The Universe Knows Right from Wrong
nautil.us
nautil.us
Then there are a bunch of pithy lines, which the author seems to treat as obvious in context revelations, but to me seem to utterly lack evidence/argument.
> "No matter how the universe had turned out, two plus two would equal four and it would have been wrong to torture people for fun."
Umm why? That seems non obvious to me.
>"Pleasure is good and suffering is bad because Reality is essentially directed toward the former and away from the latter"
Is it though? And that's ignoring the whole question of wtf does it even mean for reality to be directed in some direction.
> "My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."
Umm ok.
>"It is broadly agreed that (all things being equal) pleasure is good and pain is bad..."
Isn't the definition of pleasure, being good. Seems kind of circular - everyone agrees feeling good is good and feeling bad is bad.
>"The reality of objective value is a non-negotiable data-point and we are entitled to make whatever postulations are required to account for it."
'kay then.
All definitions are (meta)circular. Because language is recursive.
I think that you would communicate better if you avoided such references. I'd even venture to suggest that your internal thoughts might be improved by not shoving arguments into such pre-defined categories.
Just because you haven't heard of something it doesn't preclude it from being a well-indexed idea in human folklore.
Google is your friend.
Here is aa equivalent statement, as terse and clearer, than the comment you made above.
Is that an incentive to trick the measurement?
Seriously. I'm trying to help you here. At present, you're just wasting your time.
I prefer a simpler argument for why there is a subset of morality that's universal for (vast majority of) humans: argument from shared brain architecture.
We're essentially running the same wetware under the hood, at least on the time scales of human civilization. So while the universe doesn't necessarily privilege a set of values, human brains are. And that's all that really matters (until we meet aliens or start building conscious AIs) - conscious experience is a feature of brains, not laws of physics in general.
For instance, economists have found the value at which US society estimates an American's life by seeing at which point risks balances costs in some hazardous investments.
It favours the quantitative over the qualitative which is a good way to trip over the McNamara fallacy.
Philosophy is about answering real, deep questions, not about trying to find smart ways to pretend your interlocutor is confusing when defining a field that is characterized by the vagueness of the concepts it explores.
Either make an effort to understand what your interlocutor mean or explicit why the ambiguity your perceive is relevant.
I am arguing that morality is something subjective, created by human society, but that can therefore be measured with the tools of human sciences, like economics.
You are arguing that an improper way to measure it would lead to bad outcomes, which I agree with but I fail to see how it addresses the question. Do you think a proper way to measure it is impossible (and the meaning for "proper" here, is, OBVIOUSLY, "that does not lead to the outcomes you outline")? If so can you explain why you think so?
I am arguing that the social aspect of morality isn't about measurement, but about whose yardstick we should be using.
Said differently: How do we calibrate our measurement instruments?
Man is the measure of all things. --Protagoras.
So to rephrase your objection, you think it is impossible to have an objective measurement of something in the human society? Are you arguing in practice or in theory?
Because right now this is a thought experiment, so for now we can assume perfect knowledge of what is happening within a society. You don't need instruments to calibrate, we are making a theoretical, philosophical point.
If we agree that it is possible in practice, then we can talk about how to implement it in our real, imperfect, partly unknown world but it is not even clear we are there yet.
> Man is the measure of all things. --Protagoras.
I don't know the context of the original quote, but in the context of that discussion, that's the negation of objective truth, something I disagree with. If that's your point of view, we have a core disagreement that's going to invalidate the rest of the discussion.
Are you hungry? Yes.
That trivial question/answer exchange allowed me to measure 1 bit of information about your state or hunger.
Measurement isn’t the difficulty. Objectivity is the difficulty.
For a measurement to become “objective” it requires inter-subjective consensus.
Disagreement is the thing which hinders consensus.
And there is plenty of disagreement to go around when it comes to measuring things like “health”.
