If they thought that, then clearly they're wrong. — The Great Whatever

What makes them wrong, though? Because the rest of us say so?

Don't get me wrong, I think it's immoral in the extreme in the non-realist sense. I just don't see how one can philosophically make the case for moral realism.

But that's not true at all. For example, I can say 'I bet/hope that painting is beautiful – so I hope someone gets to see it!' and this makes perfect sense, even knowing no one has seen it. But for this to make sense, it has to have been beautiful independent of anyone's seeing it. In fact, that's why we want to go see it, because it's beautiful. — The Great Whatever

Or because other human beings have similar aesthetic tastes? How do you get from people having aesthetic experiences to the object being aesthetically pleasing independent (real) of anyone?

I think an individual can see whether an object is beautiful by beholding it, but that the object is beautiful doesn't mean that their beholding it makes it beautiful. It already was; they just saw that it was. — The Great Whatever

There do exist sado masochists. One particularly nasty individual in the early 20th century tortured and killed a bunch of kids. He got off on that stuff.

Reason I bring it up is because you have vigorously defended hedonism, and in conjunction with knowing something is beautiful just by perceiving it, how do you account for such individuals? Are they wrong?

think an individual can see whether an object is beautiful by beholding it, but that the object is beautiful doesn't mean that their beholding it makes it beautiful. It already was; they just saw that it was. — The Great Whatever

But what's your rationale for this? It just sounds like an arbitrary claim where you have no means of ascertaining the truth of the matter, since other individuals can see the same object as ugly, and there is nothing else to something being beautiful than our perception of it.

I'm guessing that this all stems from your metaphysical radical subjectivism, where there is no objective truth of the matter, so all truth is whatever the individual beholds.

I'm not sure what you mean. — The Great Whatever

Are we not discussing the case for or against moral realism? I'm confused at your confusion. If morality is no better than beholding a beautiful object for any given individual, then how is it real?

But what if he just replied, 'I don't believe this map is accurate?' — The Great Whatever

Along with all other maps, official documents, governing bodies, etc?

But it's not the best example of realism, because humans somewhat arbitrarily (for historical reasons) determine what cities are the capitols.

Or what if he just said 'I don't believe my eyes reveal objects independent of them?' — The Great Whatever

DC would still be the intersubjective capitol, but for such a person, I'm not going to hold my breath on any realist claims from them.

Is there a difference between there being a truth to the matter, and an objective truth to the matter? Claiming there's no truth to the matter would seem to commit one to saying nothing is tasty, which is wrong, since plenty of things are. So you must have something else in mind. — The Great Whatever

Realism - there is no real taste value. Similarly, there are no real moral or aesthetic values. Only subjective or culturally defined ones.

don't know, because I've never tried fruitcake (that I can remember). — The Great Whatever

The point is that there is no objective truth of the matter about whether fruit cake tastes well. In fact, the taste of fruit cake is entirely a creature and individual matter, for those who can taste fruit cake as anything.

I'm just pointing out that that's an odd belief, and I'm not sure how to convince you otherwise. — The Great Whatever

Shouldn't that tell you something? If I claimed that New York was the capital of the US, you could show me how I'm wrong.

What is more objective than looking at something and seeing that it's beautiful? Aren't all methods of inquiry in some sense observational like this? — The Great Whatever

No, consider taste:

Me: This fruitcake is the best tasting stuff on Earth. You: fruit cake is disgusting. It should never have been made. It's an abomination to human taste buds.

Turkey Vulture: might as well be a rock. (I have no idea whether turkey vultures have an interest in fruit cake but I'm guessing some animals would be totally disinterested).

What is the truth about whether fruit cake tastes amazing? It's entirely a subjective matter. There is no objective, or real fact of the matter.

Do you always think you're wrong, or there's no fact of the matter, juyt because someone disagrees with you? People have different opinions, that's perfectly common. — The Great Whatever

Right, and in some cases we have objective means of determining who's right. But this is not so with aesthetics or morality.

No; whether the object is beautiful is. Of course, I can often tell whether an object is beautiful by seeing (etc.) it. — The Great Whatever

Even though people disagree with you? What makes so sure?

Why would the culture's opinions matter? Just because someone has an opinion that p, doesn't mean that p. No? — The Great Whatever

Because there is no other fact of the matter.

Uh, I don't know. I would have to know what song you were talking about. — The Great Whatever

So you are the arbitrator of what's beautiful?

Really? What are those methods? — The Great Whatever

Those would be scientific, logical or mathematical methods. They're objective.

Shouldn't you look at (or otherwise experience) the thing itself, to find out if it's beautiful, rather than asking or observing whether people find it beautiful? — The Great Whatever

So when I find a movie or song to be beautiful and moving, and then other people, perhaps even friends or family, find it to be otherwise, who is right? Am I beholding the movie or song correctly, or are they?

So, is the idea that if people defend different sides of an issue, there's no objective truth to the matter? — The Great Whatever

For morality and aesthetics, I would say yes, because we have no other way of determining their truth than what people find moral or beautiful.

