eliminating those that can be shown to be incorrect — Pfhorrest

Except it's still not clear that this is what your method does. Where's the "false" in your "falsifying"?

Like a car coming at you, you’ve just got to get out of the way somehow, it doesn’t matter which way. — Pfhorrest

Okay, yes, and that's satisficing, which means you have a clear goal, a way of deciding whether it's been met, very often a scheme for reducing candidates, and usually a deadline or a plan that definitely produces a decision ("the first thing I find that actually works" is such a plan).

Whichever changes seem best fit to make to you, go ahead and make those. — Pfhorrest

But that's not.

Either you don't really mean "best", and satisficing is fine although we don't know how you're doing it, or you do mean it and you'll have to explain what it is you're supposed to be optimizing and how you'll do that.

To recap: your theory isn't falsification a la Popper but Quine's web of beliefs, and the way you select what to disconfirm when your web becomes inconsistent is -- as yet unclear.

Okay, I think I see what you have in mind. But I still don't see how it works.

The new observation entitles you to eliminate something, thus whittling down the number of possible consistent sets of beliefs. Sure, it doesn't tell you which one to eliminate, because of underdetermination, but what matters is not knowing for sure which belief set to eliminate but eliminating one or more. Whittling down will have been achieved.

So when does the actual whittling down happen? As far as I can tell, knowing that you're entitled to eliminate something or many somethings from an effectively unbounded set but not knowing which something -- that might be necessary but it's not the same as actually whittling down.

Stage 1. Your dance->rain hypothesis.
Stage 2. Dance & no rain.
Stage 3. ???

What happens in Stage 3? Anything? Do you just move on to Stage 4, knowing that whenever you like you have several options for filling in Stage 3? Maybe in fact it makes sense to wait, see what else turns up. Maybe Stage 4 will give you a way of picking which Stage 3 whittling-down option (and there are many) is the best. But it'll be just like Stage 3, including the option to disregard the even newer observation entirely.

You do of course have the option at any point of using some completely unrelated method for choosing which whittling-down option to follow. But that hardly seems in the spirit of the thing.

The Quine-Duhem thesis is that it is never a single prediction that is exposed to disconfirmation but the entire theory, the entire framework, right? And then you need further mechanisms to make defensible decisions about what to count as disconfirmed. I have no memory of what Quine says about this, but I suspect it convinced pretty much no one.

Falsification is already in there, isn't it? I know very close to zero about Popper, but I thought his program was to tie the fate of a given theory to specific predictions and expose them to experimental rebuttal one at a time. Fail any single test and the "whole theory" is toast. I assume that the "whole theory" is a structure defined entirely in terms of entailment, and that just looks like a fairy tale. At any rate, this is nothing like underdetermination, is it?

Instead of starting with a blank slate of no possibilities and trying to build something up from that tabula rasa, you start out with every possibility live, and then for every argument or bit of evidence you encounter, every relationship between certain ideas you find, you whittle down some possibilities — Pfhorrest

Maybe I missed it, but it's still not clear how this whittling down is done. I get the impulse: if any one of {A,B,C,D,E} explains {x,y,z} and we can rule out B, we've made progress without settling on which of {A,C,D,E} is the best theory much less The Truth. But you need to be able to rule out B, and I'm not sure you've actually shown that you can, given underdetermination.

Can you give an example, real or imagined, but not schematic? For instance, you made it clear to @Janus that you reject theism. Do you consider it falsified? Or just unlikely?

I think avoiding Hempel is supposed to be one of the strengths of falsificationism, since you claim not to be interested in supporting evidence at all.

In the real world, supporting evidence does matter and people are more or less Bayesian about it.

This is non-black cat — Banno

Why didn't you do Hempel? Every non-black non-raven counts as "evidence" that ravens are black.

Logic is swell but it's not the swiss-army-chainsaw it's been taken to be.

In all cases, note the rather surprising approach: the seemingly infinite production of new flowers at the core of the inflorescence, the apparent absurdity of the face development. This is what emergence does look like: it's not designed and built like a human architect or an engineer would have done it. It grows, a certain growth is happening, that leads in surprising ways to a familiar structure (a plant, a flower, a face). — Olivier5

This is just lovely. What an excellent post.

It’s a question of whether objects having parts is coherent and consistent with physics. If not, then complex objects don’t exist. — Marchesk

Yawn.