Yet, it does not sound far-fetched an idea that you have an objectively measurable vertical speed relative to the ground and that it would be safer to maintain that speed under a current level?
Consumers all attach different subjective values to objects, yet, markets converge on a price that is considered consensual, yet almost everyone disagrees on the consensus reached. This is because there is a consensus not in the result, but in the process that leads to that result.
Morality in societies are similar: No one is exactly aligned with everyone else on moral questions, yet, the general state of affairs results in a consensual compromise that can be measured in the same way that you can measure the market price of an item by confronting buyers and sellers.
Did you purposefully ignore my question?
Holistically speaking, how do you propose we measure “health”?
What sort of market compromise do you have in mind with regards to said measurement?
> Did you purposefully ignore my question?
No, actually I had to rewrite my answer enitrely 4 or 5 times to avoid talking past each other, as it is clear we have different worldview, but I am doing my best to be less dismissive and bridge the difference in assumptions, something I did not do in my earlier messages, sorry about that.
> Holistically speaking, how do you propose we measure “health”?
I am not. I am proposing we measure precise aspects of morality. Keyword here is "precise". Measuring something requires a workable definition. A word like "health" or "good" can have several operational definitions that are contradictory with each other. In some contexts, like a hospital, you would measure "health" with a compound of physiological measures, like temperature, heart-rate, blood pressure. An economist would probably define it more in terms of likelihood to survive the year/decade.
Likewise, "ethics" or "good" are not operational definitions but things like "approval of peers", "likelihood of being recognized guilty of a crime", "reported happiness" are measurable metrics that we can use to try and establish a quantitative model of ethics.
λx.health
This is equivalent to the English sentence "health is health".
Reduce it for me. Translate it into an expression roughly equivalent to "health is a function of...."
> Lets represent "health" as the identity function in Lambda calculus.
Health is a function now? Why an identity function?
> This is equivalent to the English sentence "health is health".
No, this is equivalent to the sentence "health transforms anything back into what it is" which is a weird predicate.
> Reduce it for me. Translate it into an expression roughly equivalent to "health is a function of...."
I am genuinely trying to understand what you are looking for. Considering just this sentence of yours, how is this not answered by my previous message? Especially this part:
> In some contexts, like a hospital, you would measure "health" with a compound of physiological measures, like temperature, heart-rate, blood pressure. An economist would probably define it more in terms of likelihood to survive the year/decade.
This is not a tautology, that's practically two algorithms to get numerical values that represents metrics of health.
And why are we talking about health? I thought we were talking about ethics?
I am representing it by the identity function, because Holistically “health” is itself and nothing else (otherwise you are equivocating “health”). This is the first law of logic: identity.
You insist on reductionism, so I am asking you to reduce “health” to its constituents.
We can do the exact same thought experiments with “ethics” - reduce it.
It isn’t sufficient to say “X is a metric of health/ethics, if I think more of X is healthy/ethical and you think less of X is healthy/ethical.
The starting point of this conversation is to say that it is neither you nor I who decide the appropriate amount of X, but that by measuring the compromise human society reached in term of balance between X and Y, we can determine that society wants e.g. 0.654 of X for each unit of Y.
If you accept the predicate "Society's behavior defines what is ethical" then you get a moral framework that is interesting (but that is not mine, personally, as I refuse that predicate). It gives you a coherent framework that is the closest you can have from an objective morality: it is an inter-subjective one. It is also changing in time.
Measurements/quantities are about the past (a posteriori). Morality is about the future (a priori).
If you measure “health” or “ethics” at X (X>0), where in your model would it say whether X OUGHT to be driven towards; or away from 0?
And yet human health has greatly improved over the last 2000 years is a true, qualitative statement.
Quantitative models are just instruments. Those instruments themselves can be used ethically or unethically.
2. Morality is about the future? You must have skipped a step there. Are you assuming consequentialism? Do you mean that the morality of an action can only be judged w.r.t its future consequences? If so, it just means you need probabilities, which can be evaluated objectively.
