Comments

  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    How? What does 'taking into account' a reason actually consist in? Perhaps you could give me an example of someone else's reason (maybe presented in your recent discussions of meta-ethics) and explain what you did to 'take account of it', how has doing so contributed to the 'something' we come up with together? — Isaac

    The OP of this very thread is full of them. A chain of reasons to abandon one position and then a new position adopted to account for those reasons and then more reasons that rule that out so some other position adopted to account for those etc. The main point of that OP is “look how there are reasons against all of these conventional meta-ethical views. Let’s discuss what a view that accounts for all of those could be like.”

    How are you deciding what is a 'good' argument? — Isaac

    A sound argument. One that makes valid inferences from true premises.

    Of course the truth of the premises could be open to question which then pushes the argument back further, but that’s just how reasoning works.
  • On rejecting unanswerable questions
    ↪Isaac
    That is a good point. In practice, there are some things the exact details of which can never be encoded in any finite mind. But in principle there are answers to those questions available to arbitrary precision given enough mental capacity. There is some number at every digit of pi, and in principle it could be calculated. There is some position of every atom in the atmosphere, and in principle it could be ascertained. These aren’t answer-less questions.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    You highlighted a need for some systems to arbitrate in the latter case, but no similar need for arbitration in the former? — Isaac

    No, we need and have a system for arbitration in the former case too. That’s what rational argument is all about. We share our reasons and then together try to come up with something that takes into account all of those reasons. That’s precisely why I came up with something other than all the example methods of moral arbitration you gave: they all have some good reasons some bad reasons and arguments against each other highlighting each other’s bad reasons and their own good reasons, and I try to listen to all of those arguments and then creatively figure out what something that takes all of them into account would look like.

    Which is completely analogous to the procedure I advocate for resolving moral disagreements, except in the case of meta-ethical or otherwise entirely philosophical disagreements we’re dealing entirely in pure a priori reason, and contingent phenomenal experiences don’t matter, while on my account of resolving ordinary first-order moral disagreement (and ordinary first-order factual disagreements), experiences matter, so other people’s experiences are reasons that need to be accounted for in whatever solution is come up with.
  • On rejecting unanswerable questions
    You can just refer to me by name if you like. :)

    he doesn't reject individual questions if they prove to be unanswerable, he rejects the notion that a question can be unanswerable. — Kaarlo Tuomi

    That’s pretty much it.

    so that when confronted with a question of the form, "at what age do angels learn to fly," he can supply the answer "I don't know" and that satisifies his conditions. — Kaarlo Tuomi

    Not quite. If there were such a thing as angels, “I don’t know” wouldn’t be the answer to that question, though it might be somebody’s honest response to it. My principle against unanswerable questions would just say that there is some correct answer to that question, even if we don’t know it yet.

    But since there aren’t any angels, the question is problematic in the same way that “how long is the king of France’s hair?” is problematic. There is no king of France to have hair of any length. I suppose that preceding sentence is the correct answer to that question, though I admit that that is in a sense a question that doesn’t have an answer. Just not in the sense that I was thinking of.

    So perhaps I should think about rephrasing that. The gist I was going for is that whatever state of affairs you’re inquiring about, some response will correctly convey what it is. If you ask something about angels and there are no angels, saying so is the answer to the question; if there are any angels, then something else is the answer. “I don’t know” is always an acceptable response, but “we can never know” never is.
  • Robert Nozick's Experience Machine
    ↪David Mo
    It’s a straightforward extrapolation of things that are already very real. We have forms of entertainment that give us pleasurable experiences.

    A major reason not to just engage in that entertainment non-stop is that it can only give a limited range of experiences. So what if it wasn’t limited? Would there be any reason to ever disengage?

    Well, of course, you have your physical well-being to see to, you need to eat etc. So what if something could take care of your physical needs while you were spending time in this fully immersive entertainment? Would there be any reason to ever disengage?

    Well, you probably have to pay for all this, so you still have to go do work to afford to have the home and all this entertainment system equipment. So what if we lived in a fully automated utopian space communism, and you didn’t have to work for that? Would there be any reason to ever disengage?

    That’s where the scifi story begins. And well, there’s concerns that something in the real world could ruin your life of luxury. There‘s moral concerns for other real people not in your entertaining system. There’s the pleasure of knowing the secrets of reality through scientific discovery etc. And so on. So what if all that could be taken care of? Would there be any reason to ever disengage?

    If so, that shows that pleasure is not the sole or highest good. If not, maybe it is. And that would answer a question in moral philosophy for us. Which then applies back to the present day: is there anything morally inferior about spending all day playing video games if you’ve already done everything you need to or at least can do to maintain your health and financial security and care for others etc?
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    So the moral philosophy you're advocating is one which seems right to you? Yet if other people advocate a different moral philosophy they're not merely of a different opinion, but they are wrong? — Isaac

    There is nothing special about me or moral philosophy in that regard. This is just ordinary judgement and disagreement. On every matter, everyone has to work out to the best of their ability what seem like the right answers to them, in light of all the arguments one way or another, and consequently the alternatives that seem wrong to them too. To disagree with someone just is to think that their opinion is wrong.
  • Heraclitus Weeps For Us, Democritus Laughs At Us
    The common factor to comedy and tragedy, and what I hold makes drama (inclusive of both of those) like a mirror image of beauty, is that while beauty is about experiences of something seeming in some way right, comedy and tragedy are both experiences of something seeming in some way wrong.

