the complete elimination of all suffering is an 'is' we measure suffering - we might do so by questionnaire (taking people's word for it), we might do so by fMRI scan, empathy...whatever. These are only the means by which we do the measuring, what we end up with, after that measurement is taken, is a fact, an 'is'. — Isaac
This is essentially the conversation we're having. — Kenosha Kid
we have left the reasoning for what-is-to-be-done behind. And that will always be moral reasoning, when the thing to be done is primarily qualified by the goodness of it. — Mww
Before heading off on that dialectical tangent, does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires? In other words, does your “generic problem solving” type of reasoning distinguish itself from the type of reasoning that grounds your “compelled to behave”? — Mww
If empathy boils down to mere recognition, which requires something to be observed, apparently negating being unaware. A philosopher will naturally balk at any phenomenon that does not present itself to our rationality, especially a stimuli-response example of it. — Mww
Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww
Jeeez, it sucks getting old. After spending all that time with a book written by him, it never even crossed my mind. Predispositions. (Sigh) If I’d been proper and used his last name with all those equivalences, I might have got it right. — Mww
I think this is problematical. Humans are plainly - empirically, even - different to any other animal, in terms of their capabilities, intellectual and otherwise, and certainly in terms of self-awareness. And that's both a blessing and a curse - a blessing in that self-awareness, combined with language and the ability to seek meaning, opens horizons of being that are simply not available to animals. And a curse, in that we can contemplate the meaning of our existence and our death. — Wayfarer
Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch if “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”). — Pfhorrest
It’s really not though. There being something banging on the door is there being something that is actually (objectively) moral — Pfhorrest
I’m just saying that the persistent shared experience of something banging on the door is all there is to there being something really banging on it. — Pfhorrest
But to agreed that there is this persistent shared experience of something banging on the door, yet deny that anything is really banging at the door, because of a doubt that monsters exist, is to conflate any belief in SOMETHING banging at the door with a belief in monsters specifically doing so. — Pfhorrest
Not to mention, if we can rationalize with it, how can we not be aware of it? Or must we now separate being aware of, from being conscious of? — Mww
In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think.
— Amazon
Failure to accept evolution and the sciences that study our humanness is a very serious morality problem with social, economic, and political ramifications. — Athena
Well said. I agree with the worry about the ramifications of non-empirical moral metaphysics. I think that understanding what we are, and why we are that way, should shed light on which ethics are consistent with human society and which aren't. — Kenosha Kid
There is a direct relationship between racism and Christianity and the problem with education that we have experienced, preventing our democracy from being fully realized besides having a prison system based on false beliefs and the highest number of incarcerated people in western culture. The belief system supports the military-industrial complex and the notion that our military is serving God. That is a bit of a moral problem with serious ramifications. — Athena
I'm still impressed you read it so quickly. — Kenosha Kid
But where did the quality of goodness come from? What makes that outcome "good"? — Kenosha Kid
System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of. — Kenosha Kid
on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity. — Kenosha Kid
Whenever you see an optical illusion, you are unaware of the things your unconscious mind has done to the image before presenting it to your consciousness for consideration. — Kenosha Kid
But this is describing individuals. It does not describe objective "oughts" and "ought nots" but rather those arising from the experience of each person separately/ — Kenosha Kid
Then you're making no differentiation between an empirical fact and a belief. It is an empirical fact that something is banging on the door. Objective morality is not an empirical quantity: it cannot be detected, or verified. It is only a belief, like that there is a monster at the door. — Kenosha Kid
What I can measure are my moral feelings: how I feel when I see a child in distress, or a person being attacked, etc. I have no access to any objective moral truths, but I do have access to scientific evidence that those feelings are explicable in terms of physiological drives. I have a window to see what it is that is banging on the door, and whether, knowing this, the belief is justified. — Kenosha Kid
That the human has qualities is irrefutable, so what does it matter where they come from as long as it is tacitly acknowledged they are present? — Mww
There is no intrinsic contradiction is supposing the quality of good is every bit as present as the quality of altruism or empathy.
...
Altruism is represented by selfless acts, empathy is represented by your “emotions and insights”, good is represented by my “moral dispositions”. — Mww
System 1 is a problem-solver. There's all sorts of problems it solves that I have no consciousness of.
— Kenosha Kid
Agreed, in principle...
on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour because there is ambiguity.