3. The is/ought problem is well known. The core assumption of this discussion is: "we ought to do as society decided to do". All that remains to be measure is what society decided to do. Does society make effort to raise or lower X? That's a factual question that will lead you to know whether X OUGHT to be increased or decreases.
> And yet human health has greatly improved over the last 2000 years is a true, qualitative statement.
It is totally subjective. There are people (e.g. believers of racial purity) who would argue it is not the case. You can find antivaxxers to claim that our way of life is inherently unhealthy compared to ancient times. Religious fanatics consider that spiritual health (the only important one to them) fell since the times of revelations.
Life expectancy has increased, but there that's an objective metric that you, subjectively, decided matters. "Health" means nothing until you have "reduced" it to objectivable metric.
OK then.
You've objectively measured that ethics (or health, or whatever metric you are going for) is 7.
Or (to be a tad sardonic) you've established that the meaning of live, the universe and everything is 42.
Eureca! You quantified it.
What happens next?
>It is totally subjective.
Objectivity is inter-subjective consensus. So tell me, if the well-being of humans is 'totally subjective', would your rather live in society 2020 AD, or society 2020BC ?
Better ask yourself what happened before. If you get a number, it means you chose a metric and an algorithm. That's what you get. What you do out of that metric depends on which it is.
> Objectivity is inter-subjective consensus.
No it is not. Facts can disagree with human consensus. This is an epistemological basis of science. If all humans decide that our soul survives our physical death, it does not make it so automatically.
On ethics, though, the starting point of this conversation is that inter-subjectivity is all we need, because true objectivity is not achievable.
> So tell me, if the well-being of humans is 'totally subjective', would your rather live in society 2020 AD, or society 2020BC ?
2020 AD. Without hesitation. And I think 95% of the population at least thinks like me, which makes a pretty strong consensus exist on the specific question "did well-being improve in the last 4080 years?". Note that the percentage of approval is an objective metric of the consensus.
I am arguing that similarly one can objectively measure the intra-subjective consensus on ethical questions and that this would lead to a coherent moral framework. A pretty conservative one though, as it would equal good to the current habits and customs. It is valuable for people who want something objective; intra-subjectivity is the closest you can get. I personally choose more progressive moral framework which require being comfortable with their subjective nature.
It is also possible that the metric is considering only one aspect of a society's ethical position, especially given that things like trolley problems, and some of the things that are done in the name of nominally ethical religions, suggest that people are not consistently rational in their ethical thinking and behavior.
One might, for example, value another's life purely on the economic value it is to oneself - would that be an ethical position or the absense of one? I don't doubt that one could make some sort of argument for the former, but ethics are really only interesting when they are at odds with perceived self-interest.
That's not my stance, btw, but that's a morality framework that is coherent.
It seems to me a way to avoid considering the contradictions in individual choices, which is where many of the interesting issues of ethics lie. This stance may be coherent in its own terms (and quantifiable, 'objective' and so forth), but I am skeptical that it yields much insight, and I think it is wise of you to not adopt it.
Does this stance offer any specific counter-arguments to the specific points I raised in my original post in this thread? Does it, for example, refute my claim that "a measure of the phenomenon is not an explanation of how human societies came to have an ethical aspect?"
It allowed economist for instance to measure that the price US society is willing to pay to avoid the loss of one random American life is about 8 million USD. I think this is a valuable insight.
As for your last paragraph, I think you can truncate it: "a measure of the phenomenon is not an explanation". I agree, but I am not sure why this is a relevant point. We are talking about ethics, not the history of ethics. Understanding virus biology won't necessarily explain virus evolution to you but is still valuable.
As for your other earlier point, I am not sure I understand your criticism. Economics has proven that many human decisions are irrational or rationally bounded. It is pretty certain that ethics is no different. Why would it make it incapable of producing worthy results?