Certainly a viewer cognizes the results of combinations of parts to whole. What is that on its own without the viewer though? — schopenhauer1

Is that a metaphysical question?

'Irreducible Mind' — Wayfarer

That's the one, my bad. If it got reviewed at all I guess that's something. Mainstream folks also seem to think it's worthwhile attacking Sheldrake but not, say, Zecharia Sitchin, so again that's something. I say more power to 'em, even though I think it's all bullshit.

philosophical methods of defending beliefs differ from those employed in more general senses — Isaac

It would be interesting, as a matter of history, to see how this plays out in Plato, where the standards of justification are in play as various justifications are examined. It's a very old thing for philosophy, to find common sense wanting -- too casual, too unsystematic, too inconsistent. Even in Plato you see accusations of bias (of course you think X because you're A). I've sketched some of the ways I think this downright fear of ordinary thinking has been ratcheted up, because now we know it can be invisible! (And even when it's visible, and right in front of you, you might not recognize just what you're relying on. That's the net result of "ordinary language philosophy".)

At any rate, the message has gotten through that to do philosophy right you have to rely on special methods of justification, and probably specialized vocabulary invented just for the purpose, and so on. That this can look, if you squint, a bit like how science deviates from common sense is all the more encouraging.

Coming back to the matter at hand, philosophical problems like the subject of this thread just look different if you start from a modern science-aware world-view. Here's how Dewey begins Democracy and Education:

The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered into smaller bits. Never does the stone attempt to react in such a way that it may maintain itself against the blow, much less so as to render the blow a contributing factor to its own continued action. While the living thing may easily be crushed by superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence. If it cannot do so, it does not just split into smaller pieces (at least in the higher forms of life), but loses its identity as a living thing.

As long as it endures, it struggles to use surrounding energies in its own behalf. It uses light, air, moisture, and the material of soil. To say that it uses them is to say that it turns them into means of its own conservation. As long as it is growing, the energy it expends in thus turning the environment to account is more than compensated for by the return it gets: it grows. Understanding the word "control" in this sense, it may be said that a living being is one that subjugates and controls for its own continued activity the energies that would otherwise use it up. Life is a self-renewing process through action upon the environment.

That was 1916. There's really nothing much here that couldn't have been written long before, no mention of evolution at all, but it's a starting point suffused with the impact of Darwin. This passage doesn't even nod at human beings per se, but you know this is exactly what he has in mind: a human being is an organism living in an environment, start from there. Dewey really thought Darwin would completely reshape the entire landscape of philosophy, but a hundred years later it feels like that change has barely begun. We're still writing footnotes to Plato.

you are in trouble — schopenhauer1

No I'm not. Human beings are made of the same stuff as other animals and the medium-sized dry goods in our environment; we are the sort of animals we are because of exactly the same processes of evolution that result in other animals being the way they are. And when we're not unconscious, we're conscious. That fact doesn't trouble me in the least. Why on earth should it? It's exactly as interesting as the rest of natural science, but it's not shocking or troubling in some way. I honestly have no idea why people think it is.

At the moment, we don't fully understand how the brain works... our understanding has no roof, maybe some missing walls so to speak, and that's used by mystics as an excuse to separate out the hard problem and insist it's not being answered. — Kenosha Kid

a hard problem of the gaps — Kenosha Kid

This is dead on. @Wayfarer posted a link to a collection of perhaps quite serious academic work on psi phenomena (William James would be thrilled!). I can't possibly judge how good the work is, but what leapt out at me was the title: Irreducible Consciousness. That word, "irreducible", has a very particular connotation for a lot of us, and it's not a nice one.

The target of the OP, I think is the religious, the flat-earthers, the creationists, the anti-vaxxers, the climate change deniers etc. But most people form beliefs of that more complex sort on the basis of reports from members of trusted groups. — Isaac

That's the low-hanging fruit, but I think the real motivator, in terms of cultural history, is Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Darwin. It's Freud in particular: the revelation that we have something like "unconscious thoughts" and, more importantly, unconscious motivations, and unconscious commitments is troubling to people careful about how they think. In the modern context, it's the widespread awareness of unconscious bias. Nietzsche (and then Heidegger, Derrida, Sartre) has all sorts of things to say about failings of the intellectual conscience, of bad faith, of having some inauthentic weltanschauung, of all sorts of self-deception. Marx offers an explanation of the source of some of those, Darwin too (Hoffman with his "desktop" thing). Whether you buy the grand narratives, nowadays you can't get around knowing that your reasoning might be motivated in a way We Don't Approve Of: on top of the "fallacies" so beloved on this forum, which are easily sussed out, there is the fact of racial bias, recency bias, availability bias, and all the rest. You might even think you're flailing away in the prison of a Kuhnian paradigm, desperately fighting off an alternative to your position just because it's not your position. You might just be a captive of your Whorfian language, thinking the thoughts you happen to have words for and no others. I haven't even mentioned feminism, which says something about me!

