If Dems win the White House and Senate, will they (and SHOULD they?) pack the court? — Relativist

This is kind of tangential, but I had the thought recently, looking at the history of Supreme Court nominations, that perhaps instead of only appointing new justices every time one dies, it should just be habit to always appoint a new justice for every new combination of president + congress; in other words, every two years. Give the president and congress the whole two years to decide on who to nominate and confirm, and if they still can't agree on anyone, the existing court just picks its favorite of the nominees thus far rejected.

That is approximately the rate at which new justices get appointed anyway.

I originally thought "every presidential term", so every four years, and if we had been following that schedule in recent decades, we would currently have almost exactly the same Supreme Court we already have; basically only Kavanaugh wouldn't have had the opportunity to be appointed.

Sure, sometimes you would end up with slightly more or less than 9 justices, but the number of justices has varied widely over the years anyway, so that's no problem.

But looking back further in history to see what would have happened if we had always been following that rule, it looks like we would have had an empty supreme court some time in the mid-late 20th century, so I thought instead to change the rate to every 2 years instead of every 4. If we had always been doing that then we would presently most likely have a Supreme Court of size 14 (2 more each for Obama, W, and Clinton), with a balance of 7 conservative / 7 liberal.

And what brings discipline to the world when it has been totally forgotten? — Gus Lamarch

The presence of a state is the absence of discipline, if by discipline you mean something like governance.

You've probably heard the adage "a government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned". That describes a state very well: it's the ungoverned monopoly on violence sitting at the top of a power hierarchy. Stateless governance (anarchy) is when nobody gets to sit at the top ungoverned, where all govern and are governed equally.

I am pretty sure that the state's legitimacy has already been proven by it through the power it commands over the population of said state. — Gus Lamarch

So you're claiming that might makes right?

That's tantamount to saying "there's no such thing as 'right', only might". And I already said that the only thing a state has is its might; no states are right.

State means order; — Gus Lamarch

No, a state is a monopoly on the use of violence. That's the textbook political science definition.

The question of the legitimacy of states is whether anyone morally deserves such a monopoly on the use of violence, rather than the legitimacy of violence being regardless of who commits it: if it's wrong for anyone in some context then it's wrong for everyone in that context.

But did you really want this thread to derail into one about anarchism? I thought you were asking about Rome. I gave the anarchist answer to one of your questions about Rome.

The burden of proof is on the state to prove its legitimacy, and it has not done so.

And that wikipedia article is a little unclear. Philosophical anarchism is a view just about the moral legitimacy of a state, without any specific commitments to any particular plan of action. Philosophical anarchists do not categorically oppose the overthrow of states, they just don't categorically push for it to happen right now. States should go away, somehow, eventually, because they are morally illegitimate; but philosophical anarchism has no specific commitments to when or how that should happen. Different individuals may hold different opinions about it.

(I personally think that the elimination of the state is the "limit", in a calculus sense, of increasing perfection of government: if we make existing governments do fewer bad things and more good things, we eventually, in principle, make them stop being states, and achieve stateless governance; or at least, that is the condition that continued improvement to the government approaches, even if we're not ever able to actually reach it).

You asked about moral legitimacy, not what to do in practice about people doing morally illegitimate things.

No states are morally legitimate — Pfhorrest

Please, clarify your position, — Gus Lamarch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_anarchism

My main question would be about what makes a concept of state legitimate so that it has influence over territories that it does not control, and which moral arguments could claim this legitimacy — Gus Lamarch

No states are morally legitimate; all any state ever has is its effective control over a territory.

What was, or rather, what is the Roman Empire? — Gus Lamarch

I think the simplest answer would be the empire founded by and containing Rome. When the empire founded by Rome was no longer centered on Rome, it was still the same empire; but when that empire no longer contained Rome, it was no longer the Roman Empire, but something else. Any other empire centered on or founded by Rome later would not be that Roman Empire, but instead some other Roman Empire, requiring we number or otherwise distinguish Roman Empires from each other, none of them deserving the definite article.

Yeah I actually don't know what @TheMadFool means.

Yeah I’m thinking of this all as a philosophical thought experiment divorced from the practical details: basically “if you could directly stimulated pleasure centers in your brain would you want that ability?” In actual practice no, I’m not getting brain surgery unless I really need it.

What about Mental health issues? Depression, anxiety, suicidal ideation etc — MSC

That’s the kind of thing I was thinking of.