I am not sure but you seem to assume that "ethics" is a quantity that I propose to measure through a single number. This is not what I am proposing. I think ethics is a domain as large as economics in which some phenomenon can be identified.
I am also proposing that people could then use the ethical models produced as a moral guide and have a coherent morality (but a conservative one: customs and normalcy define "good") and reach it through an objective process.
I consider myself a progressist, so this is not the morality I will adopt, but I recognize that this is a worthy endeavor nonetheless. If only to measure ethical progress within a society.
> It allowed economist for instance to measure that the price US society is willing to pay to avoid the loss of one random American life is about 8 million USD. I think this is a valuable insight.
I see that I was not specific enough, and should have written, "I am skeptical that it yields much insight into the origins of morality and the article author's claim that it is a universal property." I am still doubtful that this observation of current utility provides much insight into the issue that was both the subject of this essay, and of the specific post that you originally replied to.
> I am not sure but you seem to assume that "ethics" is a quantity that I propose to measure through a single number.
While it is clear now that you have a much more thoroughly developed position, it was the only example given in your original post.
We seem to be talking at cross-purposes here, so let me say that I am not questioning the utility of these metrics, but I do not see them as leading to any particular conclusion about the origin and ubiquity of ethics and moral behavior. On rereading your original post in the light of what you have written since, I now take it that your points there are a) morality is something that is built by mankind (as opposed to being universal in the sense that the essay author argues for?); b) the way to find out what a society's ethics are is to measure what it does (as opposed to accepting that its values are what it says they are?) and c) with objective measurements, we can continue to build a better, more effectve morality. If so, I am in complete agreement with b) and share your hope for c). With regard to a), personally I lean more towards TeMPOral's and roenxi's speculation that initial concepts of right and wrong evolved alongside the abilities of self-aware consciousness and the ability to develop a theory of mind, but I am aware that this is just armchair speculation.
About a) we are not necessarily in disagreement, we just probably talk about different aspects of morality. I am personally not a believer of objective morality but find that the closest we can get to is that "mankind's morality", which can be argued to be at the root of collective decisions like laws and judgements.
You are talking about individual morality, a related but different thing and indeed, collective morality spawns from individual morality so it is unlikely to give insights about individual morality's origin.
Eg, a society that allows random murders will be at a staggering disadvantage. By magic, most (all?) societies have strong moral arguments against murder. Ditto honesty - honest societies have structural advantages.
Any cooperative species will have something that looks like morality. Even ants practice first aid.
On the other hand, where game theory says some choice is arbitrary, the brain can have a default encoded - and that default will be universal across humans.
> cooperative species will have something that looks like morality
For the argument of the post to be valid, it has to apply to 'species' rather than a correlated subset.
Because that's how they've defined the words "two", "four", "plus", "equals", "people", "torture", "for fun", and "wrong"?
Neither of those statements makes any empirical claims about the physical arrangement of matter in the universe, so neither of them would be refuted by any possible way the universe could have turned out.
> > Reality is essentially directed toward the former and away from the latter
That this is false is obvious to anyone who has actually bothered to observe reality. People sometimes unnaturally and non-essentially impose such direction, but Reality itself tends toward the opposite.
It reminded me why I consider academic philosophy a fraud. I love philosophy, and places where it happens usually call it another name because the academic philosophers really perverted that word.
Let's substitute morality with "facts".
"Maybe I'm missing it, but the argument seems to be that facts are objective because everyone things they are. How is that not begging the question?"
Begging the question only applies to demonstrable truths, not evident or self-evident truths. We do not and cannot and need not demonstrate first principles. The reality of morality is obvious. The only way you can doubt it is through intentional or habitual skepticism, i.e., through some kind of philosophical FUD. I can doubt the existence of my left hand, but it would be insane for me to do so and there would be no way for me to recover my acceptance of the existence of my left hand apart from abandoning my doubt because my doubt was never rational in the first place, only willed arbitrarily.