The variations on this worry go on and on. We are obsessed with the possibility of self-deception.


Bonus reference

Should have mentioned Wittgenstein too (and Sellars). How do I know my argument is what I think it is? Am I actually relying on a simplistic picture I have of how this works? Am I taking words that make sense in one context and smuggling them into another context as if they still have that meaning?

So it's use consists almost solely in your being able to answer a quiz question.

That does not show that knowhow and knowing are incommensurable. — Banno

If my purpose is to answer such a question, but that's not why I learned it, so far as I know, and it might come in handy doing a Crossword too. What is the point of this?

I'm not sure why we're having this argument.

Is there some reason to avoid a commitment to people having either factual knowledge or (I looked it up now that I'm home from work) declarative memory, like Bismarck being the capital of North Dakota?

It is not a discreet atom that could be tied to one memory or to one neural chain — Banno

So much depends on the details though. Of course memories are connected to each other, and of course we draw on factual memories operationally. I suspect that the way factual memories are activated and used in planning and so forth is different than the way skills are, that's all. Motivations are in there too, and they're also different, aren't they?

I'm pretty sure Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota, and I could probably manage to pick out the state on a map, but I've got pretty much nothing else going on there. If I didn't know that, my life wouldn't be much different.

Again, so what? — Banno

Then they're memories. Do you remember what point you're trying to make?

We already distinguish between knowing-how and knowing-that in everyday language. Some languages even use unrelated words there. And I'm betting the neuroscience supports the distinction we already make. You're proposing something you'd need to argue for against both sorts of evidence.

People tend to have memories they can't access at will, but something like a smell can trigger them. Early childhood memories are like that. (Complete recall is a known thing. Marilu Henner is a case.) Besides that there's repressed memories of trauma. Besides that there's everyday forgetting and then remembering later.

Could one have stored in memory a fact that was utterly irrelevant to any action one might undertake? And here we might include saying "I remember that..." — Banno

Could you have memories that you cannot in fact access or verbalize? The answer to that is clearly yes. In principle? Dodgy.

I thought of "giving the answer expected" as what you know how to do with a fact, schoolboy style, but it feels thin. Seriously I'm sure there's research that shows facts and skills are stored differently. It is certainly true for language that word roots are in one place and rules another.

Techne.

Was just reading Dewey yesterday making a related point about Plato and artisan knowledge (which he casts as proto-scientific).

It does seem like there are facts we just store in memory though, so I'm not sure it's worth universalizing.

This is cool.

Stats people talk about "how much of A is explained by B" but you're absolutely right that the closest we come in everyday language is something like "A is (or isn't) a good explanation for B", where "good" seems to mean "convincing", which leaves open the possibility that it's not the "real" explanation.

I was recently thinking about the reverse (which might be relevant here): if it takes {A,B,C,D} to bring about E, then having any 3 of the 4 in-place makes the last one behave as if it's the whole set, as if it's the explanation, the other 3 are just context. (Or we do statistics.)

Good topic. Have to think about the psychological point at the end more.

No. I'm suggesting philosophers might better analyse knowing that... in terms of knowing how... — Banno

That's actually all I was trying to ask, just wasn't sure what else to say knowing-that would be knowing-how to do, but maybe there's no general form.

Did you have something in mind?

It is certain that the bishop must stay on squares of the same colour; until it becomes time to pack away the pieces. — Banno

And the knight must land on a different colored square, but of course neither of these points are in the rules; they are both inferences from the rules plus our custom of playing on a checkerboard patterned surface, and of course you needn't.

But this is another example of "knowing how" rather than "knowing that". Are you suggesting we should analyze knowledge in terms of "knowing how to form beliefs"? Wouldn't we have to tack on "well" or "reliably" or something else?

