> The idea that "life is meaningless" means that society cannot rely on you, because you'll do whatever strikes your fancy, whatever the consequences.
How does "life is meaningless" imply "life is useless"? Also, why would nihilism entail radical individualism? The core of nihilism is that since the indifferent universe is without meaning humans have to give it meaning, quite the opposite of what you're implying.
> The core of nihilism is that since the indifferent universe is without meaning humans have to give it meaning.
I'm not that familiar with nihilism, but I'm rather surprised that "humans have to give it meaning" is part of the core. That's somewhat non-obvious to me; intuitively I would have expected nihilists to believe that meaning cannot exist.
Can you point me toward some sources that say nihilists actually believe that humans are capable of creating meaning?
>Can you point me toward some sources that say nihilists actually believe that humans are capable of creating meaning?
That's a big part of existentialism (Sartre, Camus, etc), in which life has no inherent meaning, and it's rather empty existence, and it's up to the person to make any meaning for themselves.
what marks humans out from the rest of the meaningless universe that suddenly blesses them as meaning bearers? almost seems to imply some sort of religious idea that humans are not a part of the ubiverse
We've been seeking answers to big questions like where did we come from, why are we here, and where are we going, for a very long time.
Now whether that those answers are accurate is a different question. But I think it's clear that humans crave meaning, and are happy to relegate meaning-making to third party institutions such as organized religion or the media.
Another way to understand it is that the universe is truly "objectless" because "objects" are merely concepts in the mind of the "subject."
Non-human subjective experiencers also imagine meaningful objects in their own minds. There's nothing special about humans other than their ability to communicate with other humans.
If there were no meaning outside of humans, then every human would be free to construct their own meaning. This then leads to radical individualism, since no frame of meaning would be truer than any other.
That's what we do. How would letting others construct a meaning for us be better? The reason societies exist is because we lean to a human-centric meaning, not radical individualism necessarily, because we are hard wired to do so. But having a meaning imposed on you is not good, I think. Also, the reason we do good to society is because it satisfies us INDIVIDUALLY, not because we think it is efficient - there was no thinking involved in us being social beings, but evolution.
The fact that expected utility theory isn't nearly as scrutinized as the labor theory of value, whilst being at least as flawed, tells you something about the "value free" nature of modern econ.
Expected utility theory, if anything, is more scrutinized than the labor theory of value. They gave Kahneman the econ Nobel for (among other things) documenting empirical failings of expected utility.
It... is? The difference is that the labor theory has been thrown out as unsalvageable, whereas expected utility theory is useful enough in some theoretical applications to stick around.
The question is whether the grounds upon which it was thrown out (which relate to specific problems) are therefore sufficient for it to be "unsalvageable". Nonetheless, as I already mentioned, the pretension that economics lacks normative content gives the false impression that ideas must be discarded because they are not scientifically valid rather than for ideological reasons.
That's the thing, though -- the labor theory isn't just "not scientifically valid." It clearly doesn't describe what is -- it's not how people value things, and it doesn't make sense as a description of what ought to be.
The LTV was never intended as a description of what "ought to be" (in fact, Marx cautions against such use), and it was intended to describe how things are. The idea is that people do value things according to their socially necessary labour content, and that this mechanism works "behind the backs" of all members of society. I'm curious in what way it isn't scientifically valid.
The LTV wasn't thrown out because it fails to describe how things are, because soon enough marginalists realize that the same criticisms actually apply to their own theory. It was thrown out (mostly by Samuelson and his pals) of specific issues: the transformation problem, the generalized commodity exploitation theorem, and by extension the Okishio theorem, all of which have been addressed in the Marxian economic literature.
LTV is clearly normative, and it's why people still try to revive it. The idea that factory owners are exploiting their workers has a certain intuitive appeal as a moral proposition.
The LTV wasn't exactly thrown out -- there are situations where marginalism and the LTV exactly coincide -- but it was superseded because outside a narrow sphere it becomes incoherent. The classic example is technological substitution -- if you have two ways of making something, one that is capital-intensive and one that is labor-intensive, then you will probably pick the one that's cheaper. So you can't calculate the labor content of a good independently of prices.
The specific issues you enumerate are issues within Marxist economics in general. The LTV was superseded well before Samuelson's paper on the transformation problem.
It seems like an ok reading of the history on first glance but it is the Marxist perspective. I suppose necessary to understand the heterodox viewpoint.
> So central to
capitalist reality is this motor of growth that it lies behind both imperialist conquest and the
launching of those periodic prolonged booms of which the Belle Époque and the post-war
Golden Age are the most recent examples.
This is a pretty ridiculous conclusion that is demonstrably false.
Marxist value theory basically died out in the 70s, which Freeman basically concedes in the "The Marxists Divide" section. His TSSI is an attempt to resusitate the theory, but it has found few adherents.
It is worth noting that the TSSI isn't the only one around any more, though - nor is the strictly quantitative interpretation of value theory. The TSSI was constructed as an interpretation to solve the transformation problem, but there's Dumenil's New Interpretation now and Fred Moseley's Macro-Monetary Interpretation. It is not surprising that Freeman would make such a concession as an economist rather than as a philosopher, where Marxian value-form theory flourished in Germany and Japan during the 70s and 80s and still to this day.
Regex is a family of languages each of which can have various implementations. You could have a regex implementation that instead uses mutually recursive functions etc.
What is true is that regexes are typically not turing complete and can be represented with simple state machines.
It’s due to return on energy investment going up due to new productive technologies, aka “capital”. “Capitalism” is an orthogonal issue. To put it in Marxian terms, you can have a socialist community with a capitalist mode of production.
The way new capital reaches the third world can be attributed to globalization of market circuits, for instance, China is currently investing into Africa much like the first world did to China in the past.
Of course, if you define the terminology differently, say you’re an Austrian Economist, the above explanation might appear unintelligable.
Does there not exist some ridiculously parallel equivalent of Bresenham or Wu? I imagine with the right datastructure you should be able to do pixel/line intersection tests in the pixel shader?
A pixel shader cannot choose where to draw, it is simply given a pixel and asked what colour it should be.
In order to reduce the overdraw to something manageable, you need to generate geometry (via the CPU, geometry shader or vertex shader) that covers a relatively small superset of the pixels you actually want to draw.