    The distinguishing difference between comedy and tragedy is how they approach that wrongness: comedy approaches it frivolously, with levity, making light of whatever is wrong; while tragedy approaches it seriously, with gravity, taking the wrong thing to be a weighty matter.

    This wrongness can be of either a descriptive or prescriptive kind, just like the rightness of beauty can be. I think this is best illustrated in the wide varieties of comedy, ranging from slapstick (where people experiencing physical violence is treated lightly instead of as a matter of grievous injury) and roasts or other jokes explicitly at someone's expense (that are treated as an acceptable transgressions of social norms), which are both making light of prescriptively bad things; to jokes that hinge on setting up and then subverting expectations (where something that was thought to true turns out to be false), including postmodern comedy that violates medium conventions such as breaking the fourth wall, and even things like puns where the wrongness is just the use of the wrong word in place of the expected one.

    All comedy hinges on something being, in some way or another, wrong, and yet treated as not a big deal.

    Tragedy, on the other hand, depicts something being in some way wrong, and makes a big deal out of it being wrong.

    Both of them are, for that wrongness that they depend on, in some way un-beautiful. Yet both can nevertheless be, in the end, beautiful in their own way. Comedy, in making light of bad things, shows them as not so bad, and so correspondingly good, at least relatively speaking, and thereby beautiful in a way. And tragedy, in treating bad things as weighty matters, can speak hard truths about bad experiences that people can really have, and so, for that truth, also be beautiful in a way.
  • advantages of having simulated a universe
    ↪Kaarlo Tuomi
    Glad I could help. :-)
  • advantages of having simulated a universe
    Simulations bridge physical distances. You can do pretty much anything without going anywhere, so the energy savings would be substantial.

    The actual cosmic distance between planets likely makes traveling to other solar systems untenable, so naturally one would expand a sense of inner space with simulations.     — Nils Loc

    That's the use that I can see for universe simulations generally. I predict that the far future isn't going to be human beings bodily traveling the stars, but of an increasingly sophisticated and defensible civilization here at Sol (Dyson sphere with star-lifted fuel supply and a stellar engine), with Earth, its biosphere, and human civilization preserved amidst it, while a swarm of AI-directed robots explore (and similarly transform) the universe, reporting detailed information about it back to Sol, where we can then "follow" after them virtually.

    But the usual hypothesis that leads to this train of thought is that an advanced civilization would build a simulation for scientific purposes. They'd want to know what a universe like such-and-such, including people like so-and-so, would be like, so they make a model of one and see what happens in it. In a sufficiently advanced model, the modeled people in it might actually be fully conscious beings perceiving the model as their universe.

    There's little reason I can see why one would want their simulations to start to contain simulation ad nauseum. You can't just go on nesting forever: every bit of memory and processing power used to simulate a simulation in a simulation is more memory and processing power the top simulation needs, so on a fixed computational budget the deeper universes have to get smaller and simpler, and the computational budget of one where they don't do they balloons exponentially. so the usual "we're probably in a simulation because most universes are simulations" argument fails to persuade me.
  • Natural and Existential Morality
    ↪Kenosha Kid
    What you're talking about there is how we've all got our own moral intuitions. There are a lot of "oughts" that we're naturally inclined to grant without question. Those are the "oughts" that we reason from when we read a mere description of something and conclude that something good or bad happened: we already have opinions of the form "X ought not happen" before we read that "X happened".

    Similarly, if my girlfriend tells me she saw an adorable squirrel eating seed in the middle of a bunch of pigeons down the street from my house, I'll believe her account without needing to confirm it, because I already know from experience that that's a kind of thing that can happen.

    But, for example, when an ex-girlfriend long ago complained to me that someone she saw at work told her to smile, from that description alone I didn't understand why that was bad. I imagined myself being at work and someone telling me to smile, and I imagined that I would take it as a friendly gesture, someone trying to help cheer me up. She had to talk me through all the other experiential context in order for me to understand why, in her circumstances given her history and the world as she generally experiences it, a strange man telling her to smile is demeaning and unpleasant. She had to explain what is different between her and me that would explain why she would experience displeasure in that context when I wouldn't.

    If someone tells me that someone they know got injured or something, I can extrapolate from my own experiences with pain to know that that's a bad thing, without having to get injured myself and see that yes in fact having cuts and bruises and broken bones does indeed feel bad.

    But my girlfriend couldn't understand why I not only wanted but needed to pop my neck and back sometimes; to her imagination, that sounds like something that would be unpleasant, and she couldn't understand why it would be pleasant, because she hasn't had the kind of spinal problems I've had and doesn't know what a relief it is from a kind of pain she's never felt. Not that it's a level of pain beyond anything she's felt, but she has no experience of pain just from joints inside her body being misaligned, with no cuts or bruises or breaks or anything. To her imagination, the neck-popping seemed like it should feel like a break, and so be bad; while to my actual experience, the neck-popping alleviated a different kind of pain, and so was good.