If it can be made so that just existing at all in and if itself feels like at least a slight net positive, regardless of what else is going on, then it seems that that would go a huge way toward relieving anxiety, depression, and existential dread.

That is a good point, but that’s really all mere a side-effect of my proposal, not the reason for it. The reason for proposing this isn’t to create an impractical verb like “to human”, it’s just to make clear in the structure of language that objects are bundles of properties and properties are propensities to act, so at the bottom all of our predicates are some kind of inflection of verbs.

Maybe it helps some people. Most people I know have no trouble getting the drugs of their choice and no hesitation to offer them to me. Hasn’t made it any harder to say “no thanks”.

“Drugs” is exactly the metaphor I thought of. I’ve gone my whole life without succumbing to the temptation to just drug myself into blissful oblivion. More recently when it’s become clear that a lot of my mental anguish is not all circumstantial (from outside events) but coming from within myself, I’ve hesitantly tested small doses of (prescription) drugs to help pull me over to functionally good-feeling instead of cripplingly bad-feeling. The dial (not button for me) sounds like a more direct version of the same principle, and if I can resist the temptation to become a junkie I’m pretty confident I could resist the temptation to turn the dial up more than a trickle.

If you want endless sensations, be then irrational animals and leave your vacant places as former humans to those who are really worthwhile. — Gus Lamarch

Those who are, what, philosophical zombies, soulless automata that do nothing other than exercises in pure logic for fun? Sorry, not fun, that’s a kind of pleasure. For what then?

All of the “higher” functions of humans are unquestionably of immense value, but that value is in large part instrumental for its effectiveness at reliably attaining the simple pleasures, and where it is not merely of instrumental value, its intrinsic value lies in still further kinda of pleasures.

Once we have answered all of the questions and solved all of the problems, once we are all knowing and all powerful, what then is left but just to ENJOY it? All the sound arguments against just living in pure enjoyment right now — and there are plenty — hinge on there still being unsolved problems and unanswered questions the answers to which may reveal problems that could threaten the possibility of everyone just enjoying themselves.

"One" as in the god-thread? — god must be atheist

No, as in someONE vs someTHING, which is the change they made.

A person is someONE, but their face is someTHING, so if we are describing the beauty of a person’s face, it’s not objectifying the person to say that their face is a beautiful THING.

Can I vary the amounts of stimulation? ‘Cause like... orgasmic bliss all the time sounds kind of debilitating, but a small trickle of “everything’s fine, relax and don’t stress out” would be great.

I’d like to always feel at least slightly on the positive side of things, but for HOW MUCH positive to still go up and down in response to other things.

For no other reason than it seems irresponsible to just trust you to take care of everything else that concerns me about the world and retire into perpetual orgasmic bliss.

Your phrasing would suggest that the face is a person. The partner is a “one”, but her face is a “thing”.

A human is, as you say, a bundle of properties, of prone-nesses, each of which already have corresponding verbs. — Kenosha Kid

I’m not suggesting that we replace all of those verbs with context-dependent versions of “to human”; it’s just a side effect of my broader proposal that there would be a verb “to human” implied by the form of the noun we would use in place of our noun “human”, e.g. “humaner”, where “to human” just means “to be humany” or “to do as humaner does”. Since to be is to do, to human strictly speaking would just mean to be human. But in looser contexts it COULD mean any of the many specific facets of human-ness.

It occurs to me we already do something kinda like that with expressions like “how human of you”, or the entire adjective “humane”.

Antifa are anarchists or anti-capitalists and there’s no dirtier word to a Trumpian than anti-capitalist. — praxis

To the right, anti-capitalist = communist = totalitarian = fascist, so if anti-fascist = anti-capitalist then anti-fascist = fascist, in their dictionary.

Thanks for trying to clarify, but that does sound pretty much like what his fans have said to me before.

What they’ve told me is that Harris wants to just give an operational definition of “good” as “conducive to human flourishing” or something along those lines, and then get on with figuring out what is conducive to human flourishing, putting aside any further arguments about whether “conducive to human flourishing” really works as a definition of “good”.

That kind of definition pretty much is the archetype of ethical naturalism, held by e.g. utilitarians. As it happens I think that “conducive to human flourishing” and “good” are more or less coextensive so it would be good to get on with figuring out what is conducive to human flourishing, but that doesn’t serve well enough as a DEFINITION, and bypasses a bunch of nuanced ethical and metaethical questions besides that.