It's different with empirical or mathematical claims, because we do have means to investigate independent of what one group or another thinks. There are still some people who remain convinced the world is flat, but they're simply wrong. This is easily shown.

But if we have two cultures, where one thinks that torturing kids in some situations is moral, and the other disagrees, then what independent means is their to determine who's right?

'm not sure about this. It seems to me that certain things are beautiful and others less so, or not. Isn't this a kind of realism about aesthetics? Certainly I don't think my beholding them makes them beautiful, rather I appreciate that they are (and others can too). — The Great Whatever

You behold them as beautiful because of the kind of creature and individual you are, not because they are beautiful. A turkey vulture likely finds the smell of dead carcasses to be intoxicating. Humans find it revolting. But okay, that's a different topic.

It is interesting how in the past you have defending radical subjectivism, and I've defended realism about the world, yet here we are totally the opposite side.

think the moral realism/anti-realism debate can be approached in a different angle: moral realists typically believe moral truths can be discovered — darthbarracuda

But where are they discovered from? Nature is no guide to moral behavior, plus the whole is-ought distinction. It's left to human culture, and human cultures vary quite a bit. Individuals and groups within a culture often disagree a lot on what's moral.

So to TGW's point that disagreement doesn't mean there's not an objective reality, this is true. However, we have no justification for thinking so, because we can't know it. I think it goes farther than that, actually. Moral values only exist in social groups, and social groups disagree on what's moral, therefore there is no real standard.

Just to put this out there for everyone, as a counter to TGW's claim that torturing children is objectively wrong because presumably everyone agrees, consider the institution of slavery throughout history, particularly in the Americas.

There are other examples. Some cultures have practiced human sacrifice, probably as a sacrifice to their gods. Then there's female circumcision, untouchable class distinctions, conquest by war, and many other abominable practices that were seen as justifiable and even good. There's probably even been some offering of children as a sacrifice, given a couple references in the Old Testament.

And then there's how the Spartans treated their kids to toughen them up, which might be considered as a form of torture to modern values.

The notion that facts having to do with people are somehow exempt from being 'real' in the sense in which realism of any sort is interested seems to me mistaken. Features of an act itself obviously have to do with people and their actions as well. Surely we don't want to say that morality and its grounding has nothing to do with people and their actions: that's precisely what morality is (at least in large part) about. — The Great Whatever

Yeah but the same can be applied to aesthetics, and the case for realism qua aesthetics is even less well supported than morality. It seems quite clear that a lot of what human beings find tasteful, interesting or beautiful is particular to human idiosyncrasies, and is not some objective feature of the world.

As an example, say we end up using Mars to dump all our trash on until it becomes an ugly, smelly planet by human standards. Is it ugly to the universe? Is it ugly to some alien creature that feasts off trash?

Back to morality. Would aliens find torturing human children to be immoral? Maybe, but maybe it would depend on their culture and what it means for aliens to conceive. Would the universe care about us torturing kids? It doesn't seem like the universe cares at all what kind of bad things go down. It's not even a proper question to ask.

So then, morality, like aesthetics, is dependent on human values, which are not objective. They're particular to us. They don't exist independent of us, unless you want to argue God or Platonism.

So is the idea "if there is an objective X, we can't disagree about X?"

But that's nonsense, right? — The Great Whatever

Sure, but that we can so profoundly disagree about what's right and wrong in many cases, particularly across cultures is what makes it questionable. It's different than some ordinary fact that we can have consensus on. Let's take slavery as an example. It's just as bad as torturing children, yet it has been defended vigorously by various cultures and individuals over time. It's even been claimed that slavery was objectively moral, in that God ordained slaves to be in that position in life.

If evolution is the case, then it's really hard to see how there can be objective morality, in the realist sense. We're moral creatures because that's the best strategy for us to pass our genes on, but the exact morality can vary depending on what works in any given time or culture.

However, if one isn't a realist about the world, then one could ignore evolutionary reasons for why we behave the way we do in favor of grounding morality in something else, like God or the platonic realm, I suppose. But then one needs to account for the various disagreements over ethics. Why is it that we can fundamentally disagree about how to behave if there is an objective moral code we're all supposedly aware of?

Going back to natural fiber (wool, linen, cotton, leathers and feathers) is possible, but doing so would require a tremendous agricultural and manufacturing shift. — Bitter Crank

There's always hemp ;)

As long as we have enough oil to last until the world transitions to cleaner energies, then we should be fine on that front. Battery, solar, wind, etc are all improving. I don't know how long it will realistically take to transition. Say it's 30 years. Do we have enough oil for three decades?

Oil can be replaced. If nothing else, we have a giant ball of energy in the sky that won't run out for billions of years. And you never know with cold fusion. The breakthrough might still happen.

I think adapting to the resulting climate change from burning so much oil will be more problematic than running out of it. We'll have a different energy economy in a few decades, but we'll have to adapt to the results of a warmer climate. Let's hope it's not severe enough to dry out the Amazon, or melt Antarctica.

