Just like “rule of law” and “family values”, “the troops” and some other stuff, free markets were never something they really care about.
The reality of Republican free markets were about compounding and growing big business and resource extraction at the expense of everyone else.
The rest is all about convincing suckers that getting kicked in the balls is good for them. The most obvious example being farmers. Most aspects of agriculture have been consolidated into oblivion and the markets are not super functional. 80% of the dairy operations in my state are out of business. 60 companies dominate eggs in the US - there used to be 3 in my city.
The immigration-baiting isn’t even a conservative position, most of the history of conservatism has been pro-immigration.
Instead it’s simply the answer to the question, “how do you convince the last vestiges of the labor unions to drink poison and vote for the people who openly plan to destroy them.”
I think without a clear, shared definition of “free” the term “free market” has no actual social value and just becomes a political football that sounds good but changes meaning at a whim. Some people use it to mean completely unregulated, some people use it as a synonym for “fair”, and ne’er the twain shall meet.
The big difference between left and right is that leftish politics are based on everyone being equal, and rightish politics accept that some are more equal than others.
It’s not such a terrible tension to live with. We can have, say, equal rights to life while also allowing unequal rights to gold nuggets. You might have more gold nuggets than I do but we both have the right to live in peace.
The far ends of the spectrum though involve, respectively, redistribution of gold nuggets to all, and at the other end a commitment to survival of the fittest that extends to viewing any kind of market regulation as commie bullshit.
A completely “free” market is likely incoherent, but under normal terms - probably degrading since the 1970s. And very predictable if wealth can buy you power to change the system.
They'll settle for an unregulated market. What they really want is a free market for them and their friends, and crippling regulation for their competitors.
You're using terms incorrectly. Conservatism has nothing to do with free market.
The people who care most about free markets are liberals (called libertarians in the US).
Presumably you mean to say "Republicans". And your answer is "under Trump". But it's important to note that Trump merely took the Republican party back to its roots. Traditionally, Republicans were more protectionists than the Democrats. Regan changed that, and Trump reverted.
But what annoys me about people who criticize this change, is that it often comes from people who don't believe in free markets.
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As a side note, I think the reason Americans use these terms so wrongly is because of the 2 party system. It forces all ideologies into two camps and for Americans "conservatism", "libertarianism", "nationalism", "fascism" are all the same.
Trump ran as on the Republican ticket, he had been a lifelong NYC Democrat up until he ran for president.
Republican != Conservative… and in reality Trump is neither, but at the same time, the type of Democrat he was no longer exists. It’s also a mistake to confuse Republican for Establishment GOP.
It's not clear at all that consciousness is independent of the substrate. See the Harder Problem of Consciousness by Ned Block: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3655621
It is clear that consciousness is independent of the substrate if you don't believe in magic.
We could make a very dumb biological calculator out of a few genetically-engineered neurons that would very obviously not be conscious.
It's still an open question if we can embed consciousness in our current microchips if we had enough of them together (which I think we currently don't), or if it requires some other physical process we don't fully understand, e.g. quantum. I strongly doubt it does require any quantum shenanigans, but even if it did, we can and will find all sorts of ways to make computers that can perform those shenanigans too. Eventually we're just going to stop being able to move the goalposts, unless you set those goalposts in magic-land.
Quantum physics isn’t shenanigans, it’s completely fundamental and necessary to the brain and its electrochemistry. To say “yes but we can create a model of the brain which doesn’t need all that, we can model the classical physics or a reduced set of quantum interactions (running classically)” and then model the brains neurons on a computational substrate, well this is going to be nothing like the brain so won’t give you the result you’re looking for.
And say what you want about meat but we don’t seem to find consciousness in rocks or plants or clouds or hairdryers. And the buddists report that some very strange things happen if you meditate for years on end but obviously they must be talking shit and making it up because it’s not testably scientific.
Why always the strawman about "magic" or "supernatural" in these debates? The universe can be natural without it being fundamentally physical or functional. We don't know that consciousness is functional, in fact one could argue consciousness is the one thing that isn't captured by functional explanations. Because when you explain how a brain functions, the experiential part is left out and just assumed since we have brains that have experiences. So obviously there is a correlation. But we don't know that this correlation exists for anything functionally equivalent. We don't know that consciousness can be simulated.
My view is physical, functional, mathematical and informational explanations are abstractions from shared experiences. Abstractions remove the experiential aspect to arrive at something objective so we can understand the world around us, since experiences are creature and to some extent, individually dependent. This is Nagel's ultimate point in What It's Like to Be A Bat paper about the objective/subjective divide. And probably related to Kant's argument about phenomena vs the noumena outside experience. We try to understand reality via abstraction.
And it has nothing to do with magic. It's an epistemological situation we find ourselves in, which may or may not tell us something fundamental about the world. Depends on your metaphysical assumptions as to what can fundamentally exist.
You can prompt it to be multiple people, fictional characters, aliens or a sentient rock if you wanted. You can have it be act annoyed or engrossed with the conversation. The fact you can do all this indicates it's not feeling anything, it's just generating tokens based on it's training.
There is a modern philosophical agreement that the hard problem depends on qualia by both proponents and critics. So when Daniel Dennett argues against David Chalmers, he attacks the definition of qualia. Or when Keith Frankish argues for illusionism, he attempts to show that consciousness is not actually qualia. And when Nagel says we don't know what it's like to be a bat, he means the bat qualia of echolocation (what it feels like when bats use echolocation to sense the world).
You can live without any conscious sensations? Do you never dream, never visualize, never hear your inner dialog, never experience an emotion? Being in love is as foreign to you as feeling enraged?
I'd ask what it's like, but of course you wouldn't be able to tell me.
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