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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 24 2007, 09:04 AM (1,059 Views) | |
| Moonbat | Apr 26 2007, 12:20 PM Post #76 |
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Pisa-Carp
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You are quite right that the real world and the common sense approach to experience are not the same, but then we know this already. Our common sense intuition are completely wrong, the nature of reality really is nothing like the way we would expect it. The real world is the quantum world, is the relativistic world. In reality human beings really are atoms (i mean that the description of atoms specifies us, so the reality matches the description of atoms obeying laws, i'm trapped using natural language so unless i really want to make a point i invariably fall back to using it), and atoms really do obey the laws physics. Evolution built us, and selective pressures favoured information processing that meant self repeating patterns of molecules could avoid predict and react to certain interactions with bits the world. We can hunt antelope and we can dodge spears. But of course the nature of the world will be very very strange to us, our brains did not evolve to fill that function. Our ability to understand the world is a secondary effect. So it's not suprising.
Ok, but then you will never understand the world, for you will never be able to realise that our naieve intuitions our false.
See when you say stuff like this, it becomes apparent you don't understand the idea.
Again you haven't understood what i've said. If you want to talk about the properties of the fertilised egg i'm perfectly happy for you to do so. If you want to talk about the engine of car i'm perfectly happy to do so. If you want to understand the bit of reality (and by understand really i mean if you want to know the relationship between the reality you call the engine and other 'bits' of reality) that you refer to when you use the term "car engine" then automechanics is the place to look. But if you want to call the engine not an entity but a collection of entities (the pistons and the injector etc. etc.) you are free to so because you are not saying anything about the world. Indeed if you want to define terms that are very unintuitive you are free to do so. If you want to define the system based upon a temperature gradient you're free to do so, if you're clever you could capture the same information by considering say a density function mapping the density at all places, and a temperature distrubution function and some other subset of definitions from which you can answer question that you could answer defining the engine as a subset of parts.
There is no question "of the human" that's more incoherent muddle. There is a reality it can be described, it has properties. I'm interested in an objective concept of ethics i find it hard to be content with a subjective theory you like have (i know you like to think otherwise but you are powerless to defend your axioms so your entire theory of ethics is subjective). Only from experience which provides an concept of good and bad that is a truism, can such a theory be created. Only Utilitarianism works as objective theory everything else involves arbitrary axioms. Now there are less academic reasons that we can consider i mean, the thing with animals is really really strong. I mean we make other minds suffer all the time, for our own ends, now i think most people will see that as something in need of justification and the thing there is no way of justifying it that doesn't also make questions of fertilised eggs entirely irrelevent. The only way out is to do the kind of nonsense that you do and insist on a weird essense of human thing that starts at the fertilised egg and is mystically significant. That's what matters this essense of human thing. But if one can describe the world in terms of atoms (and one can describe the world in terms of atoms) and if those atoms obey certain laws (and they do obey certain laws) then this approach doesn't make any sense. It doesn't hold together. It distintegrates under questioning.