    Your discussion here gives a good solid account of why we have a lot of "ought" intuitions, why we evolved to be eager to accept that certain things are good or certain things are bad, and so to easily agree with at least some other people when they claim that something is good or bad. But that evolutionary account doesn't establish that or why those things are good or bad, just the cause of us often thinking so. And despite that frequent agreement in the contexts where such agreement was evolutionarily advantageous, we also have frequent disagreements, especially now (the evolutionary "now", past 6-12Ka) that we live lives so different from the ancestral environment.

    Moral objectivism is only the claim that those disagreements can be rationally (small-r, not big) resolved: we can talk about why (as in reasons, not causes) one person or group thinks something is good or bad and another thinks otherwise, and work out some kind of unbiased conclusion. My kind of moral phenomenalism is only the claim that the reasons we should appealing to in those disagreements are the things we have common (as in shared) experiences of seeming good or bad. Thus objective phenomenalism about morality, which is to say, altruistic hedonism, is just the two of those things together, saying that we should listen to and be concerned about each other's claims that something feels good or bad, and try to work out together some course of action that feels good and not bad to everyone.

    (And the other principles of liberalism and criticism together just mean that by default everything is permissible until it can be shown wrong, and it is always up for debate whether something or another genuinely can be shown wrong or not. These seem to be the counter to what you think "objectivism" means, as in absolutism, necessitarian, a priori, unquestionable moral dictums. But that's not what it means).
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    I see no reason for moral claims to be any different than any other claim in this regard. What I do not get is the confusion regarding what the claim means, or what it is saying. What's not to be understood about what the claim means, assuming we are competent language users? We all know what it means, don't we? If we do not, then we've gone horribly wrong somewhere along the lines in our meta-ethical considerations, because we most certainly used to. — creativesoul

    Meta-ethical questions first arose in response to the logical positivists’ verificationist theory of meaning, which is very similar to what you outline later: a statement’s meaning is what it tells you to expect of the world if you go and investigate it. But moral statements, following the is-ought divide, aren’t telling you what to expect about your experiences of the world. If I hear that something is good, that doesn’t tell me to expect anything in particular about it to be apparently true, or for anything in particular to even appear to exist. You can't get an "is" from an "ought" any more than you can get an "ought" from an "is", so "ought" statements have no implications on what "is".

    So are moral statements then meaningless, if verificationism is true? And if not, then what do they mean, if not the same thing as non-moral statements? That's where meta-ethics comes in, trying to answer those kinds of questions.

    The term "moral" would no longer be being used - on pains of coherency alone - as a value judgement/assessment, and the same is true of utterances of "ought". Rather, "moral" would be used to pick out things that are about acceptable/unacceptable thought, belief, and/or behaviour. — creativesoul

    "Acceptable/unacceptable" is just another kind of judgement/assessment, so I don't see the difference here. What does it mean for something to be acceptable? We can check the descriptive fact of whether something is accepted, but what observation do we make of a thing to verify its acceptability? Like, describe two things that are exactly identical in all of their features except one is acceptable and the other is not. What's that difference between them like? (This is a rhetorical question, I don't expect you, or anyone, to be able to actually do that).

    Take a promise made to plant a rose garden on Sunday. "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday" is incapable of being true/false at the time of utterance, but claims about that promise, or based upon that promise are most certainly capable of being so. For example, if one promises to plant a rose garden on Sunday, then "there ought be a rose garden on Monday", is true for the exact same reasons that there ought be a red cup in the cupboard. — creativesoul

    In this case, the promise is basically just a future-tense description. "I promise to plant a rose garden on Sunday" and "I will plant a rose garden on Sunday" have pretty much the exact same content and function: they're impressing upon the listener the belief or expectation that on Sunday I will plant a rose garden. If they believe me when I say that, then they will expect me to plant a rose garden on Sunday, which is the sense of "there ought to be" here: it's expected that there will be.

    A lot of moral-ish language also gets used for future-ish descriptions and vice versa, because moral prescription is more often than not about the present and future, while descriptions of reality are more often than not about the present and past, so it's easy to conflate moral with future and real with past. (In my essay On Rhetoric I recently added a bit adapting Aristotle's past-centric "forensic" and future-centric "deliberative" forms of rhetoric into reality-centric and morality-centric forms instead).

    But they are distinct purposes, because one can also say prescriptive things about the past and descriptive things about the future. You can say that something ought to have happened yesterday, but didn't; and that something will happen tomorrow, but shouldn't; and so on. So just saying that something will happen, "ought to happen" as in you descriptively expect it to, or you will be surprised if it doesn't, is different from saying that something should happen, ought to happen, as in you prescriptively "expect" it to, or you will disappointed if it doesn't.