We are very much on the same page.

((Lately I've been reading Dewey and Herb Simon, both people with one foot in philosophy and one in psychology. I may even come to see this as a strength in Hume, rather than trouble.))

What seems, again, in my experience, to be signified by a shift to the term 'knowledge' is that there will be agreement among others in one's social group. — Isaac

I'm also strongly inclined, as I think you know, toward "community first" approaches for a bunch of reasons.

How much this relates to the ontological status of 'knowledge' as opposed to just what constitutes good habits (in the Ramseyan sense) — Isaac

It's getting harder and harder for me to care about the ontological part. (I also can't help but see the dual-process story as validating the reliance of Hume and Ramsey on "habit", though it feels a little tendentious.)

Philosophers tend to want to focus on the status of claims (is it a belief? is it knowledge?) and on the status an individual is imagined as assigning to their beliefs. But it might be possible to quit doing that. In the usual case of belief revision -- I thought there were two packs of poptarts but when I look there's only one -- does it matter that my belief was marked as revisable or defeasible? I do revise with minimal hesitation, if any. The "hunh" I grunt is, by introspection, mild curiosity about how there came to be only one or why I thought there were two, but there's very minimal tension associated with the belief revision itself.

There are all sorts of stories about people resisting revising their beliefs (although one of the biggies, "backfire", turned out later probably to be wrong), but I wonder if there is really an issue there well described in terms of a belief's status at all, or if it's just more about reasoning processes, specifics of the evidence, etc.

it is impossible to generate a belief which is not based on some interpretation of the evidence (input from the outside world). It just neurologically can't be done). So everyone already has a justification for all of their beliefs, the justification is whatever external inputs caused it. — Isaac

You and I went around and around about this once before, but I think I have a better sense of your overall approach now and mine has shifted toward yours. Still, I'm not quite ready to treat "cause" and "reason" as equivalent. This is right next-door to @Philosophim's question:

I think most of us intuitively feel that a "gut reaction" is not necessarily knowledge, but can be a guide that we examine to gain knowledge. The point at which instinct crosses into knowledge is the question of epistemology. — Philosophim

This is right around the usual dual-process story: it might be simplest to call what System 1 gets up to "caused" but a lot of those habitual responses are caused in a way that will pass muster and reflect repeated earlier effortful examination of things by System 2, so we might as well call those causes "reasons" in the non-causal sense too, the sense in which "justification" is not a synonym for "rationalization".

If challenged, a person might engage System 2 and begin a process of assembling the evidence they are comfortable claiming underlies a belief; we can call that "rationalization" in a wide sense, allowing that we might approve or disapprove of their claims for evidentiary import, etc. (Sellars seems more or less to claim that saying "I know" just signals we are now playing a language-game that requires everyone to put on their System 2 hats -- it puts a claim "in the space of reasons".) Or they might refuse to engage System 2 (wait -- is that even possible??) with a bare "I just know" and philosophers tend to frown upon that.

I think there's another sense in which the example @Philosophim gives is the sort of thing philosophers hope to be able rule out: we are used to thinking of a belief as being partially caused by the world out there and partially caused by us, by our other beliefs, emotional responses, and so on, and we imagine sort of measuring and comparing the contribution each makes. We want to say that your feeling of dread (a) tracks reality -- something in this room is odd and you picked up on it, or (b) is just you. There's reason to suspect no such general program is possible (if Quine was right about the analytic/synthetic distinction) but there is something to this, and it's related to @Pfhorrest's thing about being "responsive" to evidence.

So there are two kinds of criticisms that can sometimes and sometimes not be made about the same beliefs:

• formed with minimal "input" from the environment and considerable input from your other beliefs or "gut reactions";
• "insulated" or "protected" from possible revision.

Philosophers don't like either of these but will let the first slide so long as you are open to revision; the second is more or less sinful. Are there good general-purpose ways of talking about these things?

This all feels right to uneducated me, but to be really convincing I think we should also have an account of introspection -- along the lines of, candid self reports look look like blah because this is what's available, or because the purpose of self reports is blorp and in fulfilling those requirements we represent internal processes or state in this familiar way. That's slightly frustrating though because you just cannot let people prone to say "I am now observing a tree" do this!