All those poor innocent skin cells so tragically killed. I care about humans. But if i want a system of ethics that is objective i can't just say i care about humans because that's what i care about. For that is merely asthetics, what if someone says to me "i don't care about humans, i care about stacking loaves of bread, i think that's what is really important" what do i say to the ethics of bread stacking. How do i dismiss any argument about ethics? How do i find resolve any dispute? I can't, i can just say well i don't like that, it's not intuitive to me, it doesn't feel right. But that is simply subjective. It felt perfectly right to the people the past to treat Africans far far worse than their caucasian counter parts. Our common sense intuitions are a product of our environment. Now if your happy with subjectivity, if your happy to say i feel this is right, you feel that is right, and i don't claim my ethics are in any objective sense "superior" to yours for i have no criterea to appeal to such that i can do so. Then that's fine you can say anything you like is bad or good. It becomes equivalent to a kind of asthetics. Now i think Utilitarians does actually violate some intuitive concepts, but then again this is no supirising to me, since almost all our intuition about fundamentals of the world are wrong. (Again understable given the evolution herritage of our faculties). On the other hand i am wary of some aspects of Utilitarians and indeed i spend a fair amount time arguing with a friend regarding whether it really holds together. It's just that at present there is no alternative. Not if you want something that is not merely projection. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Moonbat | Apr 26 2007, 12:29 PM Post #77 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Well i agree with you to an extent. IT and I disagree with one another regarding what it even means to be good, and i think that is not simply us, i think that is not resolved to the point of consensus - not when you consider all the grey areas - but i think there will be a fair amount of convergence (whether it will be fully resolved... i don't know) when you look at the longer time scales and at the kinds of things that influence us. I'd also agree with that ethics is not resolveable purely by rationality in the sense that you might have a perfectly rational serial killer. You need more than reason you need to care. And in that sense i'd agree that there is a kind of duality (though i'm not sure if i'm using it in the same sense) as people are not complete altruists we have all kinds of other goals, we have self-interests, there is constant conflict there etc. |
| Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem | |
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| Moonbat | Apr 26 2007, 01:30 PM Post #78 |
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Pisa-Carp
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Any 5, we excrete, we feel anger, etc. there are a myriad of hypothetical descriptions of human behaviour that could be taken as axioms. As far as i'm concerned they wouldn't lead to a system that i'd intuitively like but they are logically valid.
Of course i disregard it, it's completely incoherent. It dissolves into nothing upon the slightest analysis. When you say it is good for cows to eat grass, what do you mean by "good"? Do you mean, cows don't die, or they don't get sick, or they don't feel pain. etc. What do you mean by this word? I mean if you want you can try use Utilitarianism to defend your axioms, you can say oh but it benefits the humans/cows in the sense that their experiences are more positive, and there is a self-evident meaning to positive. But you don't want to appeal to Ulitarianism. When you start talking about ontology what are you talking about? Cows eat grass because genes that govern grass eating behaviour succeeded in proliferating. Cows are complicated physical systems, i can describe them in terms of cells and atoms and processes, etc. etc. That's what's actually there in the world. What role is it you want ontology to play?
So good is the thing that promotes the good the being. And what heck is that? You won't belabour the words. But what the words "good" and "evil" mean, how we should define them, how we should consider them that is what we are arguing about! I think good should be understand as what benefits the total sum of experience. What do you think good should be understood as? First you say some set of axioms, then you say those axioms because they are good. That's not saying anything at all! If someone says to you they think it is "good" for races to be seperate you appear to have nothing back but assertion. You say it doesn't promote the "good of the being" (whatever that means) they say racial purity is a part of the good itself. That there is value in racial separation, that blood lines are a physical embodiement of the past, that they are part of humanity, that they a good in and of themselves. Indeed nutters frequently place group idenity whether national, religious or racial above all other considerations for them these kinds of things are the ultimate good. What are you going to say to them. Look at all the "good of the being"? That requires them to accept your definitions which they clearly don't. See your screwed they have a different view to you about the fundamentals, they have different axioms, you have no way of saying their axioms are wrong without appealing to your own axioms, which of coures can't possibly work. You're stuck with subjectivity.
I like your criterea - to an extent, intuitively they sound good to me. What are you going to do when you meet people who don't agree with your assessments - i mean whilst i like them their are bits i don't like - the way you consider fertilised eggs to be more significant than apes for instance. So how can you argue against me? All you can do is assert you're right and i'm wrong, but that's immediately subjective for i can just assert the opposite. Intuitively enslaving black people because they were inferior sounded ok to a hell of a lot people. Intuition is not good enough. It's affect by our cultural environment, it is influenced by the ebb and flow of history. It is the very definition of subjectivity. If you want an objective theory of ethics, a theory that is independent not just of the observers that happen to be alive, not merely a consensus, but is independent of the outlook of _all possible observers_. Something that is an aspect of the real world. Then we can't rely on intuition. It clearly won't work.
Axioms are rules. Aquinas made up your rules (though people have as far as i understand it added to them since then). He looked at the world thought about how he felt we should behave and defined a set of rules. Guided by empathy along with the current cultural sensibilities of the day, a fair amount of common sense intuition. Voila. But if someone disagrees, if the tribe of some jungle think "actually what is good is to sacrifice a child every fullmoon", what are you going to say to them. Here look at these axioms. They could say here look at our axioms. What are you going to do? You have no metacriterea, you have no way to weight your axioms against theres. All you have is intuition. So you say "well i don't think so", that's it. You can do no better than that.