— Kenosha Kid
I submit that reason must be used to determine anything of which determination is possible. — Mww
Ambiguity merely regulates the certainty of the determination. — Mww
So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?” — Mww
This suggests my unconscious mind actually does something to the picture of shaded squares. — Mww
Why couldn’t optical illusions just be an error in judgement, given from improper understanding of that which is the cause of it? — Mww
To my knowledge, innovation in tribes (without outside influence) is generally mimetic, not pedagogical, i.e. the innovator has no authority and, to boot, is not necessarily aware of why their innovation is successful (Dennett's boat builders again). I'll firm up on this in a subsequent post, but if you have counter-examples ready that'll save me the effort (laziness is my moral virtue). — Kenosha Kid
Boehm's modal dominance seems reasonable to me, and he seems to think that a biological basis is the consensus. But, even though human groups have mostly been small, we may have evolved from large precursor species groups, so it's not a given that, if there is a biological basis for dominance, it is particularly for dominance of the group over the individual. — Kenosha Kid
I’m not starting from the “is” that is the description of those people’s experiences, but from the “oughts” those experiences directly give rise to in those people. — Pfhorrest
Every experience someone has that feels bad to them, i.e. that hurts them — not their emotional or cognitive judgement of the morality of something they perceive, but the immediate experience of a bad sensation, where the sensation itself conveys its own badness, i.e. pain etc — take that to be bad (an “ought not”), as it seems to be, and add that to the list of things that are bad (a bunch of “ought nots”), which then demarcates the boundaries of what still might be good (“maybe ought”). — Pfhorrest
It's a bunch of small pieces of the one big objective "ought", in the same way that individual observations are only small pieces of the one big objective "is". — Pfhorrest
You have "no access to any objective reality" either by those standards. You only have the small pieces you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say is looks true, looks true). Similarly, you only have the small pieces of "objective morality" you can subjectively experience, and your trust in other people's reports of their experiences (that what they say feels good, goods good). In both cases, objectivity just means accounting for all of those experiences together without bias. — Pfhorrest
That just evidences the confusion I'm trying to clear up here. You seem to place "objective reality" in the same category: that objective reality isn't the unbiased total of all possible empirical experiences, but it's some thing out there somewhere that causes all those experiences. — Pfhorrest
it is insufficient to simply say: "Objective reality of external phenomena has been well justified, so we're safe to apply the same assumptions to morality." You need to infer an objective moral reality in the same way. But when I check my moral values, I do not see the same consistency. I do not react the same way in similar situations each time. I do not find that I generally agree with others who have been in the same situations. And I do not find that learning not to hit people gives me an automatic knowledge of the morality of horn-tooting douchebags. It seems in all respects a subjective, irregular phenomenon, and the assumption of objectivity is not supported. — Kenosha Kid
I acknowledge that something is present (the banging at the door). When I see an apple, feel an apple, taste an apple, even though these are all indirect ideas of an apple, I happily acknowledge that something is present. — Kenosha Kid
I feel pain when I see someone suffering -- that pain is present. I feel glad when I help them -- that gladness is present. — Kenosha Kid
However I don't have this sense of a priori moral knowledge or of moral objective existence. — Kenosha Kid
on moral issues, reason must be used to determine an intended behaviour.......
— Kenosha Kid
I submit that reason must be used to determine anything.....
— Mww
These are contradictory. If one accepts that human decisions are sometimes made unconsciously, one cannot hold that reason must be involved in every human determination. — Kenosha Kid
So is there an answer to “does the psychologist admit to different kinds of reason, as the philosopher absolutely requires?”
— Mww
Different to problem-solving? No, I don't think so. — Kenosha Kid
There are certainly things that reason has that aren't problems to solve in themselves but are factors of problems — Kenosha Kid
The rational mind is an employee hired for solving certain problems that now thinks it's the boss! — Kenosha Kid
That someone else thinks something 'ought' to be the case is, to you, a fact about the external world. — Isaac
Not all matters that people think ought not to be the case are related to immediate hedonic sensations, even of themselves, certainly not of others. — Isaac
Individual observations do not speak to the efficacy of a belief in an objective reality. — Kenosha Kid
Yes, Anglicanism is not what Christianity once was. (Worth remembering that Christianity was the moral revolution of altruism and empathy, until it itself acquired might.) Do you believe Christianity to be the chief cause rather than just another symptom? I'm unsure. Your country was the first major secularist country in the world. You had founding fathers who were quite incredulous about the notion of God in general and of Christianity in particular. Your country was religiously diverse while remain that secular too. It seems to me that nationalism was the American illness, and Christianity one of the government's rallying points for nationalistic sentiment. — Kenosha Kid
Read, but not studied. — Mww
What I reject are beliefs about where these things come from, where they exist, what values they can have, what values they must have, what qualities they have, that proceed from no data but one person's sensations and a lot of imagination. The artefacts of moral metaphysics (and I don't just mean Kant's Metaphysics of Morals, but any metaphysical origin story for my moral values) are not present like an apple is present. My feelings are. — Kenosha Kid
hedonic sensations, — Isaac
hedonistic. A hedonistic person is committed to seeking sensual pleasure — the type of guy you might find in a massage parlor or at an all-you-can-eat buffet.
