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Comment by Threeve303 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately after much trial and error I have discovered that the “world” doesn’t run on logic. It runs on emotion.

You can square it with some basic philosophy. Hume's Guillotine - you can't derive an ought statement from is statements alone. Munchhausen Trilemma - you can only answer "why" with circular reasoning, infinite regress, or axioms - axioms being the only reasonable option of the three.

Throw in some other logic, and you end up with the conclusion that the world can still be logical, but that many normative conclusions (which is what the world runs on) depend on moral axioms that differ from person to person.

So there's a distinction between people that reason correctly from their moral axioms, and people who don't. And among the ones who don't, there's a distinction between those that just make a mistake, and the ones that are deliberately presenting their arguments in bad faith. But even the latter have their own internal conclusions that are honest attempts at rational derivations from their internal values.

People who claim to reason from moral axioms are usually hypocritical in special cases, or evil in special cases. If you observe the behavior of someone who believes in moral axioms, you will find that they will go back and change their axioms (at best) or ignore them, when they lead to a conclusion that goes against their natural moral intuitions. Otherwise (I have never seen someone do this, but I guess it's possible) they would be "evil in special cases," going against their conscience and probably doing something bad, just because they made a mistake in choosing their moral axioms long before the special case arose.

It's very common in philosophy (and the sciences, too) to find that the axioms lead to the wrong answer, and as a result say "oops, they must be wrong," and pick different axioms. In that case, though, the flow of epistimophlogiston is going from empiricism back to axioms, not from axioms to conclusions.

On the other hand... that's exactly what it means to be human, and is not the flaw that it is often made out to be in the literature.

We as people both forward-chain and backward-chain. If I have principles that are important to me, I might reason forward from them to plan or conclude. And then if I discover an undesirable outcome, then that means I've learned something about myself, and then I can reason backwards to adjust what my principle actually is, and reason forward from that adjustment.

There's nothing morally wrong with learning and evolving. It doesn't by definition mean we're inconsistent.

This is a common saying but i've never liked. The world running on emotions is just another way of saying the world runs on logic, just the premises and goals are different than what we think they should be.

Which is like saying the world runs on chemistry interactions. Technically true, but we're losing practical meaning the deeper we go.

Because everybody likes tangentially related xkcd: https://xkcd.com/435/

Are we?

Maybe this is an unfair generalization, but usually when i hear people say something like, the world runs on emotions, its used as an out to avoid having to understand where the other person is coming from, on the [BS] principle that emotions are irrational and unknowable.

They are rational and knowable for the person holding them and irrational and unknowable for everyone else.

I disagree.

Most people have poor self-awareness and don't understand themselves or their own needs.

I also don't believe rationality is subjective but an objective statement about the world. You might not know if someone else's actions are rational, but that has no bearing on how rational they actually are.

I agree.

The "set of premises and goals" we currently operate upon are not ours, but planted by someone else (parents, teachers, media...).

Add to all this the fact that world may run however it wants, but the emotions are ours. If we alter the "set of premises and goals" we can alter our emotional response.

I’m pretty sure even a computer would agree that whether a defendant is sentenced to prison or not shouldn’t depend on whether the judge has eaten lunch yet.

A computer won't tell you anything about what "should" or "shouldn't" happen.

If you were to (theoretically) simulate the whole judgement process with all of its real world parameters, including whether or not the judge has eaten lunch yet, the computer would definitely conclude that the result will depend on whether the judge has eaten lunch yet.

However, whether or not it should depend on that is a judgement that the computer can't and won't make.

That’s a fairly baseless assertion to make. There’s nothing fundamentally special about the human mind that a computer couldn’t plausibly simulate eventually, and morality is included. A computer could just as easily develop morality as a human would. I would even argue it’s inevitable.

In many ways logic itself is emotional -- the feeling of pieces fitting together perfectly, the feeling of things that were unclear becoming clear; all these kind of feelings drive people toward logic as a way of thinking about the world.

I respectfully disagree (I think),

We can be emotional about pieces fitting together etc. but we certainly don't have to. Those pieces are still going to fit together.

As Threeve303 have said - "the world"/people run on emotion. Some of those people (a minority) are going to be attracted to logic because they will see the value of it. So, I guess, we can say that they will feel (have emotions?) toward logic, while others won't - but that doesn't matter because the "pieces are still fitting together" with or without people feeling anything toward logic.

(Hopefully that made sense, especially because English is not my first language.)

Kind regards,

dtl

I'm not certain that this is unfortunate. Being able to apply situational context and treat humans as complex beings rather than actors that must accept rational argument gives us a wider range of solutions to serious problems.

> Unfortunately after much trial and error I have discovered that the “world” doesn’t run on logic.

I love that you came to this conclusion based on logic (trial and error).

The "unfortunately" in your first sentence is an indicator of an emotion - sadness or unhappiness.

>> It runs on emotion

So, I think, you are right.

This is far from unfortunate. Ethics comes from emotion

You could argue being ethical is to simply be logically equitable. It's ethical to treat others with respect and report bad behavior, sure, but it's also logical to buy into the standards of society in order to enjoy those same basic protections yourself that ethics offers to other people. Treating others how you want to be treated is a mutually beneficial arrangement.

This argument taken ad infinitum though devolves into a pit of moral relativism. I happen to completely agree with your argument—ethics can be derived as a functional application of rational logic. But I think the more germane point being made was that establishing the normative sociocultural definition of collective Ethics, is ultimately an emotional determination (if guided by rational logic). There exists no metaphysical Ethics which can always be axiomatically derived on the basis of rational logical. At least I think that was the argument anyways…

Yeah the crux is, if you invent your own ethics then how do you make sure that they are universally applicable? How do you make sure people will agree with you instead of creating mutually incompatible ethics with the same intentions as you? You base them on logic with a sprinkle of emotion.

So does most sin. Do we need to be ethical if we are not evil?

Ethics helps us answer questions like "what do we owe to ourselves" and "what do we owe each other", which have nothing to do with sin, good, or evil.

Well the answer is usually something along the lines of, dont be evil to your neighbour (or some variation thereof, whether that's put in terms of utility or universal laws), so i think it is related.

> It runs on emotion

This truth is in the -motion suffix itself.

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