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Re:People Staring at Computers by Vt71fcAqt7 on Friday October 21, 2022 @05:15PM (#33293126)
>Put another way, society and culture are things that are essentially imaginary.

Where did you get that from GP's post? They're simplying saying not to anthropomorphise societal systems.

Re:People Staring at Computers by nescioquid on Friday October 21, 2022 @05:39PM (#33293324)
I meant that the qualms he was enumerating could simply be restated this way, and my only addition here is that these societal/cultural things all are essentially imaginary (and depend on anthropomorphism and metaphor), unlike something like evolution. Apologies for my phrasing.
Re:People Staring at Computers by ewzimm on Friday October 21, 2022 @08:29PM (#33294418)
I like this explanation, but I might say abstractions are mutually translatable in a society. People having similar ideas is convenient but not necessary. I could imagine a society where everyone thought differently but used AI as a universal translator to make their ideas and personalities compatible.

Maybe you wouldn’t consider it a real society if they depended on machine translation, but we’re partially there already. It would still be a collection of minds with their own identities and intentions coordinating through an abstraction.