The interesting bit of morality is the culturally mediated bit. That, I think, would have been less the case in pre-agricultural times, not because they relied more on the defaults, but because there was only one culture to learn from, there was a strong line of non-pedagogic influence (mixed ages), a relatively stable environment, small group sizes (minimising Chinese whisper effects), no strong advantage to selfishness, no virtual social groups (which are too easy to manipulate). — Isaac
For me the only key elements I have as my foundation are that it has to be pre-human (Frans deWaal's work on primates and Sapolsky's peaceful baboons seem compelling evidence to me that pro-social behaviour is pre-human), and it has to be largely culturally mediated - by which I mean learnt through childhood, with perhaps some limits and constraints set by evolved predispositions. — Isaac
When someone says that a cold-blooded murder is morally good, the appropriate response is "No, you're not using the words correctly, that's not the sort of thing we call 'morally good'". — Isaac
I was talking about how our brains work, not what people believe. — Athena
Read, but not studied.
— Mww
That is the difference between slow thinking and fast thinking. — Athena
I’m talking about either replicating their own experience to get your own copy of their same “ought” if you doubt their claim, or else just accepting their “ought” claim on its face if you can’t be bothered and just want to trust them. At no point are we to take a step back and talk about the “is” fact that they hold that “ought” opinion; we stick to the “ought” opinions themselves. — Pfhorrest
I’m saying that regarding both “is” questions and “ought” questions, we would do best to concern ourselves only with possible answers that we can test against our experiences: empirical in the former case, hedonic in the latter. — Pfhorrest
seeing some people doing some stuff and passing moral judgement on them isn’t a direct experience of something “seeming bad” the way that pain is. — Pfhorrest
As with the all of these matters, the real question is: why the uniformity? — Kenosha Kid
The more I think about it, while I do think culture is extremely important, 100,000 years of seemingly stable, small group sizes seems too long to have a generic cultural explanation. Cultural timescales are expected to be much, much smaller. — Kenosha Kid
The point of Chinese whispers is that it changes, but we didn't seem to change in this respect until 12,000 years ago. — Kenosha Kid
No doubt. All that is the empirical mode of perception. That altruism, empathy, and good...justice, beauty, liberty, etc., are not detected by the senses, even if objects of them are, indicates some other mode of presence must be possible. — Mww
And there it is. A different mode of presence. In addition to the empirical mode given to your senses by the person, the person also presents to your rational mode some activity of his that elicits a feeling in you not given by the person as an object, but by what the person is doing. — Mww
Dunno about a sense of qua feeling or emotion, but anything a priori is absent any and all matters of experience. From that, any cognition resulting from the conjoining of conceptions is thought only, hence a priori. — Mww
Anyone can observe the object of my action. If that action has been determined by my lawfully deterministic will, it is a moral action. And indeed, possibly an immoral one. — Mww
Not a contradiction, but a confusion of source: reason used to determine moral things, reason used to determine all things........unconscious decisions. — Mww
Are there different kinds of problems? — Mww
I wouldn’t call those factors of problems. Factored into problem solving, perhaps? — Mww
That still leaves rationality fully in charge of that of which we are conscious. — Mww
My unconscious mind is not the me I know, so if it causes errors in me, then the rational mind I know should be the boss. — Mww
Every individual observation rules out some possibilities about what might be objectively real. An account of objective reality has to account for every single observation, otherwise it’s not actually objective. — Pfhorrest
It kind of sounds like you’re implying confirmationism here, that enough observations can prove something to be true, rather than the falsificationist view that anything might be true that has not yet been observed false. — Pfhorrest
There being an objective reality means that something can be actually false, not just disbelieved; and there being an objective morality means that something can be actually bad, not just disliked. — Pfhorrest
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