That doesn't mean there isn't a way to account for morality.
Now, I reject panpsychism because panpsychism is really just a rehashing of Cartesian dualism masquerading as something new. However, it might be a welcome development and provisional stepping stone toward a recovery of telos. Once we finally abandon the stupid Cartesian view of matter we've been enslaved to for 400 years, we can recover the only real understanding of the basis for morality: teleology and the natural law.
You really think so? I don't. To me this (that morality has some ground truth and isn't just some sort of subjective opinion in how people should behave) seems like an extraordinary claim that contradicts experience.
If morality is objective why can nobody, even in culturally homogonous groups, agree on what it means to be a good person?
What a bizarre argument. Mathematical truths are defined to be true -- entirely the opposite of what the author is trying to claim about moral truths, so this is about as absurd a comparison as one could make.
I'm no expert but this article reads to me like hand-waving psychobabble.
For some odd reason a subset of all the possible non-sense maps really well to the real world.
The reason Maths works is because it is based on intuitions (counting, space) that are presumably shadows of the physical world cast on the evolving brain via coarse perception. The effectiveness of Mathematics in Physics is probably not unreasonable at all.
For the sake of argument I can conveniently forget what "1" means, and then you can try and explain it to me like I am from another planet.
Semantics are a non-trivial matter.
Note how you are reaching for complex/abstract ideas (like a "topos" and "natural numbers") to explain simple/intuitive ones (like 0 and 1).
"toposes" and "sets" (of "natural numbers") are socially constructed in the subculture of Mathematicians.
Outside of that shared experience, they are pretty meaningless.
I guess you are on the "discovered" side, and I am on the "invented" side of Mathematics ;)
You're super-close to a deep realization: all words are only sensical to certain subcultures. IOW there's no absolute meaning to any word. In that perspective, we're both right; "1" is meaningless and 1 is categorical, and it's just a question of pointers vs. names.
Another quick and deep corollary is that reality is socially constructed; whenever a quorum of humans is mutually intelligible during a conversation, then they are agreeing on the local nature of reality. Humans can't construct global maps of reality, though, since they can't observe the Universe all at once. Indeed global maps of reality are forbidden by the Kochen-Specker Theorem.
Edit: To clarify for the audience, I have no appeal to higher categories here, and the definitions of category theory are not some sort of categorization or classification process, but axiomatic definitions akin to set theory.
"defining categories" and their respective categorisation rules is the process of classification. They don't account for the classifiers themselves.
You are super-close to a deeper realisation even.
If any notation is meaningful (even one that uses symbols like ∞), then it's Turing-recognisable.
Type-0 Chomsky grammar. In formal languages syntax is semantics.
In so far as understanding (comprehension?) goes, you could say that I subscribe to the axiom of unrestricted comprehension. It's rather un-Mathematical doing so.
Perhaps a nitpick, but: axioms are defined to be true. Mathematics, roughly speaking, is the business of exploring the consequences of chosen sets of axioms. Sometimes published mathematical theorems turn out to be wrong.
The baffling thing is how few and simple axioms we need for them to be useful.
If I look outside right now, the sky is probably better described as cyan; quite obviously a different colour from the blue exercise mat that happens to be on my floor.
The sky can also be described by many of the other colours depending on weather or the time of day.
Color happens in your head.
That is why trichromacy, tetrachromacy, pentachromacy, dodecachromacy etc. is a thing.
Only the person who responded to the person who made such a statement were more polite about it, hence this "discussion".
I think that in the definition you gave "accepted" should be replaced by "assumed".
The first sentence of that problem is an axiom. It is absolutely 100% true, within the context of that story problem. It could contradict another axiom, but it can't turn out to be false, because it's not a statement about the real world.
That distinction is important, and it seemed to me you'd skimmed over it.
Axioms are directly defined to be true for the purposes of mathematical inquiry, and as such can't really be wrong. At worst, a set of axioms can be inconsistent.
