Is there an ethical difference when it comes to taking lives?

On the other hand, it seems like in all of these cases, there was something to gain from performing such actions — Alec

Would you want someone to say that they loved and cared for you, but they didn't gain anything from it? That their concern for your well being was not accompanied by any feeling on their part? That it didn't satisfy any desire in them? That they wouldn't feel bad if something bad happened to us?

Consider someone bringing their lover a flower, but explaining that it gave them no pleasure or gain from doing so. Would the lover accept such an offering?

No, not at all. We don't want that from our loved ones.

Any time someone wants something that isn't to their own benefit. Compare I simply want to save someone from a burning house vs. I want to save someone from a burning house in order to protect myself from the guilt of not doing so. — Alec

Is this really why people rush in to save someone from a burning house? Do you think the would-be rescuer sits there and debates with themselves until guilt takes over, and they decide to risk their lives?

That's not what I've heard. People tend to act heroically in the moment, but they can't really say why they did.

think this was the premise behind the Selfish Gene book by Richard Dawkins. I believe his contention was that altruistic actions serve to promote the survival of the species and are therefore ultimately selfish, with self defined at that population. — MikeL

If it was for promoting the survival of the species, why would those acts be selfish? Acting for the good of others is not defined as selfish by most moral codes.

Also, I'm suspicious of reducing all human motivation to genes. Genes can explain how we evolved abilities like empathy, but they don't necessarily explain the complex behavior that occurs as a result of those abilities, particularly in the kinds of societies humans live in, where culture is a big thing.

Consider your brain. You can come up with evolution stories for how the different faculties of your brain evolved. But none of those explain sitting in a classroom discussing Plato. That's on an entirely different level of explanation (historical, cultural, sociological, meta-cognitive, etc).

It's like saying that Lebron James was born to play basketball. No, he wasn't. Basketball isn't something any human evolved to play, nor is Plato something any human evolved to think about it. Rather, those are complex emergent behaviors because we create culture and can self-reflect, and like to have fun while challenging ourselves.

The emergent behavior can model itself. — Jake Tarragon

How about a conventional computer running a simulation of a billion chinese using pencil & paper over a century to simulate a conscious society of humans.

I don't really want to derail your thread further from your main topic, I just wanted to voice my objection to you dismissing idealism out of hand. — Victoribus Spolia

This thread hasn't been commented on for a while, so it doesn't matter.

I don't dismiss idealism out of hand, because I've been involved in plenty of very long idealism/realisms threads in the past, which challenged me to seriously consider the idealist arguments, but ultimately, realism is more convincing.

So that seems to beg the question. Science assumes a mind-independent reality, how can you therefore use such to prove the existence of such? — Victoribus Spolia

Proof might not be doable in metaphysics, but I take it to be a most reasonable inference. If a plant is observed to have grown while nobody was around to perceive it, then it makes sense to suppose the plant underwent growth independent of any observers. There are all sort of things like that where the reasonable inference is that stuff is going on when we're not around to perceive.

The alternative is that somehow our experiences are structured as if stuff goes on without us. How experiences could be like that is a mystery.

Well, the Wittgensteinian answer would be to say that the environmental and cultural context that is normally present when asserting that "China Brain" is conscious, is lacking, in the same way that the normal context required for the same assertion is also lacking when considering the abstract operations of a human brain divorced from it's environmental and inter-personal context. — sime

But what if it's a simulation of a human society and not just a brain? Would all those 1s and 0s written out on paper over a century have experiences then?

On what grounds do you believe that there exists more than consciousness and conscious content? — Victoribus Spolia

Science. I was intending on starting a thread on science and realism where I would explain.

Why can't you accept #5? That seems like an unsettling declaration that lacks objectivity (no pun intended), or is perhaps based on a misunderstanding of Idealism..... — Victoribus Spolia

I'm convinced there is more to the world than what we perceive.

Or maybe silicon chips aren't, but that in the future we are able to build organic computers (which would amount to artificial brains, I suppose). — Michael

A Jupiter-sized organic brain that could dream of us?

Supposedly a Jupiter-sized computer could perform one million ancestor simulations a second, so I guess all the boring detail isn't that big a deal, and probably would just be for research purposes, such as alternate histories or figuring out things traditional history lacks the data for.

But whether a Jupiter-sized computer could actually be built and perform such incredible feats is pure speculation. And whether an advanced civilization would be motivated to build it, who knows.

Or you could reject a physicalist account of consciousness and argue that simulated consciousness is impossible. — Michael

You could reject that consciousness could be emulated (not just simulated where the Sims act as if they were conscious) and still be a physicalist about it. Physicalism doesn't commit one to functionalism about subjectivity. Searle would probably reject the simulation argument, for example.