Those questions are still worth looking into, and can be looked into simultaneously with doing a “science of morality” that is just investigating what causes human flourishing, just like we can still do science simultaneously with doing philosophy of science and don’t have to either wait for the latter to be finished before we do the former, or give up on the latter entirely since we can start doing the former without it.

Like I said, this is the impression I've gotten from other people defending him, so I'm not surprised if some of his actual views have gotten lost or distorted along the way. I welcome corrections on what his actual views are.

What is the foundations that Harris gets wrong? — DingoJones

Ethical naturalism, basically. Which wouldn’t be such a problem is all he meant was “not supernaturalism” or “not divine command theory”, because those are even more wrong. But there’s a lot more nuances in metaethics he’s insisting that we should just ignore; there’s a lot of problems that naturalism and the alternatives he‘s probably thinking of have in common.

I'm not sure the question of the ontological status of those coordinates is particularly relevant. — Kenosha Kid

Yes, this is my stance on the ongoing argument in this thread. My view on creativity is not anti-platonic, it’s just platonism-agnostic: it doesn’t matter whether platonism is true or not.

My point in the OP was that an algorithm like this AllEndlyStrings does not count as a creative process even though it will eventually come up with every product of a creative process; BUT that adding randomness to that (making it non-deterministic), or even making the search process completely random jumps around the configuration space, doesn’t help at all, its still just as non-creative. What matters is the details of the algorithm, how it identifies new (undiscovered) possibilities in relation to old possibilities. That relationship between the known and unknown is reality what I’m getting at.

A lot of creative works of our age would seem completely off the wall (“random”) uninteresting nonsense to people from a thousand years ago, because they lack the context of all the intervening works.

"To human" doesn't have to mean any particular conscious actions that humans may or may not choose to do.

What is the definition of a human? You'll give some list of properties, I don't actually care what that list is right now.

For each property you list, there is some way of describing that property as a propensity to do something under some conditions.

To do all those things under the relevant conditions -- to exhibit whatever combinations of properties defines a human -- is "to human", in the strictest narrowest sense.

In a looser sense, someone doing something contextually associated with humans, like "to err" or whatever, could also be another sense of "to human". E.g. from the perspective of some inerrant angels or something, "way to human it up" could be a cromulent way to say "you erred".

The little exposure to Harris that I have is his fanboys on Wikipedia trying to act like the idea of a "moral science" is a Harris original, and not just yet another statement of ethical naturalism plus the insistence that we not actually philosophically examine that statement but just take it as a given and move on with doing "moral science" on his terms.

And I say this as someone who is generally very much behind the idea of something like a "moral science", but I think Harris has its foundations completely wrong, and those should be questioned; but questioning it doesn't mean we can't get on with doing actual good in the meanwhile.

Harris comes off to me (by proxy) as akin to a physicist saying "stop doing philosophy of science / epistemology / ontology, just accept [my preferred philosophy of science / epistemology / ontology] and get on with doing the science!" And even though I am a hard-core physicalist who thinks we definitely should continue being on with doing the science, that doesn't mean we don't need to defend and shore up its philosophical underpinnings against those who would sabotage the project from beneath.

But he can't shave himself because he shaves only those who do not shave themselves. — Gregory

Therefore he does not shave himself, making him the kind of person who he does shave.

Therefore he does shave himself, making him the kind of person who he does not shave.

Therefore he does not shave himself ...


That's why this is a paradox.

Self gratification has low worth and should remain unsung. — praxis

If everyone could gratify themselves in every way then the world would be quite a happy place.

It's only self-gratification at the expense of others' gratification that's blameworthy.

But only inasmuch as anything at the expense of others is blameworthy.

You are correct and SMBC made my overarching point better than me.

How does a verb prone into another verbing?

(Individuation of processes maybe?)

Just playing about. — fdrake

I don’t understand.

How do we handle nouns like 'human' that do many qualitatively different things? — Kenosha Kid

That’s why I mentioned the process going the other way too: from the noun “a human“ we could back-form a verb “to human”, which means to do those things definitive of a human. Asking what exactly that verb means, what those things are, is the same thing as asking what makes something human.

I’m saying more like instead of the noun “human” we would have the noun “humaner”, which is something prone to humaning, where to human is defined as above. We can still start with the nouns, but ideally the language would formulate the nouns in a way that makes their relationship to verbs clear: that persistent phenomenon over there is a “somethinger”, where “to something“ is to do... that, what’s happening over there.

That’s because the photon doesn’t go through A1 OR A2, it goes through A1 AND A2.