Emergent properties are different; they're not directly defined to be true. This is of practical consequence, as mathematicians sometimes get them wrong.
There are not "truths" in mathematics, it's literally a system of logic with definitions at the bottom (axioms) and then a following of the results based upon the agreed upon logic.
Going further, in Critique of Pure Reason Kant uses mathematics as an example of synthetic a priori knowledge. This is the lever he uses to overturn the traditional halving of all knowledge into either analytic and a priori or synthetic and a posteriori (empirical). The halving was the basis for Hume's radical skepticism and it's predecessors.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/panpsychism/
One line of argument for panpsychism that I don't often see mentioned is that humans/animals assume that we're the only form of consciousness in the universe. This strikes me as rather myopic, at least as a baseline assumption. It seems like the starting point should be assume that other bodies in the universe are constituted in similar ways and not animals on Earth are exceptionally, unexplainably unique.
> But the problem for neo-Aristotelians, or indeed anyone who tries to ground moral truth in the natural world, is that moral truths, like mathematical truths, are necessarily true, which means that it’s impossible for them to be false.
The author completely fails to prove why that is the case, not to mention that this isn't even true for Mathematics either, depending on your starting axioms...
All knowledge is ultimately based on assumptions, and those assumptions ultimately hang in thin air. We rely on our senses to observe the world around us, and we rely on our mental faculties to interpenetrate what we observe. But we have no way of knowing if our senses, and our mental faculties, can be trusted, if they are accurate to some objective reality.
It might very well be that what we take in from our surroundings and environment isn't an "objective reality", but an incredibly twisted and mangled version which is has more falsehoods, inaccuracies and errors, than any truths. To say that the sky is blue is an incredibly "human" observation, which relies on our eyes having divided the light spectrum into arbitrary ranges we call colors. There is no grounding to distinct colors, other than what our eyes and brain arbitrarily imposes to make sense of what it's taking in. It's a clever, but arbitrary, way to look at the light spectrum.
But we do the best with what we have, there is no point in wallowing in pity, we simply work with the tools we are given. Now, even if we cannot justify it, it does appear to us that murder is morally wrong. We are repulsed by it, we wish to avoid it, we want to minimize it, we label those who do it as being flawed and broken, and we have all sorts of theories and ideas about how murder doesn't fit in with how human life operates.
Even though I cannot point you to any objective anchoring as to why murder is wrong, I can neither point you to any objective anchoring for anything. I cannot prove that what I see, touch, feel, smell and hear is really there, nor that what I am observing is in any way accurate. Even the most basic mathematical facts are suspect, if you can't verify the mental faculties behind it.
So why reject the moral facts I cannot verify, but accept the observable, evidential, mathematical facts that I cannot verify? Who gets to choose which ones gets a pass? I think murder is wrong for the same reason I think the sky is blue: because that's what my senses, body and mind tells me.
As for the dichotomy of logical verification given our meat-based fallible physical medium, I'm reminded of Godel's incompleteness theory, i.e. that it is possible for a set of axioms to be internally consistent (e.g. basic algebra), yet we can construct a meta set of axioms to demonstrate that it is impossible to mathematically prove every truth therein.
My point is just that to me, and my society as a whole, murder is seen as something bad, as a simple and obvious fact, a safe assumption. If somebody wants to tell me that assumption is wrong and should be removed, I want to see what sort of stuff their assumptions are built out of to justify such confidence.
Physiologically we have brain mechanisms that activate when we see a stimulus to another person (yawning and phantom limb experiments being well known examples).
Hypothetically if we had evolved from mantises instead of primates, we might be physiologically conditioned to think eating our sexual partners was the norm. I wouldn't be surprised if our moral framework in that case lead to utterances such as "how dare you not sacrifice your life for your children!"