His argument (from physics) isn't just that spontaneous brains are more likely, but that spontaneous brains with memories of a life like ours are more likely. — Michael

Is this spontaneity a form of last Thursdayism? Also, the spontaneous brains would involve the formation of an environment I can survive in long enough to remember, and will likely involve interaction with other people and technology, such as what I'm using right now.

In the old days, this kind of thread would go 100 pages, with much talk of apples, cats on mats, and the height of Mount Everest before it was cataloged.

Isn't that also what Buddhism says?

The latter position, to be coherent, must posit God or some kind of universal or collective mind. That is just the point I have been making. — Janus

And without some kind of universal perceiver, the idealist has no way to justify the existence of other minds. The universal perceiver plays the role of spacetime for idealists.

Just mix in something about politics and race and you'll get a nice FB discussion going.

Ideas, as in thoughts? — javra

Ideas as in perception, not concepts. That's the sense-data theory of perception that Locke, Hume, Berkeley and others have championed. And it does bring up the specter of skepticism regarding other minds.

But if we directly perceive minds/bodies when we interact with people, the problem of other minds need not be an issue.

And the materialist has to show how mind A can know about body B via ideas in mind A. — Michael

Au contraire. The materialist can just deny that perceptions are ideas in the mind. It's my understanding that the majority of professional philosophers who weigh in on perception are direct realists these days, and that sense-data has fallen out of favor.

I fail to see how that's more parsimonious than saying that ideas in mind A are caused by interacting with mind B. — Michael

You're right, but that's a problem for indirect realists and dualists to deal with.

This is what an idealist needs to do. Show how mind A can know about mind B via ideas in mind A. What is the connection between one mind having ideas of a body belonging to someone else, and another mind? How is that different from dreaming or imagining someone else's body (and behavior)? I dream of having conversations with people, but I've never had reason to connect that to someone else that's not part of my dream.

because if you're arguing for materialism then the mind is a physical thing, and so there shouldn't be a problem with saying that minds can interact with each other without any intermediary. — Michael

Is that like how software can interact with other software without an intermediary (hardware)? For a materialist, the mind is part of a living body, not separate from it. It would be meaningless for mind to mind interactions independent of a body.

What does it matter!? This running about for absolute certainty is a running after the horizon in belief that one can eventually hold it in one's hands. — javra

We can't be certain, but we can strive for reasonable beliefs. I'm arguing that idealism is less reasonable than materialism when it comes to other minds, because materialists have a plausible account of interaction via bodies that idealists lack.

To then affirm that in the movie Inception the other agencies were not “real” is then, I argue, a fallacy of reasoning (given the very metaphysical premises of the movie). Either you envision a body that is asleep/unconscious/etc. from which is produced multiple interacting agencies, or, else no such body and there being nothing but a communally shared dream between a multitude of agencies (as to the movie’s depiction of recurring personas, this in a way is no different than Shakespeare’s comments that all we are are actors/agencies/roles on a stage … playing out our roles on the sage of life (or at least something to the like)). — javra

But Inception does explicitly state that the people you encounter when entering someone else's dream are projections of the dreamer's unconscious mind. The only exceptions being the other minds who have entered the dream with you from outside via the machine that allows people to have a shared dream experience.

However, the main character Dom, played by DiCaprio, does have ongoing doubts as to whether he's ever actually awake, and one of the characters in the movie is actually a projection (his deceased wife).

This leads to the possibility that Dom is stuck inside a dream the entire movie, and all the other characters are his projections. Or he's being incepted from outside. But there's no way for him to be sure. In actuality, the director is incepting the audience, creating doubt in the viewer as to what's real, leaving it open to interpretation, similar to a philosophy discussion.

Those questions can be asked of the materialist as well. — Michael

It's like claiming that we're all dreaming. Take the movie Inception. On one interpretation, the main character is inside a dream the entire movie. If so, then he has no reason to believe anyone else he interacts with is real.

Contrast this with being awake. We have reasons to believe other people are real, and not just ideas in the mind. That's the difference.

I don't understand why you think bodies being of substance A can avoid solipsism but bodies being of substance B can't. — Michael

Because the substance of idealistic bodies is ideas in the mind of a perceiver, not a shared world of material objects.

Idealists don't have a body. They're in a similar position as the BIVs, minus the envattment. What they have is ideas in their minds of having a body and interacting with other bodies.

You need the idealist version of a Matrix to get around that.

And the idealist can say the same. — Michael

An idealist can say it, but I've not seen it backed up. What is it that connects the ideas in my mind of your behavior to your actual behavior, which I suppose are ideas in your mind?

BIV A has experiences of having a body, BIV B has experiences of interacting with other bodies.

But how does B justify interacting with A?

Materialism suffers from the same epistemological problem. — Michael

A materialist can say that it's inconceivable for a human being to act like they have a mind but not have one, since mind is necessary for human behavior.

But this is what (some) idealists claim is the case. So you're saying that idealism can't avoid solipsism because non-solipsistic idealism is false? — Michael

I don't know. It seems like it has an epistemological problem regarding other minds.