And you and Pfhorrest both end up talking about resolving disputes, though Quine's model on its own has that classic me-alone-figuring-out-the-world feel. — Srap Tasmaner

On my model, the disputes can be internal to one person. There are multiple options and you're not sure which to believe: how do you choose? It's the same exact problem as different people with different opinions trying to decide which if either is correct.

That implies that the competing theoretical frameworks overlap, right? — Srap Tasmaner

I'm not sure what you mean by that.

What I mean is that, assuming some common background theory, an observation might imply that such-and-such is the case. But of course we could always instead change the background theory so that the observation does not imply that such-and-such is the case. As Quine points out, we're always testing the combination of whatever thing we're explicitly trying to test with an observation, plus all of the background theory that's we're not explicitly trying to test. And that's a totally unsurprising thing to me; of course we're always testing the combination of all of our beliefs.

Like, a medieval astronomer noting the retrograde motion of planets could conclude from that observation that the true motion of planets cannot be simple circles, and that we must conclude that they follow epicycles around intermediary points that in turn circle the Earth as we previously supposed the planets to.

Or, Copernicus might point out to them, we could instead modify our background assumption that planets circle the Earth at all, and instead suppose they and the Earth circle the sun, and the relative motion of the Earth and (other) planets would account for the observation of retrograde motion in the sky.

Except, that still doesn't perfectly fit the observations, so the critics might retort that we do in fact need to conclude that epicycles are real anyway, whether or not the planets circle the sun.

Unless, Kepler might point out to them all, we instead modify out background assumption that everything in the sky moves in circles at all, and allow for the possibility that their motion is elliptical.

So the observation of retrograde motion either proves that epicycles are real, or else disproves the assumption that planets move in circles*. Either way, we're still adapting our theory to account for the observations, and so still doing empiricism.

*(Or... any of an infinite number of other possible explanations that would still fit that observation).

So how do you see the theory-ladenness of observation playing out when settling an empirical dispute? — Srap Tasmaner

I’m basically a falsificationist, so if an observation implies one thing in the context of one theory, but is also consistent with some other theoretical framework entirely, then both of those theoretical options remain live possibilities.

We never ever pin down exactly one theory that is definitely the one truth according with observation, we only ever narrow down the range of remaining possibilities still consistent with observations thus far.

Yeah I get real tired of people thinking quantum mechanics violates classical logic. Being in a superposition of two states is not the same as being classically in both contrary states at the same time.

I hold only disputes about reality to be settled by EMPIRICAL experience specifically, but disputes about morality to still be settled by experience, just a different facet of experience: hedonic experience.

I didn't define "empiricism" so everyone could put their own spin on it. I can't tell what your spin is. — Srap Tasmaner

Possibly because my “spin” in much broader than any of the others you’ve mentioned, e.g. Quine pointing out that observations are theory-laden seemed kinda pointless to me, because of course they are, that doesn’t make empiricism false; etc.

I would define empiricism as the view that the correct way of adjudicating differences of opinion about what is or isn’t real is comparison to our empirical experiences.

That is equivalent to the rejection of both the view that our empirical experiences can’t tell us anything about reality because they’re all dubious, and the view that there are ways of learning about reality that do not depend at all on empirical experiences.

Rejecting empiricism means effectively rejecting criticism, because if there is no common experience against which to judge things, we cannot rationally resolve differences of opinion, leaving us with just fideism (if we nevertheless promote some opinions over others) or else nihilism (if we don't). Either of which leaves us unable from the start to make any progress in sorting out truth from falsehood... which would leave us unable to tell whether empiricism was true or false. If we are in such a state of not knowing, we nevertheless cannot help but act as though we think one way or the other, by either trying to figure out what is true or false by appeal to our common experiences, or not trying. If we don't try, then of course we will fail to ever succeed. If we do try, we still might never succeed, but we might at least have a chance.

It thus follows from the skepticism of empiricism that one ought to proceed nevertheless under the assumption that empiricism is true, for to do otherwise is merely to give up on the pursuit of truth.

It’s not possible to “see behind the curtain”, so all we can do is assume that AI who are functionally identical to humans either do or don’t have the same experience as humans. I’m saying that I operate on the assumption that they do, and that effects my decision; if you assume otherwise of course that effects your decision too.

I’m not disputing the scenario, I’m making a judgement about it: programs that perfectly replicate human functionality COUNT AS people as much as humans do.

AI people are still people, so if life in the virtual world is nice then enjoy it, and if it’s not... well that depend on whether life outside would be better or not, and what it might take to get out there.