On the nurture side, the sentinelese are perfectly fine with killing foreigners violently on sight. There are also records in other tribal cultures of the belief that cannibalism was a way to inherit someone's desirable traits. So clearly culture plays a role as well.
All of these are from nature and nurture, they don't exist as mathematical laws or any sort of foundational aspect of how the universe works. It's all just subjective and arbitrary inventions we have created to categorize and make sense of what we observe.
Yet they are all immensely important to us! Even though they don't have objective grounding. We base our entire societies, our ways of life, our ways of thinking, around these incredibly non-justified categories of things.
Yet, there is a whole lot of people who seem to want to exclude morality from this box. It has to be thrown out, because it's not objective, not justified, not "real". But in contrast to what exactly?
(To paraphrase Flanders' and Swann's song, "The Reluctant Cannibal"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjAHw2DEBgw
"Always be sincere, whether you mean it or not."
"I won't let another man pass my lips!"
We have many thoughts and ideas about life. For example, a person might think, "The ideal life is infinitely long and involves no pain." This probably comes from a logical part of the mind, similar to where statements like "two plus two equals four" are validated and appreciated, but that doesn't mean it's equally objective. We are animals, and staying alive and avoiding pain are strong drives.
What a horribly written horribly reasoned article. Very frustrating to read.
> But if Reality is itself a very general form of consciousness, and my consciousness is a specific form of that general form of consciousness, it follows that Reality is present within my consciousness.
No it doesn’t follow. You are fully capable of experiencing things that are not reality. That’s just poor reasoning.
I work hard to keep my tone online positive but this article is simply religion presenting itself as science, and it enrages me.
Half the people talking about panpsychism are just bloviating in-between hits on DMT and are hoping to achieve Nirvana and merge with some Jungian collective unconscious, but are usually completely ignorant of that entire concept.
Panpsychism doesn't mean everything and everywhere is tripping on acid having a great time. Panpsychism is actually kind of terrifying; just think about what it must feel like to be one of a trillion trillion trillion hydrogen atoms suddenly recruited into a massive supernova and then drifting alone for 5 billion years and being washed through the entirety of life's evolution on Earth, taking part in a trillion different DNA molecules and cell walls; not having any clue about what you've been a part of or why. Being a horrible-looking blood-sucking mosquito downed by a bug-eyed frog, munched on by a croc, farted out a horse...or frozen into a granite hunk in the dark bowels of the Earth for eternity. No, panpsychism doesn't mean your preference for the Yankees over the Mets are somehow the moral code of the universe, or that damn squirrel with a twinkle in its eye is the manifestation of the all-knowing god, you fool (author).
Usually the models of Panpsychism have a spectrum of consciousness and associate complexity of the thing with consciousness. So sure, let's say atoms have some consciousness, they have as much as is seen by a first look, that is their behavior and intelligence shows it, and it's not much, basically zero. A rock probably has more. It probably has rock-like consciousness, it has rock-behavior and rock-thoughts. It probably likes being a nice rock, hosting all those crystals, flowing through places sometimes slowly, sometimes flying off from a volcano, sometimes dissolving in a melting pool, merging with other rocks' rock-consciousness. Of course there are grumpy rocks too, just like there are many kinds of humans. And so on.
I was unaware, and searching suggests you are referring to him sleeping naked in the same bed as a 17 or 18-year-old, without touching them, supposedly to test his celibacy.
Which is, quite frankly, hilariously innocent compared what "sleeping with children" implies, particularly in the context of being contrasted with Epstein.
> None of the women who participated in the brahmachari experiments of Gandhi indicated that they had sex or that Gandhi behaved in any sexual way. Those who went public said they felt as though they were sleeping with their aging mother.
If this is horrible enough to outweigh the good in his life, hell better make room: we're all coming.
So... there is this guy, who has an opinion... okay... and?
So in attempting to provide evidence for his claims, Goff creates a weak framing for the necessity of evidence and then attacks the framing?
