topic, and I have been for eleven years. And here I go again: This approach sounds very righteous and pure until you realize that, by adopting it, you’re outsourcing your soul to Trump in precisely the same manner as his sycophants have. Ultimately, if you oppose something because Trump wants it, you’re not sticking it to him, you’re sticking it to yourself. Note the language Miller used: “opposed on all counts.” That, right there, is the problem. It’s entirely reasonable to take a binary view of the man’s character or electoral desirability, to submit that you will never trust him, or even to declare that he is the worst commander in chief in the history of the country. But to oppose him on “all counts”? That’s not judgment; it’s oppositional defiance disorder. Donald Trump is the president whether one likes it or not, and he’s going to take political positions and exercise political power whether one likes it or not. To decide ahead of time that one will oppose all the decisions he makes is to subordinate oneself to him. I refuse to do that. I think everyone else should refuse to do that, too.

    Miller’s colleague, Cathy Young, weighed in on the same debate by describing herself as “an anti-Trump absolutist” who believes that “when he does/says smth I agree with, I think he discredits those things.” This, too, sounds good. But it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Are we really to believe that, say, school choice is rendered better or worse as a policy depending on who says they agree with it? If so, what is the mechanism by which that happens? If Jeffrey Dahmer had been in favor of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, would that have “discredited” the goal by even half an inch? That is superstition. In fact, it’s worse than superstition: It is a politics of men, not laws. If Donald Trump says something I agree with, I say that he is right. If he says something I disagree with, I say that he is wrong. Likewise, if he does something I agree with, I say he’s right, and if he does something I disagree with, I say he’s wrong. To do so is not to endorse him or to “normalize” him. Nor, if one has taken such a stance, is it to abandon one’s steadfast vow to vote against him every time, or to dilute one’s conviction that he is a uniquely bad person. Rather, it is to assiduously play the role of citizen in a free country, and to emphatically insist that there is nothing — not even hatred — that is capable of persuading you to hand your conscience over to another, and in so doing, to render your voice a mere tool of the ventriloquist behind the stage.

    I've bolded the simple, eloquent strategy CCWC follows, and I try to do that too.