    Just because you think something is going to happen doesn't mean you think it ought to, and just because you think something ought to happen doesn't mean you think it will.
  • Koans
    Once there was a goat who was walking to town to eat with his friend the llama. As the goat was walking, he came upon a man who was looking like he was either about to scream or cry. The goat asked the man, "what's wrong?" The man replied that his wife had just left him. The goat said, "well, that's nice, gotta go," but the man said, "wait! I sense that you are an enlightened master who has come to teach me the way to enlightenment in my time of need. Please teach me all that you have to know." The goat reluctantly agreed, and took the man on as a student.

    The man followed the goat for many days, and tried to talk about spiritual things. Every time he did, the goat would bite him on the arm or leg, whatever was closest. The man realized the wisdom in this, and began to enjoy the journey itself. However, one day, he was feeling unsatisfied with the situation, and pleaded with the goat to teach him something about the nature of the Universe.

    The goat reluctantly agreed, and after finding a good place for meditative thought next to a lake, began to instruct the man:

    "Tell me, man, can these trees continue to grow if the sun stops shining?"

    "No, Master, it cannot. Without the sun, the trees will die."

    "And what of the rivers? Can they continue to flow without the rain?"

    "No, Master, they cannot. Without the rain, the rivers will dry."

    "And what of the teachings that lead to enlightenment? Can enlightenment occur without someone to teach the teachings of enlightenment?"

    "No, Master, I do not believe that they can. Without a Master, all of the teachings will disappear, and no one will be able to be enlightened."

    "Wrong!" the goat said sharply. "In the case of the sunshine and trees, and in the case of the water and the river, there was always a cause and an effect. For each effect within the world, you can be sure there is a cause, and for each cause, there must, by definition, be an effect. But the teachings of enlightenment do not exist, and therefore have no cause or effect. Why not? Can you tell me why not?"

    The man looked confused, and said, "Master, I don't understand. Why do you say that the teachings of enlightenment do not exist?"

    The goat breathed deeply, and said, "Okay, let me try my question in another way. You say I am an enlightened Master. How did I get to be an enlightened Master? Take your time and answer me correctly."

    The man closed his eyes and thought deeply. Many different answers came through his head, but none of them felt correct. He waited until he thought of an answer that seemed so obvious, he wondered why he had not thought of it. "Through your past lifetimes, Master. You have been practicing for many lifetimes and you were able to overcome all hardships and reach enlightenment."

    "Wrong!" the goat said again. "Please, think about the answer and try again."

    The man sighed, and again closed his eyes and thought deeply. Again many answers came into his mind, and in fact many of the same answers came again and again. He began to doubt for a moment whether or not his first answer was correct, but he quickly removed all doubt from his mind with an effort of will. He then thought, in order for me to come up with the correct answer, I should stop thinking about anything at all. Then, all of a sudden, an answer came into his head. "Through the power of the Universe. You came to be a Master because of the power of the Universe, which somehow knew that I would need you. Everything works out! Everything has a plan! I understand now, Master!"

    "Wrong again!" the goat said in the same tone as before. "This is the last time. Please, think about the answer and try again."

    The man began to breathe heavily. He was discouraged and couldn't understand what the answer was supposed to be. He closed his eyes and tried to think deeply again. Something was bothering him, now. He thought that he had found some sort of new understanding, but now his doubt was now back, stronger than before. He tried and tried, but he couldn't ignore it or push it away as before. Then, all of a sudden, it hit him.

    "Goats can't talk!"

    The goat got up from where he was sitting and bit the man on the arm, and walked away.

    The man was enlightened.     — lgstarn's Zen Slap
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    What would working sufficiently well consist in? Is it the extent of agreement with the answer, the extent to which you agree with it? — Isaac

    Working sufficiently well means not being vulnerable to any reasonable criticism. Whether or not a particular solution is vulnerable to any criticism is up to each particular reasoner to evaluate. In my evaluation, there are sound objections to all the things you listed: people have problems with them and I can see why, their reasons for not completely accepting them seem sound to me. That isn’t to say that all of them are completely wrong in every way. A real solution would incorporate the best from all of them while avoiding the problematic parts.

    Say, hypothetically, we asked the world "should we give a tithe to charity", by vote. The vote was 60/40 in favour of a tithe. Everyone agreed that this is a fine way to decide. Would that then make democratic vote a 'good' method for you? — Isaac

    In that particular case where everyone is satisfied, even the 40% who lost the vote, I have no objection there. Generally wherever there is unanimity there is no problem. But that doesn’t mean that every majoritarian vote gives a perfect solution to every moral question. It’s easy to construct scenarios where a majority vote clearly breaks down. (“Two wolves and a sheep...” etc).


    In any case, you brought these things up in the context of moral nihilism. To think that any of these actually is morally sufficient is already to reject moral nihilism. Moral nihilism would have it that none of them are and nothing possibly can be sufficient, because the questions are inherently unanswerable.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    ↪Isaac
    If none of them work sufficiently well then yes. If I thought any of those was a perfect solution I wouldn’t go looking for a better one.