It's not an artifact of reason, but it's the other way around, where we can only reason about the things the theistic object of faith has caused. (or even just deistic).
Without too much woo, I'm less circumspect about these beliefs, and think we all believe what we respectively perceive we need to. However, something curious I think I may have discovered is that both faith and fear cannot be experienced simultaneously. If this were true, and fear was just an interpretation of an emergent chemical/biological artifact of life in the universe, it implies that something which necessarily extinguished it could also be just as real.
On the question of what is more absurd, belief in the existence of a superbeing we cannot conceive of yet whose will we can somehow divine, or that our reasoning is sufficient to rule out the existence of such a being, if you have ever tried to argue with a dog or a horse or even a baby, the limits of the latter case seem too stark to provide much confidence in their powers.
Its core claim is that while many of our ideals of morality shift over time, some are absolute and transcend place and time, and therefore they must have been created by something outside of the universe. That claim occupies only the first few pages, and from there he attempts to further conclude that not only is there something, it is specifically the Christian god.
Which ones? I honestly can't think of any of the top of my head for which I wouldn't know a civilization which didn't honor them.
> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not be able to convince you that this view is true.
Isn’t it necessary for then to try to “convince” you insofar as just stating a conclusion without supporting arguments is no different than stating an opinion?
Or put a different way, why would you ever desire to hear opinions without trying to understand them or establish their truth?
> You cannot believe the view I will defend in this book. I therefore will not be able to convince you that this view is true.
This appears as a concession that the truth about the topic cannot be determined. In which case, from a philosophical point of view, what’s the point?
That being said, I often prefer the presentation of “Here are some interesting things I’ve observed and thoughts I’ve had. Do what you will with them.”
There's no reason those terms need to be taken as objective. They're as socially constructed as the rest of science and philosophy. We ought to believe things with good evidence because that's what our scientific culture values.
If another culture didn't value that, we'd pity them for being less effective at their goals - it turns out that updating beliefs on evidence makes you more effective. But there's no objective more sense in which they're "bad", they're just less effective.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece
(This is not a defence of Epstein but a criticism of the article's argument and coherence.)
What is cruelty? He's just juxtaposing abstract "cruelty" with some unspecified hypothetical and assumes it is meaningful. Cruelty presumes opposition to nature, so it makes no sense to say that some act A, understood in the abstract, is cruel.
"Different statues are made of different clay; on the container view in contrast, everything that does, or could, exist is a manifestation of the same Reality."
Prima facie, sounds like a vulgarization of God-as-Being, i.e., all things exist as potentially existing in relation to actually existing things, and actually existing things are like potential things in relation to the act of existence that causes them to be, which is God.
"If we follow Aristotle in grounding moral truth in the goal-directed nature of human beings, then we fail to account for the necessity of moral truths."
The aim was never necessity but nature. The natural law is called thus for a reason. I don't know what "good" or "bad" is apart from the nature of a thing.
"My proposal is that the inherently directed nature of Reality entails that it’s objectively good for Reality when it manifests as pleasure and objectively bad for Reality when it manifests as pain."
He's elevating the world of plural substances to the level of a single substance and referring to it as Reality. But this does nothing to convert the natural moral law into the necessary moral law because you've just reduced the universe to one thing whose nature is such that such-and-such is good for it and such-and-such is not. To accomplish that kind of necessity, he would have to identity nature with necessity and that would require identifying what he called "Reality" with God. If Reality is God, then this is pantheism. But why this need to posit necessity?
"Foundational theories of morality have been locked in a perennial tug of war between the supernaturalism of Plato and the naturalism of his opponents."
Has he explored Thomism? Forms exist only in things and the mind, but also in God. Thus, you have both access to moral truths by knowing the natures of things, but even with the destruction of those things, they continue to exist in God (even if we may not be able to know them). Also, it is bad for human beings to harm others at least because it harms the common good and thus their own good. It is against our own natures to do so.