As an analogy, say both of us are BIVs. I have experiences of a world and people, and so do you. Let's say you're aware of being envatted. Now how would you know that I exist, and solipsism isn't the case for you? You would have to say that somehow we interact. But in order for that to happen, something has to wire our BIVs together in order to have a shared experience. So we can invoke the mad scientist as an analogy for Berkley's God.

But without the mad scientist, there's no reason to think that my experiences have anything to do with any other minds, other than as pure speculation. There's no way for me to know if my experience of you is anything more than an idea in my mind.

If we go for Hume's bundle theory, for example, our bodies are bundles of sense-data, and when these bundles of sense-data interact, you can directly perceive my immaterial body (as per a naive realist understanding of perception). — Michael

The problem here is that sense-data are sense-data for some perceiver, not an independent bundle that anyone can perceive. Unless you want to invoke God as the universal perceiver, there is no place for an independent bundle of bodily sense-data.

There is a huge epistemological hurdle to overcome here where mind A and mind B are somehow having a shared sense-data experience, where mind A's is of mind B's sense-data body bundle, and vice versa.

Come to think of it, why would mind A & B have sense-data body bundles at all?

You're a mental thing and I'm a mental thing. When we "touch" this elicits in you certain experiences. — Michael

So our minds touch? Or is it our perceptions that are touching?

It's the same sort of thing that happens for the materialist. When my physical body "touches" your physical body, this elicits in you certain experiences. — Michael

I don't think it is. Materialism does have difficulties with incorporating all aspects of mind, but not in this case. Having a body is how we interact.

The idealist claim that all things are fundamentally mental or immaterial in nature is not to say that only my experiences exist. — Michael

Yeah, I know that.

And the idealist's claim that independent minds can interact with and perceive each other is no more problematic than the physicalist's claim that independent bodies can interact with and perceive each other. — Michael

But I don't see how. Walk me through how I go from ideas of your body in my mind to interacting with and perceiving your mind, which isn't an idea/perception at all.

It's not some obscure tribe by the way. It's the official language of Indonesia, spoken by more than 200 million people. — andrewk

My fault, read too quickly. Used to hearing about some tribe that thinks/does things radically different.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I used Google Translate from the English "to be or not to be" to Indonesian: "untuk menjadi atau tidak menjadi". Then reversed it, and "to be or not to be" was the result.

I tried "existence" => "adanya" => उपस्थिति (hindi) => presence

That's interesting. उपस्थिति => Kehadiran => presence

I wonder why the Indonesian to Hindi is different.

And the idealist says the same. Only that the human beings that we interact with are mental/immaterial things, not physical/immaterial things. — Michael

That doesn't work, because minds aren't ideas. See where I edited my previous post right before you responded.

Yes. Isn't that also what the materialist says? — Michael

Yes, bodies are more than perceptions for a materialist.

How does the materialist know that there are other minds? — Michael

This depends on whether the materialist can make a case for mind being a part of a living body. If so, then the materialist can say that we perceive the activity of a mind when interacting with another human being.

The idealist doesn't have this option, since bodies are just ideas. Minds can't be ideas on the pain of solipsism.

There are minds other than mine. It's idealism, but not solipsism. — Michael

I never understood how idealism justified this stance. I get that metaphysically non-solipsistic idealists maintain there are other minds, but how they know this is problematic.

Now just take away the physical bodies. There are minds other than mine. It's idealism, but not solipsism. — Michael

So me perceiving your body is how I know you have a mind? *Ahem*

I suppose if I wanted to ask an Indonesian, in Indonesian, whether Harry Potter is real, I might ask something like 'Do you think anybody ever did all those things that the book says Harry Potter did?'. — andrewk

We could also ask the Indonesian if rocks are made up of smaller things we can't see, taste, touch, etc which give the rock the properties it has.

The relevance of that to the thread is that, without that verb, I don't think one can even describe a difference between an Idealist and a materialist. The difference dissolves to just one of language use. — andrewk

Does it really though? If you asked this Indonesian tribe whether imaginary rocks are made up out of the same stuff as ordinary ones you stump your toe on, would they say yes?

'The map is not the territory', which uses 'to be' in the 'identity' use. So according to Korzybski himself, his most famous utterance may be meaningless. — andrewk

There's other ways of noting that a map of London is not the city of London. I can't hail a cab while visiting a map of London. I can't bungee jump off a six inch model of the Eiffel Tower. And the equations of gravity written out on a chalkboard don't exert any force on me.

Of course the map isn't the territory.

(although as a philosopher that statement makes me blush, as I know that counterfactuals like that are meaningless). — andrewk

Why are they meaningless? I fully understand the concept of Bernie Sanders being elected, just like I fully understand the idea of alternate history when watching The Man in The High Castle.