    You may as well point at all the different religions’ accounts of the origins of the universe and ask if we really need scientific cosmology to come up with yet another one. Yes, we do, because those ones all have problems.
  • Natural and Existential Morality
    If the criterion of moral evaluation of something is whether it seems right or wrong, then you haven't said or proposed anything at all, you've just stated a tautology. — SophistiCat

    No more than a claim of empiricism is a tautology. Which it very well could be taken to be: the claim that any supposed thing the existence or non-existence of which would make absolutely no noticeable difference to what appears to be real, is not real. That sounds pretty tautological. But note how it’s distinguishing between what people might nominally think is real, and what the experience of reality is like. It’s saying that if you think X is real but the existence of X makes no difference in any experience of reality, then you’re wrong.

    My claim of hedonism is like that. It’s just saying that if you think something is or isn’t good, but that thing makes no difference in what does or doesn’t feel good to anyone, then you’re wrong. Besides that negative proposition, yeah, it’s pretty tautological, the good is what feels good, just like empiricism, reality is what looks real.

    The data that you collect is not an ought; it is a record of observations or reports - an is. — SophistiCat

    This just seems like you didn’t read the post you’re response to. Either you verify the hedonic experiences yourself, and get “oughts” directly from them (as a hedonic experience just is one that motivates an “ought” opinion, in the same way that an empirical experience motivates an “is” opinion: they are precisely the experiences of things seeming respectively good/bad or true/false). Or else you just take someone else’s “oughts” they claim to have derived from experience, without checking them. One way or another, what you end up with is a list of “oughts” to start from, and then you build more “oughts” out of them. You never start with any “is”.

    one can only ask why we are moral (as I'm trying to explain to Pfhorrest). — Kenosha Kid

    Asking that question presumes you known what is or isn’t moral, which is exactly the question at hand. Can we know that? If so, how? What does that even mean? It it just means some certain kinds of behavior we evolved to do, then you’re just giving an account of how we evolved to do what we do, leaving open the question (or else presuming an answer) to whether that stuff we evolved to do is moral.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    Could you walk through the logic that helped you reject non-cognitive approaches? It seems you take the Wikipedia article as an exhaustive list of non-cognitive approaches. Personally I have found more nuance in this space. — Adam's Off Ox

    I haven’t completely rejected all non-cognitivist approaches; I think universal prescriptivism is the closest thing to right that I’ve seen. My own view could be called “non-cognitivist” by those who don’t distinguish cognitivism from descriptivism; my view is a non-descriptive cognitivism.

    I would like to hear about the nuances you’ve found that I left out here. The meta-ethics I studied in college didn’t have much more than that wikipedia article does about it.

    You also seem eager to reject all forms of moral nihilism. Is that a logical approach or a reflection of your sentimentality? — Adam's Off Ox

    It’s a practical constraint. People generally talk and think and act like some moral claims are true and others are false and they try to figure out which is which. Arriving at moral nihilism is tantamount to simply giving up on that endeavor. But we can’t help but be constantly faced with moral questions as we live our lives. Rather than just trying to ignore those questions and by our actions tacitly assume some answer to them, which might be the wrong answer if there are right and wrong answers, practicality behooves us to at least consider the question and try to act in the way that is most probably right, should it turn out that anything is. So any approach that ends up saying there isn’t any answer to be found is for that reason impractical. We need some way of trying to answer moral questions.
  • Robert Nozick's Experience Machine
    The follow-up question that comes to mind is whether you'd be fine with a machine that basically just induces a single moment of ecstasy and then you die. The machine won't necessarily kill you, you just won't notice the passage of time since you'd experience unchanging maximum pleasure. We'll assume that the rest of the universe is taken care of. — Echarmion

    My intuition is that I would rather have a machine that gives me an unending variety of different pleasurable experiences, rather than just one big one forever, but I have pondered a lot about what life in an infinite artificial heaven would be like, and eventually transcending into an eternal timeless bliss is one happy ending I’ve imagined. An even better one, though, would be to induce a state of mi d where I find everything fascinating and wonderful like I’m a child seeing it for the first time, and full of joy at the experience, at any experience; and then have an unending variety (even if it events has to loop) of such joy and wonder forever.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    Kant's "groundwork" doesn't so much start with the question "what should I do" as it starts with the question "how can I be free". The categorical imperative is arrived at as the form of the "general law" that one must follow to be free of the vagaries of circumstance. — Echarmion

    Interesting. I had forgotten that from Kant, but then separately elsewhere (regarding free will theodicies) come up with a similar thought of my own, that free will is having moral reasoning be causally effective on your behavior, such that thinking that something is what you should do causes you to do that, instead of something else that you didn’t think you should do, which would be unfree will (where your will, that which moves you to act, is not dependent on what you meant for it to be; you are not free to will what you want to will, where wanting to will something and thinking it’s the right thing to do just are the same state of mind).
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    Put differently, we've pretty much concluded that events in the future are not fixed by the state of the universe now. Does that invalidate the notion of block time? — Banno

    I’d say it requires multidimensional time.

    The universal wavefunction does evolve deterministically, but that wavefunction is itself a multidimensional construct containing an ensemble of possible states of the universe. So that kind of gets you to quantum block time in a more conventional way there.