So step 1 would be figuring out what candid self reports of mental state really look like in the wild (or, you know, the opposite of wild, the lab), maybe noting what purposes they serve, socially for instance, but some of us talk to ourselves pretty regularly. I would guess there are several pretty distinct sorts of introspection. Is getting distracted in the middle of a task and then trying to remember what you were doing, by introspection, very similar to a verbal reaction to how good your sandwich is?

As with the allocation of responses to objects, I think any allocation of ownership to responses would be mixed, and mostly post hoc — Isaac

Right, and I think that if qualia are to serve as the updating of the old sense data theory they are supposed to be, then the assignment of the quale to me, the subject, has to be "early", before it's presented to my awareness -- it's not "sweetness" or even "the taste of apples" but "the taste of this apple to me, right now" that is supposed to be presented.

But then the subsystems for processing and packaging "input" from the world, which are admitted to be the domain of neuroscience, would have to be able to label their "output" making rather high-level determinations (ownership, context, particularity), would practically have to be conscious agents themselves. It would be as if the effectiveness of the hierarchical structure in place entitled subsystems operating under top-down constraints to take credit for being thus constrained and count the very constraints they work under as their value added, and all to set up entitling awareness to claim credit for much more than just playing its allotted role.

If that doesn't make any sense, it's only because I'm out of my depth.

Consciousness is just the tendency to be able to report on mental activity and it's caused by the neurons which produce language, movement and other awareness-mediated responses being stimulated by the neurons constituting the processing of sensory inputs to which that awareness relates. — Isaac

As the subject, this is my tendency to be capable of reporting -- but not just on any mental activity, on my mental activity. I'm wondering if there are pre-utterance steps where some subsystem perhaps tags the analysis and speech prep being done as "me related", or if there aren't, and why we need or don't need such steps.

There is a strong temptation, I have found, to respond to my claims in this paper more or less as follows: "But after all is said and done, there is still something I know in a special way: I know how it is with me right now." But if absolutely nothing follows from this presumed knowledge--nothing, for instance, that would shed any light on the different psychological claims that might be true of Chase or Sanborn--what is the point of asserting that one has it? Perhaps people just want to reaffirm their sense of proprietorship over their own conscious states.

This sense of proprietorship is known to be violated sometimes, in ways big and small, persistent and fleeting, from auditory hallucinations to insights that come unbidden.

So, to summarize the tradition, qualia are supposed to be properties of a subject's mental states that are (1) ineffable (2) intrinsic (3) private (4) directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness.

I only skimmed instead of rereading, but it seems to me Dennett might have added here that I am generally expected to know non-inferentially, and perhaps infallibly, whose qualia are rattling around in my consciousness, and to know that they are mine rather than yours.

Oh, it looks like @fdrake and @Kenosha Kid are nearby.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference. Moreover, the conviction persists–though history shows it to be a hallucination–that all the questions that the human mind has asked are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume –an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them. Old questions are solved by disappearing, evaporating, while new questions corresponding to the changed attitude of endeavor and preference take their place. Doubtless the greatest dissolvent in contemporary thought of old questions, the greatest precipitant of new methods, new intentions, new problems, is the one effected by the scientific revolution that found its climax in the "Origin of Species." — John Dewey, The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy

What's your point?

If I turn my hand into a fist, does a new object appear? Or is it the same object as before? And how do you come to know that? — Marty

I think that's a nice question, but not necessarily one that has an answer, and thinking it has to be answerable is probably a mistake.

Philosophy is often a way of asking ordinary questions about extraordinary things, or extraordinary questions about ordinary things. (Don't remember who said this.)

There is a difference between a hand formed into a fist and hand formed into some other shape, and that's worth understanding in a bunch of ways, but the "thing" approach looks like a mistake unless "thing" encompasses theoretical entities. But the impulse to look with fresh eyes, to see the very familiar as strange and worth exploring, that's the whole ball game.

it’s easier to remain convinced of a falsehood by a bad argument when there’s nothing at stake for being wrong. — Pfhorrest

This is the sort of thing I think is ripe for philosophical analysis, though "analysis" is a lousy word there. I even started a thread on a related phenomenon a couple weeks ago, but drew no interest.

What interests me about stuff like this is that to do it justice you need some basic logic and argumentation stuff, some more practical argumentation stuff, some psychology, some sociology, some economics, some biology, some linguistics -- you get the idea.