You keep trying to translate my concept of ethics into yours, but square pegs don't fit into round holes - it doesn't work the same way at all. I say simply that there are positive and negative experiences, it is meaningfull, nay it is a truisim, to claim that i benefit by having more positive experiences and less negative. The hypothesis that there are other minds in the uinverse, that you and the other members here and animals that they experience, that they also have positive and negative experiences is blatently true. So then just as i can say for me that i benefit from various experiences, i can say for them too. I can say it is good for a person not to watch their child die, and by that i mean that the experience for that person is negative in precisely the same way it would be negative for me to watch my child to die. Further i'm not tied to simply assuming everyone is like me, i can easily recognise that people respond differently to different stimuli but that each person has experiences, has a quality of life, and that quality of life can increase or decrease. Thus given any decision or any event i can ask the question is it good for all the minds in the universe. When i mean good i mean the an increase of the net quality of life in the universe and when i say bad i mean a decrease. That is an objective definition of good bad, you cannot fault any of my axioms. You cannot tell me that it's arbitrary. For it is self-evidently not. Since I have the faculty of empathy i can recognise what experience in other minds is like, what it means, i can see the significance of pain, i implicitly see what the negativity of the person watching their child die means to them. And so i seek to minimise it. This faculty of empathy, this sense of compassion, is something most humans appear able to do. Because i care about this sense of collective good and bad, i will attempt to feed the sense of empathy and compassion in my children and if i had the opportunity in others. That's it. Nothing more. If you want to tell you don't care the dieing mother you are free to do so. If you want to tell me you think the world should be stacking bread, if you want to call that ethics then i say that's fine you can attach any string letters to represent the idea you have though it's not the same thing that i mean by "ethics" so one of us should change the string we use, which one of us is irrelevent (though pragmatic considertions might weigh in), then i ask you why you're saying we "should" be stacking bread, and i watch you fail to justify it. And then i say if you want to stack bread, fine by me. See i'm happy to accept some people are not going to be interested in this objective concept of good and bad, what i find difficult to the idea that there is no coherent definition of good and bad that is independent of me. That's why i pick Utilitarianism, i mean i do struggle with it in terms of the trade offs. Maybe we really have to accept ethical subjectivism for most instances, maybe all we can have is a kind of asthetics and comfort ourselves with the fact that because we are quite similar to one anotherwe can expect a fair degree of comformity. At the moment i'm still set against that, but i'm not as sure as i was. Oh and the common good thing is really very very similar to my maximal utility function the difference is simply that you define yourself on humans which you consider starting at fertilisation and ending with death, and i consider the set of all minds.
If you ask why i support having a state i can give you an answer, if you ask me to explain how the state came to be i can attempt to give you an answer. If you ask what is it's purpose, i can't answer the question until you specify it's purpose from the perspective of what? Similarity with the role of law. I can tell you where it comes from, i can talk about the emergence of regulating mechanisms in populations of agents, i can talk about biological and social evoltuion and the factors that drive change in law, etc. and i can tell you what i think law should be based upon my concept of ethics. I don't mind people arguing based on natural law theory for certain laws pragmatically as in it seems to work and benefit minds it just can't be an ultimate basis of objective ethics. Because it's tied to axioms that are bound only by intuition. Now i don't think natural law is anything like a complete guide (for some of the reasons i've already mentioned), infact i don't think any set of axioms that can be written down in a few paragraphs can accurately guide the evolution of a society such that that society maximises the experiences the it's constituents and the other minds it influences. I mean in a way you could just say laws are valid if they benefit minds, defining benefit with reference to experience. It's just that's not much a guide line when it comes to actually making decisions. to actually make decisions you have lots of approximations you need people coming at it from many different angles arguing for the what benefits people (and indeed animals - making animal cruelty a crime seems like a pretty good idea to me) the most. |
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12:33 AM Jul 11