    But my preferred way to think of it is to envision time as a path through the configuration space of the universe, which I take to mean a different kind of modal realism. Other possible worlds (in a Kripkean sense but not a Lewisian sense) are the exact same thing as other times; futures and pasts are just other possible worlds that bear a particular kind of relationship to this present actual world.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    ↪creativesoul
    Meta-ethics isn’t about whether or not that kind of thing is true, but about what it means for something like that to be true (or false). What exactly is a claim like that saying?

    I haven’t given my account of that yet in this thread, only said briefly why I think the conventional accounts fail in one way or another
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    Where do you think Kant's "freedom through morality" approach falls within meta-ethics? — Echarmion

    I don’t recall that phrase exactly from Kant, so can you elaborate on that?

    I’ve also always had a hard time figuring out Kant’s metaethics. He seems clearly a cognitivist and not an error theorist. It seems plausible that he might either be some kind of universalist subjectivist like an Ideal Observer theorist, or else a non-naturalist realist. It’s really hard to say exactly.
  • Meta-ethics and philosophy of language
    ↪creativesoul
    The exact answer to that is precisely what is at question. What exactly is it that makes a moral claim different from any other (or not)?

    But the rough class of utterances we’re talking about are the kind involving words like “good, bad, moral, immoral, right, wrong, just, unjust, ought(n’t), should(n’t), etc”. As I’m sure you already know.
  • Scattered Thoughts on Living
    -- At 31, most normal aspects of life are still a struggle for me. Becoming able to get a minimally sustaining work-from-home job (after an excruciating in-office decade) to get my own apartment, and to take care of my expenses; that is basically the sum of what I've achieved in terms of day-to-day life. It was hard-won, and I am grateful that I have gotten to this point, but, as a achievement, it places me far behind the curve. — csalisbury

    Having felt a lot like that at that age myself, I wonder if you have looked at the actual curve numbers. I was surprised to learn that as poor as I seemed and as hard as it was to get any bare semblance of a “normal” adult life, the statistics showed that I had never actually been below the median.

    If that’s true of you too, the takeaway isn’t that you’re not really poor, but rather that we are all poor, and it’s not a personal failings of your own that you haven’t lived up to your internalized expectations. It’s a systemic problem, and you may be rising to the challenge better than most others are even while you feel like you’re failing.
  • Koans
    "Goats can't talk!"

    ...and the man was enlightened.
  • Consequentialism vs. Deontological
    I hold that that is a strictly speaking false dilemma, between the two types of normative ethical model, although the strict answer I would give to whether the ends justify the means is "no". But that is because I view the separation of ends and means as itself a false dilemma, in that every means is itself an end, and every end is a means to something more. This is similar to how my views on ontology and epistemology entail a kind of direct realism in which there is no real distinction between representations of reality and reality itself, there is only the incomplete but direct comprehension of small parts of reality that we have, distinguished from the completeness of reality itself that is always at least partially beyond our comprehension. We aren't trying to figure out what is really real from possibly-fallible representations of reality, we're undertaking a fallible process of trying to piece together our direct sensation of small bits of reality and extrapolate the rest of it from them. Likewise, to behave morally, we aren't just aiming to use possibly-fallible means to indirectly achieve some ends, we're undertaking a process of directly causing ends with each and every behavior, and fallibly attempting to piece all of those together into a greater good.

    Perhaps more clearly than that analogy, the dissolution of the dichotomy between ends and means that I mean to articulate here is like how a sound argument cannot merely be a valid argument, and cannot merely have true conclusions, but it must be valid — every step of the argument must be a justified inference from previous ones — and it must have a true conclusion, which requires also that it begin from true premises. If a valid argument leads to a false conclusion, that tells you that the premises of the argument must have been false, because by definition valid inferences from true premises must lead to true conclusions; that's what makes them valid. If the premises were true and the inferences in the argument still lead to a false conclusion, that tells you that the inferences were not valid. But likewise, if an invalid argument happens to have a true conclusion, that's no credit to the argument; the conclusion is true, sure, but the argument is still a bad one, invalid.

    I hold that a similar relationship holds between means and ends: means are like inferences, the steps you take to reach an end, which is like a conclusion. Just means must be "good-preserving" in the same way that valid inferences are truth-preserving: just means exercised out of good prior circumstances definitionally must lead to good consequences; just means must introduce no badness, or as Hippocrates wrote in his famous physicians' oath, they must "first, do no harm". If something bad happens as a consequence of some means, then that tells you either that something about those means were unjust, or that there was something already bad in the prior circumstances that those means simply have not alleviated (which failure to alleviate does not make them therefore unjust). But likewise, if something good happens as a consequence of unjust means, that's no credit to those means; the consequences are good, sure, but the means are still bad ones, unjust. Moral action requires using just means to achieve good ends, and if either of those is neglected, morality has been failed; bad consequences of genuinely just actions means some preexisting badness has still yet to be addressed (or else is a sign that the actions were not genuinely just), and good consequences of unjust actions do not thereby justify those actions.