It's nonsense to say that a tree doesn't falls in the forest if nobody is there to witness it, it just does. — Question

Sure, and a computer moves electricity (or light) around when nobody is around to witness it.

This is clearly not true. A computer is a logical space, which behavior is dictated by logical facts. Ask Turing. And as per the Church-Turing-Deutsch principle, the world is the totality of facts, not things. — Question

But a computer is actually a physical device that we invented to do logical things with. You have to have electromagnetism and atoms to make an electronic computer. The whole logical space, boolean algebra, and programming are all abstractions on top of the actual physicality of the machine.

The world is the totality of things. — quine

The world is a totality of fields?

I don't know that this works when it comes to physics, though, with it's universal laws, constants and particles and forces. You can't point to one electron as an example that defines the rule. They all have the same charge, mass, etc (that is what it is to be an electron).

The world just is. Facts are something we create from our intersection with the world as part of forming knowledge. Facts are a knowledge construct, even though they are about the world. But they are not the world, as if facts could exist independent of any minds.

The principles we (robots, fish, iPhones, humans) work on e.g. the laws of physics and chemistry are same. The difference I believe is that of degree not of kind. — TheMadFool

Are planets robots? How about black holes? Plants? Fire?

Physics and chemistry apply to everything physical. You've basically equated robotics with those two fields. There needs to be a bit more discrimination before you can compare life forms to robots.

Is a squid like a robot?

That is, ethics is shown, not said. — Banno

Except that it is, like since you were a little school boy. Do this, don't do that. It's better to share. 10 commandments. A good person does this and not that. Our language is full of ethical entreaties. We have ethical schools of philosophy dating back to pre-Socrates. We discuss ethical dilemmas presented to characters on various shows. It's hard to see how ethics isn't intimately related to language.

Or Babylon 5: mind wipe the criminal and replace it with a new mind. I don't recall where they got the "new" minds from.

Well what hasn't been done cannot be done and must be a bad idea. I concede — unenlightened

It would be like promising to get rid of money if you got elected. Now maybe one day in the future we'll be post scarcity and there won't be money or prisons (maybe a neural adjustment will fix criminal impulses). But that possibility says nothing about the reality of a politician abolishing punitive forms of justice today.

I'm not expecting to get elected any time soon. — unenlightened

Even if you were elected, you wouldn't get very far with abolishing punishment. Literally every society engages in some form of retributive justice.

Punishment is never sensible. If someone is unpleasant, they are not made more pleasant by being unpleasant to them. — unenlightened

Punishment is also for the victims and society's sense of justice. This even applies to studies where participants play a game that gives them a chance to cheat, and others will go out of their way to punish the cheaters, even at cost to the themselves.

Humans have an innate need for some form of justice. It's not all about the perpetrator.

A primary function of a mind is to create knowledge - each mind has to do that for itself. Animals don't create knowledge. — tom

Nah. The primary function of mind is to figure out how to survive and have (and rear in some animals) offspring. The accumulation of knowledge is a spandrel. Evolution could care less about philosophical, mathematical, or sports knowledge, for example.

Plants don't count but horseshoe crabs do because ...?

Wouldn't the statistics be heavily in favor of being some bacterium or virus overy any other life form?

How about we change mind to sonar. It's incredibly unlikely to be a whale or a bat. Therefore, only whales and bats exist. Or perhaps, it's incredibly unlikely to be able to use your mind to change the color of every single skin cell, therefore, only cephalopod minds exist.

Afterall, what makes the human mind more unique than that of an octopus or a bat? Just because we value abstract reasoning more than being able to see with sonar or camouflage into the background? (Would be quite useful in certain social situations come to think of it.)

There's a very wide range of abilities that we're not so great at or lack altogether. A mantis shrimp's eyes puts ours to shame, and are probably unique in their combined abilities. Maybe only mantis shrimp eyes exist?

The argument is trading on pure anthropomorphism. I doubt very much nature agrees with our exaggerated sense of self-worth, or philosophical obsessions over language and abstract thinking. The lowly horseshoe crab has been around in basically the same form for four hundred million years or so. We've been around for what? A couple hundred thousand in close to modern form? The horseshoe crab has survived all manner of cataclysms. We worry about making it out of this century.

Maybe only horseshoe crab minds exist.

It's not just "my form." It's ridiculous to think that every (other) physicalist is merely deferring to the science of physics, and that that's all there is to the position. — Terrapin Station

Of course it's not just deferring, since it's a philosophical position. But the term is physicalism for a reason, and that's because modern physics has shown that matter isn't the only game in town. Or to put it a better way, matter is only part of the physical picture.

That would matter if physicalism were adherence to whatever the received view is in the scientific discipline of physics, but it isn't. — Terrapin Station

I think you have your own version of physicalism as evidenced by:

TThe idea that energy can obtain apart from matter is part of the "crap" I was referring to earlier. It's incoherent. — Terrapin Station

As such, whenever I mention physicalism going forward, just ignore it, because it obviously has nothing to do with your form of materialism.