No one field is really equipped to handle this well. Traditional philosophy deliberately has tunnel vision for "just the arguments" but then exceeds its remit by pronouncing on which behaviors are rational.

So why would moral claims be unfulfilled? — schopenhauer1

The presuppositions of moral claims, viz. the existence of human beings interacting with each other.

If a person exists, do not cause harm or force a situation of burdens onto a future person. If a person does not exist, then yes, a moral claim doesn't matter. What is wrong with that? — schopenhauer1

Maybe that you state it as if the two are unrelated; one brings about the other.

But let's talk about you.

You submit that a person ought to be spared suffering. Why? We do usually have an answer for that: not suffering is better than suffering. The person who's pain we relieve, for instance, is that much, let's say, happier.

But that's not what you're talking about. You want a person who does not exist to be spared existence in order to be spared suffering. They do not benefit. Their non-life is no better than it was before by being kept at the non- stage. So why do it?

To repeat: there is a commonly accepted justification for the idea that we should avoid causing suffering to others and to relieve suffering when we can. We do it because it is better for that person. And we can be pretty specific about this: if I catch a brick that was about to land on your foot, I know a lot about what you were going to suffer and when, and I know in what way your life is better than it would have been if I had not caught the brick. If your shoulder aches and I get you an ice-pack and an ibuprofen, I know exactly what you were suffering and when your life became a little better than it was.

What justification is there for preventing a person's suffering by making sure they don't exist?

"You don't get our money until you demonstrate an understanding that science is a death trap." — Hippyhead

You might be assuming that but I'm not. I thought your idea of their being two different rates of change was spot on, and very close to what others have said. Given that, we can demand that the new tech demonstrate first, or as it reaches development milestones, whatever, demonstrate that it can be controlled. This is exactly what did not happen with nuclear weapons, exactly what did not happen with the deployment of AI by social networking platforms.

The latter is tricky. The same sorts of techniques (way down at the bottom) put to reprehensible use by Facebook can be put to excellent use in reading X-rays, where machines I believe are capable of outperforming radiologists now. So what do we do there? If we block their use entirely, we miss out on a good. Are we to have a Ministry of Technology that would approve uses, and police and strictly control their distribution? I'm not in love with the idea, but maybe it's necessary.

I'd say that there's another option of bringing around scientists and technologists so that we don't have to police them, but even if almost everyone bought in and acted responsibly, thousands and thousands of Oppenheimers, there would always be somebody who'd break the rules. Maybe this is the place for some sort of governmental action.

By and large this is how regulation of any industry works; there's usually a certain amount of trust between the watchers and the watched and that makes it cheaper and more efficient for everyone, but only with the understanding that violating these norms can bring the full force of the law down on you. It's a solid model, but in practice we all too often end up with a mess as bad as what we're trying to get a handle on.

Still, we could aim for fixing our whole approach to regulating the private sector. Maybe science and technology are not particularly special cases in this regard.

No, I'm just saying a prescriptive claim that would, if followed, lead to the presuppositions of moral claims being unfulfilled and unfulfillable cannot itself be a moral prescription.

The parody theory I posted is a rejection of morality that is indistinguishable from anti-natalism, despite having a different motivation.

Here's a "moral theory":

Thou shalt not have children, but if there be no people then do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.

Please give me why the right kind of answer is for people to have to exist. — schopenhauer1

Morality is premised on people existing, presupposes them as the cards to be sorted are presupposed in asking for them to be sorted.

There are no moral issues without people; eliminating people undercuts what is presupposed in any moral position. You're cutting off the branch you're sitting on and insisting it's the same thing everyone else does, but it is not.

But you don't end up with a sorted deck, which was the whole point. You've redefined the goal, and maybe the way you redefined it almost works, maybe not, but your redefinition left room for you to propose a solution that meets your criteria but is not a solution to the original challenge.

I have insisted that moral questions have the form: how should we treat each other?

An answer that leads to there being nobody to treat anybody any way at all is not the right kind of answer.

Suppose you're supposed to figure out how to sort a bunch of playing cards; the answer you come up with is throwing all the cards away, on the grounds that there are now no unsorted cards remaining.

See how that might be unsatisfactory? Even if other competing methods include phrases like, "So long as there are unsorted cards, ..." It's clearly not what we wanted.

Bringing about a world in which no one is harmed because no one exists is not what we were looking for in a morality.