    Consequentialist models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what is a good state of affairs, and then say that bringing about those states of affairs is what defines a good action. Deontological models of normative ethics concern themselves primarily with defining what makes an action itself intrinsically good, or just, regardless of further consequences of the action. I think that these are both important questions, and they are the moral analogues to questions about ontology and epistemology: fields that I call teleology (from the the Greek "telos" meaning "end" or "purpose"), which is about the objects (in the sense of "goals" or "aims") of morality, like ontology is about the objects of reality; and deontology (from the Greek "deon" meaning "duty"), which is about how to pursue morality, like epistemology is about how to pursue reality.
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    ↪Banno
    :up: :ok:
  • Robert Nozick's Experience Machine
    ↪Wheatley
    The only reason I wouldn't plug into an experience machine is concern that there is something that might matter in actual reality that is being hidden from me in the experience machine, and conversely that I am being hidden from the rest of the universe so my power and influence is limited.

    If I could live in an experience machine, and there were robots out in the real world keeping an eye on things, doing research into reality, etc, that I could communicate with from inside the experience machine, so that any important information in the outside would would be available to me, and any changes I need to make to the outside world can be made via those robots, then I would see no reason not to do so.

    And if in time it became clear that there's never anything new I need to learn about the outside world, and nothing that needs my attention out there (because everybody else is in the experience machine too, and the robots have everything outside taken care of), then I'd gradually just trust the robots to handle it, and enjoy my perfect life inside.

    In other words, if there is nothing outside that could disrupt anyone's pleasure on the inside, and nobody else's displeasure outside to concern myself with, then there's no reason not to. All the reasons not to boil down to your own or someone else's pleasure being at risk.

    That actually sounds like basically the closest thing to heaven possible, and the end-state of the universe we should be aiming for.
  • Psychology of Acceptance
    ↪Pinprick
    :100:

    Acceptance is the opposite of rejection, where to reject is to receive disfavorably ("Why did you give me this? I don't want this! Take it back!") or, of ideas, to disbelieve ("I reject your reality and substitute my own!")
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    So I'll just not express my opinion on any philosophical topic anymore because that would just be discussing "my philosophical system"? I said nothing about any connection to anything else in philosophy besides determinism, chaos, and so on in this thread. Which is the topic of this thread.
  • Mary's Room
    Furthermore, I hope you're sufficiently sensitive to understand that the idea of viewing humans as objects is de-humanising. — Wayfarer

    Viewing them as ONLY objects is dehumanizing because it denies their subjectivity, their agency. But all subjects are also objects, and that’s not dehumanize.
  • Mary's Room
    But that doesn't say anything. It's the very attribute that enables first-person awareness that is the subject at issue. So saying 'well, some objects just happen to have first-person awareness' says nothing. It simply obfuscates. — Wayfarer

    There is still the open question of what it is that makes at least some objects subjects, sure. But all that Mary’s Room proves is that there is more than just being an object to consider: there is also being a subject. It only disproves eliminativism, not physicalism. If some kind of emergentism or panpsychism can pan out, then physicalism is still tenable. I think emergentism has basically the same problems as substance dualism, which leaves only panpsychism.
  • Mary's Room
    Are persons objects? — Wayfarer

    Yes. Every thing is an object, persons included.

    At least some objects are also subjects, and it is the being-of-that-kind-of-thing-in-the-first-person that makes up their subjectivity.
  • Cogito Ergo Sum - Extended?
    Yes. But reality may not be what you think it is. — Gnomon

    This. We cannot doubt that there is some kind of world or another that we are experiencing. But we can in principle doubt any particulars about that world. Conversely, although we cannot doubt that we ourselves exist to have experiences, we can doubt any of the particulars about ourselves. All that's indubitable is that someone has some experience of something. All the details are up for grabs.
  • Mary's Room
    Yep, that's about it.

    Mary knows everything about what brains seeing the color red are like, in the third person: she can look at a brain and tell you if it's seeing red, and do stuff to a brain to make it see red.

    But Mary doesn't know what it's like to be a brain seeing red, in the first person, until she has been a brain seeing red. She could use her knowledge about brains and their relation to the perception of redness to induce that state in herself and then know it, but until she actually does that, she doesn't know it.

    And that doesn't require that anything non-physical exists. Just that there's a differences in experience between observing a physical object in the third person, and being that same kind of physical object in the first person.
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    ↪InPitzotl
    You make a good illustration of how prediction doesn't necessarily lead to chaos. I guess I would have to weaken my claim to prediction can easily lead to chaos. The example situations I was thinking of are ones where, given information about undesired consequences of actions, the predictor system then acts differently, which then produces different predictions, and the predictor system then acts differently, etc. I hadn't really thought through how this still nevertheless settles (or can settle) on a stable course of action, once the predictions are all of desired consequences.

    I guess the only real upshot of this to the implications of determinism on free will is that a predictor system can arbitrarily evade prediction, by doing other than what it predicts other predictors will predict of it.

    I don't know now, I'm feeling burnt out from work search shit and can't think straight anymore today.
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    ↪InPitzotl
    I'm not saying anything about this has to do with humans or intelligence, merely giving humans with intelligence as an example of a predictive system. The computer example you give works perfectly fine for me too.

    You say that in that case the result isn't necessarily chaotic. That's what I'd like more information on, because it seems intuitively like it must be chaotic, because every change in prediction causes a change in behavior which changes the future prediction which changes the behavior and so on in a non-linear manner. (You say "isn't changing any program's behavior", and in one sense, a conditional sense, that's true, but I mean in the sense of the consequent of that conditional. All the "if-then"s are the same, sure, but if every "then" results in a different "if" that then necessitates a different "then" which produces a still different "if"...).

    ↪fdrake
    Nothing about this has anything to do with my philosophical system, this is just a comment on the randomness-vs-chaos subthread of this topic. My original point of commenting was just to clear up the conflation of randomness with chaos, and this line of conversation is an extension of that, about how even if we didn't have randomness, the consequent predictability would then make any world with beings like us trying to exploit that predictability chaotic, and hence unpredictable still.
  • Cogito Ergo Sum - Extended?
    I’ve had a similar thought myself.

    Descartes famously attempted to systematically doubt everything he could, including the reliability of experiences of the world, and consequently of the existence of any physical things in particular; which he then took, I think a step too far, as doubting whether anything at all physical existed, but I will return to that in a moment. He found that the only thing he could not possibly doubt was the occurrence of his own doubting, and consequently, his own existence as some kind of thinking thing that is capable of doubting.

    But other philosophers such as Pierre Gassendi and Georg Lichtenberg have in the years since argued, as I agree, that the existence of oneself is not strictly warranted by the kind of systemic doubt Descartes engaged in; instead, all that is truly indubitable is that thinking occurs, or at least, that some kind of cognitive or mental activity occurs. I prefer to use the word "thought" in a more narrow sense than merely any mental activity, so what I would say is all that survives such a Cartesian attempt at universal doubt is experience: one cannot doubt that an experience of doubt is being had, and so that some kind of experience is being had.

    But I then say that the concept of an experience is inherently a relational one: someone has an experience of something. An experience being had by nobody is an experience not being had at all, and an experience being had of nothing is again an experience not being had at all. This indubitable experience thus immediately gives justification to the notion of both a self, which is whoever the someone having the experience is, and also a world, which is whatever the something being experienced is.

    One may yet have no idea what the nature of oneself or the world is, in any detail at all, but one can no more doubt that oneself exists to have an experience than that experience is happening, and more still than that, one cannot doubt that something is being experienced, and whatever that something is, in its entirety, that is what one calls the world.

    So from the moment we are aware of any experience at all, we can conclude that there is some world or another being experienced, and we can then attend to the particulars of those experiences to suss out the particular nature of that world. The particular occasions of experience are thus the most fundamentally concrete parts of the world, and everything else that we postulate the existence of, including things as elementary as matter, is some abstraction that's only real inasmuch as postulating its existence helps explain the particular occasions of experience that we have.
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    ↪fdrake
    That doesn’t sound like the kind of thing I’m talking about. I mean like how if you could send information back in time (backward causation) to show someone their future, their foreknowledge of that future would then change their behavior and so also change what their future ends up actually being. Likewise, if that person merely predicts their own future in an ordinary way (or just hears such a prediction), those expectations about the future will change their behavior and so make their actual future vary from the predictions.

    True backward causation introduces true randomness (even if the universe was otherwise deterministic, the moment that information from the future arrives introduces a fork in the timeline, and from the perspective of someone living through that moment it’s random which timeline they “end up in”). So it seems that something that seems to approximate backward causation (ordinary prediction) would in turn introduce something that looks approximately like randomness, i.e. chaos, even if everything was technically strictly deterministic.

    IOW it seems like it must necessarily be very difficult to predict the future of something that can predict the future.
  • Natural and Existential Morality
    ↪Isaac
    Do you (or some scientific consensus) not agree with Kohlberg's stages of moral development? That seems to confirm my own experiences. The first stage is all about avoiding immediate suffering (punishment) and seeking pleasure (reward). Then they start considering reciprocality and more and more altruistic social behavior until in the final stages it's all a matter of abstract principle. As the people in the middle (conventional) stages usually see those in the post-conventional stages as though they were actually in the pre-conventional stages, not being able to conceive of a post-conventional moral capacity, I similarly think those post-conventional abstract principles end up appealing to the the same basic criteria as the first stages, but in a much more universalized way.

    Just like religious people think that science is more "base" or "unenlightened" for caring only about empirical observations. Religious belief is like conventional morality. Science is like post-conventional morality. And those stuck in the middle can't differentiate the end from the beginning.

    "Before you walk the path to enlightenment, chairs and chairs and tea is tea. Upon the path to enlightenment, chairs are no longer chairs and tea is no longer tea. Upon reaching enlightenment, chairs are again chair, and tea is again tea."
  • Causality, Determination and such stuff.
    Can @Kenosha Kid, @jgill, @fdrake and the like weigh in on the accuracy of what I was saying up-thread about predictor systems (like human beings) being inherently chaotic / non-linear systems? My math isn't good enough to verify that formally, but the similarity between prediction and backward causation, plus the relationship of backward causation to apparent randomness, seems like it has to guarantee it; i.e. foreseeing the supposed future necessarily changes the past that that future was foreseen from and so changes the future which then etc...
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